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Still listening to Jane Siberry -- track two of The Speckless
Sky, over and over. The song is seven steps to the
wall. Why is it so compelling? I'm not sure. It shifts
between a pretty strong beat and some really floaty musical stuff that
I don't know enough to describe. It's very layered. Plus the
lyrics are really, really good, although reading them isn't as nice
as hearing them.
How to describe it? The first block of words is pretty fast, with a
lot music behind in, and a beat. The second block has no beat; it's
just her voice, with synthesizer behind it very soft just hitting
occasional chords, and slowly the music grows. And, oh, words are just
so terrible for this. Perhaps I need to read a lot of music reviews to
understand how people talk about things.
All of which is not what you want to hear about, but I'm getting to
that.
Portland was a blast. I saw Rent twice, once Saturday night with Jim &
Paul (the planned viewing), and then at the Sunday matinee with just
Jim. Adrian (who played Roger) was so incredibly gorgeous I am still
in shock when I think about him. After both performances I went around
to the stage door and got autographs and talked to people a little,
which was terrifying but very rewarding. Leigh Hetherington, who plays
Maureen, grew up forty-five minutes from me, so we had a brief
conversation about Oklahoma. I wonder how old she is?
What else? The hotel was nice and incredibly cheap for what you got;
$80 a night, and the rooms had kitchens in them. Wow. No pool, no hot
tub, no hotel restaurant or any of that stuff, but I didn't mind in the
slightest. Powell's was a block and a half away, and there was a great
24-hour diner across the street from the hotel, with Tarantino movie
posters on the walls and really excellent gardenburgers. Paul was
happy with the neighborhood due to the high gay-bar density, which made
it easy for him to go pick up men. All in all, a win.
Plus, downtown Portland is tiny -- as we discovered
Saturday, you could enjoyably walk from the hotel to the theatre in
about twenty minutes,
I spent about $220 at Powell's, for the record. Bad Cera. But a
bad Cera with a lot of books. I picked up a bunch of psych books
and some sf on my own, plus Paul recommended a bunch of gay fiction
that has so far been interesting. I went overboard, but I had a
really nice time doing it.
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So that was the weekend. The rest of the week isn't much worth
mentioning. I suck at writing when I'm really depressed, and Mon/Tue
were pretty high-depression high-stress days for me. Deadline pressure
at work. Trouble sleeping. Nerves about seeing Norm on Wednesday, for
the first time in three weeks. Guilt about inflicting my nerve-wracked
self on Jim. I dealt with all of this mostly by working; I put in
fourteen hours Monday and twelve on Tuesday. Wednesday was only eight
-- I went to Millbrae, had a very low-key session (easing our way back
into things -- but there was some nice stuff which I'll get to in a
minute), worked until 7ish, and then went to dinner with Jim & Chrisber
& a friend of Chrisber's from his dance classes named Rachel. It was a
fun dinner, despite my being dead tired.
And now it's Thursday. Tonight I'm going over to Rachel's (Rachel
Gollub, not Rachel whom I met last night) to be initiated into the
secret art of headband-making. I anticipate a lot of gossip. It would
perhaps be more sensible of me to go home and get some rest, but I
haven't gotten to hang out alone with Rachel in a really long time.
I'm looking forward to it.
My session with Norm was largely filled with a nightmare I had on
Friday, a very vivid and intense abuse nightmare which bears no
relation to anything I actually remember -- which doesn't say much
given that I remember very, very little. But anyway, I digress. I
described the nightmare, and Norm asked a lot of detailed questions.
Eventually we kept coming back to the same thing, which was that I
don't actually feel anything about the in-nightmare abuse.
Not as the girl being abused (who had no basis for comparison, so while
she felt her life sucked she wasn't really upset or angry about it),
and not when I woke up. I was shocked at the dream, at the detail of
it and the intensity, but I wasn't scared or upset or angry. Going
over this led Norm to bring up repressed emotion as a trauma-survival
method, which of course I'd read before -- but do you know how
incredibly validating it is to hear that from your
therapist?
At the end of the session I said, "You know, at least I've answered one
question."
"Which one?", he asked.
"The wanting to know if something had really happened to me."
He grinned, and sort of laughed. And said, "Our clues sure seem to be
pointing that way."
I probably misquoted him horribly, but that exchange had me grinning
all the way home. Someone believes me from the evidence presented,
not because they care about me. That's important. I need all the
validation I can get.
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