What I Am

I"ve spent some of last and most of this long weekend sorting through boxes of old stuff. I had boxes in the garage that I still hadn't opened since I moved here in July. And there were plenty of other boxes, that I knew were full of stuff that would eventually need to be sorted and lots of it thrown away. I've been moving from place to place hauling all this stuff with me. I get so terribly attached to it. Or just the memory of it. Or the memories in it. I'm not completely sure. But if I was going to do this, I would have to be ruthless. I would have to make myself part with things I put away and never thought about again until it was time to move and then I realized, well, I should probably go through that stuff and get rid of some of it. But the thought was too much. I put it off. And put it off some more.

Last weekend I started in the garage with a box of video tapes. Yep, VHS. I had two boxes full. And those things are heavy. Moving them from place to place was made pointless by the fact that I don't even own a VCR anymore. But I had to look through them. See what I had in there. Videos I haven't played in years, but hadn't yet replaced with DVDs, if I ever would. There were lots of recorded tapes of stuff I taped off the TV. Back when there wasn't any other way to see something again. I chucked all of them. Then there were the tapes of music videos. The videos of Tori Amos, and Morrissey and others. Concert films. And then movies. I tried to keep them in my head, ones I planned to replace. Others, I had no real desire to ever see again, and can't even remember why I bought them in the first place. I tossed them all. I was brutal. I had to be.

After I emptied those boxes, I came to the one box for which I had no idea what it contained. It was one of those boxes my parents packed up at the old house in New York. They never opened it when they got here. Just put it on a shelf in their garage. Then when they moved this last time, they gave it to me. We think this is yours, they said. They had no idea what was in it either. It wasn't labeled. And it has sat in my garage for 10 months now. Finally, I would open it. And look what I found: trophies and plaques and medals, awards from school and sports. Varsity letters. My bronzed baby shoes. Stuff I kept in the bottom drawer of my nightstand in my childhood bedroom. I can see it exactly as I left it. Mom and Dad just dumped it all in a box and years later, here it all was.

That was last Sunday. So during the week at work, I began to plan for the next round. This weekend I would have four days to delve deep into the recesses of my past. First up, the footlocker. I have two footlockers. One that I spray painted outside and wall papered inside and covered with stickers. I took it with me to college, freshman year at Syracuse, when I roomed with Hina. The second, my actual army footlocker. Again, covered in stickers, mostly of places I've been. Used as a coffee table as recently as when I lived in Utah. I had some idea of what was in them. But could not have imagined the reality.

Footlocker one was filled with manilla envelopes, clasps neatly fastened, labeled in my own writing. Military photos. Poetry! hand written in high school. And letters, hundreds of letters and cards. I have somehow managed to keep every card and letter I ever received from anyone while I was in the army. Letters from Mom and Dad, and George and my aunts and grandparents. But also, from teachers, and coaches, and friends. Childhood friends. High school and college friends. Army friends, even an Army Chaplain. Friends from every stage of my life. I could see from the envelopes that these letters were sent to me at Fort Jackson during Basic Training. Then at Fort Gordon, then at Fort Carson, then in Darmstadt, Germany.  Then some after I got back home to New York.

The first footlocker also contained some ridiculous items. Bank statements, cancelled checks, and even ATM receipts! I got out the paper shredder. I opened every envelope and shredded everything that had my name or other personal information. I tossed the rest. I ended up with a big bag of trash. There were wall calendars from 1986, 1992, 1993. Date books. Notebooks. Manuals. An envelope with the dried petals of a flower I was given by an old army boyfriend. Old photos. Pay statements. A few old exam booklets. Things probably best lost to time.

But as I delved deeper, I found hand written notes from Hina and others that we wrote in school and passed to each other during class, folded into complicated shapes. Print outs of the primitive email system we had in 1988-89 on dot matrix paper. Messages from friends and even from some of my ball players, from when I managed the baseball team. One young guy always asking if I thought the coach would ever play him. In those messages and notes, I was brought back to that time. The trivial things that concerned us. The inside jokes we shared. Then there were the copies of the newspaper, with my byline in the sports section, reporting on my baseball team. Hina and all our friends writing all the other articles. We did it all. And I kept it all. Poems I wrote about baseball too. I remember at the time, Ms Sylman, my English teacher, told me that one day I'd write about other things. And I have, but I came back to baseball time and again too.

Then it was back upstairs to my office. For the piles of papers which included all the materials from my teaching days, lesson plans scribbled on the back of flyers, and even some favorite student papers that I kept. Grade sheets. Teacher evaluations. I reluctantly got rid of all of those. I kept my own school papers, essays and fiction, with notes from professors. An academic paper I presented at a conference. A trail of my development as a writer. Tomorrow I'll open the other footlocker, which I'm pretty sure holds all my old journals. And the little notebooks, with the black marble covers that I wrote stories in as a teenager. Juvenilia! (If I may be so bold.) I think I'll transcribe some of it, maybe most of it. Make computer files that can move with me much more easily. But can I really let go of all those handwritten pages? I don't know. There's plenty of time to figure that out still. First I've got to get typing, or scanning, or absorbing. Reading it all will takes weeks, months even. And it will make me laugh, and cry, and shake my head. It will make me remember who I was, who I am still.

What's the Frequency, Kenneth?

Meanwhile on 30 Rock... This season Kenneth has been promoted to an executive in NBC's Standards and Practices Department. And then he misguidedly quits that job to come to Tracy's rescue and ends up only being able to find work as a janitor.  It's just like Kenneth to be so self-sacrificing that he puts himself at a disadvantage to help someone else. However, I suspect that the wardrobe department may have run out of crazy old suits to put Kenneth in.

Somehow, Kenneth manages to keep his chin up ("Medically, it's a neck ridge."), but he finally admits to Jack Donaghy that he does this by lying to himself and he doesn't know how much longer he can do it. I have a feeling that Kenneth will end up back as a Page soon. But in the meantime, he hasn't been used much in recent episodes. They usually find some way to get him involved a little bit each week, now that he doesn't work directly for TGS. But it's less than before which makes me sad.  In last week's live episode, it can be argued that Kenneth saved the show (Again!) by locking everyone in Tracy's dressing room and reminding them about all the great moments in live television. Okay, I'm the only one arguing that. But still. 

Kenneth still makes me laugh more than practically anyone. So my weekly happiness quotient is directly proportional to the frequency of his appearances on screen. He had an interesting turn in this week's episode. He ends up filling in at the last minute in Tracy's wife's fashion show, modeling what looked like a poncho, with his boxers showing. They put him in hilarious makeup, and then he had the sudden urge to try cocaine (heaven forbid). Hopefully he'll get more plot involvement soon. In the meantime, I have plenty of back episodes to watch over and over.

UPDATE: 5/20/12

This week was the season finale and it ended in a rather disturbing development for Kenneth.  Ms. Whassername is up to her usual manipulative tricks. And Kenneth just wants to see the good in everyone. Hopefully, he realizes before it's too late. He can't let her keep him from getting back into the Page program. That is where he belongs. And next season will be the last. They just announced it this week. Hopefully they get a whole season's worth of episodes. At least it looks like things might actually end well for Liz, which I assume is what we all want. I know I do. 

UPDATE to the UPDATE:

13 Episodes. That's all we're going to get for Season 7 :(

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Back to the Mets. After their 6-2 start, they came back down to earth a bit and are now hanging in there just above .500 at 15-13. That's good enough for 3rd in the division. So I still feel they are having a great season so far. There have been more injuries. Ruben Tejada got hurt today, tripping on his way to first base and Jason Bay has a cracked rib. But Andres Torres is doing well since he came back, and Kirk Nieuwenhuis has been quite the rookie sensation. David Wright and Daniel Murphy are still batting over .300, well over in David's case at .375! Daniel had four hits yesterday and drove in the first two runs today as R.A. Dickey cruised to his 4th win of the season. #LGM

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The turtles are doing well. I have finally named them. Sydney and Scout. Sydney is the shy one and Scout is the intrepid. I spent a good four hours cleaning their tank yesterday. Boy they made a mess. I put them in the little cardboard boxes I brought them home from the pet store in while I worked on their home. Sydney just sat perfectly still, head in shell the whole time. But Scout was literally climbing the walls. The box was just high enough that I figured there's no way he gets out of there. But later when I came back from washing the gravel in the bathtub, Scout was not in the box! I couldn't believe it. He didn't get far, he was just in the corner of the room by the closet. But I was amazed that he got out. You don't really think of turtles as being very agile, but they can be. Lesson learned!

Reader Meet Author

I thought I'd talk about some of the books I've been reading lately.  I saw my therapist today and I remarked how I often talk to her about what I'm reading or what happened on 30 Rock or what the Mets did, and that this was probably not the best way to use the session. I actually said to her one time, "If I start giving you a summary of a 30 Rock episode during the next hour, please stop me." Come to think of it, on more than one occasion, I've sat down in her office and declared that I was not going to talk about X or Y, trying to stay on task.  I guess it's just that I don't really have anyone else to talk to about this stuff here. But I digress.

I just finished reading the memoir by Rachel Dratch called, "Girl Walks into a Bar..." In it she talks briefly about her time on SNL, and some of  the ups and downs of her career, and then at length about her dating life, and how she unexpectedly got pregnant and had a baby at age 43.  It was very well written and enjoyable. As much as she has ended up being (by her own admission) a marginal comic actress (one person who asked what I was reading said "Rachel who?" I had to explain that she was on SNL at the same time as Tina Fey and Amy Poehler), she is really, really funny, a great story teller, and I ended up liking her very much. Some of what she talked about was the pressure on women in their 40s who have never married. Something I can definitely relate to. She always had the worry in the back of her mind that she might never have a child. That's not a worry of mine, I don't really mind not having children, but I get the whole thing about not finding the right guy and feeling like time is running out. Rachel ends up having a child with a man she's only known a few months, and she did not get that full fairytale ending. While the guy is very involved with the child, he and Rachel never really figured out what they were as a couple. And she's only mostly okay with that. She's grateful for her son, as that's more than she ever thought she'd get, but is still a bit sad too, and not afraid to say it. It just struck me as so real. Things don't wrap up neatly in the end all the time. Or even most of the time.

Speaking of Tina Fey, I also recently read her memoir, "Bossypants." I like how the cover has a quote on it saying, "Totally worth it" - Trees  The irony was not lost on me, as I read it on my Kindle. Tina is the epitome of self-deprecation. In this collection of essays she, like Rachel, talks about her life and career in a way that lets you see that she really earned it, but allows for the fact that she was also very lucky. She's eminently likable, and still so funny and smart you want to be jealous, but you can't.

It's just a total coincidence that I read these two books in relatively close succession. It was really interesting to see two sides of the story (Rachel had originally been cast as a regular on 30 Rock, but was replaced after the pilot with Jane Krakowski). Hearing Tina, the creator of 30 Rock, and then Rachel, Tina's long time friend and colleague from Second City and SNL, talk about what happened during that time was inspiring to me. Because the media made it out like Tina had betrayed Rachel and Rachel was angry with Tina over it, but they both showed the same rare combination of honesty and professionalism.  No one blamed anyone. In the end, it was just about how the show was developing, and how there were a lot of other people whose opinions mattered and went into the decision. It wasn't like one said they were more right than the other. They just described how it was in their own experiences, like the classy, intelligent and talented ladies they are. Each of their stories touched only briefly on that episode, mostly because people continue to ask them about it. They both went on to show how much more there is to them than the names and faces people recognize on TV.

Before that I read yet another memoir, "Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?" by Mindy Kaling, who writes, acts in, and produces The Office. Mindy's book was more of a mixed bag. Framed somewhat as an advice column, it also gave the background story of how Mindy became a writer/performer. I came out of it with a mostly positive feeling about her. Especially since the character she plays on the Office is so annoying. It's good to know that's not really her. At the same time, she struck me as somewhat, I don't know, like maybe more of a snarky brat. She describes her experiences with humor, but sometimes it seems like she's missing her own point.

Going back further, I read Kristin Hersh's memoir, "Rat Girl." Kristin's book reads like you are in her mind, going with the flow, just watching how it works, and it's weird and wonderful. She writes about being bi-polar, not in a direct way, but in a way that allows her to reveal herself in layers as many things, not just bi-polar, not just an enigmatic yet successful musician, but as a whole person who happens to see the world unlike anyone else.  Kristin, several of whose songs provide titles for my blog entries as well as this blog itself, is perhaps a bit of a patron saint to me. I have met her in person several times after concerts, but in reading her book, it's like I know her more than ever. And I'm glad to have finally made her acquaintance.

Looking at my Kindle library, I realize there are a lot of memoirs. Next up is R.A. Dickey's "Wherever I Wind Up." Add to the list Fred Stoller's "My Seinfeld Year," Elna Baker's "The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance," Crystal Renn's "Hungry," Valerie Plame's "Fair Game," and Ron Darling's "The Complete Game" and one might wonder if I ever read fiction anymore.

I do of course. Some recent standouts include Chad Harbach's "The Art of Fielding," Jennifer Egan's "A Visit from the Goon Squad," and Tom Rachman's "The Imperfectionists." Looking at this list, I can see that the Kindle has encouraged me to read more books, take a chance on some I may not have read otherwise. I think just the ease of thinking 'I want to read that,' and then having it in front of you in two minutes takes away a lot of that dithering I'd do in bookshops, turning the book over in my hands, weighing it, feeling it as an object and wondering if I should take it home, or if it might just sit there unread. Not that there's not value in that too. I think books are wonderful objects, which is perhaps evidenced by the fact that I have bookshelves in every room of my house. I'm just more selective than ever in what books I bring home, because there is only a finite amount of space to store/display them all. At the Borders Going out of Business sale just before Christmas, I picked up a handful of books, the best of which was Brady Udall's "The Lonely Polygamist." And I think that's probably the best overall book I've read in the last year. Sometimes it takes a certain circumstance to bring a book to you. Whatever it is, we must then invite them in and let them live in us. Some stay longer than others.

Much like my reading list, in my own writing, I still tend to lean towards memoir, but I'm also thinking lately that I shouldn't be so afraid of fiction. I used to be able to do it. I'm experimenting here and there. But I think it's time to start experimenting towards something instead of just around it.