Struggle Plays Around

Since I've joined the ranks of the working girls (no, not THOSE kind of working girls, get your mind out of the gutter!), I've discovered something miraculous. While the daily grind doesn't just extend to my coffee, and while the work week can seem endless at times, one of the most amazing things about working, rather than being a student, is, with some exceptions, your nights and weekends are fairly free. Now, this might not sound that revelatory, but stay with me here. For the last 22 years, excluding the brief respite given by vacation times, my evenings were occupied, initially with piano lessons, play practices, vocal jazz rehearsals (am I painting a solid picture for you concerning both my dorkiness and my mother's saintliness?) and later, as the years went by, with part time jobs and meetings and always, through it all, the endless homework, coursework, paperwork and schoolwork, designed to turn the average human being into a pedantic philosophy quoting machine. Or, you know, teach us something. Whichever way you slice it, it took up most of my time, so between classes during the day, working in the evenings and chasing this elusive "sleep" creature all weekend (between drinking bouts. What? Not-Yale was tough!) , I pretty much kept myself busy.

But now that all of that is behind me (at least for the next few years) I'm discovering this amazing thing known as "doing things during the week". Wild and unconventional as this concept is to me, it seems to me that I may be a little behind the times on this one. For example my friend Jon, (hi Jon!) Has drinks and dinner dates with people all the time. When we trade stories about the previous evening, I regal him with tales of Netflix and Sleepytime, while Jon counters with exciting stories about his dating adventures in the Capital. Once I started asking around, it seemed that all of my friends had ceased to reserve their "out of the house" moments for the weekends. So I thought, why not?

Now, given my innate uncoolness and my deep seated need for sleep, I figured I couldn't do anything that crazy on a Monday that might mean I couldn't make it to work on a Tuesday. So body shots, Roman orgies and road trips to Washington were all out, (Sorry, Jon), as were assassination attempts on Latin American dictators were all out. (Just ask the CIA, that last one can take YEARS.) So what was a girl to do to fill all her new found time? The obvious choice, attend two different one-man plays about the lives of Truman Capote and James Baldwin, respectively. Duh.

The Maukingbird Theater Company is a small but prolific company here in Struggledelphia who produce work which looks at questions of sexuality and gender in a new and often striking way. I've seen a great deal of their work, and for a new company they are interesting in tackling some of the most disturbing and perturbing questions facing society today. Their current work is kind of a two parter, two separate plays, each a one man show, each with the same set, but each with a different subject. "Tru", a blustering and meandering 2 hour Odyssey, is told from the perspective of an aging Truman Capote, whose tenuous status in society is quickly plummeting due to his indiscreet, if acute, descriptions of the socialites and dilettante around him. "The Threshing Floor", a singing, zingingly tight hour long chronicle, probes into the life of James Baldwin. While Capote made a career of being the ultimate hanger on, Baldwin exiled himself from the United States in every possible way, I mean, the man practically put the ex in ex-patriot. Perhaps I preferred the piece on Baldwin because of my own recent regression to US soil, because of my own concerns, post graduation, post travel, post life as I've come to know it, about what to do next.

Or maybe I just liked it because it was shorter. Now that I know weeknights are an option, I'm going to fill them just as high as I can. After all, I've got 22 years to make up for. Just don't tell my choral teacher, okay?

The best laid struggles...

Oh, my dear lord. Last night I legitimately spent the evening with a young man of my age and general demeanor who totally and without shame listened to his c-d player the entire time. From my apartment to one bar to another bar and every street upon which we walked, this kid was in his own world, with the c-d of his choosing. Naturally I was both enthralled and concerned by this action. Why, might you ask? Let me explain.

First of all, who the HELL has a portable c-d player in this day and age? My GOD that was odd to see. To be fair, this young man also carried around with him a small but substantial library of c-ds to switch in and out. Which is something that would be quite common to see in, oh, I don't know, the late nineties? Yes, well, welcome to Spain, a country where the concept of the Internet is still one that needs to me explained to the majority of the population. The other day someone told me that her parents refused to get the internet in their house because they insisted that they didn't have room for it. A second of all, who on Earth DOES that? Who listens to their music when they are with other people? Because I am a creeper at heart, at one point during the evening I found myself unabashedly staring directly at this person, as one does when something totally insane occurs. "What?" he asked me. "Nothing", I said.

Now, in another life, this incident would have totally baffled and confused me for days, maybe weeks on end. But since I came to and started living in Spain, well, this is just another day in the life. Now that I'm here I've come to realize that Pedro Almodovar isn't making fictional movies, he's making documentaries. The randomness of this country continues to amaze me daily. For example, yesterday I had planned and hoped to take a day trip to the nearby town of Segovia. I woke up, shook off my hangover, and headed to the train station to meet some friends and buy the tickets. Of course, as this is SPAIN, all of the trains for the day were sold out. How it is possible for every train leaving every half an hour to a town less then an hour away to be sold out, well, I have no idea, but guess it is. Just another fun fact about being here, I suppose.

This month at my favorite vintage theater here in Madrid they are showing a series of Charlie Chaplin films. When watching the hilarious and heartbreaking movie The Circus and observing the hijinks and antics of Chaplin as he ran, bowlegged, around a group of clowns, I couldn't help but relate strongly to his "little tramp". Lost, confused, mugging for the camera, honestly, that's like my Tuesday night here in Spain. If I had a mustache and a bowler hat, hell, you wouldn't know the difference.

Still. At least I take my headphones off when spending time with other people. I have to say, I don't think that's culture difference, I think that's just a struggle.

Happy Families are all alike, but unhappy families are all struggles

History is scattered with what my middle school gym teacher might call "good efforts". As someone tragically born hand-eye coordination deficient my childhood gym classes were filled with falsely cheerful cries of "nice try, Leah" and "that'll heal with time, we promise!".

But while I wont be entering the Olympics any time soon, unless there's a category for struggle, in which case I'm taking home the gold, I usually can give more then a "good effort" when it comes to other activities, like, say, eating, or mocking, or watching tv. And I do indeed enjoy reading, in fact I'm not half bad at it, I rarely have to look up words, my comprehension makes me moderately amusing at cocktail parties, and I don't shy away from books whose length challenges the bible to a cage match. In fact, some perverse part of my mind attracts me to tomes of great length, maybe because I can use these novels both as reading materials and as small hand weights to tone on the go. The Iliad, Don Quiote, Crime and Punishment, I've slogged my way through several of the world's great books (of course, the term "world's great books" was coined by the older white gentlemen who wrote them, so let's not put too much stock in THAT) and I've enjoyed the process, to some extent. Lost in a world of windmills, ancient cities and names that end in -sky, I've wandered the halls of the western canon, chewed my way through the words of dead men like a bag of potato chips. So this summer when I decided that I should tackle Tolstoy's classic Anna Karenina I was looking forward to the wide world of 19th Century Moscow. Lord, was I fool back then.

Look, don't get me wrong. Anna Karenina is a wonderful book, and I'm enjoying it, I really am. I just can't seem to make myself read it. I'm 500 pages in, I'm finally at the point where I can figure out who is who, no small feat considering that ALL THE NAMES ARE THE SAME, and I just can't seem to move forward. Instead of sitting down and reading this great novel, among other things I have done the following:

1. Re-watched the second season of Mad Men.
2. Read the last two Harry Potter books, the Rough Guide to Europe, Sputnik Sweetheart, several Terry Prachitt novels, a book of Chinese folktales, and countless magazines.
3. Considered changing my stance on Lost after seeing a photo of Matthew Lillard with his shirt off.
4. Scolded myself for my shallow, shallow mind.
5. Rented 10 apartments.
6. Memorized the contents of the Sephora website.
7. Spent some time with my good friend wine.
8. Attempted to create the perfect gazpacho.
9. Took a tour of historic Philadelphia.
10. Stared at the cover of Anna Karenina.

So clearly I'm in a weird holding pattern and I think I need a motivational coach or a trainer or something to get me through this. Do they have that sort of thing?

Struggle Grows Up

I don't know what it is about birthdays, but they always strike me as odd events. When you are little they are whirlwinds of excitement and cake, and, because at that age it's still acceptable, you can have a theme. I remember one favorite birthday when my parents had a woman from the Struggledelphia Zoo come in with cages full of live animals and I spent the day joyously chasing roosters around my yard with a boa constrictor decorating my shoulders a la Britney Spears. I also got to hold a hedgehog. Best day ever. But, as we grow older and wiser, we tend to shy away from parties with matching Aladdin napkins and plates, and are more attracted to parties with matching tequila shots.Certainly last year, my 21st birthday, was celebrated with the theme of "shwasted". I fondly recall proudly stepping into a Strugglevania liquor store and presenting the clerk with every form of id in my wallet, including my Russian student visa and my library card. She was unimpressed, but she gave me my first legally purchased alcohol ever. I guess Cyrillic wasn't her best subject.

Some might say that 22 is a massive let down from the birthdays which have come before it. It doesn't have the wide eyed wonder of my zootastic event or my Disney themed pizza party. I don't feel like a responsible part of the country like I did at 18 with my new-found ability to vote and buy pornographic materials (anyone else think it's weird that those two go together? Don't blame Clinton. It's not his fault. Damn you Supreme Court!). I have been legally drinking for a year (sorry, liver) and so the bloom is sort of off that rose. So do I have to look forward to as I celebrate my departure from the womb? The world being what it is, and me being a young college grad fighting not to be nauseous when observing the job market, honestly I think there are times when we all wish we could just hop back in.

But I'm choosing to take a more positive approach, and view this birthday as a step forward. Hope and change, right? I mean, that's what I voted for. In my power yoga class (which I take twice a week with my parents. Say it with me: Never been cool) a middle aged father of two with huge tattoos and a shiny bald head guides us through an hour of intense poses and stretches in a room heated to 100 degrees. While my usual response to his voice goes something along the lines of "oh, for the love of god stop talking and get to the part where we lie down on the ground because my arms are about the EXPLODE", he did say something the other day that made me think. When discussing pain, like the pain that shoots down my legs in downward dog as I scowl at my feet and sweat, he said that what pain really is is change. We feel the pain of changing when do something different, and difficult as the pain can be to stand, it's that pain that makes us something better.

I'm all for self improvement. Especially now that I can legally drink my way through it. So as painful as growing older may be, I say, bring it on. Another year of struggle, coming up.