the breathing memory

with the east coast deluge, my wedding season comes to a close. it is fittingly dreary for an "end of things," though i had hoped to grasp a tiny bit of summer here in the south. alas, i waited too long. instead of lounging by the pool, i have ample time to putter around my home town. to visit the spots of those enduring moments in my brain. probably too much time.

that being said, the last of my weddings was beautiful. vastly different--actually, they were all very different from each other. yet, everyone managed to plan something very fitting. i love how different they all have been.

sometimes on the other side of the fence you mush all marriages together. it becomes a blur of TLC episodes and wedding magazines. when most of your friends are single or family-less, you start to re-imagine  "domestic bliss" from fragments of your memory, real, imagined, from that last pulp novel to the 3d family film...

my sister Julia and her husband got married at their new house, which they have been refurbishing themselves all summer. and we are not just talking a little paint--not only the walls, but everything from  a complete upheaval of the yard, to the plumbing, to the freakin roof-- yes, they laid the beams!! in the ceiling!

not only was the wedding perfectly simple, but allowed all the friends and family to really appreciate how much work they have already put into their new home.

alyssa's wedding, on the other hand, was incredibly elegant last week. the ceremony was at a beautiful mansion, overlooking LA. all the fancy guests hid beneath delicate, matching parasols to fend off the blaring sun.

i didn't know a lot of people at the wedding--a far cry from the plans we made as teenagers in high school, daydreaming about our lives together. the houses we'd have, the baby strollers we'd push, the husbands we'd torture... it wasn't so much the "what" but the fact we'd be doing everything at the same time, so we could share the suffering and the joy, could gossip and bemoan together.  but times change. and we grow up. i guess some of us do.

her wedding was officiated by another of our friends who got one of those "day passes" to legitimately perform the ceremony. a very sweet idea.

my mind is full of twistable turnable thoughts that i have not yet decided if i should let in or i should just pack away.

however, i am very glad that i took the time, money, and effort to make it to all of the weddings this summer.  living the status quo is a terrible place for an artist.  you must stretch yourself in some way as much as you can. whether reading new scripts, attending scene study classes, trying out different ideas or having wild adventues.  sometimes, esp when things are emotionally stressful, stretching can mean a simple, rote physical warm up. but it can also mean this overindulgent "exploration" of "feelings."

and as i am falling asleep typing this, i'd better sign off for now.

limbo: when the aliens descend

there is a state between awakefulness and dreaming. it is unrecognizable when you are in it- the state of full cognition flows right into this limbo without marker. but it seems to me that this limbo might as well be a whole 'nother person taking over my body. invading my skin as my conscious slips from control. maybe it's an alien having fun with a corporal human. or maybe it is a me from an alternate world.

i have often wondered if our dreams are reality some where -- after all, if the multi universe theory is correct , everything that can be is somewhere. why not then our dreams?     if in a dream we can see into another version of ourselves, maybe this limbo is a different kind of blurring between our realities. this would explain why i still feel like me even if i can only vaguely remember what has happened, what i have said and done.

could this also be what happens when we drink? maybe not when we just drink to a state of drunkeness, but when someone's conscious blacks out, when we are still acting and speaking and doing, but not recording any of it. maybe we aren't recording it because a different version of ourselves is recording it.

have you ever stayed up all night? had a sleep over? as a four year old or fourteen or forty four? have you had those late night conversations where you know you are making complete sense and then you wake and your friend or partner or sister laughs and says "you were saying the funniest shit last night!" and you don't remember.

i have long loved to document those moments. well, i love to capture those moments for myself. but if they involve other people they can sometimes be embarrassing or too revealing just as often as they can be good fun.

but alone they are like tapping into some secret. the bulk of my really bad poems in highschool came from mining limbo. i wouldn't be able to sleep, would sit up under my skylight with my journal de jour and scribble away my thoughts. in the morning i would look over what i had written. the last few pages often enough were illegible - even my other selves have atrocious hand writing. but before it trailed off into chicken scratch, there was pure adolescent angst gold.

i don't do this anymore. i don't have the luxury, my days packed going from one thing to the other in my desperate attempt to realize a career of a working artist in nyc. it seems my nights are a delicate balance between struggling to sleep and dropping like a rock. if i tried to write as i sleep, i'd probably keep my mind spinning on endless tracks till dawn breaks.

however, i do take a very long subway to my pinnacle of manhattan. at least late at night i do. and i am becoming adept at thumb typing. which means my itouch is filled with "notes" thumbed out as i force my eyelids open to stave off opportunistic thieves, rapists, and hoboes.   sadly the touch screen keyboard isn't quite as forgiving as my  young penmanship. and the apple provided automatic word correction doesn't always help.

but flipping through those late night subway ramblings, i again wonder- just whose thoughts have been pouring out?  i'd like to meet her.    


ps. if you haven't seen the joe iconis rock and roll jamboree yet, what is wrong with you? don't you get how awesome it is? my sister, katrina rose dideriksen, is a superstar and joe iconis somehow taps my brain. not to mention the awesome stylin' of the rest of the iconis family. seriously. get on the train.

kilimanjaro: the metaphor of the mountain

with the rain delaying my run, i've finally finished posting my account of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. i'm glad i happened to look back at it today. it has been a tough week, i have struggled to come out of the dark side, to put out some positive energy, appreciate what i have without coveting everyone else too much.

yeah, i'm still going to struggle with that a bit, but having my own words thrust back in my face doesn't hurt:

"Can i hold on to the metaphor of the mountain? it is impossible not to see the implications of it in my own life. simply jogging, i am reminded- how can i quit now, this is not as hard as Kili, not as cold or hot, i can breathe, i am not empty. but of course even further the comparison is unavoidable. i am an actress- unemployed for quite a while, frustrated and more often depressed by my comparative successes to my friends and colleagues and family.

i see around me what i have sacrificed, the relationships, the security. but am i yet empty? and even when i have given everything, does that mean my feet stop? do i turn back, beaten, or do i go on? reaching my highest peak, battered physically, mentally, and perhaps only half brained, but reaching it some day all the same..."

read it here: shangala-bangala

nightmares and dreamscapes

wow. i had some f*cked up dreams last night.

the combination of some screwy personal events on top of opening a show in 10--ack make that 9 days, makes for some fabulously detailed wack job in my head. who can i blame for this? i'd like to take no credit for the random electrical impulses.

of course, some people say we are "solving problems" from the day when we dream. i think that was Jung, right? actually, after the last couple of nights i've had, i'd much prefer the "working things out" hypothesis to the Freudian "repressed desires."

i mean, f*ck. these better not be repressed desires or i have got some seriously screwed up priorities right now.

i wish i could record my dreams and rewatch them back. i'm sure many people have this wish, so why do we not have a device? i used to love Christopher Pike books when i was young. these are YA books with way too much sex and murder and fantasy--probably good my parents didn't ever look that closely at them as he was (and is) very prolific. i cherished about 41 of his books-could even guess the titles when they were wrapped and under the xmas tree by feeling the embellished titles through the paper. this probably explains a lot.

anyway, in his book the eternal enemy the main character inadvertently records her dreams by sticking her finger in a vcr while sleepwalking. course she turned out to be a cyborg, but she didn't know that when she was busy screwing her boyfriend and tracking down who was trying to kill her.

that vcr thing stuck with me though. what with blue tooth, we wouldn't even need to sleep walk. you could hook that bad boy up while charging your ipod at night, then review on your morning commute. lets see, NPR podcast or inexplicable ex-appearance dreamcast? what would we like on the A train?

running partners

some of the children that chase after john and i, pose for juls:

Kili kisses the sun

A5 bartlett hotel

looking out at our driveway-house A5

come to africa, fall in love. i dare you not to.

come for too long and you are infected, longing to come back and uncontrollably urging everyone else you know to do the same. a powerful virus...

since we are here, we have convinced my aunts and uncles and cousin to visit us instead of our annual outer bank trip. the first group arrived this week. it is my cousins James and Alex's first trip out of america. a far cry from a leisurely trip to england or france, to the museums and restaurants. the Louvre is amazing, the Vatican worthy of unending examination, i wouldn't have missed Pompeii, while Ramses and the Pyramids still linger in my dreams... but if i could only choose one for my future children -if they may be- i would spend any extra cent to get them to the plains of africa, the lions in the misty mornings, the umbrella trees, and the herd of elephants with their babies towering over your jeep.