perhaps it’s the rain

Rainy, rainy day.

Nothing is really going on, and that makes me nervous. When the big deal of the day is that I have to remember baby powder for rehearsal tonight… well, I’m not losing too much sleep over everything.

Except I have the power to lose mad sleep over it.

I’ve always been very intimidated by authority. And a director is the ultimate authority in this case. I’m petrified that I’ll forget to bring the baby powder and he’ll be disappointed in me. Not even mad. Just let down. I’m already a little freaked out because I left part of my costume at the club. My headgear and glasses are sitting in a trunk with my costume (yeah, I play a big geek in the sketch, but it’s a lot of fun), and I don’t know if he wanted me to bring them to rehearsals tonight or not. So I’m freaking out. I’m debating going out and buying new glasses or something… I don’t know what to do, really.

I just want to be able to deal with higher-ups without getting massive ulcers.

When I was eight, my mother got a call from the school, asking her to come in to speak with the teacher. They were concerned my parents were putting unnecessary pressures on me. I had made a 99 on my last test and I couldn’t stop crying. When they asked why I told them that now I was never going to get into Harvard with a full scholarship. My mother did not know where this came from, and honestly, neither do I. When I was a kid I was obsessed with being perfect. With being perfect came the praise. And I think that’s what I really liked– getting praise. When the teacher says you’re good, you know youre good. Man, I’d freak out whenever I forgot my homework, or if I forgot to study for a test or whatever. I wanted to be on good graces at all times.

Whenever we’d move to a new school I’d get so nervous about what the new teacher was going to be like that I’d get sick to my stomach and miss, like, three days of school. Apparently I thought getting into good graces all over again was harder than making myself vomit.

This sounds like some sort of kid phase, but honestly it lasted throughout junior high and didn’t end until high school. In high school, however, I had Moved Enough, and no longer cared if I was the best. I was convinced I was just going to move again and start all over with a new teacher and new kids and new GPA’s and such. So I didn’t let it get to my head. I did well in school, don’t get me wrong. But I stopped becoming suicidal when I got B’s.

Where is all this coming from today? I don’t know. It’s cloudy outside, and I was feeling lazy, and I remembered that I never wanted to be lazy when I was a kid. I thought that wanting to do “nothing” was the worst thing in the world. But last night I was determined to do “nothing” and I had a great time. Well, I didn’t start out wanting to do nothing. Originally I was supposed to write a couple of sketches (including the infamous “nudity” sketch mentioned before), but I kept finding other things to do. I had never seen the end of The Goodbye Girl, I had to fix some things that were wrong with my computer, I hadn’t done my yoga in a while. I had a few people call me to ask if I wanted to go out to a bar and go play NTN trivia but I was thinking, “I’m in a bar every night for the rest of the week for performances and rehearsals–I want to stay home tonight.” And I was all by myself and keeping quiet, and it was really nice. When I was younger I would have considered it a waste of an evening.

So, again, I’m feeling older. Ick.

I don’t want to forget the prop tonight, and part of me is just wanting to relax about the whole thing, but a very powerful childhood-y part of me is saying, “don’t forget don’t forget don’t forget” and the next thing you know I just wrote a bunch of paragraphs about me not forgetting the baby powder this evening.

I just want to crawl back into bed today. Last night was weird. Both my boyfriend and I were so tired, but I know we both woke up a few times during the night. Once I found him at the foot of the bed, and he said that he had just woken up on the couch, but he wasnt sure how he got there. Once I woke up because Taylor bit my wrist, and I yelped, but it didn’t budge Sleeping Beauty next to me. Then I heard him stir and I woke up to find the cat sitting on my boyfriend’s back (which never happens) and I looked up and my finger was in my boyfriend’s mouth. I’m not sure whether he was grumbling over the cat or my finger, but in either case I fell right back asleep and didn’t realize how funny that entire scene was until I was driving to work. I mean, how did that happen? How long had my finger been there? You have to understand that he’s a foot taller than me, so I only come up to his chest. My arm was stretching up there to his face, and my finger was pushing on the roof of his mouth. Weird. Weird sleepwalking dreams.

I sleepwalk in times of great stress. I rarely remember anything about it, but sometimes when people tell me what I was doing I can remember the dream that I was having at the time. I have very vivid, colorful dreams with strong sensations and emotions, and they are never about mundane activities. My entire family sleepwalks– or at least has had full conversations while asleep. I think I’m the only one who gets out of bed and roams around, but my mother and sister have talked to me after I’ve woken them up, only for me to find out a few minutes later that they are still asleep. One morning (I think I was thirteen) I woke my mother up for work and she said, “Don’t touch the clocks.” I took that to mean she wanted a few more minutes. I came back a little while later and woke her up again and asked her if it was okay if I went around playing with the clocks. She yelled at me. Yelled at me. “Pamela, you know damn well why you can’t touch the clocks. Now quit playing around with all those ghosts and come eat your dinner. Quit flying around the room.” I was afraid that my mother had finally lost it, and I had in fact, forced her into the nuthouse that she was threatening me with all these years.

A half-hour later my mother was in the living room drinking her tea and I came up laughing, expecting to joke about the whole thing. I said the word “clock” and she goes, “Go to hell.” That afternoon when I came home from school she didn’t remember any of it. She had sleepwalked through the entire morning. She had woken up sometime after I had left for my bus. There’s many stories of my family attempting to converse with one of us in his/her slumber. One night I had to save my sister from peeing on the kitchen floor (she thought she was in the bathroom). Another night my father tried to teach us how to make waffles. One night I ransacked my parents dresser drawers looking for my “costume” (this was years before I ever started acting). I was convinced my mother had lost it. Another night my mother woke me up and I held her and cried and told her I deserved that medal. She felt terrible for me and had no idea what I was talking about. During the whole L.A. trip I started sleepwalking again. I woke up in the middle of the night looking for my black bag that had all of our scripts in it and I was lost in a castle in Spain. When my boyfriend showed me my bag (which was really in the middle of the bedroom) I thought he was such a hero for coming all the way to Spain to help me out. He talked me back into bed and I fell back further asleep.

A bunch of co-workers were just in my office talking about our bodies. We are all very depressed now and feel really fat because Skinny Girl Across The Hall was just talking about how fat she is. And now as I sit here, eating the last of a cookie a friend gave me, I remember that I HAVE TO PICK UP BABY POWDER AFTER WORK. I can’t get away from it. I just can’t. I am a victim to authority.