Seeing Clearly Again

I talked to my mom on Sunday night over Skype, as usual. She had just had a cataract removed from her eye the previous Wednesday and was on the mend. For weeks ahead of time she was very apprehensive about the procedure, mostly because (as someone born in 1940) she couldn't believe that having your eye sliced into while you're awake isn't always a painful, traumatizing experience.

But on Sunday night, she was actually chipper. In her usual way, it was a simple reaction, with her thick old-New-York accent:

"Who knew?", she said repeatedly. And she added, with a giggle: "And suddenly, I can see myself clearly in the mirror again!"

Granted, she was referring to how much easier it would be each day to put her eyebrows on. But it was a moment of realization for me. She'd been out of focus for years now, and despite her age and experience was still afraid of things she didn't understand, even if they were simple methods of bringing her back to zero from some other, "off" place. Maybe things she not only didn't understand, but didn't know how to trust as well.

And once again, I was there saying "uh-huh" with my words to my mother, when in my head I was relating to her more than I dared elaborate on.

See, my mother and I have a close, affectionate relationship. But it's also quite complex. There is only so much she can understand and digest all at once, so I spent much of my adult life keeping a great deal of things to myself. I came out of the closet at 18, and my parents were always introduced to my serious boyfriends. But I didn't share everything that I could have, including the things that maybe in hindsight she could have helped me with. As I got older, I came to appreciate my mother's real comprehension of the bigger things in life, especially regarding close relationships; and I turned to her a lot more. But also, as I creep closer to 40, I also realized that she is from a very distant generation which simply went about its priorities differently, staying in unhappy, even abusive, marriages for some ridiculous sense of honor that never, ever made sense to me.

Anyway, she is well aware in a general way of what has been going on in my life over the past couple of months. She tends to get protective and defensive of me when there is trouble, and I've often found that stressful and unhelpful because it always came across as if I couldn't be trusted to take care of myself, or I should stop taking risks in life. Both sentiments, in my mind, lead one to lowering your standards, "settling" instead of striving, and ending up more unhappy yet.

But she's my mother. Of course she's going to want to stand up for me in her own way. And as I get older, I get much less apprehensive about her ways.

And I realized this morning as I was shaving that she's not the only one who can see herself more clearly these days. I was thinking about what I've been afraid of over the past few months, and what has been leading me to cower in a corner rather than face life. I realized it was my old-fashioned anxieties from experiences I had in relationships dating back to the early 1990s, with men who have absolutely nothing to do with today, with Vini, with my life or with the me that I am to my core.

And that "me" is not the person I was in 1995, or in 2000, or even in 2002 when I moved to Logan Circle. I'm extraordinarily different, inside and out. And looking closely into the mirror, for the first time -- I finally saw it.

Happy Birthday New Club Whirled: Ours Is Just a Little Sorrowed Talk...

I heard this come on when I was in the shower a little while ago, and the tears are still going down my face. Not just because I realized this blog is one year old at midnight, but because no echo from the past could better capture everything pressing on my heart at this moment than this song.

I cried to an old song by the same band that stumbled into my ears back in December 2004. But what a world of difference.

There is no video. Just close your eyes and listen. Thanks for spending this year with me. Stick around.

Tuesday A/V (Friday Edition): Mars Attacks!

With my energy level back up to soaring levels, I'm finding myself multi-tasking all the way through incredibly long and busy days this week. So much so that I'm juggling tons of meetings, teleconferences, deadlines and communications with a series of daily house-related responsibilities (workmen are coming and going daily) and my intense gym schedule.

One of the best results is that now I get to even multi-task my fun, too. And there is the random 5-10 minute breaks spent on YouTube, where I stumbled over this gem of an opening sequence from the 1996 Tim Burton film adaptation of Mars Attacks! In fact, for anyone who dreamed of being a filmmaker as a child, this opening sequence is about as close to a wet dream as there is. The visuals are both super-high-budget and hilariously corny; the Danny Elfman score is so thrilling that I still get goose bumps every time I hear it. And then there is the cast to beat the band, more star-studded than ten 1970's disaster movies combined.

And the film itself is, to me, up there with Showgirls as one of the least appreciated big-budget satires of American culture of the 1990s. It's an absolutely brilliant film, particularly from the point of view of foreigners looking adoringly at the United States, how its childish naivety always gets it into horrendous trouble and its mere gumption manages to let it land on its feet in the end. With huge explosions and destruction as a backdrop. No wonder it was such a giant hit in Europe, and not so well understood in the U.S. itself.

Also, it takes me back to one of the great moments of my life at Solo Piazza in Logan Circle. I'd just gotten TiVo and a home theater sound system for my 42-inch TV on the same day in 2003, and the first movie I recorded was Mars Attacks! When Sean came over to meet me that evening to go to dinner, I dragged him inside, cranked up the volume, and had him enjoy the spendour of this opening sequence in its full glory before we left. I was like a little kid, and the greatest phase of my life in D.C. was just beginning.

The Week That Was

Just a dispatch from the re-whirl. So much is going on that's good, it's almost impossible to know where to begin or end at any given moment.

The training is going very well. Less than a week and I'm feeling and seeing results, most of all in how I'm so full of energy that I can barely sit still most days. When I think of the money I am spending on a personal trainer -- and the money I could have spent on months of therapy in its place -- it amazes me how fast things have turned around simply by getting off my ass.

I went out on Saturday night to a party at Beth's apartment, around the corner from ours, and just dripping with Americans and such. It was really fun, and kinda hard to leave. I had to head over to The Week as promised to meet some friends, among them Thomas and his boyfriend. It was a very fun night, given the fact that I ended up going alone -- no Vini, no Elaine, no DC friends -- and was wondering how the night would turn out. As it happens, I met up with the guys, and met some of their friends, and the music was really great. I wasn't at my usual altitude, but I was traveling nonetheless. And on nothing but a few glasses of champagne and a whole lot of water.

It proved to me at least that I can have fun just about anywhere, so long as I am being me -- and I'm feeling good. In fact, it was a strange experience being on the dance floor on Saturday night, and being so far away from where things left off in that clubbing identity I didn't realize I had. See, I thought I was a free agent, more or less, in my clubbing world all the time. That it would never really matter where I was, who I was with or what I was doing -- it would always still be me and the whirl. But that wasn't the case. Maybe it was true way back when I started at age 16, in places like Limelight and Tunnel, or Spyze and Paris New York. But after a while, the act of clubbing had become something so much bigger for me.

It was the one place, anywhere in the world, where I could summon all the ghosts and spirits of times past, present and future, all the hopes and yearnings, joys and miseries, and push everything towards some kind of catharsis that would leave me exhausted, satiated, and at peace when it was all over.

This meant that in times past, like in the 1980s, it was simply about finding a place where I felt I could be me, whoever that was. In college, it was a place where maybe I could find love. In my 20s, it was merely a set for a dearly wished-for erotic adventure. Later on, it was where I'd hoped to find some kind of social niche, a place to belong amidst the turmoil of my life and career. And finally, around my late-mid-30s, it was a place to let go of the world outside, and to bond with my dearest friends and the bigger tribe that would be whirling around us, be it at Nation or Blowoff in DC, or be it in any one of a dozen clubs in a dozen cities around the world.

So, as I was dancing at The Week on Saturday night, I realized that this was probably the biggest part of me that went away over the last year. It went far away. I'm not sure whether it's even really back or not. It's like it was my kid, and it went off to college, and now while it's the same kid that's come back I don't know if I entirely recognize it or not. And it's gotten all haughty, kinda scruffy and self-possessed, and doesn't want the usual milk and cookies. So I'm wondering where we go from here together.