Day after day

DSCN0541, originally uploaded by Melynee.

I mostly took this because I love the deterioration of the paint. But the graphic always amuses me: poor Stick Figure Man looks so awkward. And the dog's head is just...wrong. Is it even on the right way?

Insanity linked to the third month of the Western calendar.

I think because I’m tall, I often get asked—by people I’ve only just met—whether I ever played on a basketball team when I was growing up. (People who’ve known me longer don’t ask. Telling, probably.) The answer is a resounding NO. I was a dancer and a theatre geek (Er, still am. The theatre part, anyway,) and I stayed as far away from sports as was physically possible. The only team sport I ever participated in outside of the requirements of a gym class was Synchronized Swimming. And yes. They do, in fact, have a team for that. Or, at least, they do in the public school system where I grew up. Even that was short-lived, though: one year in Middle School, and then I believed I had joyously left behind the world of team sports forever.

But I grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan—home of the University of—which means that it is impossible to live your life without running up against team sports; from September through November it sometimes feels as if the city exists solely to support the football team. My family has always had season tickets to both University of Michigan football and basketball, and although I enjoy the spectacle of football Saturdays, it’s always the basketball team that has really mattered to me—a somewhat less than ideal situation these last ten years or so. I go to the games whenever I’m back in Michigan, and I follow them on TV when I can (a pretty easy prospect when I was in Cleveland for grad school, somewhat less effective living here in NYC). I cheer for them when they play well, swear when they don’t, and hold a special place in my heart for the now-departed Tommy Amaker (even if he does wear his pants too high). And…that’s about it. The season starts, I’m interested; the season ends, I forget about it until next year. I’m a fan, but not a Fan—and it’s completely limited to the Wolverines. The Pistons? The Knicks? Basketball, in general? I could care less.

Except for three weeks in the spring.

For the last several years (barring the year I was more worried about finishing my MFA and moving back to NYC) I have filled out an NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament bracket. I fully admit I have no idea what I’m doing. I fill it out based on very little information; my sole source of research is the columnists on ESPN.com. I have very few governing rules to the picks I make; most of the time I pick based on whim. But I always pick at least one 5-12 upset (often, I pick two—I tend to root for the underdog). And I, like my mother, tend to believe in narrative arc; if a team’s got a good story, I might favor them. (Remember the last time the University of Michigan won the NCAA tournament? I do. Barely. It was the year that they fired their head coach, Bill Frieder, just before March Madness began, because he accepted a coaching job at Arizona State. Steve Fisher, previously the assistant coach, stepped in and guided the team all the way to the title. Okay, they started as a number three seed that year anyway, but still: good story.) I fill out a bracket based almost entirely on instinct and guesswork—mostly for bragging rights within the family (I have yet to win them) and to watch my ranking plummet on ESPN.com—and yet there’s still a tiny part of me that thinks, “This is the year I’ll show them all.”

So this is fair warning: North Dakota State, I need you to pull off an upset. Missouri, I’m counting on you to make a run to the Elite Eight. And MSU, pull up your shorts and tie on your shoes, because I’m looking for you to go all the way. After all, it’s the “Road to Motown” this year. Once you make it to the Final Four, you’re basically playing on a home court. Now how’s that for a story?

In search of a home.

Spoilers for Season Four of Battlestar Galactica through “Islanded in a Stream of Stars” included below. Be warned.

Going home was a pretty defined concept for the first seventeen years of my life. After I left for college, however, things got a bit more…mutable. Home became—depending on when and where I was, and who I was talking to—anything from a small, shared dorm room with a bunk bed and two desks, to a series of three- and four- bedroom apartments in various states of disrepair in upstate New York and New York City, to a house in suburban New Jersey, to my first “very own place” in Cleveland, to a new bedroom with its own balcony in the house that my parents built. After my senior year, in college, though, home could never again be the blue bedroom in the front corner of the house in Michigan that I grew up in, because my parents moved. Which is fine; I love the sprawling, open house my parents built on 20 acres of semi-rural land, right in the curve of the woods, with the neon green of the spring buds filling the windows of the house with the proof of spring, and herds of twenty deer making a daily dinnertime grazing trek across the open spread of the meadow.

It’s been a relatively peripatetic life since college, with a number of years in NYC and New Jersey, some time outside of Philadelphia, a couple of years back in Ann Arbor, and a sojourn to Cleveland for grad school, before returning to New York City. For the past ten years or so, home has generally been the place where I wasn’t: Michigan when I was talking to friends in New York or at school, the city when I was visiting my parents, and anywhere else when I was living in Ohio. Although I referred to these places as “home,” I was mostly using the word as shorthand for “the place in which I store most of my stuff.” For about ten years, the places I have used the word home for have been, of necessity, impermanent, and “home” has weakened, becoming diluted with generic use.

I moved to New York City, both times, because I am an actress. It’s not just what I do—in fact, most of the time it’s not even what I do; that honor is given over to temping, or more recently, helping to operate a theater—but who I am. It’s how I identify myself to the people I meet, and it’s also how I see myself when I look in the mirror; it’s how I define myself to myself. And right now, New York is the center of the theatrical world. It is a remarkable city in which to live, and there are things about living here which I love: the May morning air on a run around the reservoir, playing hide and seek with the sunset while walking down an avenue on my way home from work, buying fresh flowers on any corner, any time of year. But I have never loved living here and I have always known that home would end up being somewhere else. I was excited to move back here after finishing grad school, and also utterly unsurprised, less than a year later, to realize that instead of living here, I feel more like I am simply trying to keep myself busy until my life can begin. And so I have begun to think about the possibility of leaving.

My family are all back in Michigan, and we’ve always been incredibly close. I’m getting to a time in my life where struggling out here by myself is not balanced by my quality of life. But, while Michigan has a number of wonderful professional theaters, the amount of work there is several orders of magnitude smaller than in New York City, and even in years where the local economy is not falling apart, is insufficient for me to support acting as a career. So what do I do? Is it worth it to me to change the way I see myself, to find another vision of who I am, if it means I’m happier in the small ways on a day-to-day basis? If I can paint the walls in a place that I own? Watch tulips that I planted come up in the spring? Call up my sister because I had a bad day and then meet her for a glass of wine after work? A place where I could send my children out to play in the afternoon and be thrilled at their stories of adventure and imagination when they came back to the house, dirty and smiling, several hours later? I wrote a piece several years ago for popgurls in which I talk about home as a process—is part of that process finding a way to re-imagine the thing about myself that I’ve always taken as a given?

You know, sometimes I wonder what home is. Is it an actual place, or is it some kind of longing for something, some kind of connection? – President Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell) to Admiral William Adama (Edward James Olmos) in “Islanded in a Stream of Stars”

In a serendipitous bit of timing, I am not alone in wrestling with these questions. Battlestar Galactica is hurtling toward a series finale after four brilliant seasons. In a universe very like our own but just a little bit somewhere, or somewhen else, the 39,651 remaining survivors of a catastrophic war finally found their touchstone—the mythic Earth, their one remaining idea of home—only to discover a decimated planet utterly incapable of supporting life. What do you do when the dream that sustains and motivates you cracks into an infinite number of pieces and blows away before your eyes? Who do you become when the ship that defines your job—which also defines your life—is disintegrating around you? Who can you possibly be, when you’ve touched the charred remains of your own dead body, and yet can feel your feet against the ground, blood pulsing in your ears, rush of adrenaline all the way into your fingertips? These are the questions the show poses. With the adjustment of a few life-threatening (although no less life-changing) givens, they’re the same questions I ask myself crawling out of bed early in the morning to go to another open call. And they’re the same questions we’re all asking ourselves in front of the news at night, watching the sparkling, brightly-colored vision of the American consumer culture bleed out into a pale, tattered fretwork of failed aspirations. Battlestar Galactica has three more weeks to answer. I have a couple of months. And we all have…as long as it takes.

It will fill your heart and hands

DSCN0537, originally uploaded by Melynee.

Seriously.

I am a reader. I don't go anywhere without a book, or a magazine, because nothing occupies those inevitable minutes when you're stuck on the train, or standing in line, like having something to read. I'm also a multi-tasker; talking on the phone while doing dishes being one of my personal favorites.

You know what I don't do, though?

I don't read while walking down the sidewalk. Or up the stairs from the subway. Or crossing the frigging street. Because I do not want to die an early death, either from a vehicle that I did not see because I was too caught up in the latest Savage/Love column, or the cumulative hatred of all of those people trying to get to the job they still, luckily, have, but may not for much longer if they're late because somebody couldn't be bothered to look from his paper and move at a decent pace.

I'm just saying.

Stand, wait for rising sun.

March32009, originally uploaded by Melynee.

There are a couple of things that make waking up really early worthwhile.