Merci à tous!

my coworkers who saw straight through me; the unexpected and welcome return of Friday night pizza, albeit in a slightly different form; David Mitchell; those kids who brought my writing back; the University of Kansas; escape to Colorado; Marylanders; Subcontinent, and my introduction to Sir U von L; StoryCorps, for planting the performance seed; Detective Sergeant Hathaway; voters; The Four Feathers; all the girls who worked with me on the play at the Center, whose deep-thinking ways really lightened my load; Lake Shore Drive, for providing the perfect backdrop to cathartic music blaring, sightseeing, and (once, memorably) hysterical breaking down; ZooLights at the Lincoln Park Zoo; Owen & Engine; "It is what it is."; a hard-won East Coast trip; Skype; "I feel like a character in an after-school special" and unexpected safety everywhere I went; "Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?"; those people I keep mentioning here; those characters I keep mentioning here; family and friends for whom distance and time is no barrier; Iowa City; Peppermint Joe Joe's; tea; introspection, supervised and unsupervised; growing up; my version of adulthood; BAMFs

Would(n't) Rather be Music

December 18th, 2011. A red letter day. One of many days when it became obvious that sometimes the answers lie outside yourself. My dad, on that day, on any writing I might do on the film I had just seen: "You have to get it into your soul first." The film was Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, whose many other versions were already firmly embedded. He knows how I work.

To no one's surprise, I am still obsessed with Cloud Atlas. It definitely got in my soul, and it didn't even take repeat readings (pending, but first I have to read the entire oeuvre of David Mitchell), or repeat viewings (accomplished). All it took was one good go-through and, if I'm honest, listening to the Lion King orchestral suite on repeat. Everything else was just reinforcement.

It's not a new concept for me, and it wasn't in December 2011 either. What Dad did was articulate a lifelong manner of relating to material--fiction, film, social causes, anything--that had me drawing "dream pictures" of my favorite Wolves Chronicles characters at age ten, taping them to my wall in my bedroom in Paris, and lulling myself to sleep with a heady mixture of art contemplation and a Zouk soundtrack gently emitting from my old boom box.

It worked, too. I had more dreams that year of interacting with fictional characters than I had ever had before or have had since.

On the other hand, there were the visions of Lewis & Clark west of the Mississippi, the quest for Musketeer leavings in the Loire valley, the prowling after spies in London, the discovery of political theater courtesy of my first and best loved social justice obsession.

There was the time I read Anthony Blunt's memoir. There was the time my parents and I went to the gay pride parade in Paris. There was time I wrote to Joan Aiken and she wrote back.

Those are the moments that got into my soul because something else had gotten in there first and made room. The other moments in my life that have been just as meaningful (often more powerful, more emotional), like returning from France, being backstage, graduating from high school, from college, my parents' moving away from Champaign, uproarious moments with my roommates, hot tub talks with Subcontinent, laughter with P, literary analysis with M or K, standing platonic dates with R, standing platonic dates with T (occasionally combined)...those moments hit me with significance from somewhere else. Anything arriving in or emerging from the depths of my soul comes pre-wrapped with its own significance, and I can enjoy it for what it is. Those associated moments stand out in my memory as unreservedly happy.

Yes, there is only room for so much in there. There were songs I listened to last year, driving to and from work on tough days, or driving up and down I-57, that really hurt from way down deep. I listen to them now and they're good songs and they'll always have associations, but they don't so much match who and where I am anymore.

Cloud Atlas is humanistic, realistically optimistic, and it contains multitudes. It's not squeaky clean, (and it's not simple), but I wonder whether it could have slipped so effortlessly into my soul last year. Maybe I would have read it differently, as one of its own characters does, albeit with far less drastic results. Maybe I would have liked it fine, put it down, and forgotten about it in a few days.

Maybe it was always meant to be.

Four More Years

Here's my suggestion. Whether you're happy--I'm thrilled--with Obama's victory or not, how about you take whatever you felt most passionate about in this election and pursue it, on any level. The world could always use more voices.