I recently went through a break up. And by recently, I mean the other windows open on my computer right now are her facebook page and "same day flower delivery NYC."
Her biggest complaint: that I never turn off. That there is a lack of down-time, just-be-ourselves-time, fun-time in our relationship. My biggest complaint: that I don't feel like I can "just be myself" around her. That I feel like I need to make up for the fact that I spend so much time onstage, cancel weekend trips last minute, and am, at times, emotionally wrecked from being passed over for the part I was born to play, seeing the end of my twenties fastly approaching and not really having a savings account, and having spent the past five years of my life almost exclusively with other performers--we have an odd code of conduct, for sure--and being in front of "normal people" tends to make me nervous.
We spent the better part of the morning walking up and down the West Side Highway with the dog, hashing out details of:
"You make me feel..."
"But I'm trying as hard as I..."
"That's the point. I don't want you to try..."
"But when I don't you get..."
"I can't help that! You make me so..."
"Well, it doesn't help when you..."
"But if you could just..."
"Ugh! I'm tired of fighting. "
"I'm just so tired of fighting."
And so on and so forth. In the end, I packed my bags and hugged her good-bye, shook the dog's paw and whispered in her ear, "I'll miss you the most, Scarecrow." I cried, she told me not to forget my hat, and just like that, something I thought would last forever was over. That old familiar homeless man who camps out near the subway entrance would never be my homeless subway man again. No more hitting tourists with my over-stuffed tote-bag filled with burlesque props and a ukulele in front of the IFC. All of it, just over.
Then...
"Wait a minute!" I thought, attempting to cry unobtrusively on the B train back to Brooklyn. "It's not just me! Everyone feels awkward just being themselves! I can make this relationship work!"
And then I started googling flower delivery.
Allow me to explain. I shall begin with an anecdote of the boys who live next door.
My former future wife lives in the hip West Village on what we had always considered a quiet block. All of the basement apartments in her building are privy to a private cut of what in Chicago would be an alley, but in New York we call a "back yard." It's a twelve feet deep lane of cement that separates her building from the one adjacent and is divided with charming wooden fences to create "yards" or "patios" or "a place for the dog to pee when it is raining and I don't want to get out of bed," depending on how you look at it. It is an ideal haven for bbq's, outside furniture, and conversation in a part of the city that is otherwise entirely infiltrated by sex shops and douche bag bars that stock Bud Light Lime and run specials on Michelob Ultra on Sunday afternoons. It is one of my favorite places in the world, that back yard, so you can imagine how frustrated I was when a group of ne'er do wells compromised its sanctity.
Next door to said haven resides a clan of twenty-something assholes who we assume work somewhere in finance and are obviously recent graduates of whatever soft-ivy-liberal-arts institution is handing out diplomas these days--(I can say that because I went to one such school. Sure, the education is great, but looking out onto one's graduating class, one cannot help but be filled with a sense that we are what is wrong with the world, with our $100,000 sheepskins, beer-stained cargo shorts, and vodka-filled Nalgenes under our robes.)
The collection of four men who live next door play their music loudly. Extremely loudly, which would be one thing were they having a party now and again, but is quite another issue entirely in light of the fact that there could be absolutely nobody on that patio, and they would still be blasting mid 90's rap, horrible techno, and "Now That's What I Call Music! 27." They do not speak unless they scream, and what they say is rarely worth saying at all. They're the kind of grunting idiots that reinforce the theory of evolution if for no other reason than they are clearly not-so-distant cousins of monkeys. Sometimes we pop our head over to remind them that it is a Tuesday at 11pm, or a Sunday at noon, or a Saturday at 4:54 in the morning, and could they please turn their music down. They hate us. And we hate them.
My source of revelation, however, is that heir music habits are so horrible, that there is no way they're genuine. Sure, I'll turn up some Tom Petty when the evening calls for it, but no amount of pent up anything requires the atonal choral renditions of "Freefallin" to which I am exposed on a regular basis. It's group think. They're all just trying to impress one another. Monkey one talks loudly, Monkey two talks even more loudly. Monkey three drinks crappy beer, Monkey four drinks crappy beer. Monkey one decides he needs to pee on the fence that separates our yard from theirs, Monkey three laughs and asks Monkey Two to please hold his crappy beer while he also pees on the fence. Lady-Monkey one who works at a consulting firm but wants to be an "event-planner" sees all four boy monkeys peeing on things, drinking crappy beers and talking loudly about nothing, and thinks this is what she should be doing, too. So she invites her other lady-monkey friends over and an awkward party ensues until Angry Lesbian Monkey next door pokes her head over the fence and asks to turn the music down, we're trying to sleep. Maybe one of the monkeys feels badly for Angry-Lesbian-Monkey, but the other monkeys have decided being loud is what monkeys are supposed to do, so they have to keep being loud! Monkey two realizes he's out of crappy beer, goes inside to get a new one, rise and repeat.
I know what you're thinking. "That's all great about the monkeys, Scout, but where do you and your awkward social habits fit in."
So, I'm not a monkey-see, monkey-do type of gal, but that doesn't mean that I have supreme self-confidence, it just means I don't have a monkey to follow. I do have a monkey whom I love and want desperately to love me, so I perform for her, and in the process, I'm awkward. I try not to be, but I am. And when the monkey I love says she doesn't like my monkey games, it hurts because all I ever wanted to come out of them was for her to love me. I've never been a follower. I was weird as a kid and now make a living out of being a little bit weird as a performer. It gets into your head that you're supposed to be a certain way, whether that be a douche bag junior analyst who listens to top 40 music or a well meaning cabaret singer who has been banging her cymbals for so long, she isn't sure how to stop.
The point of all of this is, whether you follow or you try to make your own way, "just being yourself," is the hardest thing in the world to pull off. Sometimes, like an unripe banana, the harder you try to peel it, the more it breaks off in weird places, and you squeeze weird banana pieces out of it, and end up trying to use your teeth to get it open, and then you try to play off that weird taste, but it's gross and makes your tongue sting, and in the end, sure you peeled the banana, but you made a mess doing it, and maybe the banana would have been a million times better if you just waited till it was ripe and cuddled it from time to time and told it that it was pretty.
Extended metaphor, but you get my gist.
I'm going to try to get my girlfriend back. I'm going to try to figure all of this out, and in the meantime, I'm going to keep slamming on my cymbals and trying to make people laugh. If all of this works out, it will be a miracle. And if it doesn't, at least I'm still better than the ass-wipes who live next door.
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