The week before Thanksgiving, I took some vacation time and went to NYC to see some shows: Hadestown, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and Jagged Little Pill. I’m surprised I’ve never done a New York playlist before, but I haven’t- so here one is!
I always feel like I’m on the verge of getting back into writing. I certainly have some ideas. But for a long time now, I’ve had a hard time getting myself to sit down and write. Because of sadness or laziness or some combination of those.
I’m not doing NaNoWriMo or anything, but I am going to try to write SOMETHING in November. We’ll see how it goes.
To quote another John Mulaney bit, I think about this every damn day.
Mulaney's (@mulaney) "horse in the hospital" riff was dubbed the best political joke of the Trump era for calling out the "constant panicked drivel of the 24-hour-news cycle" https://t.co/KFANYrn6yV
(His Radio City Music Hall performance (on Netflix) is a comedic tour de force) pic.twitter.com/IU3tVD9WDN
— Khanoisseur 🐶🤦🏻♂️🌎 (@Khanoisseur) May 5, 2018
I’m hoping later this year to go to New York to see some theater. One show I really want to see is Hadestown, which won the Tony for Best Musical this year. It’s a re-telling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.
This one song, a love song between the two leads, really jumped out at me when I heard it, mostly because of this one line: “All I’ve ever known is how to hold my own, but now I want to hold you, too.”
And I could be completely off-base, and overly optimistic, but I’ve always thought that if I ever do meet someone and fall in love, after a lifetime of loneliness and independence, that is exactly how I will feel.
I turned 35 on Saturday, the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. (It’s weird to think that the moon landing was only 15 years to the day before I was born. 1969 seems a lot farther from 1984 than 2004 does from 2019.) I fully expected to be miserable on the day that officially determined than any pregnancy I ever have will be a “geriatric” pregnancy. And there’s still no guy who could help me achieve that geriatric pregnancy in sight.
But even though I’m really unhappy with the state of my life, and even though it’s hard not to focus on everything I DON’T have (love, relationship, kids, house, fulfillment), this was actually one of the best birthdays I’ve had in a long time. I told Erin, Julie, and Pam months ago to clear their calendars for that day because I knew I’d need moral support. So on my birthday, they came over to hang out in the pool (on a really freaking hot day), get dinner, and sit around on my floor eating ice cream cake and drinking Diet Sunkist.
This is 35.
And for some reason, I can’t help but feel hopeful…
I’m trying.
That’s really the best thing I can say about my life right now. I am trying to change everything that’s making me unhappy. But I worry that it won’t work, I’ll have wasted all this time, and I’ll just have decades of an empty, unfulfilling life ahead of me.
…I’m not doing well at all. I’m happy so rarely these days that when I am, it surprises me.
I keep hoping I’ll have a positive update to post here, but I never do. Nothing ever changes, except for me getting more and more frustrated with the lack of change.
If you try your absolute hardest and can never reach the things you desire most, and you gain nothing in striving for them, and every moment and every interaction and everyone in your life just serves to remind you of what you’re missing…can you ever truly be happy? Or are you forced to spend the rest of your life distracting yourself with superficial pleasures because there’s a hole in your life that can never be filled?
First, quick follow-up to my last post: if you don’t follow the Oscars, Free Solo WON Best Documentary Feature, which means my cousin, Evan Hayes, is an Oscar winner! I’m super happy for him. There have been some articles about him since then, linked here!
So: song of the moment. I’ve had songs from Waitress here before, and here’s one that’s kind of underrated. The character singing, Dawn, has just started online dating for the first time and is anxious about it, which she expresses hilariously in this song. But while it’s a funny song, there is so much truth in here for those of us who have been unlucky enough to have to do online dating. For me, it’s been over eleven years now.
Eleven. Effing. Years.
And STILL I find myself like Dawn in this song, nitpicking the things guys do (He could eat Oreos/But eat the cookie before the cream), worrying about my future (You cannot be too careful when it comes to sharing your life/I could end up a miserable wife), getting anxious about what the guy will think of me (What if I give myself away, to only get it given back?/
I couldn’t live with that), catastrophizing (He could be criminal, some sort of psychopath/
Who escaped from an institution/Somewhere where they don’t have girls/He could have masterminded some way to find me) and worrying about what will happen if it DOES work out (Or even worse he could be very nice, have lovely eyes/And make me laugh, come out of hiding/What do I do with that?).
It works out for Dawn in the end. But I’m losing faith that it ever will for me, and this endless cycle of bad online dates- or GOOD online dates where the guy isn’t into me- is just absolutely miserable. The only thing more miserable would be resigning myself to a life where I never get to feel romantic love.
I’ve mentioned several times here how much I love the Oscars. Some years I’ve even seen all the Best Picture nominees before the awards.
This year, I…actually have not seen ANY of the Best Picture nominees, although I hope to change that soon. But Best Picture is not the award I’m excited about in this year of all kinds of weird behind-the-scenes Oscar drama. What I’m actually excited about is Best Documentary Feature. And that’s because my cousin Evan is nominated in that category for producing Free Solo!
I saw Free Solo when it first hit theaters in October. Since then, it spent a couple of weeks in IMAX, won a BAFTA two weeks ago (yea!), and is coming to Hulu in mid-March. It’s about rock climber Alex Honnold as he attempts to set the record for free solo climbing (which is climbing without a rope). It is seriously nerve-wracking- even though I knew that Alex is alive and well and (spoiler alert) did successfully complete the climb, I didn’t fully grasp the danger until I saw the movie. One wrong move and he would have fallen to his death. Here’s a 360 video that gives you a taste of it: