The Reluctant Receptionist

i’ve been avoiding politics on television for over a month now, having reached my complete saturation level around that time. after a while, all of the politicking and chatter just started to seem so pointless: it’s just a bunch of talking points that both candidates are spouting to try to get elected. i can’t fault them for it; it’s their job. all of this talk will boil down to a worthless pile of syrupy nothing once one of them gets elected, anyway. both candidates have to pander to their base to a certain extent. but that doesn’t mean i have to fill my head with it.

beyond that, it just makes me worry. i know who i’m voting for (ron paul 2008!) and i have since before he got the official nod from his party. as i’ve always said, i goddamned had to vote for john kerry in 2004, so whether i was voting for Hillary (my primary choice) or Barack (no schlep of a second choice) was irrelevant. at least i had a good candidate to choose this time. but since my mind has been made up for so long, i don’t need to hear all of the idiosyncrasies of the road to the white house, all of the he-said/he-said’s and 10-second CNN soundbites. i don’t follow the polls day to day. i just hope beyond hope that america doesn’t vote a rich, old, racist homophobe puppet and his vapid, pandering choice of a running mate into office. if he does, all my friends joke that we’ll all have to expatriate. but, as i’ve said on this blog before, i refuse to leave my country just so that i can have the same rights as everyone else. plus, as i told elspeth yesterday, i can’t afford to live in the united states, much less canada. and it’s so damned cold.

when i got home last night, though, phong was watching the VP debate and i didn’t want to make him change the channel so i sat there watching it with him. we were all hoping that palin would fall on her ass, that america would see what a blundering fool she really is. what actually happened, though, is that she did an incredible impression of fucking george w. bush, her aw-shucks demeanor and rapid-fire tongue wagging (completely content-free as it may have been) mesmerizing the legions of midwesterners and southerners and white people afraid of a black person and fat housewives who have never registered to vote before they had the chance to vote “one of themselves” into office.

george w. bush pulled the wool over all of these fools’ eyes in 2000 and 2004, somehow convincing them that he was just like them, dumbing down his speech, assuring them all that he was a good ol’ boy. my greatest fear is that people who don’t pay attention, people who are so easily bought, will vote for mccain because they want to see a twit like palin in office. because she is “one of them.”

you know what? i don’t want somebody like me in office. i want somebody smarter than me in office. i want someone to lead this country who actually has experience and a clear idea of what their policy will be. if i led the country, god only knows what would happen. but, as usual, i’m preaching to the choir here. i just don’t know what else to do.

i made the mistake this morning of reading my friend ellen’s blog. i say that it was a mistake not because it’s a bad read—absolutely the opposite, in fact, because reading her blog is like siting down and talking to her: it’s self-aware and self-deprecating and funny—but because it made me miss her and my summer friends just terribly. i’ve said many times that there were a few people i met this summer that i wish i could’ve just brought back to new york with me, plopped them right down amongst the group of friends i have here because i knew they’d get along, and watch what happened.

reading back through the posts she wrote this summer (i’d never read her blog before because, as i said when i first came back, i totally couldn’t be bothered with blogs of any sort while i was away) was like reliving all of the ridiculous things that we all went through, the trial-by-fire that was spending seven weeks singing a billion shows and living and eating with the same group of singers. most of all, i keep thinking about what it felt like to not have to have a day job, how freeing it was to be doing what i wanted to be doing. i keep thinking about how this summer, even when we were working our hardest, felt like playing for seven weeks. it’s not that i wanted to go on to another young artist program when onj wrapped—i was dying to come home, and another week spent away from phong might have meant an amityville horror-style mass murder (after which i would, obviously, drive to brooklyn, change my clothes, shoot up some heroin, and pretend like i hadn’t done anything).

i just wish that there was a way to make a living doing what i want to be doing (you know, um, singing or something like it). because when that’s all i’m doing, no matter how hard i’m working or how exhausted i am, i’ve accomplished exactly what i set out to. it’s so strange the way that days drag when you’re in an office (specifically someone else’s office, at someone else’s computer), and i just find myself wondering how so many people spend a lifetime doing what i’m doing now. maybe if they’re not just doing this job to make a living they’re more invested, which makes the time fly by. i don’t know, though, because, try as i might, i can’t think of another career i could ever be happy doing. and i’ve thought about it, believe me.

i know what you’ll say. that there are ways to make it without temping; that i should be teaching or coaching or…i don’t know what else is out there. and i don’t have a good reason for why i’m not. so thanks for listening to me bitch a little bit.

the food situation around the office i work in is dismal. thousands and thousands of people work in the few blocks that i’m working, yet there isn’t a single affordable, edible thing to purchase. sure, i’ve seen people walking around with bags of chipotle (pronounced chih-poe-tul by my mother, who got extremely defensive when i corrected her and demanded that i tell her how i knew that my pronunciation was correct. i couldn’t tell her why i knew—i just knew—and so, like most arguments with my mother, she won) and as much as i love it, it’s expensive. and i’m already spending 8 hours a day sitting on my ass in this cubicle (pronounced cue-bye-klee) so the last thing i need is a 1500 calorie burrito, even if it’s filled with delicious homemade guacamole and greasy, wonderful beef and beans and cheese and spicy salsa i’ll be right back.

anyway, since the food situation around here is bleak, i bring my own lunch. that’s made just a little bleaker by the fact that there’s no microwave that i can find in this office. i assumed there’d be one in the “kitchen” my first day here, so i brought leftover pesto that phong had made, only to find that my option was to pretend that it was some kind of pasta salad. i have to play tricks on my mind like that. so i’ve taken to bringing the same lunch every day, a lunch that is shelf-stable, cheap as dirt (because, as much as i learned this summer and as wonderful as it was, i am now nearly broke. and the paychecks i’ve gotten, hereafter to be referred to as “paychecks,” weren’t even enough to cover my storage space rental, much less actual bills or rent or insurance.), and doesn’t have to be microwaved. i bring a ham sandwich with dijon mustard, a plastic baggie of chips (or, today, cheetos), and a quaker chewy granola bar.

as i was eating my lunch at my desk today, so that i can use my lunch hour to go to the gym, i realized something (specifically, while i was stuffing my face full of cheetos): the meal that i’d brought myself was the exact same meal that my mother packed me when i was in pre-school. i don’t mean, like, sort of the same. i mean,

ham sandwich
cheetos
quaker chewy granola bar.

the exact same. she’d pack it in a metal disney world themed lunchbox, which started to take on the smell of its contents after a while. i have a very vivid memory (tied to the memory of making art by blowing paint around a piece of paper and nearly passing out from blowing so much) of eating this exact lunch, but in preschool. if you switch wonder bread out for the whole wheat i brought today, it’d have been identical except for its packaging.

the more things change, the more they stay the same.

last night’s audition went fine. musician friends, you’ll know what i mean when i say this: i sang well, but i didn’t nail it. you know the times when you walk out and you’re just like, “yeah. i was in the moment, my voice was there, my acting was there, i was all over that.” and then there are times like last night when, for some reason, you can’t get out of your head and you’re just kind of phoning it in. it sounds perfectly nice, but is it going to land you a role in a 20th century opera? probably not. i’m not being down on myself, i’m being realistic with myself as an auditioner. maybe, though, i’ll be surprised. they could also offer me a cover, or something, which would also be greatly appreciated.

it’s kind of strange to me how much my mood seems to be directly related to the weather these days. i never used to be like this, or at least i didn’t notice if i was. i’d spend entire winters in indiana frozen to the bone, only 8 hours of dreary daylight a day. then again, i was playing around and it was college and i was going to study sessions with amanda where we’d all lay around on the floor of the queer center and eat breadsticks and coke-in-a-box (these incredible, huge to-go fountain containers that stapled at the top) from marvin’s, our just-off-campus greasy food place. all college towns have them, don’t they? these places that people hold fond memories of because it’s where they’d order food in at 2 o’clock in the morning, or drunkenly stumble to, or subject their parents to when they visited. i don’t think that my parents ever went, come to think of it. i know for a fact, though, that i dragged them to la charreada, a place whose mexican food wasn’t anything compared to that in ponca, but is stellar compared to what we get in the city. but enough dragging you down food-college memory lane.

i can’t tell if my elevated mood is hangover from my vacation or just because it’s a little warmer/more bearable outside. or maybe it’s because i’m leaving for adult opera camp in six weeks and i can see a light at the end of the tunnel (although, obviously, that light includes being away from phong for 7 weeks and not having a paycheck, which means that the light of the end of the tunnel sometimes looks more like a train’s headlights). whatever the reason, i have spring fever. i can’t wait to get out into the sunshine, feel the air on my bare ass arms. it makes me want to actually go out and do things, to enjoy this city we live in. like, um, go to choir rehearsal.

i don’t quite know where to start writing about our trip to san francisco last week. it was, to use a really strangely disney-ish adjective, magical. the whole trip, i mean, not just part of it. not just the city, or my time with phong, or hanging out with his friends, or the food. all of it.

until i went there, i couldn’t understand why phong misses san francisco so much, why it has been so hard for him to adjust to living in new york city. i completely understand now. after one day, i was plotting and planning when we could come back, how much time we could spend, where we’d go eat, where we’d stay. there’s just something about the place that i absolutely fell in love with. first off, there’s the city itself. the architecture is a mix of victorian and modern, candy-colored wood houses butting up next to glass and steel, all on hills that scare the shit out of you when you’re driving, most of the neighborhoods (including phong’s old one) offering stunning views of two bridges and the bay, and beyond that the ocean. the streets are cleaner; the subway’s cleaner. something i loved about the subway is that the biggest cars are two cars long, and all the lines eventually break free from the tunnels. not like they do here, elevatedly, but literally onto the street. you’re chugging along underground, and suddenly the subway you’re on is not only above ground but is at street level, and the floor turns into stairs and it lets you off just right there, like a bus. i kept thinking, it’s like the subway got sick of being underground.

more than the city itself, though, i fell in love with the city’s pace. it’s a city, to be sure, but it’s a little slower than new york city. the sidewalks, even downtown during rush hour, aren’t as crowded, even when there are 300 tourists standing in line for a cable car ride. anywhere you go—the subway, restaurants, it doesn’t matter—there are a few more gay people around. our last morning there, a saturday, i saw three gay couples walking down the street holding hands. not walking down the street in the castro; walking through the subway at powell street. and no one gave it a second glance. i found myself lightening up, less on guard, more able to just enjoy being with phong and the beautiful weather.

then there are the bars. my favorite night, by far, was trannyshack at the stud. it’s a drag show, but not just lip-synching. the emphasis isn’t on being “real” or “beautiful,” but on being creative. these bitches held nothing back, and the show was filthy and funny and shocking (and i’m not easily shocked). that goes for the rest of the gay scene that i saw. there are way fewer cookie-cutter gays out there than there are here. people were actually dancing at these bars, not standing around posing. and there were hipsters and a/x fags and lesbians and trannies all there together. it’s like, i wish that someone could go to a san francisco gay bar and then go to G on a saturday night and tell me which one you’d rather spend your time at. (the last line of G’s website? “no dancing.”)

i could go on, of course, with my open-ended love letter to san francisco, but i won’t. what i’m going to try to do, though, is to remember what i felt like in san francisco: how i was open for an adventure, smiley and relaxed and excited. i’m going to try to remember that feeling when i’m crammed on a bus (this morning) or deciding whether or not to go out instead of stay in (tonight). during this vacation, i felt more like myself than i have in a long time. and it felt really good.

if i had to characterize today’s weather in new york city, i would call it ‘soggy.’ or maybe, ‘steady, soaking rain.’ either way, it fucking sucks. we luckily got a new bus stop (yes, i take the bus. every single day. and i can’t stand it in case you were wondering.) which provides a lot of shelter from the pouring rain. i sit here at my desk, though, staring out the window at the currently-being-constructed new yankee stadium in the bronx and it is an ugly, ugly day. it’s kind of crazy how far i can see from my desk. we’re on the tenth floor toward the tip of manhattan, so one side of the building can see jersey and my side of the building can see all the way past yankee stadium to the airplanes landing at laguardia. every time i see the airport these days i get excited for our upcoming trip to san francisco. even though i’m flying out of JFK because i got a direct flight from there.

i find myself counting down the days until we go to san francisco for vacation. not even necessarily because i need a break from work. work, as you know, i’m sure, isn’t all that stressful. i come here, i do my work, i take a lunch break, i go home. my singing career, while busy, isn’t stressful, either. it’s fun stress. maybe i need a break from new york city, from our daily grind. its going to work coming home practicing cooking dinner doing something or watching tv going to bed then going to work routine. or maybe it’s because i’m so excited to see san francisco from an insider’s view.

the only other time i’ve been to the bay area was for the creating change conference in college. we went for like two days and were in a conference building all day long. mel, my english professor and sponsor of our gay group, and i went out in the castro one night, but i was only 20. we couldn’t really do anything but wander around. what i remember most are how many homeless teenagers i saw in the castro, most of them gay. it struck me how close we were in age but how different in circumstance. here i was on an all-expenses-paid trip for a gay conference; here they were out on the street because they were gay.

and so i fly out to san francisco on my birthday, two weeks from yesterday. phong has a love affair with san francisco that he might never have with new york. he likes living here because of the things we can do—broadway shows, the opera—but he misses san francisco still. i have a feeling that i’m going to fall in love with it, too. but that’s what usually happens when you take a vacation away from new york: you look at where you’re visiting, at how much nicer the weather/roads/restaurants/subways are, and go “why the fuck do i bother with new york city?” then you come home and get over it.

my sister’s g-mail status message (jenny beck said the other day, ‘i guess i can’t call it an away message, because you’re there.’) right now says, “i miss my grandmother’s kitchen.” first, i had to wonder to myself which grandmother she meant. she’s had a strained relationship (everyone has) with one set, so could she mean that one? and the other one isn’t exactly known for her culinary skill. she’s an amazing woman, but cooking is not among her strengths. if i were to miss something about her house, it wouldn’t be her kitchen; it’d be the gas-log fireplace we all sit around whenever we’re together, drinking white wine. last christmas, my grandmother had accidentally punctured the bag of the winebox (yes, we drink wine from a box) and it had gone everywhere; she’d had to salvage what she could by pouring it from the punctured opening into huge plastic travel mugs. so we poured wine into our glasses from these plastic travel mugs all christmas.

so i think that it must be our other grandmother’s kitchen she’s talking about, and i know what she means. i miss her kitchen, too. i miss the way that she used to force-feed us ice cream after every meal; the way that the palette she’d laid on the ground for us to play on, consisting of blankets and a quilt that our nana had made, felt. (apparently playing on a palette is an oklahoma thing. cory and i discovered this earlier this winter when he laid out a palette for us to hang out on and everyone else was like, ‘what the fuck?’) mainly i miss the connectedness i felt at their house when i was younger, before i knew what it meant when my grandfather said racist things. before i knew i was queer and knew that when my grandfather would lambast “queers” he was talking about people like me. as i got older, figured myself out, i started to pull away, until the only time i would see or talk to them would be when i’d fly home for christmas. there was just too much of my life they couldn’t know about. so i miss them. i miss what they used to be to me.

and now they’re sick and shit is fucked. so i know what my sister means: i miss my grandmother’s kitchen.

lest i leave you on a downer, we start rehearsals tonight for st. matthew passion in brooklyn. it’s going to be really fun, i think: making music with some really good musicians, many of whom i went to grad school with. it’ll be like a little reunion. in brooklyn. singing bach.

this morning, having woken up fifteen minutes late (7:34 instead of 7:19, because phong hit the alarm and claims he said to me ‘it’s 7:19, time to get up,’ even though i think it’s a bold-faced lie), i decided to watch cbs sunday morning, the program i dvr every sunday and watch in small doses in the morning, instead of subjecting myself to the twittery chit-chat of the today show. it’s a dorky move, i know, choosing charles osgood (who always says today’s date like, “the thirteenth day of january twenty oh-eight.”) over meredith and al and ann. if only ann curry would move to cbs and replace charles osgood, it’d be my dream morning show. in-depth profiles of reading-man’s movie stars? check. 30-second shots of ducks? check. ann curry? it’d be perfect.

anyway, i was watching cbs sunday morning while phong was running around getting ready to go to the hospital and they were profiling the artist that directed the diving bell and the butterfly, a movie about a guy who had a stroke that left him conscious but completely paralyzed. he wrote a book using nothing but the blinking of his eyelid and an assistant, which the diving bell and the butterfly, which became a bestseller and now a movie by this guy that also directed basquiat. it looks absolutely beautiful. will i see it? it’s in french, so probably not. why this director can’t make a movie in english (he also directed _before night falls, in spanish.) i’ll never know. he’s american. and i—get ready to lose all respect for me—hate seeing foreign language films because i hate having to read subtitles. there, i said it. i’m not seeing this movie.

anyway, this director was kind of pretentious and self-important, but he said something that really struck me: why, in the new york times is the arts section called “arts and leisure?” “i’m sorry,” he said, “but the two have absolutely nothing to do with each other. there is no leisure in being an artist.” i know why the paper lumps them together: the paper is written for people who are attending the arts, not making them. for those people, it is leisure. it’s us—the artists—who have to work so hard to make something that people can look at as an escape.

it was just fun for me to hear someone who’s spent a lifetime making art—both visual and on film—talk about what hard work making art actually is. think about it, singers and musicians: we are busting our asses—practicing, taking lessons, taking coachings, spending decades working toward perfecting an art that will never actually be perfected, going to thankless auditions, singing for thankless rich people—to beg to be allowed to do something that will, in the end, pay us little or no money. if we actually land a singing gig, we’ll have to quit our day jobs even though taking the singing gig will probably be a major pay cut. so why do we do it? because we have to. because not doing it isn’t an option. because not doing it would mean wasting what little time we have on this earth. because we can.

first of all, really, iowa? really? huckabee. that is the man that you want to see ruling the country? and i do mean ruling the country because, let’s face it, with the changes george bush has made and with the supreme court he’s set up, if the next president is a crazy republican he’s going to be the closest thing to a dictator this country has ever seen. there will be no stopping him, and all of the poor faggots like me and my boyfriend will see every single right that we’ve fought tooth and nail for ripped away. so that’s what you want, iowa? well, thanks. fuck you, too. i know that this caucus doesn’t really determine who’s going to win the race for the nomination, that it’s only the first, but it’s still disconcerting. i think we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place: there’s no way that middle america is going to vote for an african-american. those of us on the coasts don’t get it, but seriously: i’ve lived in oklahoma and in the midwest, and underneath a thin veneer of courtesy beats a terrifying artery of racism. they won’t admit it to the news cameras or the gallup polls, they’ll claim that they’ll get in there and vote for obama, but when it comes time to pull the lever…

now, i’m not saying that it’d be any better with hillary. i don’t think that they’re going to vote for a woman that they all think is a “bitch.” they hate her like they hate martha stewart: she’s a powerful woman who goes after what she wants and is vying for a seat at the table with all the men, so she’s a bitch. maybe what our country needs right now is a leader who’s a bitch. and a leader who has even a shred of respect for foreign policy.

i know that a lot of you are going to think that i’m ill-informed, and maybe that’s true. i don’t watch a lot of political discussion, and i only watched highlights of the debates. maybe i see things too simplistically, and maybe i’ll be surprised by the outcome of this presidential race. i hope so.

christ hanging off the cross it is cold outside. i hate to resort to talking about the weather, because i know that it is the safest, most boring topic ever. it’s what people talk about at cocktail parties when they’re on their first drink. then it’s on to the second drink where you talk about work and by the fourth drink you’ve got your hand down each others’ pants. or maybe that’s just me. no wonder i never get invited to cocktail parties anymore. anyway, it’s like fifteen degrees here in new york city. last night, waiting for the train in queens, i wore the black wool coat that i’d worn out to astoria under my huge black puffy down coat. the black marshmallow, as robin calls it. i’d gone out to retrieve some of my kitchen stuff from the apartment and bring it to phong’s, so that i could start cooking there, but i couldn’t figure out a way to effectively carry such heavy things. i refuse to be one of those people who carries a granny cart onto the subway. so i went to the grocery store out there because it’s so much cheaper than the gourmet garage, which is our only real option over at phong’s. so there i am, standing there on the subway platform wearing two coats and carrying my chock-full-of-shit messenger bag and two grocery bags, shivering in the fifteen degree weather. i am fucking hot in the winter, let me tell you. i have to turn down a modeling contract twice every time i leave the house.

phong’s friends are still in town from san francisco, so we’re meeting them tonight for a late dinner and drinks possibly at therapy. i had a crazy time trying to go to sleep last night for some reason—i laid there and watched the clock spin until like 2am, knowing that i had to be up at 7. i must’ve fallen asleep, because when phong’s alarm went off at 6 i was deeply dreaming, fairly sure that i had been snoring and possibly talking in my sleep. nothing will ever compete with robin’s sleep-talking, especially the time that we were in france and she was speaking fake french in her sleep. that was brilliant. my sleep talking, i’m sure, would be much more pedestrian. it would be talking about the fact that i’m out of cute outfits for all the dinners out and friends we’ve been seeing. boring things like that. but seriously, i’m out of cute outfits.

did i mention it’s cold outside?