here comes my 19th nervous breakdown

i debated just calling it quits on this whole blog thing, since i haven't written in, oh, a month and a half. but i feel the need to write some stuff down for therapeutic reasons, so i might as well write it here.

first of all, i finally figured out how to upload photos, so here's a good one:



so my last post was at the beginning of tech week for "buddy," which was about the worst tech week i've ever experienced. at one point, the petite asian woman who designed the lights started physically shaking and cursing at our (also petite and female) stage manager; at another point, our director literally had to prevent a fistfight from breaking out between scott, our technical director, and billy, who played buddy holly. scott proceeded to walk off the production for two days, leaving everyone else scrambling to finish the behemoth set in time for opening. of course, as it always does, everything did come together in the end.

that's me in the blonde wig and glasses, playing celeste on "everyday."

so then we had a blast doing the show, and i started laboring under the delusion that i was some kind of rock star, staying out way too late, drinking way too much, and even resorting to consuming red bull. i also appointed myself the ambassador of new orleans culture, and introduced our imported guest artists to some quintessentially NOLA nightlife: bonerama at the maple leaf with george porter jr sitting in on bass; tab benoit at mid-city lanes rock'n'bowl . i was very proud of myself when they went out and bought CDs by the meters and bonerama.

and then the run ended, and our new friends returned to new york and omaha, and i jumped into a two-week run of a ghost play called "the woman in black." i was the ghost. it was fun to scare the hell out of the audience, but most of my time was spent alone in my dressing room, which was pretty depressing in comparison to the boisterous and crowded "buddy" dressing room. nor were my two cast-mates inclined to go out and party, though they were entertaining enough in the limited time i did spend with them. here we are backstage, posing as "extreme makeover: woman in black edition."

and then that show ended, and for the first time in months, i had no rehearsals, no performances, and i could start focusing on the house, spending time with my long-neglected boyfriend, and dealing with the other aspects of my life that i'd been neglecting. and i soon realized that i was really, really depressed.

but why? we're back in our house; the weather has been beautiful; it's festival season, and every week i've been going to wednesday at the square; and chris & i went to a B&B out in cajun country this past weekend, which was nice. but i'm miserable. my job is a big part of it; i am really, really, really sick of it. the fact that i am apparently going to be booted out of my office on june 1st and relocated to the "temporary classroom building" (read: trailer) doesn't help, nor does the fact that no one has any idea how all the logistics of the new reorganization are going to work out. and though the assistant provost assured me that he would want me to be able to teach in the dance department again, the department can only rehire three adjuncts, so of course they are hiring the people with the most seniority.

but it can't just be about my job. i nearly had a nervous breakdown last weekend over a ridiculous laundry mishap. since we still don't have laundry facilities at our house, i brought our laundry over to will & lisa's last sunday, and made dinner for the four of us in between loads. i asked chris to switch out the loads at one point, and later discovered that instead of putting our dirty clothes in the machine, he'd put our friend lynette's clean laundry in. this made me both irrationally angry and irrationally miserable. i sat on the couch in a near-catatonic state with tears rolling down my face and thought, damn, i am not right in the head.

and i'm not the only one. chris admitted that he's been pretty depressed lately, too, and my friend angie is in a similar funk. it seems to be some kind of post-traumatic stress kind of thing. interesting. maybe it's because we spent so long pretending everything was okay, when our lives had been completely turned upside down. i feel really angry a lot lately, and it occurred to me that it's probably displaced anger about the whole katrina thing happening in the first place, and the why-me-ness of it all.

so, yeah, i'm a bit of a mess. but this weekend is french quarter festival, and then it's jazz fest, and that can only help.