Posts from the last week

October 29, 2008: Theatah

Because the LA Philharmonic concert was sold out tonight, I went to see Waiting for Godot, and because I felt like it, I emailed Sun, the girl I met at the Democrats thing last week, to go with.

I had never seen or read Waiting for Godot, and as it turns out, Sun and I are both habitually late for things, so I spent the first 20 minutes watching the play on the screen outside the theatre and the rest of the first act being totally baffled. What’s the deal with that poor slave guy? Is that a commentary on race relations? Actual slavery? The slavery of expectation born of human relationships? Is the long monologue supposed to make sense, or is it really (as it sounded) just gibberish meant to sound intellectual but signifying nothing? Is the monologue supposed to show the danger of educating the lower classes to the moneyed classes? And why do they keep pronouncing it GOHdoe? I thought it was GuhDOE?

At intermission, one of Sun’s friends admitted that she was baffled, but intellectually stimulated, trying to figure out what it all meant. So I went into the second act more prepared to engage, and found myself swept along on an unceasing, unmitigated river of pessimism and nihilism. If GOHdoe is God, then God does nothing, never appears, but punishes if you don’t show up. And nothing, NOTHING you do means anything – kindness to strangers just ends up with you being beaten up, intelligent thought gets you beaten up, longsuffering patient endurance gets you abused and called a pig, amusement isn’t amusing, and we’re destined to repeat our meaningless playacting day after day after day, waiting for something that makes empty promises and doesn’t remember you from one day to the next.

I kinda wanted to shoot myself afterward.

The past three weeks have been so boring, people! The workday stretches out forever, and the evenings – well, I’ve been having some fun at theatres and volunteer events and dinners and the like, but I feel like the Hugh Grant character in About A Boy, who has nothing to do all day and so makes things up for himself to do and assigns points to them: 2.5 points for a haircut. 2 points for the gym. 1 point for a bath. 2.5 points for an hour loafing at the bookstore. 1.5 points for lunch.

Aren’t we waiting for the market to settle down, for the financial gods to bestow some peace and stability to our lives? But Godot doesn’t actually do anything, and even though he promises to show up every evening, he doesn’t. So we’re doomed to loaf around, desperately trying to amuse ourselves, convince ourselves that Godot is the answer, the salvation, the solution. But none of our amusements, none of the things we do to pass the time ultimately means anything. We should just hang ourselves, apparently. Except that we haven’t got any rope.

After the play, Sun and I got some dinner, and it was eerie – we’ve read a lot of the same books, got a lot of each other’s references, and she even completed my sentence about next month being Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month). If she were a guy, we’d be the couple that doesn’t work out because we’re too similar. But she’s not, and we got on very well, and I’m pleased about that.

But I’m even more pleased about this: she’s a writer, and while she writes fiction, she told me about a friend who’d written a memoir during a past Nanowrimo. Now, I don’t write fiction, and probably never will, not having the creativity to come up with a different world and people who don’t exist. But I think I might try to do this Nanowrimo thing anyway.

At least it’ll be something to do. Since in the end it’s all effin’ meaningless anyway.

October 30, 2008: Some Run of the Mill Navel-Gazing

Someone from the hiking club and his girlfriend took me to a way excellent local place in North Point tonight, where I stuffed myself with amazing dishes: deep-fried pork covered with mayonnaise, garlicky greens, oxtail in a rich, fiery pepper-infused sauce, yolk-fried shrimp. Except for the greens, I hadn’t seen these dishes before, which made it pretty special, and the presence of dozens and dozens of locals attested to the quality of the food. The place occupied part of the third floor of a huge warehouse whose first floor was meats and whose second floor was vegetables.

My companions were amiable and talkative and supremely pleasant, even as they bickered like an old couple, and I enjoyed their company enough (and apparently they mine) to accept their invitation to a dinner of hairy crab on Saturday. She, a Singapore native fluent in at least three languages, works in compliance at a bank; he, a New Jersey native with an indefatigably cheerful demeanor, took a sabbatical from his economist job at another bank to follow her here.

To me, these two young people seemed so comfortable with each other and themselves, so secure in their love for each other that the fact of it – the love, I mean – was like an almost invisible backdrop to their lives. They felt no need to announce it in either word or action. It was like the air they breathed or the ground they walked upon, so real and so true that no acknowledgement of it was necessary.

I wonder, often these days, whether I shall ever find someone with which to share that kind of feeling. As I edge out of my early 30s and into the mids, more and more people feel the need to comment on my single status, and I’ve become sensitive about it. I’m not codependent, but sometimes I think it’s only because I’ve never had a chance to become so. I’m not the girl that boys drifted over to – I often feel quite invisible in a crowd. And before you start saying that I don’t have self-confidence, I promise you, that isn’t the problem. I like myself just fine. And I know I’ve inspired some deep emotions in certain men. But real relationships? Actual dates? Not so much.

It’s a little disconcerting, thinking of being alone the rest of my life (and possibly being eaten by Alsatiens – TM Bridget Jones). Now, my usual argument is that something like 95% of Americans eventually get married, so there’s a certain amount of hubris in thinking that you’re special and unique enough to be in that 5% of Americans who don’t ever get married. But I kind of do think I’m special and unique, and before you start guffawing about that one, let me say that I don’t equate special and unique to “cool,” “good,” or any synonym of “desirable” on any level. I just don’t know many people, who, like me, wandered through post-college life with no plan, purpose or guiding principle, ended up getting a degree at a posh law school, but exited said law school with no more of a plan, purpose or guiding principle than what I started with. What am I doing? I feel like I’m waiting for something – anything – to define me. But I’m beginning to think that I’m like those two tramps waiting by the road for Godot, aimlessly and uselessly waiting for something that’ll never show up, or, if it did, wouldn’t solve anything anyway.