time to start dating a masseuse

I'm a little afraid to go to sleep tonight. I'm afraid that when I wake up in the morning (too early AGAIN; this time I have plans to go see a 9:30 am presentation of Nightmare on Puberty Street for an article I'm writing on didactic youth theatre) I will not be able to move.

This morning was sort of like that. When I had finally unwound myself from AX (um yes, that's still going on) I realized that my back had turned into an oversized Powerbar: dense, rigid, and full of questionable material. Why am I so stiff? I whined. Did you take a strange pose yesterday? he asked, all logical the way he is. Not any stranger than usual, I responded, but I knew that he might be on to something. Not that I'd taken one particularly tough pose, but that I have been modeling a lot recently. To be precise, I have had at least one modeling job every day this week; today I did two--one 2 1/2 hour university job this morning, and a 4-hour private group tonight.

This is a lot. Combined with all the dance classes, and all the walking, it starts to make sense. I am simply not as resilient as I was when I was a wee sprout, yet I'm doing more modeling work. If I had any sense at all, I would start taking yoga before I completely freeze up and have to be dragged from place to place on a skateboard, preferably by a large dog who could hold the rope in his teeth. But instead I fantasize about dating some tasty massage therapist-in-training (I understand that once they're certified, many CMTs don't work on their loved ones pro bono anymore.) Maybe I should start hanging around outside the National Holistic Institute school of massage in Emeryville, tarted up in 100% cotton clothing and vegan Birkenstocks, and see if anyone takes the bait.

I've been having a pretty emotional week; the original title for this entry was going to be drippy girl, because that's what I've been. It seems like my range of responses to various situations has narrowed dramatically; I can smile wanly, I can rant, or I can cry. Oh boy can I cry. It doesn't even matter any more what the original stimulus is. There are the obvious ones: I feel neglected by the troupe and worn out from all the tension of getting the fundraiser together, I cry. AX makes an honest, if grievous, error and schedules a date with someone else for the night he'd promised me, I cry. I learn that my father has lost the use of his legs and has to use a wheelchair even within the apartment; I wait until we're off the phone (We're doing fine here, kiddo, just fine he tells me and I can feel my mother's snort traveling down the psychic line) and then I cry.

All of that makes sense, and even more so when I admit that I'm having one of the harder periods I've had in the seventeen years I've been on the Pill (god bless Carl Djerassi, who will be tended by hosts of voluptuous angels if there is in fact a Heaven)

But crying when the only stimulus is that I'm confused because I can't decide whether to have lunch right away or wait until after I've run a couple more errands? Crying when someone says something nice about my modeling (and I'm going to brag and mention that such has been the case pretty frequently lately)? Crying when an interviewee tells me a great story about the positive impact her theater program is having on wayward youth? It's like, "maybe I should cry" has filled in all of the available spaces in the emotional rota. It's not even that I feel bad all the time, because I really don't. Some really wonderful things have been happening, I've been spending good time with people, and I'm doing interesting work.

I'm just... damp. Squeeze me, and out it comes. I have to remember to drink plenty of water, and maybe I should be boosting my salt consumption, huh? I'm starting to think of crying as something I could schedule a little time for every day, like morning pages. If you're not familiar with Julia Cameron's work, she's a writer who has made a tremendous amount of money telling frustrated artists to wake up and write three pages of crap every morning, to get it out of their systems. You write them, and then you're not supposed to look at them again, ever. Morning pages. Big money. You can even buy a Morning Pages Journal, which seems odd to me if the pages are supposed to be virtually disposable, but then that is perhaps why Julia Cameron is famous and wealthy and I am... damp. Anyway, I'm digressing. I have this idea: Morning Cry. You have to cry for three minutes, just to get it out of your system, and then you never have to look at those tears again.

Yep.