The Reluctant Receptionist

i’ve been sitting here reading all of my old entries for the last thirty minutes because i didn’t have a lot to do at my desk. yesterday breezed by, broken up as it was with a three-hour-long holiday luncheon, but today has dragged, aided by the fact that i went out with austin last night to have our usual tuesday: pieces followed by boots and saddle, both places where we know people and tend to drink for free or at least heavily discounted. as i near 30 (yes, every post for the last seven months has referred to me being nearly 30. i know this for a fact, since i just re-read all of those posts) i’d like to say that i have gained self-control, wisdom, knowledge about how many drinks i can have before i get home and bounce from wall to wall down the hallway (what i call “pinballing it”). and i thought i did. last night i had a total of four drinks, in the span of about three hours. i’m relatively sure that most madison avenue executives have that many drinks before they drive home to westchester. i was definitely pinballing it last night, though i was with-it enough to dread waking up today.

i realize that i haven’t checked in since october 2nd, the day we started paradise lost. it’s been an interesting ride, joining the new york city nightlife scene. the first few parties were absurdly spectacular, huge events that honestly got a little too crowded. since then we’ve settled more into our groove: the crowd waxes and wanes according to what else is happening in town, on the weather, on the weekend. i can honestly say that anyone who has come so far has left saying that they had a great time and that they loved the music. since the music is all culled directly from my private library, the one that i’ve been working on since i was about 13 years old, that is a major compliment.

what else? i got to interview tori amos again last week, which was predictably ridiculous. this time, i had a month’s warning that i’d be interviewing her, which only meant that i had time to get nervous. she was warm and personable and smart, though, and remembered me. i stuck out my hand to introduce myself and she briefly took it before she said, “no, we’ve met before.” and i said, “yes, we have.” and we talked about little earthquakes for 45 minutes and then we hugged (when tori opens up her arms and moves in for a hug, who am i to turn her down?) and then i raced off to a choir concert. in one day i went from administrative assistant to freelance writer to choral singer to d.j. do you get much more “new york”-y than that? i suppose i could’ve also been a taxi driver and t.v. personality. i’m working on it.

Tonight’s the kickoff of our new bi-weekly (which I will henceforth be referring to as fortnightly) dance party at Boots and Saddle, Paradise Lost. Austin and I have created a blog to track its progress, and you can catch it here.

I’ll see you tonight.

michael and his friends do something that they call the “finish game.” it’s where you make a piece of art—be it a song, a poem, a piece of writing—and the only rule is that you have to finish it that day. they critique each others’ work, and michael says that often the things that he thinks are weakest are what people actually really dig. i’m wondering if i shouldn’t do a personal “finish day” challenge with my blog. i feel like i’ve been updating it more often, only to see that it’s been a week since i’ve added anything to it. it’s not that i don’t have anything to say, it’s that i don’t have a lot that i’ve been feeling like sharing. i’ve been feeling very selfish with my feelings, trying to mull them over and digest them, learning how to once again be single in this bitch of a city. (but it’s a bitch that i can’t imagine myself leaving. when it hits me it feels like a kiss.)

i spent last weekend in DC with robin, for the first time since she started her new fancy lawyer job. it’s hard for me to imagine that my little sister is now a lawyer. it was one thing for her to be in law school—she was still in school, then, and i could imagine that she was still a baby. but now she’s taken the bar and she, as she told me last week, has “started her career.” what an odd feeling, i thought, knowing that a certain day is the start of your career. that you’ve been working toward this moment since you decided to go to law school, since you decided what kind of law you wanted to practice, and then there’s a day, august 30th or whatever, that you can point to and say, “this is the day i started professionally doing what i’m trained for.” maybe it seems so nebulous to me because i can’t point to a moment when i started singing, or because i don’t remember when i took my first “professional” audition, or because it seems, no matter how much singing i’m doing, that my “career” hasn’t started yet. what makes a singing career, really? is it getting paid to sing in church? filling your resume with roles done with friends’ companies? recitals? premieres? will i have started my career when i finally get reviewed by a big-time newspaper? or maybe this is it: maybe this is “my career” and the most it’s ever going to be.

in a way, that doesn’t seem so bad. getting to do all of these wonderful, creative things with people i like makes me luckier than most people out there, people stuck balancing books or stuffing oreo cookie boxes. it’s hard not to feel like something of a failure, though, with my sister “starting her career.” i’m nearing 30—don’t tell anyone, please—and it’s inevitable to reflect some. the time is nearing for me to tinkle or get off the pot when it comes to being a full-time professional singer, and i can see the train passing me by as i work and work a day job and a church job and fill every other moment with gigs or trying to get gigs. do i just keep doing what i’m doing, hoping that the right person will hear me? and if so, how long can i possibly keep up this pace?

robin and i had some pretty heavy talks this weekend, which is why all of this is on my mind. i’ve felt pretty loser-ish lately, because, as she put it, i “had a lot of life” happen this summer. fucking up my relationship, having my grandpa(s) die, being so so so broke all the time—this isn’t where i pictured myself at 29.4. yet, i’m not exactly sure where else to go: i can’t imagine not singing anymore, which means that going back to school for a complete field-change (if i could even decide what to go back to school for) isn’t really ideal. if i started a DMA now, i wouldn’t be done until i was 35 or 36, and even then there’s no guarantee i could land a teaching job—much less a teaching job anywhere i’d ever consider living.

and so i feel a little bit like i’m stuck in this holding pattern, waiting for the universe or for god or fate or friends or whatever to make it clear to me which way i should turn. i suppose that the best i can do in the meantime is to keep singing, keep auditioning, keep trying to be kinder, keep trying to be patient, keep trying to be good. it’s an uphill battle.

things seem to have settled down after the craziness of august/lucretia. i cooked myself dinner for the first time in probably seven weeks (because i don’t count heating up jarred tomato sauce or tyson chicken nuggets—bought in a moment of nostalgic weakness and eaten with bbq sauce made in ponca city—as cooking) on monday. what’s strange about cooking for yourself—and only yourself—is that you have leftovers for days. i seem to keep cooking like i’m doing it for an army, as i did when i was cooking for phong and i because, well, we ate like an army. it’s easier to cook a full recipe than cut it down and it means that i have to buy fewer groceries which, during weeks when i’m living on $12 (no, seriously), makes a big difference. and so i cook these potfuls of food in my gorgeous le creuset pot that i got for my birthday from amanda and phong, something that turned out to be something like a parting gift, a consolation prize. i might’ve had to move out and find my own apartment and learn how to live alone again, but at least i got to carry this gorgeous bright orange le creuset pot with me to my new hovel. after i’ve made these potfuls of food, i then eat them all week long, until friday comes and i feel like i have tomato, white bean, and bacon soup coming out of every pore. then i move on to the next thing. i will say this: i never want to see another salmon cake, ever. not even the ina garten ones.

speaking of our girl ina garten, i’ve been watching her show again, usually during lunch. i haven’t opened my head to sing since lucretia finished, telling myself that i’m resting my voice when the truth is that i’m being lazy, so i’ve been eating lunch at 1 and chilling with ina. i watch her fattily bouncing around her gorgeous kitchen, smothering her dorky husband, picking fresh herbs from her huge backyard garden and imploring us to only use “good olive oil” and “good vanilla extract” while asking “i mean, how bad could that be?” and oh my god i want her life so badly. i want to cook all day long and have my professor husband come home from his job at yale to find four different kinds of pasta waiting for him in the fridge. i want to tool around east hampton in my ridiculous black bmw convertible and have the farmstand woman know me by name. this doesn’t make me unique. i think that most fags in new york city, after they shed all of their taken-on new york city attitudes and punk haircuts and posturing, would tell you the same thing if you could ever get them to admit it. they want to be finally and permanently whisked away from this place, taken out of the trenches. but maybe i’m projecting.

it’s inevitable that on the first day of fall-like weather i put sleater-kinney onto my ipod. (of course, it wasn’t always the ipod; i’ve been an s-k fan for so long that i’ve evolved with them from tape to cd to minidisc to mp3.) never mind that today’s weather is just a tease, that i’m sure the thermometer will spike at least one more time, there’s a crispness to the air that feels like fall on my face. and the clouds are skirting across the sky, dark against blue. this weather always reminds me of indiana, a fact that i discussed with amanda when we were in chicago last weekend. we were walking around downtown, somehow needing a sweater in the middle of august, and the air just smelled different: it smelled like the midwest. and as much as i love new york, as much as i appreciate everything that i have here that i could never have in the midwest, it made me miss it. it made me miss 2:00 a.m. breadsticks and coke in a box, eaten with amanda in the third floor of the SCARE house, and sneaking downstairs to have a cigarette on the back porch before i finally admitted that it was a stupid habit that would catch up with me in the end.

we wrapped up the rape of lucretia yesterday, a fact that i was thinking about while getting dressed this morning and i can’t quite believe. i know how cliche it sounds to say shit like, “it seems like just yesterday…” but seriously. it seems like just yesterday that i was saying things like, “well, i should really go buy that score since we start staging in three weeks!” i’m proud to report that i married myself to boosey and hawkes (it’s kind of a polyamory thing) for all of august and the performances thursday and sunday went really smoothly. i of course had a couple of wrong entrances between the performances, but it was nothing major and nothing anyone would notice unless they were following along with a score. it’s not often that i will say this, but doing this role was a bit of a personal triumph. it was a lot of range-y singing and difficult to pull off, but i don’t think that i personally could’ve done a lot better. could nathan gunn—or any of the legions of young baritones who are better than me? probably. but this game is increasingly more and more about challenging myself personally than competing with other people, and so it was a personal triumph. it also didn’t hurt that everyone in the cast was easy-going and fun to work with. it was seriously a win-win.

and so here i am, monday afternoon on the last day of august, with another role on my resume. back at work filing papers, running errands, wondering what my next gig will be. it’s rare that i don’t have something lined up when i finish one project, but i’ve got some callbacks and leads on gigs—and, of course, my wonderful ongoing work with rhymes with opera and at christ church. so i’ll walk to work and back, and then to the gym, looking up at the quick, dark clouds, listening to sleater-kinney, thinking of depauw.

those of you who know me (or those of you who don’t know me and read this blog, the two’s of two’s of you left) know about my, shall we say, affinity for tori amos. i’m not one of these kooks that stand outside venues for six and seven hours, hoping to snap a shaky disposable kodak photograph from behind three rows of people, but i have, at certain times in my life, been very, very into her music. like, scary into it. like, dissecting boys for pele and forcing my friends to sit through my thesis of how it was actually in three distinct sections, each one broken up by the mysterious, odd mini-songs that populate it. thank you, amanda, bri, and cory for humoring me. if any of you care to hear about that brilliant rant, email me. like it or not, boys for pele is one of the best albums of the 90s, thorny and difficult, whispered, yelped, subversive in its sexuality and masochism, all 80 harpsichord-y, harmonium-y minutes of it.

all of this is a long way of saying what i’ve been avoiding saying since i saw her live at radio city last week: that tori, the one whose music i obsessed over, is dead. what we have in her place seems to be a hip-grinding, super-skinny, plastic-surgeried, self-described MILF. what’s bothered me so much about her last two albums ( american doll posse and abnormally attracted to sin) wasn’t just their length—though at something like 23 tracks that’s a major issue, too—or their uninteresting, obvious lyrics, or tori’s rapidly aging voice, or the fact that marcel and mark feel the need to record her in what sounds like a kotex box. my major problem has been thematic. she’s turned herself into this, dare i say it, cougar (and i don’t mean that in the bad, women-a-certain-age-can’t-have-sex way, i mean it in the prowling, aging, over-reaching woman way). her songs nowadays are all about two things: completely sleep-inducing reveries about existence (including gem lyrics such as “what does it look like/this orbital ball/from the fringes of the milky way?”); and proclamations that she herself can save you/haunt you/sex you. we get it, tori, you’re empowered. there is an earth mother and we all breathe her power, and you’re breathing her power and that’s giving you the energy to screw your cute british husband every night of the week. you’ve reclaimed sensuality (or, if you’re talking about the beekeeper “sinsuality”) and you’re spreading the word.

the problem is that, as a friend of mine pointed out a moment ago, her best work was done when she was in turmoil. this is true of many artists—ani, trent reznor, corin tucker—but it’s an extreme for tori. her rape gave birth to little earthquakes, her fight with god under the pink, her breakup with eric rosse boys for pele and her miscarriage from the choirgirl hotel. then she met mark, got married, had a baby, and all her problems are suddenly the everyday problems that we all face, but not the interesting ones. so she sits in cornwall and wonders, “what does it look like, this orbital ball, from the fringes of the milky way?”

all of this diatribe is to say that, when i saw her show at radio city on thursday, i was literally asleep for part of it. the setlist, which is always make or break for tori shows, leaned heavily on her last three albums, which in my opinion are her weakest. by the time she launched into “marys of the sea” and scott sent me a text saying something along the lines of “what the fuck is this shizz?” i was nodding off. she’d wake me up with a few stellar numbers—“little earthquakes,” “space dog”—and i’d snap back, flooded with memories of my gold honda and just how good she sounded yelping at me through those speakers. i’d think of my mom and how i would try to hide the cover art of boys for pele from her. i’d think about how dirty the lyric “i shaved every place where you been, boy” used to seem.

and i realized, during my walk down memory lane, that maybe that’s what tori is good for these days. sure, she still has it in her to make another great record. but maybe she’s now a nostalgia act for me.

when i was talking to alyson about it this morning, we both admitted to each other that this made us more than a little sad. tori actually brought alyson and i together 11 years ago this month, and i have a hard time imagining that any other singer i’m into right now would have the same power. i wouldn’t bond with anyone over, say, la roux or florence and the machine. my tastes have become just that, a taste for a certain kind of music; any hint of obsession or excitement like i had for tori amos is gone, left behind on the used car lot in bethany, oklahoma with my gold honda accord. i wonder: will anything ever excite me like that again, or was it specific to the time, to my growth, my still-recent discovery of the inner world, of the prickliness of human interaction? i hope so. i hope that i just haven’t found it yet.

let me make a suggestion: if you’re battling clinical depression (am i? probably not. this is probably just a long, protracted sadness. maybe the word for it is ennui. maybe i should look that word up before i try to use it in a piece of writing. maybe.) and are hung over and were at the beer garden seven hours ago and then talked to your ex-boyfriend and then laid awake thinking about the polite, content-less conversation you just had, don’t listen to aimee mann on the way to work. and, for god’s sake, whatever you do, if you have to listen to aimee mann don’t listen to “31 today” or “how am i different.” it’s not worth the risk.

i went to astoria last night to see cory, because i haven’t seen him since the three of us went to new jersey (not the new jersey you think of when you hear ‘new jersey,’ all strip malls and car dealerships, but the nice part, the northernmost part, which is full of ski resorts and organic farms). i was afraid that i’d be interrupting a visit with his friend mike, but when i got there i discovered that it would just be the two of us, so we had the chance to talk. all my friends—not just me, but most of us—seem to be going through something. i was telling cory yesterday that it isn’t just phong breaking up with me and having to find a new house. and it isn’t moving, and it isn’t my grandpa(s) dying, and it isn’t everyone getting married while i barrel, single, towards 30. it’s all of it, and it’s none of it.

i’m not a big no doubt fan (although i do like gwen stefani’s questionable but ballsy fashion choices) but i keep thinking about their second major-label album, the difficult, too-grown-up return of saturn. i never knew what a saturn return was until two weeks ago when i was talking to my friend michael (another ex. apparently my life is just populated with exes.) and he said something about it. if you don’t know what it is, then go here. you know that i don’t really do astrology or fate or crystals (except the ones whose last name are gale), but the concept of the saturn return has really been hitting me lately. we’re all in this incredible upheaval: everything seems to be flipping on its head, at least when it comes to my inner life. outwardly, everything is the same except that i’m not with phong anymore. inwardly, everything has changed.

you probably already know this, because i love this story and i tell almost everyone, but cory and i met when i was 17 years old at a summer camp for the arts in oklahoma. this place has been going on for years, and i think that it’s one of the best things about growing up queer in oklahoma, as long as you’re an artist or musician. you know, artsy. you audition for a panel of judges; the auditions are really stringent because if you get in you pay something absurd like 125 dollars. (i’m sure it’s more now since i was there eleven years ago.) anyway, if you get in you get to spend two weeks at summer camp spending all day working on your field of choice with really gifted teachers, then at night you visit the other disciplines. in between all of that, at least when i went eleven and twelve years ago, you get the freedom to hang out with other kids like you, which mean punk queer outcast queeny black latino white artisit musician actors. you (used to be able to) chain smoke cigarettes, you shit-talk, you fall in love. and for many people that go there, myself included, it’s the first time that you get to be around other people like you. it’s the first time that you see a world that’s bigger than where you came from, where you’re not weird because you’re skinny and jewish-looking and queer.

obviously, i look back at the two years i spent there with just a little bit of fondness. and it’s not nostalgia, because i’ve always felt like this. when i was 17, i couldn’t wait to go back. and when i aged out of the program at 18, i knew that i’d never again get to experience something like it. this isn’t to say that adult life doesn’t have its own treats, it’s to say that i look back on those summers (could they really have just been two weeks each?) as some of the most exciting, new, wonderful times of my life. and it was in that context that i met cory, who i had developed a crazy camp crush on and became what i like to call “my first camp boyfriend ever.” cory was everything i was missing in ponca city: he seemed terribly urbane, jaded, funny, dirty, irreverent. he smoked before i started smoking, and i thought it was very dangerous. in a sexy way. after camp, cory and i fell out of touch. i knew that he’d planned to move to nyc, but i never spoke to him again until i ran into him at a bar in norman in 2004, when i was living in baltimore. i gave him my email and never heard from him. (apparently, he was drunk and lost my email. and felt bad about it.)

when i moved to astoria in 2006, i ran into him, and learned that he was living down the street from me. i always say that cory and i were meant to be friends, but it just took us 10 years to make it happen. i said, “you might not remember me, but you were my first camp boyfriend ever.” he said, “robert. m. i am taking you out to dinner.” and i’ve seen him several times a week since then.

i bring all this up because cory just got word that he gets to go back to that camp this summer as a counselor. he gets to facilitate what will be for many teenagers the best two weeks of their young lives. and i am jealous of every bit of it. i’m jealous that he gets to go to oklahoma in the summer, jealous that he gets to guide these kids, jealous that he gets to spend two weeks with other grown-up oklahoma artists. we were supposed to go together, but i couldn’t take the time off work. maybe someday; for now, i hope he takes a lot of pictures.

phong and i have been going out like crazy lately, and it’s proven two things to me:

1. i am, in fact, still a poor person even though i think i can party like the evil lovechild of britney spears circa two years ago and lindsay lohan circa now;
2. i am no longer 22 years old, which means that i can no longer go out and party until 1 o’clock in the morning and still get through a workday unscathed. i don’t know if i could ever really do that, but it’s definitely a little more painful at ahem 29.

it’s totally been worth it, though, because we’ve had a rocker of a weekend and week, sort of partying like there’s no tomorrow since holy week hell starts tonight. that’s right, ladies and germs, it’s holy week. rehearsal, maundy thursday, good friday, and easter morning will all take place between now and sunday morning. luckily, unlike all those poor episcopalian souls, we don’t have an easter vigil service. (for those of you who don’t know, easter vigil means you go and sing a 3 hour service until like midnight and then you have to be at church at 9 o’clock the next morning. some churches even have a feast after the vigil, which means you’re at church til like 2 a.m. no thanks!) also luckily, cory is having us over for easter brunch after the service, which last year turned into easter all-day-drinking-and-eating-fest, much like thanksgiving part two.

so about the rocker of our weekend: we went out for my birthday saturday, which was a riot. the greatest group of people came out, and they represented my most favorite people in new york city. they were all from different groups and some had never met each other, and it made me feel really warm and fuzzy to know that they were all meeting and hanging out. everyone should get a chance to collect all their friends in one place just so that they can look around and realize for a few minutes how lucky they actually are.

sunday night, we went to bingo at the toolbox, where we stayed out WAY too late but also each won (phong, in fact, won twice). we’ve also been there enough finally that the mean lesbian named barbara has warmed up to us and was giving phong pointers on bingo. we are in like flint. flynn? in like flynn? whatever.

monday night was musical mondays at splash, which i thoroughly enjoyed for about an hour and then i completely lost my hearing because it was louder than a rock concert and the queen behind me kept doing all this choreography (not the actual choreography he was watching on screen, mind you, which might have been impressive, but choreography he made up that looked like the dancing beyonce refused to do for her “irreplaceable” video.) and bumping into me. but still, we got to see austin and josh and sing along to best little whorehouse in texas.

last night we got on the list for a foot fetish party that austin’s friend hosts at the eagle. now say what you will, but i love the eagle. it’s got cheap(ish), really cold beer, friendly bartenders, and the best music in nyc. no, we’re not foot fetishists, but i’m open-minded and can appreciate peoples’ kinks. oh, also? it meant free foot massages. phong was concerned that we were using peoples’ fetishes for personal gain, but i reminded him that we were actually performing a service. right? right.

if you don’t already love dolly parton, watch this video. if you do, your heart might explode. at the end, she tears up. i’ve never seen dolly cry before, and i wish i could give her a hug.