Off to the races!

I was going to write another blog post today but I didn't get a chance. I'm leaving in the morning for LA, where I'll spend a day with my dad and then meet up with SRO. And then on Monday, it's the marathon!

I wanted to write all about my feelings in these days leading up to the race, about our final training run over the Golden Gate Bridge, and what it's been like to see the kids come so far. But I've got an early flight and I still haven't packed. So I'll have to fill you in when I get back.

Meanwhile, you can check my Twitter updates here in the left hand margin, or follow me at http://twitter.com/errinmarie. I'll be posting via cell phone. I don't expect I'll be able to post while I'm actually running, but I'll set the scene before and after.

Man, technology is cool, isn't it?

Have a great long weekend! I'm off to the races!

If I may use an example from gym class

I was surprised to find that my last post generated an immediate response from some of my friends. The consensus seems to be that I should either move to Utah or Vermont, where I might stand a snowball's chance in hell of buying a home. And also, might I deduce, where I'd be closer to my pals?

I love my friends. (But seriously, it's time for you to come home now.)

It's rare that I get comments on here, so I never know exactly who's reading. Sometimes writing this blog feels like a game of ghost volleyball. Did you ever play that back in elementary school? They'd cover the net with a parachute so you couldn't see where the ball was coming from. I loved ghost volleyball. It really evened the playing field for those of us not-so-athletic types.

But writing here is like flinging a ball over a covered net, and you're unsure if anybody's even on the other side.

Who's out there? Leave a comment. I'd like to know who I'm playing with.

Grow up

Several months ago I made a list of everyone I knew who was pregnant. It was actually a necessity, this list, because I couldn't keep track of all my knocked-up friends. Then, as the weeks passed, the list split into two parts: those who were still pregnant and those who had had their babies. Each side would ebb and flow as people gave birth, and new people became pregnant.

At the moment, there are 26 names on that combined list.

A couple of weeks ago I went back east to visit my college roommates, JoAnne and Becca. JoAnne had just given birth to her first child, and Becca was due in two months with her second child. Conveniently for me, they live about 20 minutes from one another, so I got to meet the baby and the bump at the same time.

It was a good visit, but when I came home I fell into a bad place. It was a short-lived, but surprisingly deep depression. The stay-in-your-pajamas-all-day kind of depression.

"Do you want a baby right now?" asked my friend Emily, as we dissected my mood over lunch one day.

"No," I said. "I really don't. But you know, I'd like to be able to afford a baby right now. Or a house. You know, what got to me even more than the babies was their homes. They're not gigantic or ornate or anything, but they're their homes, that they own, with wallpaper that they chose themselves and color-coordinated paint. They have guestrooms and playrooms for their kids. They have decks. Monte would kill for a deck."

I poked at the ice in the bottom of my glass with a straw. "I don't feel like a grown-up," I said.

"Eh," said Emily, giving a half-shrug. "I hear it's overrated."

But I wasn't sure.

Last night I lay on the couch, half-comatose, nodding in front of a nature documentary on PBS. "What are you watching?" asked Monte.

"Something about elephants," I mumbled, eyelids drooping.

"You're falling asleep," said Monte. "Come on, let's go to bed."

I pushed myself into a sitting position and immediately the change of elevation set me to sneezing. "Damn," said Monte, handing me the Kleenex box, "you're having a bad allergy day, aren't you?"

For I'd been sneezing all afternoon. Actually, I'd been sneezing for two days straight. "I think it's the dust," I said. "The fan is kicking it up." 90-degree temperatures this weekend led us to drag the rotary fan out of the closet. I sniffled miserably, shuffling to the bathroom.

"Or it could be the mold," I said, looking up at the bathroom ceiling. I sneezed again. "I think I'm allergic to our apartment," I said.

"Can we move?" I asked Monte a few minutes later as I climbed into bed.

"Where do you want to move?" he asked me.

"Somewhere clean," I said. "To a place that has circulating air in the bathroom. And windows with cool, steel frames, not old splintery wooden ones that catch dust. And no Venetian blinds. I hate those things.

"And there should be marble counter tops," I continued, rolling onto my stomach.

"Marble?" asked Monte.

"Well, not tile," I said. "Not moldy, grody tile that catches all the dirty dishwater and never comes clean. Tiled counter tops are stupid."

"They are," Monte agreed.

"And it should come with a housekeeper," I said into my pillow. "And a vacuum that actually works."

"And a place for your sewing machine," added Monte. "By the way, can we move that off the kitchen table?"

"No, I'm not done with it yet."

"But are you sewing anything right now?"

"No. But I might soon." I lifted my head to sneeze again. "And we could have kitchen chairs that match, and aren't broken."

"And a dishwasher," he said emphatically. "And a deck!"

"Yeah," I said. "And an office that's not in the living room. With our own desks."

"That sounds nice," said Monte.

"It would be nice," I said. "It would be a grown-up house. This is not a grown-up house. We couldn't have a baby in here. There's no room."

"We could put it in the walk-in closet," suggested Monte.

"No, my hula hoops are in there," I said.

Then we drifted off to sleep.

I've spent some time trying to decipher these pangs that I've been having, wondering if it's actually my biological clock that's beeping at me or something else, and I think it's this grown-up thing. It's this twenty-something feeling in my thirty-something life. This feeling of "I'm still here." (Not to be confused with that triumphant feeling of "I'm still here!", which is something altogether different.)

Yes, I'm still here. Still in this apartment with the too-thin walls and hand-me-down furniture. Still unemployed (or rather, unemployed again), uninsured, unmarried. I've done so much in my life in the last six years, run laps around my younger self, and yet I'm still here. Externally, nothing has changed. We haven't even rearranged the furniture in six years. Literally, I could probably go back in time, walk through my front door and not notice the difference.

And it's not like it's all bad. If it were, we wouldn't hesitate to make a change. But I like my furniture where it is. I don't really mind that my upstairs neighbor only knows two songs on the electric guitar. And I'm lucky enough to share this small space with such a likable guy. It is by no means a bad life we're living.

But I wouldn't say no to some forward momentum.

You hear that, Universe? I'm calling again.

I bet you think this post is about you

I've had some wonderful feedback on the website and blog. I'd like to thank everybody who took the time to drop me a line and send me a little cheer. You are awesome.

But I just got my first unpleasant message. An anonymous email, sent through my website, arrived today. It said:

You're so vein.

I was torn between feeling stung by the insult and amused by the misspelling. And I wasn't going to dignify it with any sort of response, but dude, this was begging for a blog post.

Look, I'm aware that not everybody is going to like me. Does that bother me? Of course. I want to be universally liked. But nobody is universally liked, except maybe Mother Teresa, and I suspect even some of her contemporaries secretly thought she was a goody-goody.

In the week since my website went live, I've quickly grown tired of myself. I am over-saturated with my own content. I'm a sensitive person, and it's easy for me to fear that if I'm tired of me, than surely others are tired of me as well. To have my singing and my writing and my thoughts on display, inviting judgment, makes me want to cringe sometimes. I do worry about what people think of me, and I do fear the bad review.

But that's the nature of the business. It's the nature of life, really. And it's a good lesson for me to accept the fact that not everybody likes me. I'll learn to live with it.

I guess keeping a blog is sort of a vain endeavor. It makes the rather large assumption that somebody's interested in reading what I have to say - and it's pretty much all about me. But what I want to do for a living requires quite a bit of self-promotion. I'm not always comfortable with it, but that's the way it is. I have chosen to write this blog so that I can speak from my own perspective, so I can share stories on the path to my career from my own point of view. I recognize that it may not be interesting to everybody, but nobody has to read it.

Am I vain? I do read and re-read everything I write about a dozen times. Sometimes I make vampy faces at myself in the mirror. I do like the sound of my own voice. Perhaps I am a little vain.

But at least I can spell.

(Oh, snap! Didn't see that one coming, did you? Oh, I had to. I just had to.)

Ethel Rosenberg

My Songwriting class last week left me frustrated.

Our assignment was to go someplace we'd never been before and write a song about it. We'd all brought in lyrics and our teacher was helping us put our words to music. But he was going about it in a heavily theoretical way, jumping from tangent to tangent.

My simple, four-line lullaby generated a half-hour discussion on modes. I looked over my hastily scribbled notes:

Dorian: 'Moondance', Van Morrison
Phrygian: Middle Eastern, new age
Lydian: Impressionistic

and realized I had no idea what I was writing about.

Now, I've taken Music Theory. I studied it in high school, in college, and again in a course last year. But this stuff was sailing right over my head. It's not that I don't understand theory. It's more like, I can understand it for a very short period of time, before my brain needs that real estate for something else. And I was frustrated because this Songwriting class was supposed to be open to everybody, but it seemed to be geared toward those with a thorough grounding in theoretical knowledge. It was much too broad a spectrum for me, and I only wanted to know how these vast ideas applied to my particular song.

I don't think I was the only one feeling frustrated. The girl next to me was taking frantic notes and kept asking the instructor to repeat things verbatim.

By 10 PM I was fried, and more than ready to go home. My lullaby was still tuneless and I had pages of notes that meant little to me. But first:

"Your homework," said our instructor. "This is an article from yesterday's New York Times. I want you to write a song about this." He read aloud:

Walter Schneir, Who Wrote About Rosenbergs, Dies at 81

Walter Schneir, whose fascination with the Rosenberg espionage case began with a hotly debated 1965 book arguing that the couple had been framed, and ended with his grim acceptance that Julius, if not Ethel, Rosenberg was indeed a Soviet spy, died April 11 at his home in Pleasantville, N.Y. He was 81.

I blinked, confused.

The arrest, trial and execution of the Rosenbergs mesmerized an America coming to grips with the early cold war and the anxiety aroused by the Soviet Union’s testing of an atomic bomb. When the two were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage on March 29, 1951, few seemed to disagree with Judge Irving R. Kaufman that their crime was “worse than murder.”

But by the time of the Rosenbergs’ execution, at sundown on June 19, 1953, the number of people around the world who questioned the government’s handling of the case had grown. They ranged from death-penalty opponents to those who saw a Soviet-style show trial, from Communists to skeptics of the prosecution’s evidence. Picasso and the pope pleaded for mercy. With time, Americans’ views on the case demarcated a range of political identities, from left to right.

"This is a great story," said our instructor. "I want you to write a song about this, without using any of these words: Communism, trial, McCarthyism, or their names. It should be a metaphorical song; nothing should be literal. That's your homework."

I gaped at him. What the hell is he talking about? I wondered stupidly.

The girl next to me was asking, "Wait, can you repeat that? Communism...and what else?"

"Read the article," said the instructor. "You'll get everything you need from there." I waited for him to hand out copies, but he didn't. Shit. Yesterday's NY Times/Rosenbergs, I scrawled in my notebook.

I glanced furtively at my classmates to see if any of them looked as confused as I felt. "You know what's so interesting?" the guy behind me said earnestly. "I didn't realize they were executed before Sputnik."

"Oh, they were executed long before Sputnik," said the guy to my right. Great, I thought. Now I feel like an idiot in two subjects.

The girl next to me was asking the instructor to explain Ionian mode one more time. I packed my bag slowly and timed my exit to coincide with hers.

When we were safely in the hall I gave my ally a wry smile. "We couldn't write a metaphorical song about flowers or something?" I quipped, expecting laughter.

She smiled back at me, blandly. "I guess he wanted us to learn something." She exited the building and I stared after her in dismay. Who are these wholesome, smarty-pants people? I wondered as I trudged back to my car.

Twenty minutes later I plopped down in front of my computer to Google the Rosenbergs. Amid all the information on Communism, anti-Semitism and McCarthyism, here's what stuck with me:

1. The Rosenbergs were sentenced to die by electric chair on June 18th, 1953. But on June 17th they were granted a stay of execution. Their reprieve was only 24 hours long; the next day Court was called into special session to dispose of the stay, and the Rosenbergs were executed on June 19th.
2. In a last minute play for more time, the Rosenbergs' lawyer argued that the late evening time of the execution offended their Jewish heritage, as it was scheduled for after the start of the Sabbath. The tactic backfired; the execution was rescheduled for before sundown.
3. It took three rounds of electrocution to kill Ethel Rosenberg. Eyewitnesses reported smoke rising from her head at the conclusion.
   
4. Although it was eventually confirmed that Julius Rosenberg was a courier and recruiter for the Soviets, there is still doubt today as to whether Ethel Rosenberg was even involved.

Man, I thought. Sucks to be Ethel Rosenberg.

I went to sleep with all that information tumbling in my head and when I woke up the next day I kept thinking about that 24-hour stay of execution. It seemed like such a farce, such a token reprieve. Although I knew that there were many men involved in the conviction, the appeal and its overturn - some of whom were genuinely on her side - they began to meld together into this singular character, a villain who toyed with her final hours, granting her pardon and then snatching it back. She was convicted, sentenced, spared, re-sentenced, and then had the time of her execution pushed up. And after all that it took 3 rounds of juice to bring her down. What an undignified way to die.

I wanted to give Ethel Rosenberg her dignity back.

I imagined her saying to this composite man, "You know what? The hell with your 24 hours. I don't need them."

And slowly, this song began to emerge:

Verse:
I've heard it said that when your time is up
You would give anything for 24 hours
But here I stand to say I've had enough
If we're gonna do this thing then let's not be cowards

You call the shots, you end it all
Not my decision
You don't believe I'm not involved
That's your limited vision

Chorus:
I don't need your stay of execution
I don't need your courtesy reprieve
If you're going to end it all then I decide
The way I'm going to leave
I don't need your last minute kindness
One more day to think things through
You're not my friend, here at the end
I don't need anything from you

Verse:
And when I'm gone I hope you realize
That I never did those things of which you accused me
But you're so quick to make up your own mind
It never occurred to you I might not be guilty

Let's not pretend there's more to say
Why bother trying?
There's just no need for one more day
This spark is dying

Chorus:
I don't need your stay of execution
I don't need your parting gift to me
If you're not convinced by now then one more day
Will hardly make you see
You want to end it all between us
Have the guts to see things through
Try to accept there's nothing left
I don't want anything from you

(Repeat 1st chorus)

You're not my friend, here at the end
I don't need anything from you

"It's a break-up song," said my instructor last night, when I sang it to the class.

"Yeah," I said.

My classmates were nodding, smiling. "What do you call it?" one of them asked.

I said: "From You."


Click here to listen.