Old habits die hard

Some people say that in relationships, timing is everything, above all else. I don't completely believe this, but I don't disbelieve it, either. We bring to every relationship we form the sum of all of our experience, along with our current situations. And if we can't imagine our lives having turned out any differently than they are now, most likely it all has to do with one or two decisions we made, perhaps haphazardly or impuslvely, a long time ago.

Which is why "fate" is bullshit. Any of our lives could just as easily have gone a totally different direction if we hadn't ask that person for their phone number, or moved to a different city, or not gone out for drinks one night. It's sort of too overwhelming to think about, but it's something I tend to obssess about. Rather needlessly, of course.

Some very close friends of mine that I respect 100% recently undertook the viewing of Six Feet Under.

Anyone who knows me at all knows that SFU is kind of like my religion. It is what allowed me to be born again. I'll spare you the details (of course, if you've been reading this blog for the past 3 years, you already know the details....), but suffice to say, SFU pretty much ranks right up there with being born as one of the greatest things that ever happened to me. It literally changed my life: it opened up a whole new world to me, and totally altered my philosophy.

But I was also in the deepest, darkest trenches of emotional warfare at the time, fighting a losing battle against enemy insurgents in my brain that wanted to kill me. And SFU was a revelation. Why it was a revelation is too much to get into at the moment, but it was.

And the thing about my friends watching the show is this: they don't really care for it. I haven't discussed it in detail with them because I'm a coward and don't have the stamina for it (and I wouldn't want to put words in their mouths anyway), but I think they find it silly, pretentious and maybe slightly laughable.

Hmmm.

I know I'm overanalyzing here (surprise!), but if they see so very little of what I see when I watch that show, then what can that possibly mean?

Probably very little, actually. It's a fucking TV show.

But it's my TV show!!! It's what inspired me to change my life and become a therapist and go back to school. Hell, it even inspired me to practice a particular kind of therapy.

But maybe....just maybe....

If I saw the show now for the first time, assuming that my life were still in the same place it is now, would it still mean as much to me?

Hard to say, but probably not. I bet I would still like it a whole lot, though. When you find something (or someone) that speaks to you so profoundly, it's impossible to separate that from the circumstances or history.

It just is, it just does. So I can't hardly blame my friends for not seeing in Six Feet Under the same magic that I did: our lives and situations while watching it couldn't be more different. There's nothing more to be read into it than that.

Of course, I still think they're wrong and I still find it disappointing, but there is no deeper meaning than that.

A relationship with a TV show, or any piece of art, can be as complicated (or as simple) as any relationship with a person. It all depends on where you are, where you've been, and where you're going.

Plain as that.

Too Many Movies?

A few minutes ago I'm sitting at my desk in my bedroom, happily playing email Scrabble, when I hear footsteps underneath my window. Ask anyone who knows my backyard, and they'll tell you it's creepy at night. It's gigantic, and extremely dark, and lined with shrubbery around the entire fence that protrudes a good 10 feet into the yard.

I know I heard the footsteps, because my desk is right up against the window and my window is open. So despite the fact that I can't see shit because it's too dark (I never shut my blinds), I hear them and I stop. I perk up. The footsteps stop, then I hear them again, very distinctly the sound of two heavy feet walking on the dead leaves, going in the opposite direction. And it truly sounds like they're about 4 feet from my window. I have a door in my room that goes into the back yard as well, so first thing I do is look over at the door to make sure it's locked.

My roommate Garrett has a telescope he likes to take out into the backyard sometimes, so I leave my room and go knock on his door, thinking maybe it's him outside messing around, but he answers from inside his room, so obviously it's not him. However, he decides to go investigate with me.

I grab a hammer and a flashlight and we go outside. We scour the entire backyard and of course find nothing, but I swear to god it was not my imagination. Yes, I looked at about a hundred videos of ghosts today and watched Session 9 tonight, which was creepy as shit, but I heard it, and I stand by my story.

Both sides of the backyard have big gates, and the one on the north side is always standing open, and fairly secluded by a garage apartment (and that person has moved out, so I know it wasn't her; it's empty right now), but it's still there. Yesterday I saw two homeless people walking down the street, the state hospital is 3 blocks away, and a couple months ago, as I rounded the corner onto my street riding my bike home from work late one night, some cops had the entrance to the street from the main road blocked off and several cops were walking up and down my street with their flashlights. I didn't ask any questions; I just went inside and made sure all the doors were locked.

So even though it was probably nothing, it's not completely ridiculous that someone could have been in the backyard. And I'm still sleeping with the hammer next to my bad tonight.

Television Killed the Cinema Star

An early October issue of Entertainment Weekly that I was reading in the breakroom at work tonight had a fluffy, but mildly interesting article (isn't that every article in EW?) about why no gay movies have been made in the 2 years since Brokeback Mountain was such a critical and economic success. Particularly, it noted, since gay characters have become so ubiquitous and popular on television. The article offered several theories for this, like that studio producers and executives tended to be old, white men who have had their jobs for decades compared to TV producers, which have a much higher turnover rate and tend to be much younger and more diverse, and that there simply aren't any good "gay scripts" out there (which I tend to have a hard time believing; or, well, after programming the Austin Gay and Lesbian Film Festival for 2 years, maybe I don't....).

Whatever the case may be, they had a quote from Alan Ball saying that one reason he saw for this was that so many gay films tended to be about issues (AIDS, coming out, discrimination), and that being gay was the main thrust (ahem) of the story. Whereas on television, you have hours and hours and hours to slowly and subtley reveal a character's true, well, character, and make relationships so much more nuanced and realistic.



This is what drew me into television to begin with, and why I think really incredible television shows have pretty much killed my love of movies. Anymore, 2 hours simply isn't enough time for me to invest in characters that I like. I've never been terribly interested in plot, which could explain why I generally hate mysteries, thrillers, and action films. A good story is nice, but I enjoy television and film for the characters and the richness and intimacy that watching people develop over years can bring you.



All of my favorite shows (Sex and the City, Six Feet Under, Nip/Tuck, Friday Night Lights) have all been character-based, and about extraordinarily complex and nuanced characters (well, maybe not Sex and the City so much, and only the first 2 seasons of Nip/Tuck; seasons 3 and 4 got very plotty and stupid and totally sucked). And not only that, they've all been set in very specific "worlds" (high-fashion New York; a funeral home; a high-end cosmetic surgery hospital; small-town Texas) that generally have very prescribed ideas about how things should be, and all feature characters either creating or breaking those molds and boundaries. So, in another sense, I guess all of those shows have also been about identity and defining oneself within the confines of whatever world it is the characters are existing in.



With movies everything has to be so glossed over, so quick, so surface. With television shows, relationships can begin and end in real time; people can grow up, or change, in such slow and realistic ways, that when you go back and visit them again at the beginning of whatever show it is compared to the end of the show, you can really see the progress and change, whereas you might not have really noticed it while watching the show. In TV shows, characters don't have to have revelatory epiphanies and a conclusion like they do in movies. That's not real life. I'm not knocking movies here, I'm simply saying for my money, movies just don't cut it for me anymore. I like to be able to grow with my characters and become intimately involved in their lives. (To this day, I still maintain that I've never seen a movie that can rival Six Feet Under for me.)



Which goes back to Alan Ball's comment. A lot of emphasis in the gay rights movement has been placed on being "out" and visible, and how that, more than anything, has helped the cause. Because the more people that know gay people, and realize that they're not all AIDS victims, or serial killers, or political activists, the more the regular population will see them as just being regular people. If a middle-aged soccer mom in Iowa who's never known a gay person can watch Six Feet Under and watch David struggle with his sexuality over 5 years, and become really attached to him, and the show can humanize this character and make the anxiety and fear of that struggle very real to this woman, in a way that a film never could (despite how great Brokeback was, it was still two very famous, heterosexual actors playing dress up, and that's impossible to forget while watching it), then I say, bring on the TV.

Taking out the garbage

I've been really excited about Dexter, the Showtime series that came out last year about the brilliant Miami forensics investigator who doubles as a serial killer in his spare time. The twist, of course, is that he only kills "bad guys," the other serial killers that prey on children; mutilate prostitutes and create internet rape sites; awful people who have fallen through the cracks or been freed on technicalities. As the voiceover in the pilot episode explains, with a murder solving rate of only 25% in Miami, it makes his job incredibly easy.

Based on the novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay, the show seems built on a gimmick that it doesn't know how to stretch over a whole season. After having watched only the first 4 episodes, I'm ready to write it off. We learn through a series of painfully contructed flashbacks that Dexter Morgan was a foster kid taken in a by a grisly cop who noticed something sinister about the boy at a young age: he loved to kill. He had an insatiable urge to take life. But being a cop, this father didn't freak out, but did his best to try to get his adopted son to channel his impulses into something "positive." He tells him there are a lot of poeple in this world that get away with a lot of very bad things.

As an adult, Dexter claims to feel no emotion, and to be utterly perplexed by human feeling and interaction. He does the best he can to fake it with his family and new girlfriend (who, because of an abusive ex-husband, has no interest in sex and has serious intimacy problems, which suits Dexter just fine), but constantly feels his facade cracking. In the excrutiatingly pretentious voiceover that accompanies each episode, such as episode 4, which takes place over Halloween, he says things like, "People like to pretend that they're monsters. I do my best to pretend that I'm not one." He strikes me as vaguely atutistic in this way: socially retarded in a lot of ways (though very successful in his career), but methodical and obsessive when it comes to his work, and one of the best in his field (in his legitimate and non-legitimate endeavors). But he's clearly not autistic, and I think this is part of the problem with the show; there's no real reason or explanation for his behavior. It just is. But maybe that's enough, or maybe they'll get into that later, I don't know. Though the tension arising in the relationship with his girlfriend, who is starting to warm up to Dexter and wants to take their relationship to the next level, is somewhat engaging, it turns out that having a lead character that's admittedly dead inside, just doesn't do much to create drama. The voceover reveals too much most of the time, and acts, at least in my opinion, as a tradeoff for true development. Granted, I had this problem with Sex and the City when I started watching that show too, and I got over it. But at least Sex and the City was funny and came in satisfying, bite-sized 27-minute morsels. Dexter thinks people yelling a lot and having filthy mouths is proof of depth, but how can a character develop when there's clearly no growth inside? Other than that, it just becomes a not incredibly engaging cop drama, which I have pretty little interest in.

Maybe not watching past 4 episodes isn't giving it a fair shake, but that's a third of the season, and if it hasn't grabbed me by now, I figure it probably won't get a whole lot more interesting. I suppose it could go in some interesting directions by asking provocative questions about morality and situational ethics (moral relativism verus absolutism), but to accept the premise, I think you have to toss that aside a little bit. Having a lead character who perhaps feels a little conflict about his murderous urges, even though he's only taking out people that most people would agree probably deserve it, might add some desperately needed dramatic tension. As it is, he coldly tortures and kills each person in the same way (strapping them naked to a table, tightly mummified in Saran Wrap, while he hacks off body parts and saves one blood sample from a slice on their cheek for his personal collection), but literally thinks nothing of it.

I'm not sure what about this Dexter role would appeal to someone like Michael C. Hall, who so embodied the quasi-closeted, uptight emotional disaster that was David on Six Feet Under (keyword being emotional), it's hard to imagine him as much of anything else. I know that's unfair, but even in this stoney character of Dexter, I see hints of David. Like, if David Fisher had finally fucking lost his shit and gone ape-shit crazy (like he almost did in season 5), I could see Dexter emerging from that. In some strange way. Hall is an utterly watchable and compelling actor, and that's probably the only way I even got as far as I did in this series. It's too bad. I'd really like to see him in another role that's as complex, nuanced, flawed, and magnetic as David Fisher was.

Right now they're building a coffin your size.

The other night Kurt asked me if working at a hospice made me think about my own mortality all the time, and if that was disturbing at all. I didn't really respond at the time, but I would have to say that no, it doesn't. As someone who already thought (thinks) a great deal about my own mortality, I would have to say that if anything, it helps. It helps me to focus more on the here and now, I think, to worry less about everything I'm doing, and what the future ramifications will be. Living in the future has always been somewhat of a problem for me, and it's caused me untold amounts of anxiety. Travis once told me that I was an ideal candidate for religion. It's also created an almost intolerable impatience in me. One thing we were just starting to focus on in my therapy awhile back right before I quit going was to learn how I can further appreciate, not just tolerate, the here and now. How to live in the moment without always worrying about getting to the next point. How to just feel, and breathe, and relax, and enjoy each day for what it was. It sounds corny, but it's really hard for me to do. I have some theories about why I am this way, but I'll save those for another day.

As I mentioned a few months ago, we studied existentialism in my Counseling class this semester. Pretty much all modern psychology, and more specifically therapy, is derived from an existentialist philosophy. Welll, most humanism anyway, as humanism was a direct rebellion against Freud's psychoanalysis, which is very negative and deterministic and essentially posits that we're all just slaves to our pasts. But the basic tenets of existentialism are free will, responsibility, and death. It's about living each day to the fullest; realizing that every single thing we do, even breathing, is done by choice; that we live our lives with the specter of death looming over us, and it's our responsibility to acknowledge that and honor it. The existentialists said that death is what makes life meaningful. We should acknowldege the past, but pay more attention to what we do today. We shouldn't discount the influence that the past has had on us, but we're not slaves to it, and the here and now, and how we treat each day, in the moment, is what's important.

Obviously, this philosophy appealed to me very, very much. It's also the direct basis for cognitive behavioral therapy, which is precisely what I intend to practice, and frankly, what most therapists practice.

It wasn't until much later, though, that something really clicked in my brain: the reason that I loved Six Feet Under so much was because it was a narrative explanation of existentialism! I love it when those neurons in your brain fire off at just the right moment, and things coalesce in a really exciting way. Of course Six Feet Under is about existentalism, it's about death and acknowledging the responsibility you have for being alive! Every single episode is a lesson in existentalism.

Which reminded me of a fantastic essay I found last summer, in the National Review of all places, about how great Six Feet Under is. The writer, Radley Balko, makes much the same point, without actually calling it existentalism. Basically, he's praising the show for not taking a stand on abortion, one way or another, which is an issue that figures pretty prominently into the show in a few places, even though it openly promotes liberal values:

The show's critical acclaim and awards are well-deserved. The characters are wonderfully flawed and complicated, made all the more interesting by the backdrop of death: They face same decisions the rest of us do with respect to relationships, friendships, sex, and family, but they carry out their day-to-day lives just a few steps from the inevitably of mortality carried out almost daily in their home. Each episode opens with a death vignette, usually someone unrelated to the show's main characters, but who eventually becomes a Fisher "client," and whose life, death or grieving relatives somehow color and underscore the ensuing episode's themes.

If you have seen the show, you might be curious why National Review Online would publish a piece by a libertarian singing its praises. There are, after all, a number of openly gay characters and plotlines. Drug use abounds, copiously and unapologetically. There is rampant promiscuity, and enough purple language to blush a sailor. Family hour, it isn't.

He goes on to discuss the show's take, or non-take, on abortion, which is an issue that comes up at least twice in a major plot points:

But there's something else about the show that I've found surprising, and that should hold some appeal for conservatives. Alan Ball and his team of writers have shown a courageous willingness to challenge Hollywood orthodoxy on the subject of prenatal life, on the moral absolute of abortion rights, and on the soul-carrying capacity of a fetus. It's probably a stretch to say the show is "pro-life," or even "anti-abortion," but it has at least been sympathetic to the idea that abortion is more than a mere personal choice rooted in identity politics — that it is a very real decision with very real consequences, and perhaps for parties other than just the woman who chooses to get one.

I'm not exactly sure why he thinks Hollywood is so orthodox on the subject of abortion, as even one conservative once admitted, even the uber-liberal ladies of Sex and the City couldn't go through with an abortion on season 4, and Miranda ended up keeping the baby.

Anyway, he goes on to explain the situations for the abortions, and the ramifications for the characters involved, and the way the show deals with them. But ultimately, in both situations, the "drama," if you will, comes down to the characters involved having to face up to it and take responsibility. Or not.

...within that framework, Six Feet Under is in many ways one of the most morally instructive dramas on television. It's rich with human frailty and failure, one of the many reasons why it's so watchable and authentic.

But the show refuses to punish its characters for human failures, the kinds of lapses in judgment and temporary faults we're all guilty of from time to time, the kind that make us mortal. It's only when they refuse to take responsibility for those mistakes that Six Feet Under's writers discipline their characters, often brutally.

And about that, he is correct. So without even knowing it, Balko has argued for the legitimacy of existentialism, and how it only makes sense as a healthy and fit way to live life. Free will, responsibility, and death. Own it, and learn how to live as richly and fully as possible. I'm doing my best to figure out how to do that, and put it in practice. So far, I'm not doing a horribly good job, but knowing is half the battle, right? Right?

That's what I wanted to name my pug....

Lauren Ambrose, the actress who played my second favorite character on Six Feet Under, Clare, the angsty little sister, just had a baby with her weird looking husband. She's so cuuuute!

Beyond the good and the bad

On the pilot episode of Six Feet Under, the Fisher family's patriarch is killed on Christmas Eve in a car accident on his way to the airport to pick up his oldest son, Nate, who has come home for Christmas from Seattle for the first time in 5 years. This begins the trajectory of the show, as Nate is posited, basically, as the prodigal son who years ago ran away from the family funeral home business, but who gets (arguably unwittingly) sucked into it, and thus the storyline begins.

That first pilot episode deals largely with grieving, and how various cultures (and individual people) grapple with it. Nate is enraged at his own father's funeral at what he considers the "sanitization" of grief, of overwhelming, unbearable, soul-crushing grief. He is disgusted by his family's business, of the way the modern funeral industry tries to "hide" the grieving widows or other family members, if they get too "out of control" by whisking them away into a private room to sob out their tears in private. He hates how composed everyone is expected to remain at funerals, and while standing over his own father's grave, begins to throw dirt into it and curses him for being absent and screams at him for all the anger and resentment he feels. The guests look on horrified, as does Nate's uptight younger brother David, but their mother, Ruth, gets the message and collapses on her knees over the coffin, and begins sobbing uncontrollably, while herself throwing wads of dirt on top of the coffin. David is humiliated and tries to stop her, but Nate stops him and encourages her. Nate later tells David a story about how when he was in Sicily he witnessed a funeral procession of an old man whose widow and children literally fell over themselves on top of the coffin, screaming to Heaven and cursing God, and how it was the only sincere form of grieving he'd ever witnessed.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross was a Swiss psychiatrist who studied grief and the phases of it, and found in the people she studied a pattern (which is familiar to anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of psychology): Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and finally, Acceptance. She never claimed that they all happened consecutively, and in an orderly manner, but people often waffle back and forth between stages for long periods of time, sometimes years, and frequently get stuck in various stages. But overall, according to her, a healthy, normal grieving phase followed these patterns.

While still being respectful of her great accomplishments in the study of how people grieve, and ultimately come to terms with their own mortality, most modern therapists agree that the grieving process is far too individual, personal, and culturally-based to fall into such a tidy process.

Most mental illness has at its root a sense of intense loss, whether it's a metaphoric loss or a physical loss, if not a severe trauma of some kind, but usually goes unnoticed over many years.

The British developmental psychologist John Bowlby posited things a slightly different way: he outlined various processes and psychophysiological components to grief such as Shock and Numbness, Yearning and Searching, Disorganization and Disrepair, and then Reorganization.

I've done a lot of thinking about grief in the past year or so, and what exactly it means to feel, or not feel, grief, and what grief even means to people. Once you've felt it intensely, do you ever really stop, or does it just become absorbed into you, and become a part of who you are? In the area of severe trauma, particularly, I've been interested in how people feel things and continue trying to live a "normal" life, and if it's even possible. Collier and I were discussing this at one point last year, and she suggested that people who have suffered tremendous loss in their lives maybe just have a different idea of what constitutes happiness and making things manageable. I guess that makes sense to me. I mean, everybody has a different idea of that stuff, so it would serve to reason that especially people who have been through unspeakable things would have a radically different take on life and "getting by" than someone who has not been through something horribly tragic. How is it that emotions sometimes feel like they can kill us? And why is it that they don't? Somehow, someway, the human spirit just keeps on keeping on. Here is an interesting response to that sort of enquiry anyway. Which, after having done some research, is not far off from how most major psychologists view life after grief. Probably the one that makes the most sense to me (which is touched on in the letter) comes from Miriam Greenspan, who said that when you're feeling like an emotion is going to kill you (I'm paraphrasing here), just imagine that you are an animal. Animals don't analyze, or philosophize, or even try to get rid of pain, because, obviously, they are animals and don't have the mental cognizance to do so. What they do, as animals, is just feel it. That's the only choice they have! They can't even intentionally run in front of a car or stick their head in the oven, because they don't know to. They just have to feel it through, without even a slightly numbing glass of red wine, and certainly without any Xanax. How tragic, I agree, but that's what they have to do. And to my knowledge, no animal has ever died from grief.

Though I do remember as a child, I had two dogs, and one of them had to be put to sleep, and for almost a week afterwards, the surviving dog did nothing but sleep behind a big chair in our living room, crammed up against a wall, not even coming out to eat. That made a very big impression on me as a child.

Tonight it's raining and cold, and my heart is heavy and my head is full of so many things. But at least I've got a nice new bottle of red wine to help me sleep a little better.

From the "Mystic Odes of Rumi," via season 5 of Six Feet Under:

Our death is our wedding with eternity.
What is the secret? "God is One."
The sunlight splits when entering the windows of the house.
This multiplicity exists in the cluster of grapes;
It is not in the juice made from the grapes.
For he who is living in the Light of God,
The death of the carnal soul is a blessing.
Regarding him, say neither bad nor good,
For he is gone beyond the good and the bad.
Fix your eyes on God and do not talk about what is invisible,
So that he may place another look in your eyes.
It is in the vision of the physical eyes
That no invisible or secret thing exists.
But when the eye is turned toward the Light of God
What thing could remain hidden under such a Light?
Although all lights emanate from the Divine Light
Don't call all these lights "the Light of God";
It is the eternal light which is the Light of God,
The ephemeral light is an attribute of the body and the flesh.

...Oh God who gives the grace of vision!
The bird of vision is flying towards You with the wings of desire.

Funny how he's the one that gets married, but he sends me a present!

But I love Matt Kane!!!!

Today I received my very own, hand-crafted, Six Feet Under-inspired jug-type thing. I love it. It's beautiful.

Thank you! And happy wedding. So sorry I missed it.

Isn't it beautiful?

Michael C. Hall

I am so excited about this new show on Showtime called Dexter, about a Miami forensics investigator who also happens to be a serial killer, but with a twist: he only kills people that "truly deserve it," namely other serial killers. And it promises to be very, very gory.

The show stars Michael C. Hall, who played David, the uptight, resentful, lonely, and insecure gay brother on Six Feet Under, who also happened to be incredibly sensitive, compassionate, intelligent, and kind, and who cried a lot.

I read an interview yesterday where he talks about creating a character that not only didn't display, but actually had no emotions, and the challenge of getting the audience to care about someone like that, but now I can't find it. Mr. Hall seems like a really cool person in real life.

You can catch a brief teaser clip of the show here. Unfortunately, I don't have Showtime, so I'll have to wait for it to come out on DVD, but I think it looks awesome.

Man, I love T.V.

Key Art

Via Towleroad today, a small comparison between key art for Six Feet Under and the Black Dahlia poster. Interesting. He doesn't have much to say about it, just drawing attention to it. See for yourself.

Going Down

About 5 'o clock yesterday afternoon, the power in our dorm went out, just as I had gotten onto the elevator. Right inbetween the 5th and 6th floors, as I was riding along smoothly, the whole elevator suddenly jerked violently, so hard that it actually knocked me over, and all the lights went out. Then nothing.

My first thought was thought it had fallen, but of course I realized after about 1 second that that wasn't the case. So I picked myself up and found the alarm button, which had a very light ring of light around it, and began pushing it. The sound was awful and annoying even me, so I stopped and considered what to do next.

I tried to pry the interior doors open, but they would only open about an inch and a half, but enough to let in a shaft of light from the exterior doors, and to comfort me that I wouldn't run out of oxygen if I was stuck in there for hours.

Next, of course, I tried to pry open the exterior doors, but of course they wouldn't budge, but I could hear people outside, on the 6th floor. I could discern from their talking that all the power had gone out, so I started banging on the exterior doors until I got someone's attention. It was a very nice girl from Arizona named Shannon, and she went and got a guard.

"¿Hablas español bien?" he shouts at me through the door.
"No," I reply. "Lo siento."

We all laugh. So we find a translator who says that the guard has called the elevator man to come open it up for me, but he won't be here for about 15 minutes. Fine. I can wait 15 minutes. Honestly, at this point, my greatest concern was what I was going to do if I had to go to the bathroom. I'd just eaten 7 tacos and drank a soda. Yeah, I know, gross.

In the meantime, Shannon, and gradually, more and more of her friends, come to the door to talk to me through it and keep me company while I wait. Then, from 2 floors up, my professor starts hollering down the elevator shaft at me. About 40 minutes has gone by, the elevator man has finally arrived, but they can't get onto the 6th floor from the stairwell, because the door is locked to keep the boys out, and no one has a fucking key. You've gotta be kidding me. Aside from being stupid, isn't that like, the biggest fire hazard ever? And they can't find anyone who has a key???

My professor tells me to hold tight, they're working on it. Another few minutes go by, and he yells back down at me again that the elevator man is going to be jumping on top of the elevator and it's going to rock, so don't panic. Eh?

All this time, all I can think about is the Six Feet Under episode where all the people are trapped in the elevator, and they pry the door open and start crawling out, but just as one man is crawling through the narrow little space, the electricity comes back on, the elevator starts moving again, and it chops him in half. I don't want to get chopped in half.

To make a long story short, the elevator man basically manually inches me up until I'm level with the 6th floor (well at least there will be no crawling or getting chopped in half), with some kind of contraption inside the elevator shaft that you have to have a key to use. So now I'm level with the 6th floor, but there's still the matter of no one being able to get the stairwell door open to come in and unlock the elevator doors, which is also something only the elevator man can do. Great.

Eventually, someone gets a key to the 6th floor door, and the elevator man comes and opens up the elevator, and I'm greeted by about 12 girls all standing around the elevator applauding. Suddenly I'm a hero for being stuck in an elevator for an hour.

Long Time Gone

Hey there. I guess it's been awhile. Only two weeks, I suppose, and not much has really happened. Well, it has, I guess. I've been incredibly busy with school; end of the semester and all. I only have 3 class days left. It's almost unfathomable how quickly the time went by. I've been busting my ass the last 3 days on my final paper for my Theories of Personality class. We have to do a personality analysis on someone, either real or a fictional character, anyone we want, and I chose Brenda from Six Feet Under. She is truly one of my favorite characters that ever has existed. I wish she was real and we could be BFF, I love her so fucking much. She's by far, I think, the richest and most complex character on the show, and really the reason I kept watching it. So that's going well.

Today I started my volunteering at Doug's House, the AIDS hospice here in town, and still the only one in Central Texas (again, God bless Austin). Today was actually my orientation, but I'm going to start this week, probably Thursday, and work one 4-hour shift a week until I get comfortable with it, or have more time or whatever. There were 2 other volunteers with me today at the orientation, both of them women, probably around my age or slightly older. I liked them both a lot right away, and one of them even made a pretty off-color joke to me while we were talking about changing diapers, which of course immediately endeared her to me. I think I'm really going to enjoy my time there, though it's gonna be rough. Today we met 2 of the patients currently living there. One of them is a man in his early-40's, who looks about 70, and is in the final throes of AIDS. He has about 2 months left, tops. He's nothing but a skeleton lying in his bed watching television. He eats around half a sandwich a day, which takes him about 30-45 minutes to eat, and you have to break off little pieces and feed them to him, and even then, it makes him so tired he has to sleep for hours afterwards. The other was a middle-aged black woman, covered with open sores from an advanced Herpes infection, fresh out of prison. She has 3 daughters, but only one that ever comes to visit or seems interested in her fate. I got really choked up about 3 times today just talking to the orientation leader, without even having done anything, or having yet become emotionally involved in any way. But I am looking really forward to starting, to talking with the patients there and just getting to know them, holding their hands, feeding them, giving them their medications, or just sitting and watching television with them, which is mostly what they want. Some company, someone to talk to. Most of them have just been through fucking hell that you couldn't imagine, largely abandoned by family and often even friends. It's so fucking tragic. But that's why I decided I wanted to be in this field: I want to know these people, I want to help them in any small way that I can. Maybe that sounds really self-righteous or pompous, but I don't care. It's the truth.

Oh, and we went through "death procedures" today too: what to do if somebody dies on our clock. We have to fold their hands across their chests and make sure their eyes are shut, and pull a sheet over them. There are numbers for the mortuary and coroner on the wall in the office for us to call, and if the patient has a call list of friends and family, that's our job too.

As an interesting side-note: every room has a really nice wall-mounted CD player and stereo, which the orientation leader said were all donated and paid for by Sandra Bullock. I was always very ambivalent about Sandra Bullock, but that seems like a really thoughtful thing to do. Like, she actually wanted to give them something, improve their quality of life in some small way.

I guess this post is getting really long. There were other things I was going to talk about, personal stuff, but I guess it's all pretty irrelevant. The last 2 weeks have been a pretty mixed bag of mostly incredibly good, and some really awful stuff. But I've learned to just let certain things go, finally. It feels nice. For a brief 24 hours almost 2 weeks ago, I thought things might be drastically different right at this moment, and then my hopes were shattered by indifference and detachment that was incredibly painful. But what I needed, really, to just finally let that bird fly free after a year of keeping it close to me. I know I'm being incredibly vague, but whatever. Kurt & Meredith's wedding, which was just fucking amazing, Matt Kane in town for 5 days, also amazing. It was really nice to see him, and just immediately fall back into our old groove after not seeing one another for almost 3 years.

I've been drinking wine (left over from the wedding and it's delicious!) like water while I've been writing this, and now I'm drunk. I want to go to bed.

Everything. Everyone. Everywhere. Ends.

Yesterday Chris and I started watching season 5 of Six Feet Under. We've been planning to watch it together for weeks now, and he ordered it on Netflix a long time ago. He got a message yesterday that discs 2, 3 and 4 were on their way, but there was a wait for disc 1. So, being probably as obsessive about it as I am, he went on a city-wide trek to find disc 1, but no one in town had it. When I got home from school at 3:30, I tried one last place, and they had it!!!! So I rushed to the Movie Store and picked it up, and went to Chris' house.

We're the biggest geeks. Before we started watching it, we walked to the gas station and got some snacks (beer, Gatorade, ice cream and peanuts). Then we pulled down the blinds and settled in on the couch for the first 2 episodes. We commented on how much we loved the opening sequence and when Lili Taylor's name popped up as a guest star, we both groaned. "That's not a character they need to bring back," Chris muttered. I agreed.

As the first episode began unfolding, everything seemed off. A little too stable, maybe. I started to get worried that maybe everyone on the show was too happy, or content, and the show had suddenly lost its steam. Who wants to watch Six Feet Under without neurosis, misery and suffering? That's what the show is all about. Turns out my fears were unfounded: within 20 minutes, the catastrophe and heartache were already being piled on. Whew. I breathed a sigh of relief. Brenda's still completely miserable, Nate's still a total shithead, Billy's still crazy. Ruth's character has seem to taken a very interesting turn towards bitterness and regret since last season ended, and I have to say I'm not crazy about the direction Clare's heading. But we all saw it coming. I hope it doesn't last. But Keith and David's relationship seems to have taken a sweet, tender turn, which makes me happy. They both need to get over themselves and just be fucking happy already. Or break up. Jesus. David had a great line in the first episode. One of their clients at the funeral home is a woman who died by getting stabbed in the eye by her husband. David took one look at her corpse and said, "That's what happens when couples don't learn how to fight." *Sigh*

I'm aware of a couple of pretty major plot points this season, and I'm very excited to get into it. I think Chris and I are going to try to have a marathon at some point over the weekend, or next week, maybe. We can both sit and watch at least 5 or 6 episodes at a time. I love it. Although I'll be really sad when it ends.

Red wine and sleeping pills help me get back to your arms. Cheap sex and sad films help me get back where I belong.

God, I hate winter. All I want to do is board up the house, crank the gas heater, drink wine, smoke cigarettes, take Xanax, and watch episode after episode after episode of Six Feet Under until I fall into a pharmaceutical-induced coma. (That show is my religion, I swear. I would totally drink the Kool-Aid with the Fishers.)

No, it's not really as bad as all that. But I do hate winter. Everything silent and frozen is the loneliest feeling in the world. I really like having Karen around. It's like we have a snug little home together. It's very comforting.

"This is me, this is what you get!"

So, I had a dream last night that I lived next door to Brenda from Six Feet Under. Not just the actress, but the actual character of Brenda. I was hanging out at her house before work, for some reason, and we were watching The OC. I said I needed to leave to go get some coffee, but she made me some kind of crazy coffee/granola drink so I wouldn't leave. I felt very comfortable there, and just couldn't drag myself to work. I love Brenda. I wish I could be friends with her, and marry David. Although he would prolly drive me nuts.

Am I pathetic enough yet?

but the sun is still in the sky and shining above you

I found out this morning that I didn't get into UT. I felt totally deflated and called my mom crying at 7:30. It actually turned out to be a transcript problem, and they said I could appeal it, but they wouldn't guarantee anything, since it was pretty much my fault.

But on the bright side, St. Edwards University's deadline isn't until November 15th, so I'm applying there, which I meant to do anyway, and just never did. My therapist said they have a great psychology program, and he has several colleagues there and recommends it. And it's a much smaller school (only 4,000 as opposed to UT's 40,000), so I'd probably be a lot happier there anyway. It's always better to feel more like a person than a number. So I've already started my application (it's incredibly short and easy compared to UT's, also), called the University of Arkansas and Art Institute to have my transcripts sent over, and set up an appointment with an admissions counselor for next week. So hopefully everything will work out in the end, and maybe I'll be really happy at St. Ed's. It's a beautiful campus and seems to have a very active, liberal student life (even though it's a Catholic university), so I'm actually looking forward to it. Not the end of the world.

On a much lighter, and more arbitrary note, I feel like I'm in high school again: I have a pretend boyfriend. His name is David Fisher and he's a character on Six Feet Under. I'm totally obsessed, it's sick. Anyway, he's on my desktop at work, and I just sit and think about what our life would be like together. It's not the actor, Michael C. Hall, that I like, mind you. It's the character. He's so great. Is that so wrong?

i was happy to hear you remembered the view

as previously stated, friday night was insane. it all feels like a giant blur, but involves calling mark on his cell phone (twice) demanding to know why he wasn't doing with his life what he really wants to be doing, making meredith cry (in a good way), pissing in an alley, and passing along "helpful" information to one collier about her "ex," which i relayed again on saturday, and had absolutely no recollection of telling her on friday. it's the first time, honestly, that i can remember being so drunk that i didn't remember a lot about the night before, and was vaguley cathartic, even though it resulted in waking up at 7:00 on saturday morning, still drunk, and having the kinds of cramps that left me writhing naked on my bathroom floor, my intestines feeling like they were being twisted in some kind of medieval torture device. still don't know what that was all about.....

i caught 2 movies on saturday (9 Songs, which i loved, and broke my heart, and Broken Flowers, which i liked a lot, but left me wanting a bit more) with collier and karen, after which we went back to my house and each took a Xanax with a glass of red wine. i remember nothing after that, except waking up about 10 hours later in my bed, collier curled up next to me, and karen passed out on the couch. but we all agreed it was a much-needed respite from the collective agony going on in our heads.

sunday was Krouse Springs, lovely as usual, but the day being overcast like it was, made it much less fun than it could have been. Elysium sunday night, which was great until i ran into some of Joe's friends outside, with whom i did the perfunctory, "how are you?" "fine, thanks," blah blah blah. the topic of joe was conspicously avoided, and it ruined my whole night.

BBQ at the house yesterday. i was really looking forward to it, and delighted that so many of my nearest and dearest showed up, but for one of the first times in my life, the crowd was a bit overwhelming to me. i kept finding excuses to go inside and do dishes, or prepare a root beer float for someone, or go to the bathroom. it's not that i didn't want to talk to anyone, it just made me feel overtly anxious and unsettled. it was sad, actually, as i've always taken so much comfort in socializing, and just being surrounded by people that i love, even if nothing particularly interesting was going on. but all i really wanted was to be alone, and i can't quite explain what it was, exactly, that was happening to me. so many things are changing, and i have so many conflicting feelings about everything that's not only going on in my life, but in the lives by which i'm surrounded, and sometimes it just feels like it's all too much, and my head is going to explode, or i need to stand outside and scream or something. i think some of it has to do with the ways in which certain people that i've known and been close to for years, are subtly, but noticeably, shifting in weird ways, and slowly becoming somewhat unrecognizable to me. i know it's very common for people in romantic relationships to each grow in opposite directions, and even "outgrow" their need for each other, but this isn't supposed to happen with friends. maybe i'm overanalyzing it all, or just scared of the future in general and what it holds for me, but i feel at times that it takes so much more effort than it used to to feel close to certain people. it's no one's fault, and it's not necessarily a bad thing, just the nature of humanity, but it's terrifying, and i hope i'm only imagining it.

i know this is all very uneloguent and boring, but i just can't seem to come up with the correct words, or anything horribly profound to say about any of it. i feel like i'm in a fog still this morning, and just floating along, tuning out everything around me. i don't think my body has yet recovered from the abuse i put it through this weekend, maybe. i don't know. anyway, i'm really looking forward to going to Pittsburgh this weekend and getting the fuck out of town for 3 days.

i also watched the season finale of season 4 of Six Feet Under and cried my eyes out. god damn, i love that show.

something in my veins, bloodier than blood

i guess i've always been a little bit of a sucker for serialized drama on television. ever since i've been interested in human behavior and the complexity of relationships, i've enjoyed watching these very things unfold on television, starting as early as "beverly hills 90210" when i was in junior high, up to "my so-called life" in high school. obviously these shows weren't that deep or complicated, and most of the issues were usually pretty wrapped up by the end of the 42-minute episode. but at the time, i could relate to them, and they fed my burgeoning brain the things i think it needed.

lately in my life i've been completely obsessed with "sex and the city." though it definitely has its problems, and there are things about the show i don't care for, i think it's really smart, i like the characters, but more than anything else, i think it's fascinating to watch relationships grow and/or fall apart in more or less real time. having a TV show go on over a span of years enables the writers (if they're any good) to reveal characters slowly to you, to have them be very contradictory, or really surprise you in some way, just like people in real life do. it can reveal the little, minute things that people do or don't do over long periods of time that can make or break relationships. slights that people can hold, or the ways in which someone can harbor something internally for years and have it never reveal itself until one telling moment that it does. i think it's fascinating.

this past weekend i discovered and started watching "six feet under." i can certifiably say i think it's the smartest, most complicated, most painful show that's ever existed. or, at the very least, that i've ever seen. every character is deeply damaged in some way and they're all struggling to just connect with the people in their lives on some kind of true level. they may not know that's what they're doing, or they may fight it, but even more than being a show about death and grieving (which it is), it's a show about lonliness, isolation and pain. it's about trying to stop being afraid of your internal life, and your emotions, and learning to live your life in an open, honest, and fulfilling way. and it isn't easy for any of these characters, all of whom are great. admittedly, it's a bit over the top at times, but that's just kind of the nature of the beast.

and a friend of mine who also watches it told me yesterday that David, the gay brother, reminds her a lot of me, actually, which i guess i'll take as a compliment. he's 31, totally out of touch with himself, angry, lonely, sad, and resentful of the decisions that he's made, but he's also incredibly sweet, endearing, smart, sensitive, and desperately trying to figure out who he is after living his life for other people for 3 decades. and i'm only mid-way through the second season. my friend says he gets a lot more interesting and complicated and weird as time goes on. i'm so excited to see it!