Are you there, facebook? It's me, DoctorPrincess LadyScoutington

Some of you out there may already know that a day and a half ago I moved to Los Angeles, which would be somewhat normal for a creature of my profession, until I tack on the little gem of a fact that I found out about the move a little over a week ago. It's a long story without much of a cliffhanger for an ending, but the sparknotes are this: I had an urge to come out for pilot season in January, so I went out and did a comedy showcase to try to meet some industry and get the ball rolling. The ball did roll, and my new west coast management team decided that they wanted me here ASAP to take some meetings and hope for the best. So I came running. A week's worth of shows, which became sort of my awkward farewell shows (which isn't totally true. I'll be back in January for a week. Farewell shows in the same way that Barbara Streissand has been doing her farewell tour long enough for it to be a revival) and about two days of frantically trying to fit my life into two checked bags, a carryon and a personal item later--I worked out an imaginary conversation with the woman at the Delta counter while I was packing. She would say:

"I'm sorry, your bags are overweight. I'm going to have to ask you to..."

And I would say, "Ma'am. Ma'am. Let me stop you right there. I just gave away all of my worldly posessions, shy of my hopes and dreams. How much do your hopes and dreams weigh? More than 50lbs?"

And then she would let me on the plane and I would get a slow-clap from my fellow passengers as I waltzed through security shoes ON!

I did not, in fact, have to enact said conversation. Though I did miss my flight despite an altruistic attempt to be on time, it turns out my hopes and dreams weigh 49 and 51lbs, respectively, so I was good. I have, however, had nightmares about having to give away even more of my stuff.

I arrived in LA and had a chat with my new roommate and his girlfriend, an aspiring comic in her own right, and they planted the seed in my lil brain to change my facebook profile into a page... like, what you have for a band or "community event," and all my friends would turn into likes, but all my photos would be deleted, but I could back them up, and tra la la, more professional, la la.

(Why are there fireworks outside my building right now? Who sets off fireworks in November? Ugh... what have I gotten myself into. On the upside, I have yet to hear a single ambulance or ice cream truck. Fellow Brooklynites, you can appreciate my glory. )

Before you make this change, they warn you that it is irreversable. That once you go page, you can never go profile. Are you ready? Oh, I was. I'm in LA, baby. This is big time. I'm going in for Comedy Central and sat in a waiting room for FOX where there was a wall of Emmy's. A double glass case wall.

So I did it. And immediately realized that being a page means you are no longer a person. You can't comment on other people's pages. You don't have pictures and places to list your favorite quotes and movies. No opportunity to show how quippy and ironic you can be with your response to "political views."

(Ooops.  There it is. My first LA police siren. You can take the hick out of hicksville... only opposite, because I'm in a city.)

All of a sudden, I missed being a person. I was part of the first non-Harvard wave of facebook users. I've had one since the very beginning, since myspace and friendster, since Ruby Prom and The Soccer Ball, Graduation, my first summer in New York. I've had that page since some of my trans friends still identified with their cisgenders (non liberal-arts college gradates, google it) and it's gone.

A couple of my friends have texted me and asked where I went. They can't find me. And you really can't. I can barely find myself, and what's more, I can't fix it. Facebook has no interest in helping me renig on my greedy decision to become an entertainer instead of a person. I don't even know how to create a profile and start from scratch. I'm screwed. I'm erased.


There is a little void I feel about every five minutes when I would normally be checking my facebook. I'm more than a little bit nervous to try to rebuild, and more frustrated than those police guys trying to find the firework guys with the un-helpfulness of facebook's help center.

Without facebook, who is going to read my blog? How are fellow performers, friends from elementary school, that bartender who hit on me even though she has a girlfriend... how are they ever going to find me.

Perhaps this officially marks my erruption into stardom--the petit mort that is more extacy than death.

I've had the thought to start a new profile using my real name, but that seems silly. I honestly don't know what I want... I miss the way things were, but it doesn't bother me to be off the radar for a while. Maybe I'll come back, maybe I'll come back but different.

It's just odd. Like moving to a new city with parking lots and medicinal marajuana. Sure, sometimes I miss the MTA and having a bodega on every corner, and maybe I don't have as many friends here and I have to re-build from scratch, but anything is possible, and anything can rebuild itself over time.

My Biological Clock

I have time management issues, by which I mean that I am writing to you from the airport because I missed my flight to Los Angeles, resulting in the mantra: "you know what's cheaper than changing your flight? Taking a cab to the airport." Not much of a mood lifter, as mantras go, I will admit, but every situation deserves a mantra.

When I was younger, my mom used to say to me, "Scouter, you have to choose your battles." I was a pugnacious youth, never one to let sleeping dogs lie when I thought said dogs should bark. (Bit of a watchdog metaphor if you will.) It comes from an overwhelming need for justice in the world: kickball teams should have perfect talent distribution in gym class, people who say mean things should be punished, trains should run on time, and if I know it takes me thirty minutes to get somewhere, it shouldn't ever take me more than thirty minutes to get there, traffic and train delays be damned ... It is a finely woven system of everyone getting their dues that makes absolute sense in my head and, I think, fuels the slow-burn mania and anxiety with which I struggle daily.

Part of being systematically late is the sense of injustice I feel in needing to plan ahead, to succumb to the limits of 24 hours in a day, to wasting time arriving at the airport an hour before my flight when I know perfectly well that if I'm not checking a bag, I can get from kiosk to boarding gate in well under thirty minutes, from the knowledge that if I can stay home for twenty more minutes, perhaps I can finish drafting that eblast that is supposed to go out tomorrow, or make a new feather arrangement to clip in my hair, or shave my legs...

I think somehow I should be able to do more with time than anyone else is able. That if it takes a regular person an hour to do something, I can do it in 45 if I just cut out the dilly-dally. To be fair, it works a lot of the time. I've saved hours over the course of a lifetime by showing up late at airports and rushing to make my flight, caterwhaling to the front of security lines, sweet talking my way past the check in counter. I once showed up twenty minutes before a flight from Kansas City to Russia and made it. I talked my way onto a plane in Paris that I was supposed to have boarded in Moscow. I paid cash from an ATM with someone else's debit card minutes before my flight was supposed to leave for soccer camp. (That one wasn't all my fault.) I've also missed flights to come home for Christmas, to surprise my mom on her 60th birthday, and now to do my first big stand up set in Los Angeles.

I woke up absolutely on time this morning. I left the house within five minutes of when I told myself I should leave the house. And then I grabbed breakfast, missed two trains in time to feel the rush of the stale subway air as they passed me by, and arrived at the airport thirty minutes later than I had intended, which was twenty minutes too late to check in for my flight, but three hours and $50 before the next one departed. It is unfair. I should have been able to make the flight. Had the trains not conspired against me, had I not run into a friend in the deli and waited for her to purchase her vitamin water, had I better positioned myself on the trains to be able to run for the transfer, had the man at the check in counter typed just a little bit faster and the woman at the gate been kind enough to let me on a plane that was still sitting on the runway with my empty seat still totally empty, had I not revised my system last minute and decided that no one needs to be at the airport a full hour before a flight (unless you have children, in which case life is already complicated, annoying an unpredictable) and given myself just fifteen more minutes to make my journey, had any of these things transpired, I would be somewhere up in the air right now instead of listening to the beep, beep, beep of a cart transporting fat and old people from one end of the terminal to another.

But I didn't. I don't. I see x-factors as injustice, a system which, by ignoring, I can somehow overcome. But I can't. All the missed auditions, nights of making my friends wait, and rushed commutes elbowing tourists in midtown can't change the fact that I am not a superhero. I cannot stop time or make the trains like I think they should--which would be efficiently, by the way. Don't even get me started on the injustice of the MTA.

So now, sitting at gate 27 waiting for a Delta associate to give me a seat assignment, passing the time with an iPad and the unwanted company of the bellowing voices of a group of polo shirt clad southern businessmen, the type of gentlemen who use "good" as an adverb, eat fries at 9:30 in the morning in the airport, and drink those weirdly large sodas that are small on bottom so they fit in armrests and huge on top so you can speed up the onset of your type two diabetes while you are laid over. They're not in any rush. They're also wearing pastels, which is questionable at best. They're just staring out the window and talkin bout things like regular people. Their last joke ended with the punchline, "se habla anything." Maybe there's a mantra somewhere in that.

Ugh...

This is a thing that happens when you're an actor of my generation... possibly just when you're an actor... possibly just when you're a person of my generation... who can say? I've just shared a magnum bottle of red ghetto wine with my roommate while working on costumes and pasties to sell at our show tomorrow, respectively, and I have some things I would like to say.

First of all, when does a to-do list become an I've done list? I'd love to see that day. At this point, I'm not sure I even have it in me to believe that that day exists anywhere in the the scope of the history of humanity.

Secondly, why isn't Disney on instant stream on Netflix? I'm sorry, that $7.99/mo is going towards groceries, and I don't own a TV, ok. What am I, a millionaire? Who owns a real TV these days. I have an ipad. Is that not enough?

Now, onto the point of all of this: I go up for auditions all the time. Mostly commercial at this point. The types of things that could pay me more for a three day shoot than I have ever made in my entire life combined. The type of brainless smile at the tupperwear Target add that a monkey could do... but which monkey? I get really close to some of these things. I'm pretty, smart... you know the drill. But when you were raised on a fat pot of "you can do anything" and end up in the middle of your Saturn Returns with a bif ol plate of rejection, life can seem pretty conflicting. It sucks, matter of fact.

Add into it a love life and a thousand missed opportunities that if only you could get your live together enough to capitalize on them, and you get moi, angry at my Netflix... foggily blogging in the middle of the night and hoping for a whole new world where the Disney movies upon which I were raised were available for the price of an unlmited instant stream membership on Netflix.

Also, I wish I had a machine that brushed my teeth for me while I was asleep. 28 years, and I still get annoyed every night on that long and lonely trek to the sink for some Colgate and a swish or two. Don't even get me started on flossing.  Ugh... flossing. What am I, a robot? Or a millionaire? Or a millionaire robot with a TV and a two DVD's at a time subscription to Netflix?

This Shit is Bananas

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.

With Liberty and Equity for... Equity Members Only

So after the run in with RENT, I've decided to give have a Tanya Harding style wack at the world of musical theatre. I've been studying with the most amazing voice coach of all time (shout out to Shelly "The Singing Siren" Watson) and my voice is healthier than ever... which does call into question my impulse decision as a child to never ever take voice lessons because I didn't want my voice to sound "trained" and chesty like all the other sun'll-come-out-tomorrow kids from Miller Marly, Kansas City's local place to be for kids who gotta dance! and can't wait to book that regional tour of Hairspray. I took one lesson once when I was somewhere in the ballpark of ten years old, and I cried and refused to speak. Even then my need to be different was clear, and though I now have some real vocal damage and am ten years behind where I could be in terms of vocal strength, I must stand by my decision. Sure, I could have been a thousandaire by now having booked multiple tours and a small part on Broadway, but who needs that?

I do. Thus, the voice lessons.

From voice lessons have come plenty of gigs where I get to sing, mostly in the world of Cabaret, and still stripping when stripping is due, but mostly singing, and I love it.

And then there was RENT, which broke my heart. Shelly said an experience like that can only be described as being left at the altar. One minute everything's fine and they just like you for just who you are, and the next minute, they're gone, and you're all dressed up with nowhere to go. Continuing in the same direction, RENT has assumed the position of my ex. I thought we were going to spend forever together, she left me, I hated her and reveled in the mixed reviews she got without me, but part of me will always love her.

And until they fire whatever nonsense Miller Marley slut-bag they hired in my place, it's time for me to start looking at other shows.

So here I am, waiting in a long line of belters and ballers and girls in awkward audition dresses who can hit a hi-e, but only just barely, and it's mostly through their nasal cavity, which is neither pleasant nor satisfying. I sauntered in pretty late in the day for an open call for "Toxic Avenger" and took advantage of my girlfriend's West Village real estate to take a nap on lunch break. There is almost no chance they're going to get to me on the list, but I figure if I do this long enough, I'll get the hang of it and maybe even book a show. In the mean time I am blessed with an endless buffet of 16bar karaoke of all the greatest hits of Broadway, Mo-town, and songs that have been recently covered on American Idol or GLEE.

Stereotypes abound, from the kermudgeny monitor to the gay boy with a guitar and high school girls traveling in pairs signing up for everything. Tomorrow I get to do it all again for a Connecticut production of Cabaret. I feel good about that one, as my actual life is that of Sally Bowles minus Berlin and the abortion... though I was just asked to come back and host Berlin Burlesque at Galapagos in Brooklyn where I am pretend German and cover Mein Herr as my opener. Next stop, Connecticut! If thy could see me now....

In Sickness and In Health: Part I

I am blogging to you today from a hospital waiting room, waiting for my blonder half to emerge from a surgery of surgeries, one ovarian tumor lighter than she was when she went in. The surgeon is just shy of one hundred percent positive that it is a benign tumor and promised not to touch any vital organs unless they were "horribly diseased," which, though a brash turn of phrase from an otherwise plucky doctor, struck us as almost comforting after the Brooklyn accented anesthesiologist told us that it was possible for my lady to experience, death, nerve damage, stroke, bran damage, etc. from the general anesthetic, but, hey, a piano could fall on our head just walking down the street, so fuhgettaboutit. So despite anticipating my being on a slightly paranoid piano watch for the next few days, at least I'm not panicked while my future wife goes under the knife.

The short story is that in running tests for a completely unrelated operation on a major tear and boney impingement in the stuff that holds her hip together (college basketball plus sucking the marrow out of life one Chelsea Piers adult league and round of beer pong with the team at a time) they found this tumor, which meant a rapid transition from our not having a care in the world to having two pretty big cares in the world: one apparently the size of an orange, and possibly with teeth and hair growing in it (which is normal in the tumor world) and the other...well, the doctors didn't use any fruit metaphors to describe her hip issues, so I don't remember how big the tear is, but I know it's bad news.

The point I'm trying to make here, is that for a four month and change relationship, this was quite a mound of mashed potato worries to sling on our otherwise carefree veggie platter of girlfriend and girlfriend with very little notice. Now the gravy: I've never really had anything life threatening come my way, and I'm not great at dealing with anything serious in the first place. Forget life threatening, I've never broken a bone, had to say goodbye to someone I loved without ample notice, (my grandma was 97 when she bid us adieu, which, though sad, is kind of what you expect from a grandma of her years) or gone through any really major trauma ever. Well, family matters got rocky there in high school with an un-fun divorce coupled with a family member or two in rehab, more therapy than you can shake a $90/hr stick at, and the realization that I was a weird-o, which a was difficult to deal with before I figured out a way to make a living doing it, but that was years ago, and I’ve done a lot of work processing all of that. I was a worrier as a kid. I was high strung and thought the world at the cusp of a clumsy collapse at any given moment.

As a matter of fact, I've spent a huge chunk of my life trying to learn how to NOT take things so seriously, a skill which I have skillfully mastered, and am now skillfully happy and able to move and groove with the ups and downs of what has turned out to be an extremely ups-and-downs-filled career. So what happens when real trauma comes my way? What coping mechanism kicks in then? Is it back to panic and worry? Obsessing over details and making deals with the universe wherein if I am able to hold my breath for the entire time it takes for my car to pass through a tunnel my future wife won’t die in surgery? Am I going to go back to being neurotic, or will I stay cool, calm, collected, and unable to process anything real without a joke and a high five?

Again, no one's life is at risk here, but that steaming mound of double surgery is still swimming in butter on that plate of ours, and it's tricky business.

Mmm...butter. Goddamn, I would kill for some mashed potatoes right now. I'm in a hospital, they must have some somewhere... I wonder if there's a cafeteria downstairs...

Damnit. Ok, so I’ll admit, somewhere along the line of learning how to let things roll off my shoulders, I lost my ability to focus on anything in any way upsetting. In fact, focusing on any single thing for any length of time is an ace long lost from my deck, and though I've done my damnedest to replace it with a wild card or joker doctored with a sharpie and a hand drawn "A", it's never exactly the same thing. My girlfriend is right when she worries that I’ll not be the best care taker, and I’m an asshole when I assure her that just like the song says, “I’ll be there,” because I know I may not be cut out for this. 

I took our second ever fight for her to communicate to me that she needed some major support, much more than I thought I was giving, and our third ever fight for me to realize that I was going to have to stop drop and roll to find a way to make time for said support in my never-a-dull-moment-cabaret-and-burlesque-nervous-audition-after-nervous-audition schedule, at least while my girlfriend is recovering from surgery, and possibly for good. Either way, I’m sitting in a waiting room terriefied, not that the surgery will go poorly, but that our relationship will if I can’t pony up and simmer down.

More in a moment. Aunt Cathy just got here and I should stop clacking away on my iPad and look concerned. Sigh… for better or worse, here I come!

What Goes Up Must Feel Down

Sometimes I wonder if any of this is even possible--if the mountain I've placed before myself will always be a mountain, or if I'll ever feel like I've climbed something of any great import. I think of the long and sinewy road that snakes its way through my past and all the discarded projects that I've left scattered by the roadside along the way. I think of all the things I did and didn't mean to say, all the botched auditions, half finished jokes, music video concepts, festivals which came and went with unrealized potential meetings, reviewers, producers, agents in the audience. I think of all the unused ukulele lessons, which now live right next to my unused Groupons, and I wonder--is any of this, any of this, even possible?

The opportunity cost of being alive is overwhelming. I have a knee that pops every morning alongside the arches of my feet from performing nightly in drag queen heels. I read stories of performers, comedians in particular, who recount years they spent doing nothing but comedy, losing friends and lovers along the way. I think of friends that I have lost, and wonder why I haven't lost more, like a lackluster anorexic who wants desperately to be skinny but somehow can't shake the need to eat. I come so close to destroying myself in my art, measuring out my days in coffee spoons of joke writing in between auditions in the city, running lines on the train for any commute farther than four stops, saving money by buying iced tea at Dunkin Donuts, where any size is $.99. Seriously, any size. Like a giant fucking iced tea is $.99. And they have flavors. Unsweetened! Booking shows, seeing shows and strategic socialization at night, I can go weeks with ne'er ye an unplanned moment to relax, but it never feels like enough. I should be more focused, I should be more tallented, I shouldn't drink as much as I do, I should be more disciplined, I should have gone to conservatory, I should have submitted a book proposal to that writing agent who approached me after a show nearly six months ago instead of burrying it at the bottom of a to do list bloated with such tasks as "organize apartment,"  "fix costumes," and "buy a thank you presant for Shelly." (Seriously, girl. I've been looking for months, but I can't seem to find the perfect little something that casually shows you how much I care.)

I went to my intuitive energy reader this week. I try to go to her about once a year, but I carry a fear in me that seeing her so infrequently isn't enough--that I can't open my spirit guides enough, follow her directions enough, shop at Stick Stone and Bone enough, so I avoid it as much as I can. She told me to work more with mantras, which sounded like a great idea to me.

I got out the ol notebook on the train ride home today when my brain was satiated with lyrics and lines I am supposed to already have committed to memory, and I wrote:

My voice is enough. With love and ease, I will succeed. My voice is enough. With love and ease, I will succeed. My voice is enough. With love and ease, I will succeed. My voice is enough. With love and ease, I will succeed. My voice is enough. With love and ease, I will succeed.

A blog, even a short blog, after a period of not blogging, is enough. You, the reader, just you reading this... is enough.

P.S. Do you think that was enough times for the mantra? Maybe I should have written it more times.