A Word

I feel I may have...let's say..."misrepresented" myself with my last blog entry. A bit. I do appreciate the swell of concern for my well-being this last week -- heck, it's good to know that people are paying attention when you seem "distressed." But I want to assure you, there's no cause for alarm...things have just been a little shitty recently.

I forgot about the word shitty. It's a classic...doesn't get around much any more...but I like it. And here it seems totally applicable.

So this has been a rough month -- probably the roughest one I've endured since I moved down here (followed closely by the Vegas melt-down). Heck, this may be as bad as the winter of my Sophomore year of college...where I subsisted entirely on Ramen and PBJ sandwiches (Seriously. That's all I ate. Ask Jason and Koby, they'll tell you...). That Winter I was placed on academic probation during the one quarter when I only took a "light load" of three classes (flunking one because I missed the midterm, and barely passing the other two). At that point I hadn't had a girlfriend in two years (or any likely prospects...or attention from women, really). I was completely broke...with no income to speak of...living in a closet-sized room...and just starting to lose my hair. To top it off, I wasn't getting cast in any shows at the University. That was a rough time. This...?

Well, this isn't so bad, really. I eat better. I'm married to a total fox. I got my degree. Y'know...it's easy for me to lose perspective here (as I think I've said nearly seventy dozen times on this blog), but really...when I step back...I think I'm doing all right. I won't bother listing off my accomplishments, because I don't want to be seen going from "semi-depressed" to "bragging" in the blink of an eye. But I mean it when I say, "I'm okay."

All the same, though...I'll make this pledge to you -- I'm not going to be deceptive about the state of things in my life. Best advice Pops ever gave me (borrowing from Polonius' speech to his son): "To thine own self be true." And, I figure, just as important are the next two lines from that speech: "And it must follow, as the night the day / Thou can not be false to any man."

Accordingly, in this sacred digital place, I'm not going to hype up my acting experiences if they've been lousy, or downplay the good things that may come. My last blog entry was sort of a product of that attempted honesty -- I wanted to deliver an update on stuff I was up to, but the reality was that I really wasn't up to much...and that led me to speak about my professional frustrations (something occupying a good deal of my brain at the moment). I'm really not interested in going to one extreme or the other -- either bragging about the gigs I've booked, or wallowing bitterly in my failures. I'm just trying to lay it on the line...as honestly as I'm able to do.

Because I'd like to have some kind of written record here. Even if I fade off to obscurity when I'm gone, at least I've got this -- 117 posts of me talking about crap. This is a subject for another blog entry, but I've been working multiple hours working on my family tree. When I'm gone, and that poor schmuck who has decended directly from me wonders aloud, "Hey, so who exactly was my great-great gradfather?" he doesn't have to squint at old hand-written census entries and try to connect the dots. He can just fire up MySpace and take a jarring stroll through the ramblings my feeble brain.

If only I could read the diary of the mystery men and women I decended from...a German named Andreas who boarded a ship he thought was heading to Austrailia, but ended up in Texas instead...an Irish man fleeing the potato famine who made his way to New York, eventually winding up with 13 children...the bricklayer of unknown parentage who inexplicably added an "A" to the name "Rhoades," and passed it on to his children...the woman fleeing religious persecution in Luxembourg, coming to the US only to be mistreated by her husband and eventually institutionalized...the Texas farmer's wife, recently immigrated from Germany, bouncing from small town to small town with six children in tow. If only I could go somewhere and read about their lives, their personal struggles, their triumphs -- I just think that stuff is fascinating. Instead...all I get are census records...the occasional photograph...and a lot of empty space.

Wow. Digression. Anyhow, it's way past my bedtime -- I actually have an audition tomorrow for a musical -- I'll let you know if anything comes of it. Life goes on...