Great

It's been an exceedingly good week.

All the past versions of me would be proud. No matter what age, if I dropped off a dossier of life facts for Alice 2018, she would be relieved. Your solo show opened to a warm sold-out house. You found a puffy art installation outside the restaurant you went to for your five year anniversary and kicked off your heels and climbed in. You are creating content for two new college theatre courses. You had a candy bar and sparkling cranberry juice for lunch. This week two lit managers and one television producer got back to you. Two risers in Power Step class. This portfolio is golden, and I know it.

And yet. I wonder when it started. My meditation app asks me to rate how I'm feeling mentally from "poor" to "great." I am never going to press "great." I'm just not. How could I with Syrian refugees and landfills? The dozens of hanging "cancelled due to low enrollment" signs in my school. They rise up in the draft I make waking by. I believe in doing one's best, and I know it doesn't help the starving to feel guilty when I bite into vegan thai chili wings, and I have seen the power of joy beyond the self. It's been heightened of course since DJT was sworn in. In someways I feel less alone. And maybe if I'm less alone, that means more good is happening. I'll flip that coin into the good luck fountain. But the bad luck fountain has been a bubbling muck since I was I don't know when. What was the happiest I ever was? (The last time I could be thoughtless?) Maybe when Obama was elected, so I sailed on the what would be. A year later or so. I will never forget the woman with no teeth who asked if I had a lawn that needed mowing. She probably wasn't supposed to be in that Bread Co. It's snowing, lady, I thought. "Just trying to get by," she said, and maybe that was when it happened, when there would never be a great again.