This Artist Must Know Me

Read the image to the left from the bottom up. This was a part of an exhibit my friend Freddy helped curate (is that what you do for an art show?) and had I ever owned a Blackberry in my life, I'd think the artist had lifted this straight from my phone. I'm pretty sure I've sent those texts at more than one point in my life. Really only one person has ever been the recipient of them, and for that I am truly sorry.

I really will get it together one day.

Maybe It's Malcolm X

A and I had a good morning. We've had good days lately. Sometimes he says things I don't like, and then I remember to cherish all the time left with him, because it's going to end and I want nice memories. So we focus on the happy.

I used to depend on a cadre of people to help me get through the rough times. Having grown up with a family that was wildly dysfunctional, I crafted my own. As people grow and change I understand that separation is sometimes inevitable. Anyway, if you're reading this, you're obviously not one of those people I'm either pissed at or cutting myself away from. I just feel this great welling of anger swirling about inside and need to act somehow. Well, in the past I've acted with my legs and feet and brain and I'll be damned if that's not what I'm going to do now.

The First Step to Solving a Problem

...is admitting you have one.

Without going into an abundance of details, and without hanging our laundry out in the chilly spring air, suffice to say A and I have decided to call it quits. His birthday was Tuesday and it was a disaster, and that was only the most recent manifestation of much larger issues we've been dealing with.

I'm confused about some points of the resolution, but here's what I think I understand: this is amicable. This doesn't preclude us from reuniting in the future.

For the moment, I'm still living in the house. I'll be commencing a serious search for an apartment of my own (and mine alone) in the next month or so. Aside from the fact that I need to save a little more money first, things are reasonably good right now, something I attribute to the fact that we both finally admitted what neither of us was willing to fully succumb to. Nelly Furtado wasn't the first to say it, but her song "All Good Things Come to An End" certainly rings true.

What should be noted is, as heartbroken as I am that this came to pass, I also feel like I can breathe (current allergic status and reduced lung function notwithstanding). I'm excited for future prospects, from tattoos to grad school. I'm kind of jazzed to have a blank canvas of a place to decorate and break in with my style.

Anyway, I've been reading a lot. I finished Fences in anticipation of Denzel coming to Broadway and finally got around to A Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers, who authored one of my favorite novels of all time (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter). Oh, and Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys, which tells the story of Antoinette Mason, the first Mrs. Rochester, better known as Bertha (the crazy woman in the attic) in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. All of which, by the way, you should read if you have the chance. Wide Sargasso Sea is an entrancing narrative, giving a voice to a marginalized woman in one of England's more famous novels. Whether her marginalization has to do with the fact that she's Creole– neither white nor black-Caribbean– or the fact that she's from a former colony of England's, the reader of Jane Eyre knows little about her aside from the eerie pall she casts over Mr. Rochester's estate, and that she eventually escapes from the oversight of Grace Poole, who is charged with watching her, burns the Rochester house down and commits suicide, enabling him to marry Jane. In Rhys' work, we see Antoinette as she grows up and what happens when she marries Mr. Rochester and they live for a time in the West Indies. When he rejects her identity, her homeland, is when she descends into madness. It's a gorgeous work.

Obviously there's much more to the novel, but I digress. There's a memoir called I Don't Care About Your Band by Julie Klausner and it's tons of fun to read. Not only did I find myself cringing at more than one of her anecdotes from the sheer fact of having been in her shoes (if not with the same type of man), but it's written in a way so as not to elicit too much guilt from the missteps some of us less-fortunate-in-love ladies make over and over...and over and over again. The only aspect I couldn't seem to get past was socioeconomic. Well, and familial. Early in the book she talks about two kinds of women who have chronic relationship and intimacy issues with men: the kind for whom Daddy was never around and who have taken to a pole for therapy, and those for whom the men will never ever live up to the man, the myth, the legend that is Daddy, but that's okay, because they'll always have Daddy to run and be comforted by.

Now, I most certainly never had Daddy to run back to, but I am definitely not prancing naked around a pole, either. In fact, I've taken pole-dancing classes at my gym and the whole situation is quite disconcerting for me. Then again, statistically I should have two or three children by now and no significant other in sight, also, and I managed to avoid that altogether, as well. The other difference between the author and myself has to do with her seemingly endless cashflow, whereas I'm pretty much always broke. Then again, that could have been a literary vehicle to allow her to focus on the insane situations she'd find herself in with men of questionable...everything. In any case (before the digression sneaks in again) for those of us who tend to make facepalm-worthy decisions about the guys we take home, this book is that friend you always wanted to tell you that no, you're not a complete idiot and the personification of scandal, because someone else has done it, too, and in some cases, done it much much worse. And that you shouldn't feel guilty about it. That's key: forget the guilt.

I wonder if her parents read it. I mean, it wasn't at all rough for me to read, because like I said there was that whole "identification" factor, but I can't imagine writing my version and sending a copy to my parents. Or even letting them know it existed. Sweet Jesus, NO.

Perhaps because I need some cleansing of the soul the book I decided to open after I finished I Don't Care About Your Band (I wonder what it says about me and my job that I keep typing "bank" in place of "band") was A Jesuit Off-Broadway by James Martin, SJ, or Father Jim as I know him from working at The Public. Father Jim wrote it after working as a theological advisor and, later, chaplain to the writer, director and cast of my favorite play, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. It's a fair dose of history about first-century Palestine and what is known of the lives of Jesus and the Apostles, along with some anthropological speculation of other details based on evidence found in the Bible. All of that is interspersed with conversations, observations and interactions with the members of that run of Judas. I'm about halfway through and don't want to stop. I hope the copy of Judas I ordered gets here this week so I can read them in tandem; from the few excerpts I've read so far I can still hear them in my head as the cast would say them. A rare compliment from me about NYC: that show is one of my favorite parts about this city.