just hand me a pacifier, already

I’m in that weird period right now just before everything happens.  In two weeks we have a show, and starting this weekend we work more intensely on it, so right now, I’m sort of mulling it through my head preparing the show order and how we’ll do this and that… oh yeah, I’m directing it.

[scripty]
YOU
But you swore off directing, didn’t you?

PAMIE
Just when I though I was out, they PULL ME BACK IN!

YOU
You don’t even like the Godfather.

PAMIE
I might.  I haven’t given it a chance.

YOU
Pitiful.
[/scripty]

My one person show is in July, so that’s far enough away that I’m still in the running it around in my head phase.  That’s a pretty interesting phase because when it’s all in your head and no one has seen or heard any of it– it’s still brilliant.  There’s nothing tarnished at all.  All the timing is just right.  It’s once you start talking that you screw everything up.

I applied to join Austin Script Works, and I should hear about that sometime in the next couple of weeks.

Polaroid Stories doesn’t start until August.

Aspen auditions aren’t until October.

So, right now, I sit and wait in this creative limbo.  Pretty soon I’ll be really busy, but for the past two days and for the next night and a half, I’ve really got very little to do.

I should work on my one person show.

Have I mentioned how terrified I am about this thing?  Everyone just says, “Just do some of your squishy entries.”  Well, the problem with that is I don’t know what keeps you guys coming.  I really don’t.  I don’t know which ones you read and which ones you share and which ones you skim.  I can’t know that.  Also writing is a completely different medium than live theatre.  I can make jokes here that won’t translate on the stage in a forty-five minute monologue.

[scripty]
YOU
Oh, really, like what?

PAMIE
Like that right there.

YOU
Oh yeah.  That’s a pretty good point.

PAMIE
I know.
[/scripty]

So, I’m stressin’.  I just am.  I mean, it’s going to get done, and I hope it’s fine, but you know, if I wasn’t worried about it then I wouldn’t work so hard on it.  I am working on it.  I work on it whenever I’m by myself.  That’s a lot of time, since I’m by myself in my office all day.  I’m thinking about the show while I’m working, while I’m brushing my teeth, while I’m showering, when I’m trying to fall asleep– because I don’t really know what I’m going to do yet.  I have ideas.  I have a general feeling about what the tone will be.  But do I have something important to say?  Do I have a message?

No.  Usually you guys come here to hear me talk about how big of a dork I am.

Sometimes I feel like I should just decide what I want to do and then do it.  Because right now I do many different things, and they take up so much of my time that I never feel like I’m giving something my all.  I do, however, feel that I give everything my all.  But, really, if I just want to be a writer, then I should spend all of my time writing, and friggin send things out and stuff.  If I just want to be an actor, then I should pack up and move or at least get an agent.  I don’t even have an agent.  The bonus of that is I get all the money that I earn from my auditions, but the down side is I don’t get as many auditions.  If I want to be a comic, then I should try and get into Second City or the Groundlings or something, right?

Notice I didn’t say anything about work.

I have this job so that I can do all of the other things that I want to do, but work takes up so much of my week, that I feel like I’m wasting away in this office sometimes.  Not getting those job transfers made me think about whether or not I’m supposed to even be here.  I’m not.  I’m not supposed to be here.  I’m not supposed to be a tech support engineer.  I don’t care if you can ping your machine or not.  I really don’t.  But it’s something I can do, and it gives me health insurance, and pays all my bills, so I’m chained to this desk in more ways than one.  I’d like to just design web pages but I don’t know enough to land a job like that.

But I’d love to just be able to do what I like doing.  I feel like I’m not doing enough to get what I want.  And then I think, “I don’t have any more time in my life to do anything else.  This is it.  I just have to keep chipping away, climbing baby steps, whatever psychobabble I should say that means I’m trying.  I am.”

And I am trying.  But what if having my hand in too many things is keeping me from really acheiving at one?

I don’t even know which one I want to acheive in.  I like all the aspects of my art.  I like writing.  I like acting.  I like comedy.  I even like directing sometimes.  I like web design.  But I like having money and the freedom to go out of town and have vacations, and for that I need a good job.  I do have a good job.  I’m just not really what corporate America is looking for.

And when I have to cut my hair and dye it blue, I’m really not going to be what corporate America is looking for.

I’m not even unhappy.  That’s the real kick of it all.  I’m unhappy at my job, but isn’t everybody?  I just feel sometimes like I’m missing out on something.  Oh, whine, whine, whine, right?

All of this is really just me freaking out about writing my one person show and feeling like I’m not qualified or talented enough to do it.  That’s really what all of this is.  I know that.  When it’s over, I’m going to feel so much better.  Honestly.  I hate stressing about this.  I’ve never written something for me to say, I always write for others.  I hear their voices in my head.  It’s hard to hear my own.  It really is.

blah, blah, blah

Enough whining.  Really.  The show will be fine.  I’ve just got to suck it up.

My new point of obsession is that I’m tired of my car.  I really am.  I want a new car.  My car doesn’t have air conditioning (which basically makes it a lethal weapon in the summertime in Austin).  The side view mirror is cracked. I was driving one day and I noticed that the mirror was all out of whack like someone had run into it.  I positioned it back into place, and then put ONE FINGER on the mirror to push it into position and it just cracked right in half in the heat.  The emergency brake light stays on no matter where the emergency brake is, but sometimes if it gets not too hot or too cold, the light will go off.  My car is very sensitive to temperature.

Two years ago my car would do this thing where whenever it got cold the horn would go off.  Have I mentioned this before?  In any event, once it got down to about forty-five the horn would just stay on.  You could hit the steering wheel a couple of times and then the horn would stop.  This was terrible when I was driving, as it would look like I was a really angry driver going through green lights.

One quiet Sunday morning we were all asleep around six in the morning when I suddenly heard my horn go off.  It is not a quiet horn.  I threw on some clothes and ran down to my car– barefoot and in pj’s– and started hitting the steering wheel.

Nothing happened.

The horn just kept wailing.  I turned the car on.  The horn kept going.  I was feeling terrible about the horn going on at this hour, since the last time the horn was on I wasn’t near the car so I didn’t know, and someone almost broke my window trying to stop the car from being so damn loud.

So I did what any decent, civil-minded, sleepy-headed, PMSing woman would do.

I drove off.

Ask Eric what he heard in this bedroom at this point and he’ll tell you:  “WEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaa
aaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiaaaaaaa”I was driving around the neighborhood, screaming at the top of my lungs slamming on the horn, trying to get the car to shutup.  It was at this point that I realized that I was now the most annoying woman in Austin.  I was driving from apartment complex to apartment complex in my moving alarm clock.  I headed back towards the house in tears.

“aaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE”

Eric met me at the bottom of the stairs with his tool kit in hand.  He opened the hood of my car and detached the battery.

Silence.

Then a neighbor came down to bitch me out, and Eric told her to go back to bed.

When I told my father that the cold was affecting my horn he said I was out of my mind.  That if it was cold the metal would retract, not swell, and that would make the horn less likely to go off.  I went to the car dealer.  At the time my car was suffering from Tourrette’s.

“What kind of car?”

“93 Mazda Protege.”

“Let me guess,” he said, “Your car makes random beeps like you took off your seatbelt.  The only thing that fixes it is pulling on your seatbelt.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, that happens.  Probably your side seatbelt sticks sometimes, choking your passengers.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You got a club?”

“Yes.”

“Then, whenever it gets cold your horn goes off and you can’t stop it.”

“Could you put this in writing for my father?”

It cost seven hundred dollars to rid my car of Tourette’s syndrome.  I’ve already replaced the front and rear axles, and now it’s making that noise again.  I’ve bought three batteries.  I’ve replaced all four tires twice, and one of them four times.  When I bought a new radiator, the air conditioning stopped working.   I’m missing the same front right hubcap that every single 93 Mazda Protege is missing.  The ashtray in the backseat of the car will sometimes fly from it’s holding place, and hit people in the shin.  The speakers hum.  The cigarette lighter no longer works, and the lighter itself has swelled, so once you get it back in its little place, you can no longer pull it out.

For the second time in a year the lever on the car’s gas thingy has broken, so when I want to get gas I have two options:  Get someone to hold the gas lever in my car while I go around and pry open the door,  or, when I’m alone– use the handle of the club to drive a wedge under the lever to hold it up while I go around and pry open the little door.

The seatbelt holders on both sides are broken, so to find the lap belt on both driver and passenger sides you have to open the door and lean over, which instantly triggers the shoulder belt to go on its little track and hit you in the head, and then when you get the seatbelt and close the door the shoulder belt hits the other side of your head.

You think I’m done?  Think again.

Whenever I apply the brakes and turn the right front tire makes a crunchy sound.  I’ve taken to making sure I’ve slowed down before turns just so I can make the turn without the noise.  Sometimes when you turn on the heater or air fan air will blow out and sometimes it won’t.  No matter what the air won’t be cold, but sometimes it decides not to work at all.

The front right tire goes flat every couple of months.  It will be fine and then one day when I’m running late or it is late, I’ll get back to my car and it will be completely flat.  There’s no in between “it’s-getting-kinda-low.”  I’ve patched it twice already, and now I’m just trying to teach my car a lesson.

The key to my car no longer opens the trunk.  None of them do.  You have to use the latch on the inside of the car.  This is unfortunate when you’re trying to load groceries in your car in the rain.  Lately it hasn’t mattered, however, since my trunk is currently filled with all of my spare tire stuff from all the flats, and the rest of the space is taken up by a box of cd equipment that would put a cd player in my car once I find someone who knows how to install a car CD player from 1989 and I fix my cigarette lighter.

The grackles have put so much poop on my car that there are parts of the paint that are permanently faded.  There’s nothing I can do.

Someone put gum along the side of my car, and I’ve washed it four times and it still won’t come off.  The windshield is scratched in a semi circle from a bad windshield wiper changing incident.

I just can’t afford to fix everything, and once I fix something something else breaks.  I’m mad at it, and I don’t want to spend any money on it, because it only encourages the car to lash out.

I want to lease a car.  That’s my new thing.

The problem is, I have no idea how to go about doing that.  They never teach you these things in school:  “How to be a good grown up.  How to manage your money and get good credit and lease a car.  Three credit hours.”

So, consequently, I have all this desire to get a new car, but I know nothing about getting it.  Am I qualified to lease a car?  Can I afford it?  Where do I go?  Who makes good cars?

Goo!  Waah!  Goo!

I hate that cars frustrate me (ooh, there’s another one for the “what irritates me” section of the forum:  I hate when people say “fustrate”).  I feel like such a girl when I go, “Why does my car make this noise?”  Eric can fix any Mazda in the world but mine.

I just want a nice car that I can drive around that’s quiet and cool.  I’m willing to pay hundreds of dollars a month for it.  I just want to stop living in this toaster oven.  Yesterday I was filling out a survey about cars and when it asked what year my car was, there wasn’t even a button for 1993.  I had to hit 1994 or older.  That makes my car old.  I don’t want an old car.  I want a nice working pretty car.

Goo!  Wah!  WAaaah!  Goo!  Hic!

I’m making myself sick, here.