That time I had no power.

So I don't have any power.

Or at least, I didn't about a month ago.

My younger sister, who is living with me, did not approve of this. I could understand why, she wasn't facing the same financial burdens as myself, and didn't entirely understand my situation, just that now her hair straightener didn't work. Christ, I don't even know my own situation most of the time. But, I told her, "It'll be just like camping, except we're inside."

The first day wasn't bad. It's summer. I don't need heat. I work all day, I'm with my friends all night. Honestly I felt like I hardly used the place. When I got back home I realized that although one might think that because the sun is out everything should be bright, but that's really not the case. The apartment was already gray with the fading day and I scrambled about the place quickly.

I thanked God that I was a woman because women are genetically programmed to have a various assortment of candles. I decided that I would prefer to be in the living room, so I gather a candle coux to be staged there later. I also ran into my room and dug through the piles of clothing on my floor to find what I would want to wear when I went out that night, and laid the things I needed, including the shoes and bag, on a chair in the kitchen, because I was not about to look for things in my pit of a room by candlelight. Even though I am impoverished, I still have a responsibility to myself to look kick ass.

When my friend Nate came over as we had planned for when he got off of work, but before I didn't have power, he found me stretched out on my couch, with a bottle of wine on the counter and a glass in my hand, completely surrounded by candles. Of course, he was confused.

I assured him that I wasn't trying to lure him away from his girlfriend, but instead was simply powerless. Which also sounds like a come on, but upon further explanation, he understood and helped me flush away my woes with another wonderfully womanly thing; a bottle of cheap wine.

The next day I got to my class especially early so I could get a spot with an outlet, otherwise, I wouldn't have enough power to have my computer. Lord knows, if I need nothing else in this day and age as a twenty-something white kid, its my Macbook with itunes running while I'm looking at stupid stuff on the internet, downloading music, watching tv and eating dinner. I would have to opt out of watching TV, but Lost is online, so I didn't give a fuck.

Also, later that day at work, I hid my phone by an outlet near the radio, and I was able to charge that puppy too. I was only ashamed when the radio would do that blipping-out thing it does when someone is calling you. I would avert my eyes and hope nobody shouted: "Which power thief does this belong to?" holding my battered and vibrating phone in the air. Luckily, this did not occur.

As the weekdays passed, it wasn't hard to go to my friends house until I was tired enough to come home, and to plug my computer in at their place, or to open the refidgerator door as fast as possible, hoping that some, just some, of the cool air was inside. It was however dificult to just be me. I was loosing my mind over bils and responsibility, and therefore the opinion of my parents, and inevitably the rest of my life. My panic attacks would come on, and I would just climb into the bathtub (still with the glass of wine) and simply hide until they went away.

My sister, once again didn't understand this. Why on earth would I not answer our mother's phone calls? She would scoff and walk away, looking extremely perturbed. She came home from work to find me sitting in the bathtub, in sweatpants, slippers, a beanie and a hoodie, with the hood up. (I was cold and severely depressed and in the throws of anxiety.) She walked in, saw me there, in the dark and said "We don't have any toilet paper."

I said a monotone, "Sorry." There was nothing I could do about it in any way.

She sighed and walked away. For some reason, it didn't even cross her face, or strike her at all that this was not normal behavior.

Once it was the weekend, I was sick of this camping trip. Luckily, two pay checks arrived for me that day. It is true that nobody pays anybody on time in theatre.

Paychecks in hand, I rolled my car (which was running out of gas) in neutral, most of the way to the bank, cashed the checks, put gas in the car (ouch) and called up Xcel. I had power. But now I had NO money. Not even a penny. The pay checks matched nearly to the cent of what I needed to get out of this mess.

And so, that is that state I am in now. Because I'm still working for the theatre (therefore, not paid yet) and still waiting on the scholarship I was told I would be receiving in May. MAY for Christ's sake.

And now, I need to pay two months of Rent. C'mon CU Bursar's Office... C'mon CU Bursar's Office... Finish something for mama...

I'm not bitter, just bemused.

The Office.

After my brief stint in England I suddenly became overwhelmingly drawn to anything British simply due to my nostalgia. This led me to Ricky Gervais's The Office and I found it hilarious. It wasn't forced, or campy like the American version, and I thought that somewhere, and probably in lots of somewhere's, this was the reality of the working environment.

Indeed it is true. I have found it.

And now I work there. Kinda.

In this little office with the looming Cass outside my door, I suddenly find myself sneaking to the internet while no one is looking. Evading my work as much as possible, I stare into space for a bit, and then laugh privately with myself at something idiotic happening right outside my door. I've shredded for hours, and luckily I'm high so the feeling of the paper and the sound of the machiene alone can keep me entertained. I've mastered the art of having multiple windows up so that I can pop my work right up as soon as someone approaches. I'm suddenly paranoid about the amount of which I'm typing or clicking, thinking that surely others will know that my amount of clicking is NOT the right amount of clicking for that project, therefore she's not working, so get her and burn her!

Perhaps I'm overreacting.

Damn

Turns out getting rip-roaringly drunk doesn't solve as many problems as one would hope. It sadly solves no problems, potentially creates new ones, and leaves me feeling awful on the second day of summer school.

At least there are some fun pictures.

Who am I, really?

I have always thought of myself as a strong individual. I have faced a lot of terrible things in my relativly short life, and despite all of this, I shirk back in fear in unfamiliar locales, losing my stellar personality in mere moments simply because I trust no one. Shouldn't I trust myself, knowing, as I do that I am a stellar human being. So why can't I act like it. Why can't I just shut my damn brain off and simply be?

I guess I'll figure that answer out some other day.

I'm also writing this as I hide from other csf employees in a bathroom stall. Yikes.

Here's one thing I never understood...

I've been watching a lot of LOST reruns lately (mostly because daytime tv makes me want to blow my brains out) and I have a question to pose to the character of Charlie. Why not just go on a serious bender? I mean, there's a plane FULL of heroin. There's nothing else to do, you're not getting rescued, so I say loose your shit for a little bit. Everyone could join, and then they'd stop worrying so much.

I really am an insult to my own intelligence sometimes.

Thoughts on Poverty and Sewing.

Ok. You know you're broke when you walk in the door and hope that the lights still turn on. You also know you're broke when you're pulling old tissues out of the trash as toilet paper. I hope the rationing of food can continue to be effective until I have all of my money's in my greedy little hands. That's the problem with doing odd jobs, or only working for people when they need you (ie, being a slave-sewer-monkey for the theatres of Colorado): You never get paid in an appropriate amount of time. I think that if I'm doing the work now, I should be paid now. This is unfortunatly not the case, and alas you wait around for weeks, (all the while, the first of the month is getting closer) for theatre folk to get their checkbooks in balance and pay me not only the three different paychecks I should have already seen, but my goddamn scholarship. I wouldn't be wiping my ass with boogers if that was the case.

Of course, I could have budgeted.... blah blah blah...
I SHOULD have budgeted.
But that is one of the big concepts keeping me from adulthood.

Speaking of these charmingly absent paychecks, I hate sewing. That's right, after years of sewing just because it was a job in the building I rehearsed in, I have finally gotten three different gigs sewing professionally, or rather, outside of school. Working for Ted was fine. Really long days and lots of pressure for perfection, but fine. Central City, not so fine. Just a gaggle of nerdy women who have no confidence in who they are as people, and who play power games to figure out who can be the queen of their big pile of trash, or rather, the disgusting unorganized hovel they call a costume shop. In this environment I have learned that I liked my environment at school and at Ted's, not the sewing. Now I find myself working for the Colorado Shakespeare Festival as a stitcher, again. Just when I thought I could go get a nice job at Starbucks and not have my back ache every day and my fingers bleed, I get a call from Brenda who needs help finishing shows.

Goddamnit if I can't say no to an oppurtunity even if its one that I don't want. I HATE watching my friends go off and act, while I stay locked to a machiene stitching at clothes I won't even wear. I hate the tedious nature, the stupid conversations, and in the CSF shop, the painful tension in the air, between warring costume-ladies. I don't even know who the captain of the other team is, all I know is that there is something floating in that room, so once again, I keep my mouth shut. My collegues, and equally talented to me friends get to go be onstage, singing, laughing, acting, enjoying rehearsal of all things, and I stay quiet in the corner, and try to remain as unnoticeable as possible.

Yeah, I'm pretty much done with sewing.

Welcome to my Memory.

It may seem strange that at twenty one I finally feel the need to record my own reality. I have come to a simple conclusion in regards to why: I am terrified and obsessed with the passage of time. I'm aware that this is a very stupid fear to have seeing as I can't do a damn thing about it, but it doesn't stop me from feeling the way I do. I get panicked and scared when I can't remember how I felt when I was fourteen, what was my world view at seventeen, how I played and lived in make-believe at eight, or even the casual conversations of the classroom that I have experienced for all of my years as a pupil.

Before I decided to commit myself to a life of poverty (ie. acting) I was also considering being an impoverished historian because I have always adored history. This past weekend, driving across the country, I always smile when I see rows of trees along a driveway. Its a strange thing to love, but the idea that hundreds of years ago someone started to make that scrap of land their home and they carefully planted trees at their entrance gives me a beautiful sense of the longegivty of the world, and how the act of planting a tree, or simply personal creation, can last far after you're gone, but the memory of your act continues to exist and hold your humanity to the earth, despite inevitable death. I have realized in the past week that my love of history, and my strange close emotional tie to the human spirit is connected to my paranoia in regards to the passage of my own short amount of time.

That being said, it makes perfect sense that at twenty one, with the countdown to adulthood on, I am beginning to panic. In this short time, how can I live all of the lives I imagined for myself all those years ago. How can I choose where to be, what to do, how to live, when I want to be do and live so many different and conflicting things? Instead I have to stop myself and say, life will happen as I'm living it. I can freak out about not being able to remember things all I want, but I can't change that aspect of reality. There's no stopping the passage of time. I have to embrace and adore the idea of the future as much as I do the past. That being said, I'm not there yet.

And maybe if I write everything do, I'll start to remember more... and wouldn't that be nice.