It's a Biggun

i'm gonna make up for lost time by blogging the SHIT out of this next post. it's a piece i read last night at this AWESOME reading series called How I Learned. if you have two legs or a motor-bike (fuck the MTA) and inhabit the island or one of the fair boroughs, you should absolutely check out the next reading (Dave Hill is a guest!). Here is a veritable tome dedicated to How I Learned My Adolescence Was Over. Boom:

I have a feeling that adult-hood or at least my adult-hood is sort of like a second stage of adolescence, except now I have to pay bills. Maybe it’s because I’ve chosen to live the life of a performer and writer and I don’t deal with the conventional trappings of house, car, dog and/or kid. Maybe it’s because I still read the horoscope section and pretend to be cynical but recently just cut out a Free Will reading for Libra because it said ‘You Libra, are hereby invited to regard the next 11 months as a time when you will make your own life a masterpiece. Unseen forces and unexpected allies will come to your assistance if you do’ and taped it into my journal. Maybe it’s because I slept with my buddy, (the name I gave my baby blanket. anything or anyone you love needs a name) until the age of nineteen.

I do have a crisp memory of when my adolescence began though. It was at the top of a water slide in Cedar Rapids Iowa. My dad and I had just gone to see Back to the Future. It was a father daughter date and one of the last times I remember being with my dad before he left for Florida for what was supposed to be a couple years but ended up being forever. He has a penchant for the nostalgic and as he looked up at me in my tankini about ready to push my self down the slide he said ‘Annie, I just realized this is probably one of the last experiences you will have as a kid.’ Bummer dad. I think I rolled my eyes and laughed at him for being so sentimental. But he was right. It was.

11/24/88 (Seventh Grade)
Dear Diary,
GOD! Why can’t I just disappear, huh? It’s pretty damn clear that my presence doesn’t mean a shit to anyone. I mean I’m treated like a fucking baby every fucking place that I go! I am so fucking sick of it! So what if I like love stories with happy endings?! So what?! I’m sorry, that’s just the way I am right now! I don’t like those stupid dumb, un-meaningful science fiction movies that all these deranged older people around me (my step-brother and older sister) like. I’m so sick of being treated like my opinions don’t mean a fucking thing! CHRIST!!!

Needless to say, seventh grade sucked. Fast forward to freshman year of college. A real shit storm. I was home-sick. I had no clue how to take care of myself because I’d been so overprotected and sheltered growing up in Iowa. Of course I didn’t consider that to be the case. I thought I was tough and self-sufficient, but as it turned out, I was putty. It was so devastating to discover that I wasn’t as cool or independent or grown-up as I thought I was. I remember closing myself into an orange bathroom stall in the building that housed my English class and sobbing so hard that I was dry heaving. So disappointed that I was still a baby.

On top of being lost at sea, I had a whopper of an eating disorder. Which is sadly not uncommon among young women (or as I’ve also learned, older women). It wasn’t the puking kind, gross. Just the Skelator one. I called it my problem with food. My first role in a college production was as Grandma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath. If that’s not a sign I don’t know what is. Other than getting cast as a death camp survivor. It wasn’t about losing weight or having the perfect body. It was about controlling everything around me because I felt like if I gave in to any impulse, (read anything enjoyable) I would lose all control. Fun times. It served its purpose. It kept me child-like. And if it didn’t mark the end of my adolescence it did help me to mark the beginning of the end. I was like a snake sloughing off her old skin. Or if you are a fan of the precious - like me – a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. Or if you are feeling the holy spirit and slightly narcissistic – like that Jesus guy’s forty days in the desert.

7/26/94 (Summer After Freshman Year of College)
I am SCREAMING! Inside. These thoughts will not leave me. I hate this so much. I hate food! I hate it for making me so FUCKING crazy so that I cannot have one fucking thought without this damn obsession that haunts me and will not let go. I HATE THIS!

That summer, my friend Laura asked me if I wanted to get on a sailboat and cross Lake Superior with four other girls. I was spending the summer in my mother’s house and crawling the walls out of boredom. YES!!! Anything that would get me away from my mom and that cathedral quiet house. I had also taken on this cult like job with U.S. PIRG going door to door about water quality and trying to reach quota and I HATED it.

Crossing Lake Superior, also known as the watery grave of the Edmund Fitzgerald, is not an expedition to be taken lightly. You can die. It’s pretty serious stuff. But apparently I was less worried about death than a summer gaping with boredom and megalomaniac hippies behaving eerily like Ricky Roma and Dave Moss from Glengarry Glenn Ross.

The co-captains of the crossing would be Laura and Sarah. They were two years ahead of me and they went to public school while I went to parochial. Sarah was my first girl crush. She was, and is, a beauty. Quiet, extremely bright and quick with a come-back if you were disparaging to her or her friends. She was like Ione Sky in Say Anything except with the endowments of Marilyn Monroe. And I wanted to be like her. Which for some reason I couldn’t cop to, even in my journal:

8/10/94
The thing about this trip. I came unknowing. I feel at times like I know very little, especially around Sarah. It is funny. I never knew her really, but I was always in awe of her. She was this friend of Laura’s who seemed so amazingly angelic and perfect to me that she seemed untouchable. But I think I have come to realize that things and people as well, aren’t all that they may appear to be. I no longer feel in awe of Sarah (I was full of shit – I was totally in awe of her and remember eating tons of homemade pie at Silver Islet because I wanted curves like her). Sometimes I think I am being jealous or childish. (Ya think)?

I’m sitting in my apartment in Queens with yoga toes on my feet right now. Those are the gel devices that spread your toes apart and are supposed to provide a yoga ‘work-out’ for your foot muscles. This is the kind of shit I spend my money on, instead of something responsible like a new cutting board or socks. My right toes have been tingling the last few days and I am playing the hypochondriac and worrying about all the awful, morbid things that this could mean. I don’t have health insurance and although things are looking promising on the acting front, let’s face it – this business is a crap shoot. A crap shoot that seems to also have the momentum of molasses. So I guess I feel unsettled. Don’t grown-ups feel settled? Don’t they have health insurance? Don’t they have careers that pay them a comfortable or at least a decent salary? Not necessarily, I guess. My point is, I should have health insurance. I should have a baby or at least the conditions under which it would be safe or at least considered a good idea to have one. I should own something more substantial than an ipod nano (which I lost).

Great. Now you're all gonna think I’m clueless and unsettled. I’m figuring it out is all. I think that’s the best I can do right now. And actually I don’t think anyone ever has it all figured out ever. At least I’m not nineteen anymore. Sweet Christ, that was SO tough. Also – did I mention I have a show? Running at Upright Citizen’s Brigade? Featured in Time Out NY? I AM a grown up see?! My show is sort of my life right now and I’ll probably corner you later and give you a postcard. (except i didn't have any postcards to give out at the show. whoops.). I'm working on it folks.