Finding something Holy in the Holiday.

In which we discuss:
Discouraging generosity as a means of absolving ourselves of the guilt of poverty during the season of giving;
Bus rides on Christmas day;
Making friends with family;
Telling stories in play;
Coming out to your family as an Actor;
Et all...

I'm on a bus.
I seem to do most of my *sarcastic air quotes* "Writing" while riding public transportation of some kind.
My dad and I left a family party in Northern VA (a delightful time, of which we will speak later) and dropped me with a backpack, and one more suitcase than I arrived with. 
The first is full of clean laundry, and the second with the gifts of my doting family (both of which will also be discussed, at length, later).
It's dark and my eyes are tired from all this screen staring, and all I can think is how strange it is that we have found no better configuration for mass transit seating than 'front and center, everyone!'.
Where is the genius of the American innovator now, when all I want is to take a piss in the porta-outhouse they call a bathroom and to do so I have to try to parcour over the prone form of some sweet old lady who just wants to catch a few winks(she's leaning on me and it's adorable) before we hit city limits?? 
Inquiring bladders want to know.

If this blog weren't evidence enough, I will admit to being a fledgling amateur storyteller: I love to spin yarns and play with verbiage and composition, and I'm constantly exploring new venues to do so. 
So!
I've found a new one: I am going to write and run a campaign in one of my favorite if not my Difinitive favorite role playing game settings.
It's cyber punk, post apocalyptic trans dimensional, magic slinging alien slaying (or saving) epic ness on a scale like I've not seen in any other such game, and I'm writing my own (competitively) low scale epic to fit nicely in this delightfully fictional waste land earth.
Any interested parties living in, or within commutable distance to the NYC metro area, please contact me in the comments.
But the game is hardly the point!  It is that I've been given a framework to structure my narrative around (around which to structure my SHUTUP), and that's always been the hardest part for this already mystifyingly difficult process. 
I can see why so many fantasy authors have made novels out of their game sessions; the storyteller's initial process is so vague in anything but the large, set-piece details, that the actual practice of Play, the collaboration with a party of adventurers can serve to detail and inspire the finer details of the narrative as it happens.
I am so gonna get rich off of this, I just know it.

So, my family, my madre y padre, are very generous.
My impulse is to say 'too' generous, but that smacks of ingratitude and diminishment of the value of their gifts.
And I'm trying to get over that.
I am in an ok place when it comes to my finances, and by that I mean that I think I can actually pay my rent without help from my family this month.  And I'm actually rather pleased about my progress in the city thusfar.
But I could not, in any sane world, purchase them gifts Knowing that doing so would put me in a situation that would demand I ask them for help again.
Yeah, a conundrum, to be sure.
so, instead, I brought all the love and focus a gift might seek to symbolize in a visit.  I bought a round trip bus ticket and that was my gift.
And I've known that this was going to be my gift for a while.
So, knowing this, I discouraged my family from buying Me anything, thinking the sheer inequity of value of giving and blah blah blah.
I love my family, and they love me.  And they can share the success they have now because they worked very hard for many hears to have it.  If, in addition to every other expression of love they offed me, they want to show their love with generosity, knowing full well I can't reciprocate (yet) who am to discourage them? 
Is it more noble to discourage the gift for the sake of pride and equality, or to accept, swallowing price and being thankful for the bounty of new socks?
So many socks!

So, I'm in a show (woo!).
Off Broadway (woohoo!)
With potential for serious exposure (Whooooaitaminute...)
Exposure is the operative, here, folks.
Fuzzy is going Mr. Natural for my off Broadway debut in blah blah, the point is that I had to explain this to my sweet, doting family.
Mom and dad are fine, they knew what they sere signing up for when I said 'I want to be an actor' and they said 'Ok'
But my extended family...
So I'm at a holiday party, standing in the only place anyone ever talks about anything of substance, The Kitchen.
Jesse (my deliriously talented young cousin who, by sheer force of will, I have tricked into being my friend) has dexterously dismembered the roast beast and we're all standing around, picking at the bones.
Someone asks me about how I'm enjoying the city, what I'm doing with myself and all that...and I am presented with a choice.
In the ever self-editing choose-your-own-adventure book of my life, I had two options. 
Do I say:
1. "Oh, I'm working retail and just got cast in a small beans musical with the potential for real growth and public response"
OR
2. "I got cast in a show where I'm gonna be naked allot!"

I don't know where my instincts for shameless self-promotion come from, but they suck and need to be improved.
Anyhow, so begins the cautiously bemused questioning of a group of people who love and know me well enough to want to be supportive, but still nervously giggle when I say something to the effect of 'c'mon guys, it's just a penis'
Apparently, it's never just a penis.
Unless it's Equus, or Quills or something like that.
Oh well, they laughed when I made a joke out of it, and in excited to share my NYC debut with my family.
And that's the real pisser; I think they might actually come see!  I've told everyone that we're double cast, so they can look at some other pale, malnourished man-boy waggle his tallywhacker for fun and profit, but that was met with a resounding No!  We wanna see You...which I received with mixed feelings, to be sure.
Any way you spin it (like a record baby) I had one of my best Christmas holidays, not because of all the cool stuff, but because I spent my time genuinely trying to invest in my family and I felt them investing back.
Counter investing.
Incesting?  Nah, that's weird.

Happy holidays, everyone!  Thanks for reading.

Frugality and Panic; Observations from Christmas Retail. And feelings.

Trendspotting was never a movie.
But Trainspotting was.

Trainspotting was about the lost generation of disenfranchised Scottish youth, lost in a shimmering pool of hedonism and heroin, doomed to drown in it's mirror bright refraction of life, like a tartan Narcissus in the Sky with Diamonds. 

Trendspotting would just be a bunch of half baked customer service reps, taking hits off of a bong shaped like a lectern and stoning all over human behavior around Holiday Season.

Allow me to explain.
If I've had any career other than theatre, then it's been in customer service and retail.
I'm good at people, so that's my business.  (What a shmucky thing to say, right?)
Anyhow.
Like any blogger worth his MacBook, I would presume to understand how people work because I have a liberal arts degree and a pedantic disposition, so herein I shall(!):

So, we have built this convention of 'The Time of Year for Giving' which has, in a genius of Edison-ian parallelism, produced 'The Time of Year of Getting'
These have, in turn, twisted 'Giving' to 'Buying' and 'Getting' to 'GIMME'
None of this is news, but bear with me.
The gift of giving has gone sour in the state of men-mark; married, middle aged men.
They enter my store (for it is always Mine while i work there.  Not in any any deliberate ego stroke, but it does help to feel at home in one's. work, no matter how frivolous), these shambling, briefecase bombardiers, braving this foreign land of fashion and feminine grooming... things, desperate to find some token of fealty; some sacrificial ornament to pay homage. 
Homage not to the partner they think they're buying for, but an unconscious obsequience to the pagan demands of Consumerism, The expectation of Tradition, Demonstration of Success, and Sparkly Shit.
But we mask it with words like Love, Commitment, Generosity, Festivity, and Sparkly Shit!
These men come in, desperate to buy some object, some fabrication of our cultures agreed upon standard of what beauty is, and throws HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS at me so that I may act as officiant to this ritual; he's handing me the mag-strip dagger to eviscerate his pocket book and spill it's gold-backed entrails straight into my bosses coffers...
And I'm...
I'm.
Going to let that particular rent settle.

Life is just too short.
I started this post on Wednesday; a hump day.
We all have them.
But Wednesday was a different day.

I am finishing this posy on Friday, December 14th, and that means that there is nothing I can say that has any value in the face of what has happened.  Human life has been sensibly wasted, and no one understands what it is that exists inside us that makes it happen.
But it keeps happening, and we have to mourn more senseless loss. 
Children. 
Children are a wonder of potential energy; a slow fuse firecracker of bright, colorful, wondrous Chaos. 
We celebrate what children represent in our old, more practiced lives, because their eyes see all of what is with a wonder that we've forgotten.
They remind us that even an old man can be exotic, new in the eyes of his infant grandchild, and that bananas are delicious and paper being torn is hilarious, and dentist appointments can end in drug induced hilarity as well as a tooth ache.
Children remind us how to celebrate the simplicities in our banal, everyday, humdrum lives by reminding us that
There is Nothing hum drum about life.
Life is a great swirling accident, and that those children came into our maelstrom world was magic, and magic must not go unappreciated. 
If you pray, then give thanks for the joy that those children brought into the lives they touched.
The rest of us, the lonely cynics, will do what we can to honor the lives of those children by loving where we can and thanking those who touch our lives in whatever ways we can.

I've chosen awkward, stilted words on the internet.
now I'm going to go call my mom.
Love