West to East

I wonder how I'll be different. I hope very much but not completely. Lavender turned 35 last year and felt such a way about it. I didn't get it. What's a year or two? I remember when a girl I did improv with in Chicago turned 35. She grouched into the greenroom, "I'm almost forty!" (No, you are not, I thought.) Carrie, mascara running down her face, wails "I'm 35" after no one shows up to her birthday.

It started in fall. I tried to chat with two recent college grads at gymnastics about TV. They straightened up, nodded respectfully at me, like I was an elder. Because I am. I find myself wondering about the next generation, and how I will bend to their vulnerability, when the time comes. On the way home from a screening of Legally Blonde I told Lo about a very old sketch I wrote, way back in Arizona. At 3 AM I couldn't sleep, and I went searching for it online. Wow, I look ten years younger. Because I am. I wore my signature ugly cut-off sweat shorts (during a show!) and was, frankly a very clunky actor. But I felt something so new toward that girl in the video. I felt she was a different person. Not a stranger, more like a student of mine. I nodded my head at the jokes. I wanted to encourage the person who wrote them, these aren't perfect, but they are good! These are fresh! You don't even know how weird you are--but that's not bad! I feel like Matthew McConaughey tried explaining this phenomenon during his Oscars acceptance speech a few years ago and everyone thought he was on drugs.

Something else has been happening too. This odd sensation every day that I wake up. Oh, it's me again. That young comedy writer had woken up 8000 times as herself. And now I've woken up 4000 more times as me. It's like, wow, give me a break, me. I've never gotten to experience a single thing without myself there.

She won't pick up the phone, she'd rather be alone.