Day 65 of Unemployment

I am finally catching up with the talk shows, she says rolling her eyes. I’ve never been a fan of talk shows. I don’t get it really. What does everybody have to talk about ? Just alot of actors promoting their TV shows or movies and they make this innocuous conversation about what they like to eat for breakfast. Who cares?! Please make this more exciting! When's the last time you had sex? Who with? What time of day? Do you smoke afterwards or fall asleep or eat? Or at the very least, dish! Dish about the set, who was a jerk and who didn't the make up people like? We don't want to hear it was a labor of love. Boring. We don't want to know you can do Al Pacino impersonations. What we want to know is, do you do these impersonations during sex. See? I should have my own talk show.

I turn on the TV in the afternoons while I’m writing sometimes, just gives me something to do when I take a pause and makes some noise in the background. I like it quiet when I write but sometimes it’s just too quiet all the time when you’re home all day long. Then you’re listening just to your thoughts and that’s scary. I turn on Oprah or Opree as my Dad liked to say. One day this week she had this young male architect on (I guess that’s who he was, I turned it on in the middle of program) who had redone a house for a woman and her husband (? Was this guy her husband, I don’t know, they just looked so mismatched.) who had a severely damaged, water-logged home due to Hurricane Katrina. The story took us through the house as it looked after the storm and then now as the architect had redone it with all these major renovations turning it into an almost storybook home. I felt kinda jealous, like, hey, someone do that for me. And hard as I tried not to cry, even Opree was crying, I did. It really was amazing.

I watch Ellen from time to time. She’s funny but I can do without that dancing stuff. It’s just silly. I love that she dresses in comfortable jeans and sweaters and sneakers. The game stuff she does with the guests or the audience is kinda interesting and the gals who went to the Superbowl were funny.

Dr. Phil sucks. I just hate all that pop psychology stuff anyway. I mean, really people, you don’t know you have a problem? Sorry, but life is hard, and you have to work at it which means really paying for therapy that can help you over the long term. Unless you’re a sociopath in which case not even Dr. Phil can help you but at least you’ll get some time on TV.

I watched Bonnie Hunt on her show this week. She had Chandra Wilson on in some too large dress that looked like a bath robe. Can’t these hosts say something gently to their guests about wardrobe? I realize not, probably, but all the same, do you own a mirror? The best thing was the pix of Chandra’s family, adorable. I love Bonnie and I’d love to love her show but didn’t she have a sitcom for awhile there about a talk show with her as the host? And isn’t she a damn good actress and sometime director and why is she doing this? Ugh, come on Hollywood, don’t you have anything for these women? Please replace Sally Fields on that awful Bro and Sis drama with Bonnie Hunt. Somebody, hello?

So next week, I’m going to try to watch The View since I’ve seen it maybe once and it was before all the brouhaha with O’Donnell. In fact, when I saw it, they had on the original members and I tuned in once and thought, how insulting to women everywhere. Why does everything feminine have to call itself out? Like female comedy night? I refused to do those shows because I’m not just a female comedian. I’m a stand up comedian who happens to be female. I don’t write comedy just geared towards women or the feminine perspective and a few subjects. In fact, I’ve never been married or had children so that would leave out quite a few subjects. And while I understand the need for a hook in this business if I see advertised one more week at a comedy club with the Comedy Moms headlining or the Mommy Comic or whatever, I’m going to singlehandedly force a protest march on the club. I mean are audiences really yammering that bad for subject matter pertaining to kids and moms and husbands and marriage? Aren’t your lives a little fuller than that?

What else? I’m reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem—finally—by Didion. I picked it up in high school in my library years ago and didn’t get it. Now I get it in spades. The essay on Self-Respect alone is the reason you should read this tome. I’m so happy to have discovered her work at this late stage. Sometimes you’re ready when you’re ready and that’s all.

I’m reading a book on reading books, Shakespeare Wrote For Money. Nick Hornsby wrote this column about books he’d read and then compiled them, the columns that is, in one little tome. It’s interesting. I got through one column last night about his discovery of Young Adult literature. I thought to myself, what took you so long? I have read YA novels for years now. Some of them rival the best fiction out there in less vocabulary but no less literate story-telling and less pages. They’re spellbinding. What reading this reminded me of was that I have to take a break from all this heavy reading I’m doing to take in a few or more than a few of those novels soon.

I made an historic decision this past week. I am going to become a full time UCLA student. I am going to get certified in counseling, something I wanted to do for years actually going way back to my NYU days in SEHNAP, a school which doesn’t exist anymore, and my music psychotherapy days. I just can’t stomach going to back to find a perm job in the legal business. I need flexibility and time to write and create. I’m too old to not do what I want with my life anymore. And I’m enjoying immensely the writing class I’m already taking there and how it has set me on the path to other things that I could be doing as well. In some ways, this unemployment has been a really good thing for me, for once. As David Byrne says on his new CD, “Life is long when you give it away.” And that has been true for me. I’m not giving it away anymore. It’s mine and I’m living it for me. And me only.

And I must say what a wonderful Valentine’s Day I had going out with a wonderful friend last night to see a solo show and then aperitifs. That is what Valentine’s Day is all about, doing what you want to do and sharing it with people you care about. It’s not about sex, and dinner, and lingerie and roses and chocolate and balloons. Oh those stupid balloons. If you need to give someone an “I love you” on a balloon, you need help. You’re only announcing how badly you want it for yourself, not for them. I am so happy not to have had to deal with any of that obligatory Valentine’s Day stuff. It’s like New Year’s Eve. Everyone’s afraid to not have something to do but it’s all overpriced and overrated anyway. Yes, you could say I’m bitter, but I’m really not, I’m happy and relieved that I don’t need to prove anything to anyone anymore and that I finally get to do what I want to do without any guilt. So the next wonderful man that comes along will match my strength, my groundedness and, thank you, Joan, my self-respect. That’s all it is. AMEN!

Day 60 of Unemployment

Already two months, no work. Well, I’m working, I’m just not being paid for it…yet. I get all this time to write, hooray. I don’t have anyone who wants the work…boo. Here’s another little glitch. Every time I fill out one of those EDD forms to get paid, they schedule a phone call. What the…???!!! Just send the damn checks! It’s been two months and I’ve only gotten two checks totaling $810.00. Thank God, I don’t need to pay my rent or anything. Thank God I’m independently wealthy. Unbelievable. Why bother even applying for unemployment if they’re always trying to catch you in something? I don’t know why they scheduled a call this time. Maybe they just want to chat. Maybe they found out I’m going to pole dancing school for middle aged women who have been laid off and instead of taking crap during the day from men, they learn how to take it at night scantily clad. Oh wait, that’s my personal life. But at least I’ll make some money. I don’t know. I only know THAT IT WOULD BE NICE IF I GOT A CHECK!! A FEW CHECKS!!

Excuse me. So what do I do all day? First of all, can I say how much I love my place? It is wonderful. I don’t feel boxed in like I did in the old place and I can sit here and write all day. I have done more writing in the last two months that I have in ten years. I’m finishing my spec script and starting on another one, working on a pilot and writing songs for my solo play that got derailed last year. I can do things in the evening without feeling exhausted from being at work all day. I can make a 6 p.m. yoga class once a week, twice a week if I want. I can enjoy the sunshine during the day taking my walks during writing breaks. I am playing the piano again, changed my guitar strings, playing guitar everyday and sleeping in later and staying up later which is more of my normal schedule. My house is really clean too. It always was clean but now I can get to it in short rather than long order. All this and more, I just can’t afford to eat. Or use the phone or turn on the lights. But those things are overrated if you ask me.

And, I bake cookies, cakes, baby-sit dogs, help the elderly cross the street, direct traffic and planted a garden. I volunteer for the local nonprofits and make sure I’m on time for afternoon prayer with all the other sisters if I’m not lost in thought dreaming on Mt. Salzburg. Then I take in foster children and we go out during the day and sing songs with me on guitar and the children marching and dancing behind me singing along. Sometimes we climb trees and I make them clothes, because I’ve learned how to sew now, and I make them from the curtains that used to hang in my bedroom. It’s adorable. Then when it thunders they all run in my room at night and we sing some more. Ah, isn’t being unemployed fun??? I renamed myself Maria Von Trapp and I’m going to take the children out and enter festivals as a singing group. Where’s my Captain though? We’re missing the captain.

Goodness, I must go now and prepare for our farewell song to all the guests I’ve invited to my apartment to dance to Austrian waltzes this Saturday night. We’re going to sing and the children are going to use the steps leading up to my front door for the show. Later on, we’ll sing about a mountain flower that doesn’t grow in California and that no one cares about here because you can’t smoke it. Sigh.

Yeah, okay, I need to get back to work soon. Stay tuned next week when I move in with my sister and her husband after I’ve been kicked out of my motel for nonpayment and out of my teaching job for sleeping with all the men in the county. I get to wear chiffon dresses, talk like a Southern gentile peach, and get taken away in a straitjacket. That should be fun.

Captain, where are you?

Thoughts: Rev Road, Bruce, and Oscar

I just watched Bruce Springsteen and E Street Band play Halftime at the SuperBowl. I have been a fan for years now ever since Rachel O’Leary introduced me to The River double album back in college. Along with Billy Joel and Elton John, I don’t think there is a performer alive that matches this guy’s absolute talent and genius for live rock ‘n roll. It is just music that makes you feel alive and after dancing the whole set, I am now a bucket of sweat. Might have been the two cups of coffee I had before that, but I don’t think so. There isn’t anything more joyous than dancing to any music that guy makes. I must go see him in concert again somewhere. And he’s 59!!! for cryin’ out loud. All you lightweight contemporary, hip-hop, alternative, whatever bands out there, learn something. There’s nothing like that blue collar rock ‘n roll. But I give myself away as an unrepentant middle-class, Detroit girl. Los Angeles lacks the rock ‘n roll edge. I mean, really, Sheryl Crow? God bless her but it doesn’t translate.

Last night I saw a phenomenal film. In every aspect, this film was amazing, from direction, acting and writing to cinematography. Revolutionary Road just rocked my world. Okay, I get a little emphatic but isn’t that what the art of cinema is supposed to do? What a tragic, beautiful story of lost hopes and interrupted dreams and mistaken ideals of love and life. Kate Winslet is a genius. That’s all there is to it. I’ve always enjoyed her work but after seeing both The Reader and this, I have to admit that this gal has a long wonderful career ahead of her if she doesn’t go the Annette Bening route of giving everything up for “a family.” Really, you can do it all, just try. A gift is meant to be used not given up for your husband who’s 20 years older than you. What’s up with that? I digress. Back to the flick. Sam Mendes did a terrific job and Haythe wrote a fine adaptation. Not a false move in the piece and Shannon is so good as the voice of truth. I could pick apart this flick in oh so many ways but I’ll spare you just to say that every flick that Mendes does he gets better and better and every film has more heart. American Beauty was a fine debut but it lacked heart and emotion and I still haven’t forgiven the Academy for giving it Best Pix over The Green Mile. Road to Perdition was terrific storytelling and heartbreaking. And this one, Rev Road, is just as fine and wonderful and I may have to forgive Mendes for his Oscar for direction over Frank Darabount. I still am rooting for you Frank.

So now, the Academy Awards: Leo DiCaprio was robbed of a nomination for Rev Road, that’s all I’m going to say. I haven’t seen Ben Button because I can’t stand Fincher films, no heart or soul, all technical, pretentious filmmaking crap. But, I still need to see it yet, I know. That said, I still don’t think I would have given Pitt a nomination. He almost never knocks me out with anything he does. What I think he should have been nominated for: Burn After Reading, in a supporting role. He was hysterical in that and terrific. I honestly think he’s a better character actor than leading actor and I wish he would get that. He would rock. I don’t know what the Academy has against Leo but I wish they’d get over it already. Titanic, Ti-schmanic.

Kate Winslet should have been nommed for Rev Road in leading actress, not The Reader. She actually has a character arc in Rev Road and in Reader she is really a supporting role and doesn’t really learn anything. Reader is a terrific film too. The only beef I have in this category is Jolie who like her counterpart, Pitt, never knocks me out in anything she does. I’m too busy looking at her lips. In fact, I think she was nommed for this role because of her thick, raging red lipstick she wears in Changeling. I don’t get it, here’s a woman whose son was kidnapped and she finds the time to put gobs of makeup on her eyes and lips every day when she goes to work as a lowly telephone operator manager whatever and to see the police and to the grocery store. She’s supposed to be this unassuming, single mom in 1930-something Los Angeles and she’s made up like a movie star/hooker every day to go to work? When I’m depressed and stressed, the last thing I’m thinking of is hey, I better look pretty today. Or, for that matter, when a member of my family has been kidnapped!! And the other telephone operators look like regular women with almost no make-up? Can you say, hey, I’m the star and I need to stand out and be made up? That was the only element of that film, which was otherwise disturbing, yet well-made, that I didn’t believe and thought both Jolie and Eastwood should have known better. So maybe Spike Lee does have a point, eh, Clint?

Rourke is the whole movie of The Wrestler, love Tomei in anything, but the film itself is not that great of a story. Good for Rourke and the hearing aid, great “Method actor prop.” Hey, Darren, pay attention, we’re not all looking at your fancy film-school camera shots. It’s called, the story! So get over yourself already.

Slumdog is it. I don’t care what anyone says, I really enjoyed this film and it’s one of three films I saw this year that I could see again and walked out of the theater feeling really good. The other two were Rachel Getting Married and Frozen River. They didn’t give the slum kids money, they did, whatever. Really, these are movie-making Hollywood liberals even if they are from England. Do you really think they’re not going to pay these kids and take care of them? C’mon, get a clue. Anyway, India needs to get a clue. If that’s how millions of their people live, I’m horrified, and a few filmmakers aren’t going to really change anything are they? Aren’t you putting the blame in the wrong place?

I gotta say I’m making great creative use of my time off here and am in no hurry to start back at the job grind. Talk to me in a couple weeks though when my bills are due.

Finally, I’m hittin’ Thunder Road because I’m Workin’ On A Dream to resurrect my Glory Days when I was Born To Run….

I tell ya, next relationship I have, the big test: he’s gotta love Bruce otherwise….Niagra Falls.