Lydia’s Blog

It’s now officially Easter weekend. The next four days for me (five for the singers) are officially free. The last three normal two-and-a-half day weekends I spent here, in Graz—mostly by myself with a few exceptions. Blowing big wads of cash on shit I can’t for the life of me remember now, poodling around on the Internet for five-hour blocks, walking around until both knees ache and I get dizzy, etc.

No, I thought. This weekend—this LONG weekend of all weekends, I have to go away. Get out of Dodge, so to speak. Berlin, I thought, would be the natural choice. The tickets were, unfortunately, absurdly expensive from Graz…as well as from Vienna, Klagenfurt and Budapest. Fuck it, I thought. Get me out of this hellhole, I’ll do it. Then I (wisely) called Tommy to ask where he’d be over Easter. England, he said.

Then it dawned of me. Why the fuck would I go back to Berlin were it not to see the few people whose company I can stand for more than ten minutes? Tommy in England. Toby in the sticks with his family. Though I stopped calling…I imagined the list went on and on.

So no Berlin. I thought, Amsterdam…but then it turned out that Matthew would be in Düsseldorf over the holiday. Paris? Marc didn’t email me back. Rome? Jack is quite ill, waiting for an operation…and without the use of his (or an) apartment, the trip would have broken me. London? No, Beth and James are in Australia. Maybe a southeastern tour…Budapest, Bucharest, Sofia…?

Oh, why. Why, why why why why why why why. Why fucking bother.

Because, as I now in my drunken stupor can now officially articulate, the meaning of life is this: avoiding that thick, constitutional fear of the fact we’ll all die alone. The avoidance, whether temporary and cheap (via such strategies as gorging on drink, people, drugs, work, oneself, etc.) or long-lasting and idealistic (strategies like marriage, psychiatry, religion, family) of loneliness is the absolute kernel of the human existence.

Where did I really want to go over Easter? New York. I wanted to wake up in Abe’s apartment in Brooklyn, in Abe’s bed, with Abe himself snoring happily beside me. I miss my bakery on Montague St. I miss the stupid bitch of a door lady who works in the mornings. I miss the cockroaches that scatter in the bathroom at night when I turn on the lights. To me, right now, that sounds like the opposite of loneliness. Maybe you could even call it happiness.

It was too expensive. With both my American and German accounts frozen (from either lack of funds or some other reason, I’m not sure), I’m living off of the American Express card that my unfathomably patient parents still pay off and cash advances on my pathetic, pathetic fee from the Grazer Oper. It was simply too much.

So. No one was home in the cities I could afford, and $1000 seemed like too much to spend for three nights in the one place I feel human. What then?

Barcelona.

Again.

My personal favorite strategy for avoiding that thick, constitutional human aloneness is work. I mean, for fuck’s sake, what else am I doing here in Germany…that is, other than proving to those talentless, unimaginative assholes I had the misfortune of growing up with that my glamorous, creative, jet-setting European lifestyle trumps the tap-dancing shit out of their bleak futures filled with SUVs, PTO meetings, middle-management jobs, Pottery Barn furniture and once-a-month, missionary-position sex.

I’m not really sure when it happened, the work thing. I was a profoundly lazy kid. I literally slept through high school. My first year of college remains an amphetamine-drenched haze. It must have happened after that. I’m not really even that ambitious—just proud. I had to show the fuckers from West Hartford that I could become a great singer. I had to show the assholes in the Opera Department at Oberlin that I could stomp all over their narcissistically regimented program by chain-smoking and becoming a fucking hot director. I had to show American directors how provincial and lame they are by fucking off to Europe and forcing my way under the wings of the world’s most controversial, radical stage artists.

And so here I am. Way to go, Lyd. When I’m working, I’m occupied to distraction by the music, the people, the lifestyle, the illusion of it all. It’s so fantastic; I just want to drown myself in it, sometimes.

Then, there are those moments when this distraction is sucked away, like the last few quarts of bathwater in a tub. It’s only in these moments, like this moment, that I realize the thinness of the illusion.

Then I’m just another over-entitled suburban fool, typing nonsense into an expensive laptop late at night (for lack of anything better to do), already beyond drunk on cheap white wine. The only thing I have on any jackass in Connecticut, is a shitty German TV movie about two randy widows at a spa playing in the background.

But I digress. Severely.

I’m going to Barcelona. A designer friend of mine is working there currently. We’re both Calixto babies. We’ll spend three days in that Mediterranean paradise debating the details of our application to a prestigious European competition for emerging directors and designers. We’ll hole ourselves up indoors laying out storyboards and arguing over plot points and color schemes.

It’ll be brilliant. Wonderful. Yet another perfect distraction. Three full days of delaying that dreadful, gnawing knowledge of what I really am.

Happy Easter.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 14th, 2006 at 7:31 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.