Ten Seconds.

Curtain Rises.

Ten seconds go by.

Curtain Falls.

Curtain Rises.

Man in House Right Audience Front Row sits up and shouts to his left.

MAN
So, what did you think?

Woman in House Left Audience Middle Row looks back at him.

WOMAN
I liked it. A bit short, but I liked it.

A Second Man sitting to the Back Row of the House Center replies.

SECOND MAN
But what was the point of it? Nothing happened.

WOMAN
Maybe that was the point.

SECOND MAN
My kneejerk reaction is that to having my time wasted.

FIRST MAN
But it was only ten seconds. That’s barely noticeable.

SECOND MAN
It’s noticeable when I’m staring at a stage, expecting a play, waiting for something to happen. It seemed like a long time then.

WOMAN
What did you do in those ten seconds?

SECOND MAN
Felt a bit uncomfortable as the anticipation grew.

FIRST MAN
I really wasn’t paying attention. My thoughts were elsewhere.

WOMAN
Where’s elsewhere?

FIRST MAN
Nowhere, really. I just lost focus.

WOMAN (standing up)
It took you ten seconds to lose interest?

FIRST MAN (standing)
Less, actually.

SECOND MAN (standing)
That’s ridiculous.

FIRST MAN
You’re ridiculous.

SECOND MAN
How?

FIRST MAN
The play only goes on for ten seconds before you tear it open and dig inside for a meaning. That kills it, and whatever thought the writer put into it.

SECOND MAN
What meaning? That obviously intended to be meaningless, and don’t accredit the writer with this, the director is the one who made the real decisions with this.

WOMAN
There were no decisions. The curtain went up, then down.

SECOND MAN
The director’s the reason nothing else happened. You could have the directions for the curtain in the script, but there’d be so much room for the director to add to it that by not making any decisions to change that, he did.

FIRST MAN
But he didn’t want anyone to feel uncomfortable. I think his intentions were somewhere along the lines to provoke a conversation like this, and it’s remarkable that we’re putting so much thought into a play without actors, instead of watching some bland plotline unfold in uninteresting directions and after it’s over just sort of mumble about it to the people beside us or out in the lobby while we leave.

WOMAN
Are you an actor?

FIRST MAN
I don’t see how that’s relevant, but yes, I am.

WOMAN
I’m curious about how seeing a play without anyone on stage acting was from your perspective.

FIRST MAN
No different than any other play really.

WOMAN
Is it scarier to act right now, without being onstage and not having that...stage presence.

FIRST MAN
You’re accusing me of acting right now? I don’t deny it, since you are too, simply by being present and talking in front of people. Sometimes even without talking. You’re thinking about what you’re going to say and making decisions about how you’re going to say it, and I think that there’s little difference there, besides it not being scripted. Though it does seem separate from being up there (He gestures to the stage) on a stage, under lights, in costume, and all that.

SECOND MAN
On the stage, you’re aware of the audience watching you and they are aware of you performing for them and they are sure solid facts. That is not always the same when you’re not on the stage.

WOMAN
People’s interests and the effort in your performances vary.

FIRST MAN
I see. Well, I still liked the piece. I can take it and accept it as it was, since it did nothing to bother me or upset me, and I don’t think my being an actor has anything to do with it.

SECOND MAN
Or maybe it’s because with nobody on stage to compare yourself to, you did not feel threatened or envious of their talent.

WOMAN
Or maybe with nobody on stage you did not recognize another actor you knew from outside the play, thus you did not watch him or her and compare their performance to performances they had done in the past, or juxtapose their character to their actual personality, entirely destroying what they were trying to achieve by pretending to be somebody else in a some scripted story.

FIRST MAN
You can “Or Maybe” all you like, and you might be right that I did not do those things because there were no actors onstage, but I’ll never know that or not, since it didn’t happen.

First Man sits down.

WOMAN (sits down)
It's always something.

SECOND MAN (sits down)
Nothing happens.

Curtain Falls.

Christmas Eve Dinner

Tonight was Christmas Eve.


It was such a strange step into the lives of another family. Almost a completely different culture, all of them brought up differently than I was. The first part of the evening was awkward and uncomfortable for me. I was a newcomer, a stranger, to this separate life of a man not too unlike myself, but at the same time different. I watched him in a environment he was more used to. The house was large, decorative with foreign arts, old with time but new with money. There was my Step-Grandmother, his Grandmother, who was very old but not old enough to be left out of any discussion or social event. She laughed a lot, and told us stories of “then.” At one point, later one, after the awkwardness had passed and I had had some wine, she told us a story set in 1955. The others in the room laughed with my brother and I, asking us if we remembered back then. It was funny for them, because it was before they were born, like it was for us. I had a brief wine-coated daydream in which I was much older and joking about the 60’s and 70’s, never having lived then but being closer to them than the other younger folks around me. She was a nice old lady.

He reacted differently around the brothers, and they him. My Step-Uncles were tall, large men. Both of them were older than him, and I spent a good portion of the night trying to see if it showed or not. He would not joke with them like he would with his mother, well, not until he had drank some at least. They both had respectable jobs and seemed very in control of their finances. One of them, the younger one, had recently bought a boat. The older one, a postman, bought him a very fancy leatherbound Captain’s Log for it. When it was unwrapped, my Stepdad mentioned that it was very “classy.” He had gotten him a DVD of a stand-up comedian. I would watch him around his brothers, and he often would be quiet, and not look at them, and seemed to be thinking on something. Or he was not thinking, and just sitting, and being there while everyone talked and exchanged gifts around him. The odd moment was when he got a gift from my Step-Grandmother. It was a check for 2,000 dollars. Neither of the brothers received gifts like this, and when he unwrapped it, looked it over, then showed my mother, it was his brothers’ turn to grow quiet. My Step-Uncles looked down, not at anything, they seemed to be thinking of something as he thanked my Step-Grandmother, telling her he did not know what to say, and that he might start to cry. I was still uncomfortable and quiet then, so after observing it all I started to question as I always do in my mind. What did my Step-Uncles think of their younger brother, who had left the big house where they all lived in Bath, gone out to a small rural community, marrying a poor schoolteacher with two sons. I had not brought his past into consideration, his clouded and foggy past that they must know so well as part of their family story. As always, I did not draw any conclusions about the gift and my Step-Uncles’ reactions. On the car ride home, my mother discussed with him how it was so good of his mother, since the mortgage was coming up and had to be paid.

Later in the evening, during the dinner meal when I had a couple glasses of wine behind my mother’s back and struck up conversation with the older Step-Uncle with my brother, I kept having the daydream/flashforwards to when I was older and my mother was the old lady at the table that the two sons ran around and did everything for. Would he be there? Where would my Dad be? I was going to drive down to see him tomorrow, but it was not really something I could bring up in conversation with him. I wondered if my brother would be the successful one, or if I would. Would both of us be unsuccessful poor adults, pursuing careers centering around arts and lack of public interest (like my mother’s pottery)? Would our Christmas Eve dinner be in a big dining room rich house, or a cold kitchen farm house that our mother bought and never was able to sell after fixing up moderately. Which one of us would bring our wife? It was sad, but I sincerely thought upon and realized that I would probably not be married early in my “adult life.”
The future was too complicated for the evening. Around the dinner table, trading stories and eating the desserts and drinking the wine. I told the story of how I totalled his truck the day he married my mother, four hours after they had left on the honeymoon. I usually focus on the part when I crash, but in the atmosphere of his family, I instead detailed out the phone call I made the night after to their hotel room, explaining to a drunk Step-Dad how I had done the one thing he had warned me against doing right when they left. Don’t get in any trouble, he had said. His family liked that one. They brought up how my Step-Grandmother had crashed the family car only weeks after getting her license and she had never driven a car since. I guess considering the time and setting of the event, it was likely. I mentioned off-handedly how high the insurance had gotten after, and how I had the option of turning in my license, getting off my mother’s insurance and saving her a lot of money. My Step-Uncle, the older one, confirmed that I had not done that, and then my mother cut in saying that that was actually something that we “were going to discuss later at a different time.” It took me a couple seconds, but I caught up and realized she wanted me to do that, turn in my license and save her and my Step-Dad lots of money. I remembered on the car ride home that maybe they did not need that anymore, with the gift from my Step-Grandmother, but decided against bringing it up. I then retreated into an inner-tangent about how people do not always vocalize what they are thinking, myself especially.

I’ve been realizing recently that I tend to think people are more like me than they actually are. Everybody gets self-conscious and makes stupid mistakes like I do. Everyone gets over-analytical about everything, they just don’t talk about it with other people so everyone assumes whatever they want about that person. It gets to the point that I truly have no idea what other people think of me. I have no way telling what anybody really thinks of anything...really. It makes me feel lost and confused, and my perspective on life feels a little bit younger than everybody else’s. All-in-all, not in a conclusive sense, but a generalizing sense, it was all far too much thought to be having for a half-drunk reflective typing onto a word document on my laptop during the long ride home.

At one point, before the dinner and wine and relaxing, when they were passing out their gifts, I had a moment. My mother got a “staple-less stapler” and no one knew how it worked or really questioned it at all, but my brother and I took it out of it’s packaging, aside from the group and studied it. We figured out how it punctured a small flap of paper and folded it back and pushed it up into a small incision it made, like a stitch or something. It was then, while they were exchanging their guilty thank you’s and half-embarassed your welcome’s, that I realized my brother and I had this one curiosity for how things work in common, and that was true of both of us. The only other thing I’ve ever been able to realize about who I am, is that I’ll never be able to know who I am. Maybe that one moment there disproved that. Maybe.

2006

Dear Online Journal,

Sorry I haven't kept up in a while. Nothing too new or exciting to mention I guess. Which would explain my writing now. New and exciting things. Vacation is essentially over as far as visiting home is concerned. I'm leaving my hometown today and heading back to the Gorhamside of U.S.M. for some intense weeks of manual labor, grocery shopping and wasting my endless free time in an empty dormitory on a deserted campus. It will be bearable though, thanks to some excellent Christmas gifts, which include but are not limited to:

• A brand new Digital Camera
• Wireless Internet (via an Airport Extreme Card)
• A Coffeemaker
• $30 on Amazon.com (which was spent on Books, Videogames, and Music.)
• A Jadetree
• A Half-Broken Record Player

and

• Lots and lots of Socks.

Yes. These are good things. This past week has not been pretty good though, but also very good depending on what you're looking for, I guess. I've concluded I need to write more. Yes. I need to write more. It'll be difficult, now that I've become a complete camera whore. But that's okay. I think everybody has a photographic side to them.

I'm going to try and form some new habits. Like financial management. I've already gotten a good foot on waking up earlier (7:00 a.m. - ish) and I'm seriously cutting back on my dairy intake. I'd also like to speak a lot less than I do. Maybe learn a new skill as well. I'd also like to get in shape, but that usually never happens after the umpteenth million times I set myself that goal. I think I need to understand myself better before I try and understand people. I think primarily that people need to understand people more.

Films I Saw This Vacation and Enjoyed Immensely:

- King Kong
- The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.
- Kingdom of Heaven
- Cinderella Man
- Family Guy, the Movie: The Untold Story of Stewie Griffin.
- Mortal Kombat: Annihilation
- Casablanca

Time for some last minute visits, and then packing up the car. Good day.

Sincerely, Me.



Current Mood: complacent.
Current Music: 3rd planet, Modest Mouse.