16 Thoughts - April
My body knows this time of year when I breathe in. The air has a different quality, light but heavy in substance. Blooming plants, or the smell of rain on the wind. This time of year is known in my body in the mornings when I’m still sleeping, but the dawn proves earlier and earlier each day, leaving me with an under-slept, excited feeling. This time of year is known in my body as a spring athlete, when you finally get the chance to play outside. You get to show what you’ve been working on in the cold off months. I feel pressure this time of year from the inside and out as my air ways swell, triggered by the tiniest bits of tree pollen. The eagerness I feel in spring is so nicely visualized in the green tree buds peeking out from their barky winter cocoons. It is a time of year when my will is high and my hope the only way hope can be, optimistic.
Happy birthday to ME. Another year in the books and this one has worked to my favor despite my kicking and screaming because it wasn’t the way I envisioned it. It has always felt so selfish having a birthday to myself and I’m so happy that this year I get to celebrate with one of my best friends who also happens to be born on April 16th. I know Erin will be there too, and I’m decorating with yellow and pink roses for her. This next year I pledge to continue to practice patience and kindness with myself and others. Trying to appreciate the passing of time is really what being impatient is all about anyway. Being impatient has taken years off my life and now I’m 38. L’chaim.
I am trusting the person I’ve never met but who built the bridge holding the entire subway above my head. I am trusting the welders and the blacksmiths and designers of elevators and tunnels and all sorts of things.
I went to the No Kings rally in NYC last month. I went by myself although I was one of tens of thousands of people marching in Manhattan in solidarity against the Trump administration. There was some very cool art work, and it’s nice to see so many people come together and I sang with the Singing Resistance group again. This is the third No Kings in the last year and I’m starting to feel that 3 or 4th date itch where you think maybe you can ask where this is going. Like say, available and affordable healthcare? Or fair taxes? There were millions of people across the country who came together for No Kings. Now, what if all these people demonstrating commit to a protest beyond making Trump puppets and we find out how solidly we can march together? What would that protest even be?
Also on the day of the No Kings rally I had the opportunity to give the NYPD a small suggestion and it felt exhilarating. The cops had closed down Central Park West South of 66th St. and told people to either head to Columbus Circle through the park or go back to Broadway. Now, these Upper West Side blocks are long, like 5-6 minute walk blocks so turning around and going back to Broadway is annoying, especially when you just came from Broadway. I looked around and there were about a dozen NYPD officers standing in the middle of CPW behind a barricade telling people the road is closed. New York’’s finest redundancy. So I walked up to them and said, “It would be nice if some of your could station yourself on Broadway to let people know at the beginning of the block rather than making them turn all the way around.” I got a lot of nods and light bulbs behind the eyes and who knows if they even did it but like I said; exhilarating.
I spent a lot of time on hold over the last few weeks. I even heard a busy signal from the NY court house, how often do you hear a busy signal anymore? How, in this day and age in a US governmental body, do you have a busy tone and not at least an automated answering service? And how much money is spent on bombs? Soon to be run by AI? And you can’t get someone or something to answer your phone? Not even to mention a callback service.
I have gotten interested in the Library of Ancient Alexandria, a collection of papyrus’ from around 330 B.C. that grew very quickly as the Egyptians and Greeks began trading knowledge. The library had hundreds of thousands of scrolls and stories of ancient Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, Asia in a wide array of subjects. Inventions were sketched, myths became truth, generations upon generations were able to spread information to each other. However, much of the library was destroyed in a war in 48 B.C. and many other things have been lost to time, not bothered to be translated or digitized or remembered by anyone at all. As a blogger I think about the longevity of the stuff I write and in general the amount of trust we have in the internet to be there. I always have written in journals ( to make it easy for my biographers of course), but with blogging who knows what will have lasting power. Maybe in a thousand years the entirety of my blogs through the years will just be in the brain of an old AI.
“What are you willing to sacrifice on the altar of opera, and yes it is that serious.” - a recent line from Rita Libretto who’s newest edit has been going really well! I’ve been preparing for a show in the summer and I’m feeling secretly obsessed with it. I don’t feel like I want to be openly obsessed because it’s still in such an infancy for what I imagine. But these are good steps along the way. More when I know more.
My Aunt Claudia passed away since my last thoughts and I’m going to miss talking to her so much. Fortunately, she has a very present voice in my ear and an unforgettable laugh so I can still hold the echo. She was an angel on this earth, and I know she will be incredibly welcomed in the afterlife. I remember when I was 8 or 9 and her husband, my Uncle Doug passed away, and it was one of the first deaths I had dealt with after Erin, of course. I remember envisioning him going through pearly gates of heaven and into a cloud where Erin was able to show him around as if we could pass people from one spiritual plane to the next. I thought about that vision again when my cousin passed away in October of last year, unfortunately leaving another twin behind. What are the odds of that? No answer is a good one. It really sucks to lose so many people in this life, but that is the only way to add up numbers to your welcome party, to which mine will be huge.
10. I got a tarot reading earlier in the year that had the 5 cups and I am very much feeling that this month. It’s easy to focus on the unfortunate things, or the things that have gone sideways from what they were meant to be. But that’s kind of a waste of time, especially when you still have other cups upstanding. But damn it I can’t help but look at those spilled cups and think what else could have been done.
11. Alright, once again we need to talk about the patriarchy and rape and gender based violence. So one of the cups that got spilled this month that I’ve been focusing on was that I unfortunately got a massage that had brief moments of molestation. I went through a whole week of gaslighting myself into what my body and mind knew had happened. But I felt like the responsibility was mine because I could have stopped it. I felt like, I was allowing, in fact, paying for him to touch my body, so therefore I didn’t really get the privilege of now saying I was assaulted, however briefly, and horribly timidly from this young man. I froze. I started counting his strokes, I started feeling my weight sinking down further into the bed - no table. Where am I? Swimming in memories and feelings of being pinned down and violated so gruesomely yet hardly feeling a thing. And then he giggled and it was done. And I didn’t know what to do so I tipped him $10 and left. Three days later, (just like Jesus on this particular week) I was roaring to come out of this cave. The weight of the Epstein files, the weight of carrying sexually based trauma, the weight of Trump, the weight of the patriarchy is too much to hold on our own. I’ve not only been trying to make the subject of sexual assault a more frequent topic, I’m trying to talk about the frequency of sexual assault because I believe it to be much higher than we know. And then here we are finding out that a huge website all dedicated to how to drug and rape women had 62 million views in February - THE SHORTEST FUCKING MONTH. I think back to my 21st birthday, when I went out to the bar for my friend’s birthday but only had one drink because I had a game the next day, only to wake up in the bartender’s bed the next morning having very little memory of how I got there. Thank god I had a good girlfriend who found me and got me on the bus that morning to the game. I had for a very long time assumed I had stayed out or gotten drunker than I had remembered but the night sat fuzzy for me. It truly wasn’t until years later that I realized I had probably been drugged. Anyway, all that to say - I called the spa and let them know what happened and I found out later they suspended him. It took a lot of my energy this week and this was such a small moment in my life and such a small man. I swell with pride when I think of the brave survivors who have come forward about people who hold so much power.
12. This new moon really is powerful. I say that not only because it is the same New Moon that I was born under, but because Chiron is there too. The wounded healer and one of my favorite archetypes. This is a good time to recognize what hurts because in doing so you can be precise about the medicine. But you can’t really jump ahead to the medicine until you understand the symptoms. So this New Moon ask yourself what hurts and what has healed since April 17th 2018, or as I call it, the first day of my thirties. And then just listen to hear what your body has to say. And listen carefully not because it’ll be quiet but because it'll be moving so fast - it’s in Aries afterall - keep up!
13. Ughhh why wasn’t I born on the 3rd so I only had to think 3 thoughts
14. The classical musician community in America is hurting so bad. And it makes me sad to think about the great art that is being lost to poverty, madness of the business, and just general disinterest. There is a beautiful cellist playing in the subway station along to a piano track and I’m like hell fucking yeah cello karaoke on a Tuesday morning. People are looking up from their phones, children have wonder in their hearts again. I literally feel that as soon as I hear live music. I wish it were everywhere.
15. The Artemis crew is so damn cool. The way it all worked out is so special, they cancelled two time before that and because they did they got to see that beautiful eclipse with Saturn and Neptune so close to the sun. I love space
16. Alright one more long story of my crazy life in NYC. The day that someone got macheted at grand central, a guy on the subway got up in my face because I ignored him when he asked me to sit on his lap instead of on the bench where I sat. Picture it, mars is recently in Aries, I’m exhausted - I just worked all day basically in the weeds the whole time dealing with drunk people and this man starts yelling at me, “excuse me miss, miss, miss, miss.” Maybe I’m the ass hole for ignoring him but when he persisted I said, “Please leave me alone, I’m very tired” to which he must have heard as an invitation to escalate because he got in my face about why white women are bull shit. At this point my periphery got really good and I saw there was a white guy to my left, a black lady behind me with all eyes both with eyes on us. I de-escalated pretty damn well and he apologized and sat down. And I thought, wow, I am so strong and I can– and before I could even finish that thought, that aforementioned white man turns to ask me for fucking directions to which I yelled, “Please leve me alone I’m very tired.” And this white man who I had clocked in my periphery was actually a young highschool boy who was clearly traumatized by this entire scene and lost in NY. So, me and the aforementioned black lady helped him find his way to Penn Station. I got him to apologize to me too.
