Right. So. I’m having Trader Joe’s White Cheddar Popcorn and a glass of Brunello di Montacino for dinner. I have had a helluva week and I intend to go to bed slightly drunk and sleep as long as my sleep-hating brain will allow.

My only other almost full-time employee has been sick all week, so we are behind on every deadline. The artist I’m being paid to profile in a frilly local magazine has decided to come out with her mental illness in my article. I still don’t know how we are going to continue to pay the bills. It’s been an incredible lesson in patience, but by golly, I think I might be learning something. I called everyone and told them our deadlines would be pushed back a week and to stay the heck off our cases. I hunkered down and got all my least appealing work out of the way. And I’ve managed to have a good week.

So… so then. A few weeks ago I got a letter from the DMV. I thought it was my new tags; rather, it was a request for numerous certifications and lots more money. Turns out that when my car was sideswiped in the parking lot at work, and the estimate to fix the car was more than the car was worth, the insurance folks totaled my perfectly useable car. Which meant that the DMV requires me to get a new smog check and a brake and light adjustment certification. I have to turn in my plates and give them my license number and give them lots more money, too. Can you see where this is going? No? Well, I’ll tell ya. I took my car for the smog check this morning, and $60 later it passed. Next it went to the certified brake and light adjustment guy, who called to let me know that my car was over $600 away from passing: cracked headlamps, no license plate lights, no reverse lights, a busted converter of some kind in the brakes (so THAT’S why the “brake failure” light has been on for five months!) and various other goodies. The mechanic was almost apologetic, and told me he didn’t want to continue inspecting the car because I’d already rung up $140 in labor charges, and he knew that what had to be replaced was getting near the worth of the car.

So, yeah. I’m out $200 already, plus the $50 I spent a month ago (before the insurance report hit the DMV and $50 was all I owed to register). With the welding (the welding! My car needs WELDING in two places!) work, plus the extra fees owed at DMV, I now need $903.70 to fix and register my car. Oh, and did I mention that my tags expire at the end of this month? HA HA HAHAA HA HA!

It gets better. I don’t know if I’m going to try to attempt to fix the mess I have, or if I’m going to attempt to find a new old car. But I decided to take myself to the movies tonight, and just as I was leaving, the sky opened and starting dumping cold rain on the valley. No matter, I thought, since Jon recently tightened my windshield wipers (which, before being fixed, used to fly clear off the windshield and get caught on my rear-view mirrors). I climbed into my trusty 21-year-old vehicle and safely arrived to watch Annette Bening be brilliant on the silver screen. I got out of the movie, dashed through the rain and got back in my car, only to find that the fuse had blown… again. The fuse, that is, that controls a) the windsheild wipers and b) the horn. Well, I thought, at least if I can’t see someone, they won’t hear me when I’m about to hit ’em.

What was I to do? It was after 10 PM in St Helena, where everything closes at 4:59 PM. Most of my friends have forsaken me and left Napa Valley; Jon was in the city, Dad in the desert. So I pushed the wipers off of the middle of my windshield, where they decided to die, and drove home. It wasn’t so bad as long as no cars were coming from the other direction, but when they did, the water and lights and dark combined to make an ugly, blurry mess of my windshield. I don’t know how I made it home in one piece, but I did, and now the storm rages ever harder outside.

Today, Jon said, “Well, everyone has to have this kind of car experience once in their lives.” I said, “Umm, this, I’ve already done.”

But this too, shall pass, as my glass of Sangiovese Grosso passes down my throat, and I’m feeling much better.

I left for a run at quarter to five or so, to catch the last forty-five minutes of sunlight, now that the days are getting even the smallest bit longer. I ran towards toward the fields of vines that surround my road, heading east. I felt good enough to run more than walk, but when I turned around, my pulled right calf made me walk home. The sun setting in the west was highlighting the mountains and shading the vines and hills and trees and the light was so thick and gorgeous it looked as though I was surrounded by a movie rather than real life. My iPod was playing music at random, and as I crested the small hill and walked under the canopy of maple trees, stark and beautiful against the evening sky, a live Indigo Girls song stopped my feet as I tried to breathe and not start bawling two miles from home. I kept walking, watching the movie around me, thinking about dinner with my friends tonight. I almost turned off my iPod after the song, but couldn’t in time, and then the Gods of Music started playing “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle”. This was the Smiths song that got me through adolescence. When I was fifteen years old, just having moved to hell on earth, otherwise known as Arcadia, California, I used to put The Smiths’ first album on my turntable every night at bedtime. I’d turn out the lights and put the needle on the last song on the first side.

“Please don’t cry, for the ghost and storm outside will not invade this sacred shrine, nor infiltrate your mind… my life down I shall lie…”

I would try to fall asleep by the end of the song, but if I didn’t, I’d get out of bed (or rather, “off” of bed, as it was just a mattress on the floor) and put the needle back to the beginning of the song, and try again. Sometimes I did this six or seven times before falling asleep.

I kept walking as dusk was falling over the vines and the road, thinking that I had a good day, and that I’d be seeing my friends soon.

“There never need be longing in your eyes as long as the hand that rocks the cradle is mine…”

I have had two full delicious days to do exactly nothing. It’s been wonderful. I’ve given myself the time to do whatever I wanted, even if it meant watching all three Indiana Jones movies back-to-back on network television. I spared myself the tsunami aid concert with Madonna singing “Imagine”- although I did call and donate to the Red Cross- and instead I watched bad TV, read, ate lots of broccoli, and slept in. But by the end of today I was ready to *do* something, so I worked on the music for a show I’m doing in a few weeks, and then sat down at my computer to do a whole lot of nothing. This included reading many of the stories I’ve written in the last year, and also revisiting the novel I started about a year and a half ago. I was a little frightened, opening that document, because I honestly couldn’t remember what it was about. In some late-night blog ramblings around that time, I spoke of writing about all that ailed my romantic life, and I was afraid that perhaps I really was going over to the dark side in that novel. Instead, though, I found a sweet, even funny story, about hope and friendship and love. I even wanted to keep reading when it ended quite abruptly at Chapter 6. Seems I got all my vitriol out on my blog. I’m glad I don’t do that anymore. But I was suprised at the story I’d begun, and found myself rooting for the heroine. The crazy thing is that I couldn’t remember writing most of it, couldn’t remember the creative process that put those words to paper. And maybe that’s why I could enjoy it- I didn’t remember it. I can’t pick up where I left off, so it will remain the beginning of a sweet story of hope.

I also looked through all of the pictures my friends and I have taken over the last year- they are all on my computer- and they made me think of a journal entry that I wrote on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2003, when I was trying to decide between moving to Napa and joining the Peace Corps: “I fear to make a decision based on fear. Jordi and I were talking about the root of that fear, and it is not a fear of Africa, of lost conveniences, of heat, of exhaustion, of isolation, of pit toilets and bucket baths, of malaria, of AIDS. I don’t exactly fear any of that. What I fear is lost time. What will my life be when I get back in the spring of 2006? And why in god’s name am I asking such a stupid question as that? Why would I stall an adventure for fear of what I cannot know, namely my life on the other side? It doesn’t make sense. It would be a terrible way to live.

On the other hand, do I give up my novel? Do I give up what might be a great choice for me, a great change waiting for me in Napa Valley? Well, two things. If I were to go to Napa instead of Africa, there remains the possibility of the exact same thing happening in spring of 2006. I cannot know that I will be any happier, any more actualized, that my life will be very different than it is today. I hope it is, I intend to make it so, but there are simply no guarantees that one choice or the other will make my life better. It could go either way.”

it is not yet spring of 2006, but at least I can look back on that and know that my life IS very different than it was that October. I can see it in my home, in my job, and in the pictures of the last year. I do not necessarily think I made the “right” choice in coming to Napa over Peace Corps, but it has certainly been a “good” decision. I would have been a year into my service right now had I gone to Africa, and I do wonder almost every day what it would have been like. I still am committed to doing it someday. But for now, a wee photo montage of the life I live today.

Every morning, this is what I see on my run:

the not-so-impressive but still lovely Napa river

the winter green among the dormant vines

the mustard flowers just starting to bloom

the beauty and wonder of the valley floor in Wintertime

And finally, the best part of my day…



… my friends.

A person very, very dear to me is having troubles at work. Indeed, two people very dear to me are having trouble at work but one is 3000 miles away, and that’s the one I’m worried about at this moment. I hated my job from fall of 1995 to summer 2004, but I was good at it, and it made me enough money to get by. It was this little-known professional called “waiting tables” and I always used to tell myself that I’d pulled one over on the rest of the world by discovering this oh-so-deeply rewarding job. When the 9-5 hacks were sloshing away in their cubicles, I was sleeping in, or taking a bike ride, or walking around the park, or reading. I would go to the beach on a Tuesday morning, a museum Thursday afternoon. I would leave work with cash in pocket, rather than waiting for a pesky paycheck. I would tell the government only what it wanted to hear but not a penny more when tax time rolled around. And I’d work only four shifts a week and make more than my friends working full-time. My days were free, my evenings filled with music and people having a good time.

Except… except I don’t like staying up late. I love mornings, and I never saw them. I may not have paid a lot of taxes, but I had no health benefits, no paid vacation, no retirement, no savings. And when my family and friends got together on Friday nights, when someone would come to town for the weekend or invite me away for the weekend, I could never see them, could never go. I would wander Chicago/Los Angeles/New York on my own, because everyone was working. Except for most of the time, I stayed home and slept because my four shifts were so physically challenging, so emotionally draining that I needed two full days just to recover. And the people I was working with and for never liked me, not once. I was a relatively good person in the midst of sharks, a geek surrounded by high-school-esque cliques who never wanted to let me in. I didn’t smoke pot, and I wasn’t bitter and sharp, so I was excluded from every possible clan. I was belittled by management and ridiculed by fellow staff members.

Everything changed for me on 9/11. I shudder to even write that, since it makes me nauseous when anyone dares lay claim to such a statement, but it’s the only way I can explain it. All my life, a small handful of people have told me I was a leader, that I was truly capable. Over a number of years, I went from thinking they were stating the obvious to thinking they were delusional. But that night forced me to remember what it is I am supposed to do. Even then, though, I had to be told to take the reins- there were always so many brothers or co-workers or some other band that I would allow to overshadow me, even if it wasn’t their intent- and I didn’t think I knew how to command. I get flashes, sometimes, not just of that night, but of being eleven years old and irate that I was moved to second chair cello for a concert: it was a political move, and I was furious because I was the best. I knew it, and so did everyone else. I remember my parents coming in to the theatre during the dress rehearsal and catching my eye and I looked at them, looked down at my seat, and back at them and managed just to barely shake my head at the injustice. I remember visiting my high school choir teacher in the hospital after a heart attack and telling him not to worry, that i was putting together our spring show and that he needed to relax and recover. I remember hours in the practice room in college on a Sunday night, teaching myself the next week’s music so I’d be prepared to run sectional. I remember believing I was smart- not brilliant- but smart enough to do what needed to be done.

The nights of that September were shocking not just for the obvious reasons, but also because it was like the real Michelle suddenly appeared to whup my ass. She held up a mirror and asked if I was fucking joking. I was not meant to be doing what I was doing- I was not meant to be taking pride in being a great server, or crying about the unfairness of my life. But it took me two solid years after that September to quit that life and that job…eight years in all. I leapt with all my might, barely holding out hope that the net would appear. It did, less than a year later, and now, in the same way it’s hard to remember what cold feels like during a July heat wave in New York, I can only barely remember what it felt like to loathe my job. Although I have to admit, sometimes I can’t enjoy going out to dinner because all I can see are the cracks in the machine of serving: I know how brutal it is, and I know also that it is quicksand.

Two years ago, if you had told me that I was going to have a 9-5 job, with a desk and an office and letterhead and meetings and a fancy title, and that I was going to love it, I would have laughed at you and perhaps given you the finger. That’s not my life, I would have thought. Because I thought that the only thing that would make me happy is performing. It still feels a little sacreligous to admit that something other than performing brings me joy. But there was also a lot of terror in performing for me- fear that I wasn’t as good as I should be, fear that I wasn’t going to get the next show, and good, plain ‘ol stage fright, actor’s nightmare sort of stuff. There is no terror in my job now, no harrowing fear of failure. Not because I will necessarily succeed, but because I’m doing the absolute best I can and I feel no shame.

And so I think of my dear friend, my dear sister, and I know exactly what she’s feeling. I don’t know what is right for her, but I do know that she is so… god… so otherworldly in her brilliance and her talent and her, well, capability, that she could do any damn thing she wanted. She’s under the thumb of an asshole right now, and it will simply never improve. I am not one to give advice, because nothing that applies to one person necessarily applies to another, but if I dared speak, I would say one thing: run. Run like hell. Get the fuck out of there. There is NOTHING you can’t do. If you have to work a crummy day job, chances are that in a city of 8 million people, you could find a boss who isn’t an asshole. You have always hated that job. Run.

Heck, run all the way to San Francisco.