Confessions.of.a.NYC.Lezie

There is one place in the world that I can go when I feel overwhelmed, confused, nearing the apex of my anxieties and doubts of myself. It is in the dark warm corner of my Grandmother's living room, seated at the old white Grand piano, my fingers resting gently on the cool familiar keys, whose pression responds to my fingertips with delicious recognition.

When I'm there, the whole world melts away. I can play a few songs for memory, songs I taught myself as a girl and others I have learned along the course of my music schooling, sometimes the passages come and go, but when my heart and my body meld, they just pour out of my fingertips and for once in my life, serenity is simple and effortless.

Thoughtless muscle memory unlocks something miles deep inside of me, to the place that no one has ever touched, and when that music comes breathlessly I feel like it's my heart singing.

I love that piano. It's old and probably out of tune and sometimes the keys stick a little. Its full of dust and it's wise.

Last night, in a terrible fit of paralyzing stormy thoughts, I sat down to play and I kept hitting traps. Passages I couldn't remember. My fingers felt frantic, amnesiac, like strangers, as if all the energy and weight inside them had flown out. Nothing felt right. I touched key after key, searching for the right note, determined to find it, determined to get through that song. But I couldn't. I sat with my eyes closed and my hands resting on the keys and I felt completely lost.I abandoned the song that would not come, and I played some low and mismatched chords I made up as I went along.

I went to bed. I woke up in the middle of the night with the sheets twisted in knots close around my body. I'd thrown the comforter completely off. I was shivering.

When I woke up this morning, I silently made myself breakfast. I read the paper. I glanced at the work I'd done the night before, still sprawled out on the dining room table. I pulled a blanket around me and I walked into the living room and sat down at the piano.

I put my hands out to play a different song, afraid to tackle the same as the night before in case the loss of memory was permanent. That's what kept me tossing and turning all night. I can't bear to lose that song, that song in particular.

It was the first love song, and the only one. But anyway, my hands took over and I played it. With a few mistakes but I played it through and by the end I felt the door unlock. I knew I couldn't lose that song forever. Its too much a part of me.

There are some things that get inside of your bones. And they'll never leave you.

I’m an open book. I really don’t hide much, and there isn’t TMI when it comes to what I’ll share, and what others can share with me. I balance this with being acutely aware of when people just aren’t interested. If I don’t think the person really wants to know a story, or hear about something in my life, I don’t tell it. My last friend once told me that I was an enigma to her; she declared that she couldn’t figure me out. I was at a loss for an explanation, simply telling her that I’m pretty much an open book and questioning what it was she couldn’t figure out. She of course didn’t have an answer. I suspect it was because I didn’t really think she cared, and maybe a bit of intimidation. I didn’t want to open myself up to her, because I know it was a surface need of hers to have people be completely open, she craved knowing everything and having that control over people.

That’s not who I share with.

Sometimes, I think I take for granted my openness and desire to share what I feel and who I am, sometimes I forget that although I work in casual environments, I shouldn’t always say what I feel. But then, as I think about it and wonder if I don’t have a filter, I’ll flash to a picture of myself in social situation where I don’t really talk about myself for hours. Where is the middle ground?

This week at work I complained about something I was asked to do, and wasn’t shy about saying I didn’t want to do it, to my co-workers. When I thought about it that night as I shampooed, I worried, did I just take for granted how open I can be at work as a result of the casual “come as you are and say how you feel” environment? Maybe it is a sense of entitlement I have for being told, and feeling, that I’m a smart and very capable employee and I think the task is something I shouldn’t have to do anymore, instead of considering that part of the reason I’m being asked to do it is to expose me to something new, including new people. I know I can complain to these people about everything, but I do have to draw the line. As I thought about it more, I flashed to sometimes feeling like I haven’t said a word after hours with my friends. What’s the difference? Where’s the middle ground?

Talking to someone this summer after an emotional breakthrough (in which my Mom told me that she had been trying for months to get me to just talk about myself. She would ask how I was as we began conversations, but it proved fruitless, as I’d just shrug it off. She said my pattern would be to let her go first and only after she was done would I open up) she confided that she felt that often too, like she would dominate conversations and worry that I didn’t talk about myself, worry that she wasn’t being a good friend. Why do I do that? And how do I still be an open person while doing that?

I let it out when I need to, I’ve dominated many a conversation. When it feels right, and I’m comfortable and I know the person really wants to hear it, that’s when I open up. With my friends, I want to make sure they are getting everything they need from me before I lay my stuff on them, I want to take care of the people I love. At work, I have a different relationship with close co-workers. We take care of each other, and that means complaining and venting and knowing it’s safe. These people haven’t yet become someone who I let go first.

For me, I’m most open when I’m letting others be truly vulnerable, because they get to see who I really am in those moments, and I know when I need the roles reversed they will be.

….I do apologize for not writing in nearly a month. I don’t really have a really good reason or a valid reason rather. I just didn’t write.

Lies.

My life has been on slow motion. Things have gone pretty dry and boring. So no juice could be spilled here.

Sorry.

It took a really rough night last week with a lot of bad decisions involved (the first of many being drinking on antibiotics) to make me stop for a second and think about the amount of alcohol I consume on a weekly basis.I soon realized I’d never thought about this before because it’s too terrifying to contemplate. It’s one of my mind’s “don’t go there topics” along with my parents weird love affair, Requiem for a Dream’s ending, and visuals of live snakes crawling up my leg.

The culprit in this drinking frenzy?
The bottle service system.
More specifically, the free, promotional bottle system.

We’ve been preprogrammed not to be wasteful. Wasting is bad. It contributes to the polar ice cap melt and makes Al Gore lose precious hours of sleep. This mentality has somehow crossed over to unfinished Ciroc vodka and half empty bottles of bubbly. If it’s there, you drink it. Hell, we’ve all seen the 4 A.M. classic ‘waste-not’ move of men passing around liquor bottles and depositing the contents directly down their throat. Belvedere? A baby bottle? They’re essentially the same thing. Watch ‘em slurp it down.

I’ll be the first to admit I’m a champagne-whore. And if people are mixing vodka drinks, I’ll inhale whatever is handed to me through six of those little straws. I think the last time someone asked me my mixer preference, “orange or cranberry?” I shrugged with a sad smile and responded, “like it matters.” After four plus years of passively accepting and consuming drinks, I’m beginning to realize that there might be a mini problem here.I haven’t fully formulated my exact thoughts on the topic yet. As an experiment however, when I went out yesterday, I didn’t drink.

OK, lies.

I had two beers. But we all know that beer’s like alcoholic water, and only two from 11:30 P.M. to 2:30 A.M.? I was a sober chick. And you know what? I still had fun. Perhaps I didn’t feel like as much of a superstar as I do after seven champagnes, and perhaps Bob Sinclair didn’t make me as outrageously happy as he does when vodka’s swirling around in my brain, but I had some good, old-fashion fun. I danced. I talked. I knew what people looked like. I even felt like I was part of some conspiratory secret club: ‘the sober ones.’ Watching the retards jumping around like orangutans off-beat to Timbaland was both amusing and humiliating. Amusing because they looked like they needed leashes, and humiliating because I’m sure I’m usually one of them.


And my sobriety didn’t go unnoticed.“Why aren’t you drinking?” I got asked repeatedly from table managers.It wasn’t until then that I realized when I’m out, I ALWAYS have a drink in my hand. There’s photo proof of this. I almost had to re-teach myself how to dance not having a drink in my hand. It was that big a shock. My body balance was off. So much so that after I was tired of getting harassed, I poured myself a cup of cranberry just to fit in. And as I swooped down to get my juice I caught site of our three-quarters full Grey Goose bottle and the ‘waste not’ mentality started to creep over me.I fought off the temptation, kept my resolve, and it was an interesting experiment.

Best perk: the next morning I felt fabulous instead of an extra from the Planet of the Apes movie.

Sometimes, sobriety can pay off.