I'm home! Momentarily!

The job is lame, at least right now, but I am getting paid for it. At the moment that means getting paid to take a lot of training modules that have absolutely no relevance to the position I'm going to be filling (at least, I hope not; if they want me to start stickin' needles in bunny ears I'm out of there).

I literally fell asleep while taking one of the module exams. Just for a moment, thankfully.

The guy who's in training with me is cool, he lived in Austin for a while and just moved back to Chicago with his wife. He's not sure why we're learning the proper anaesthetic dosage for gerbils either, but my boss will be in the office on Monday so perhaps she'll take over from the dude who's training us now, who knows.

My building is missing a floor. Or rather, the floor is there, but the elevators don't go to it or even offer it as an option. I assume that's where they keep the animals or possibly where the space aliens live.

To get there at eight I have to leave around seven, which isn't too bad, and I get home at six. Hopefully, again, on Monday I'll have internet access at work. I had it today but was loathe to use it. The traininig computers are remotely monitored. Possibly by the space aliens. Or the monkeys.

There's a Curious George pinata hanging in the training office. Ye gods. Also photos, everywhere, of cute fluffy animals. Not so cute or fluffy are the training-module photos of what happens to them after we buy them.

I really hope the scholarship-fund job comes through. The more I see the less I like being involved in it. But I can at least tell myself it's valid medical research that's going to help people. I eat meat, after all.

Tonight's really busy and I'm at loose ends, there's a ton of stuff I have to remember to do. But it's all down in the list.

Sometimes it's easier not to write about things.

I was like this: as a child I played football (soccer) and as a teen I played baseball. And I couldn't actually watch them, much as I enjoyed them, because I wanted to be there, in the middle, playing along. I'm still that way, with the things I love. I want to be the one hanging the paintings, rigging the cues, printing the programs.

Jekyll and Hyde is playing at City Lit not a mile from my flat, in a big old Presbyterian church with an upstairs theatre. The last twenty minutes are worth the first eighty, though to watch the first eighty you might not think so. I think the problem is equally split between writer and director; the acting was exceptional and technically it was well-executed. But it was distant, alien, and not in the Brechtian sense. Brecht said to his audiences, I want you to know you're watching a play. Go ahead, smoke, eat, talk to each other -- it makes the actors try harder. But most of all I want you to see what I'm saying, not what the actors are saying. I want you to think while you're watching, not just afterwards.

Jekyll and Hyde wasn't doing that, or if it was, it did it very poorly. It wasn't Verfremdungseffekt -- it was just people, saying lines. They didn't look at the audience, they didn't look at each other. It resolved itself eventually, but too late. I want to see the fire underneath before it erupts, or all I'm staring at is a big pile of dirt.

Still, you know, I thought about going up to the director (in the audience tonight) and introducing myself, offering to volunteer. I'm a trained dramaturg, not too bad at scenic art either.

And then I saw the little line below the cast list in the program. City Lit is a dramaturg-free zone.

I'll be the first to admit dramaturgs are like spleens -- we're pretty nice to have, but you can get along just fine without one. Apparently the director's been savaged by the LMDA, the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of America, for a book he wrote. And the LMDA can be brutal, so I'm not surprised he's left sour.

Still, I could have helped. I could have -- I'm young but I'm not dumb and I could have told him why the first eighty minutes weren't good enough yet.

I have a long road yet to go, nobody knows that better than I do, and I'm not yet sure how to walk it. But bitter unkindness like that, from people in a position to help someone who only wants to do what they do, who envies them deeply that they do it -- well, it's like lopping you off at the ankle, isn't it? Much harder to walk without feet.

I don't know. It made me sad and quiet, and not overly given to excusing the flaws and exalting the triumphs.

But you can't win 'em all, anyway. So Bertolt tells me, and he ought to know.