The Soundtrack of My Severance*

When something happens in my life of any significance - happy, sad, or otherwise - I cycle through the iTunes implanted in my brain and play snippets from showtunes to give words to my feelings. I never seem to know any whole song by heart so a few relevant (and remembered) lyrics start playing as a loop in my head. If I'm alone at home or in an elevator perhaps I will sing these bits out loud. I also would extract every recording I have of those songs from my computer to put them into active rotation on my iPod.

When I found out in mid July that I would no longer have a job, or that my job would soon cease to exist because of a pending merger with another company, lines from "I'm Still Here" started a rotation in my brain that lasted for days.

Good times and bum times,
I've seen them all and, my dear,
I'm still here.
Plush velvet sometimes,
Sometimes just pretzels and beer,
But I'm here.

Carlotta sings the song in Stephen Sondheim's "Follies." She's an ex-showgirl and a D-A-M-E. She's been around the block and - although her feet are tired - she is indomitable. She ends the song, which is really a "fuck you" anthem for indefatigable, with a defiant declaration.

I got through all of last year
And I'm here.
Lord knows, at least I was there,
And I'm here!
Look who's here!
I'm still here!

That mapped pretty well to my initial reaction to losing my job - rage. In fact, I didn't lose my job. That makes it sound like I misplaced my employment because I was careless. It was taken from me. Not that I loved it. It frustrated the hell out of me a lot of the time. I had gotten through re-orgs, product blunders, and clueless bosess and I still performed. I'd delivered.

To quiet that Eartha Kitt/Dolores Grey/Yvonne DeCarlo ranting in my brain, I came up with a simple mantra: Sometimes you have to be kicked out of something in order to leave it.

It's true in work and love. My last bad break up happened about six years ago. The guy dumped me. He was a tool but I would've stayed in that relationship and entertained delusions of longevity. So he did me a painful favor by ending it.

Sometimes you have to be kicked out of something to leave it

A couple of weeks passed between notification and the merger close date where I was still an employee although I had little to do except pack up my cubicle into boxes and shuttle them home. It was at that point that my accompaniment turned morose. That's when I reached out to Miss Peggy Lee and her version of a song that starts with a child's house burning to the ground.

I remember when I was a girl
Our house caught on fire
And I'll never forget the look on my father's face
As he gathered me in his arms
And raced to the burning building out on the pavement
And I stood there shivering
And watched the whole world go up in flames
And when it was all over I said to myself
Is that all there is to a fire?
Is that all there is?

I did not know that song very well and I didn't already own it, so I bought it. I made a Bloody Mary at the kitchen counter as I downloaded it. Then I played it. And re-played it. And re-played that song that was a lot like a dancehall dirge.

Is that all there is?
If that's all there is, my friends, then let's keep dancing
Let's break out the booze and have a ball
If that's all there is

One might interpret this song as a cry of help. I see it as someone who, like Carlotta in "Follies," remains defiant although depression has replaced the anger. Also a level of acceptance has seeped into the message. If that's as bad or good as life gets then fuck you and pour me another drink.

Word got out and people would come by or telephone to offer condolences, which I refused by repeating my mantra to them: Sometimes you have to be kicked out of something to leave it. I said it to them. I said it to myself.

Sooner or later, I had hoped, my mantra would convince my emotions that what had happened was a positive thing.

The merger closed and I got a short email - pick up your severance package from HR and drop off your laptop with IT.

Best thing that ever could have happened

A good friend asked if, considering that I didn't have to work, if I would be taking August off. It had never occurred to me that I had that option. Meaning that I had the choice of not worrying about finding that next job. Adding up my severance and payout for unused PTO, I had four or five months of income to use up before my unemployment turned chronic.

There gotta be endings
Or there wouldn't be beginnings —

Right?

These lyrics from "Now You Know" (from another Sondheim show - "Merrily We Roll Along") overtook the other songs running through my head. This was when acceptance met empowerment.

It's called flowers wilt,
It's called apples rot,
It's called theives get rich and saints get shot,
It's called God don't answer prayers a lot,
Okay, now you know.

Okay, now you know,
Now forget it.
Don't fall apart at the seams.
It's called letting go your illusions,
And don't confuse them with dreams.

That day, after considering the question of "taking August off," I began a "sabbatical." After 14-15 years of uninterrupted employment - including two recessions and surviving a half dozen layoffs, I took a break. I have been going to the movies, reading books, and finally watching those old foreign films on my DVR.

Because now you grow.
That's the killer, is
Now you grow.

This last bit reminds me to remind myself that it's the hard stuff that makes you better if you can accept it, learn what you can, and move on. The alternative it that you dwell on the unfairness and the misery until that bitterness calcifies making that sadness a permanent aspect of your thinking. I do not want to hang out with that person, much less inhabit that body.

So I got shit canned. That made me angry then sad. Now it is just something that happened to me that has given me the opportunity to rest, relax, reflect, and - soon - find some new job.

[*NOTE: A "soundtrack" is different than a "cast album." The former is for films and that latter for recordings of theater scores by the original, revival, or studio casts. I only bring this up, as this distinction is very important to some enthusiasts. To me it's the kind of esoterica that is only interesting to the person in the role of correcting another.]

Today on "the View"?

I'm a bit anxious that I'm missing "The View" at this moment.

I'm concerned that I'm anxious about missing "The View."

I've spent too many days and hours at home. It's time to get out.

An All Too Obvious Metaphor

This morning I sat down to re-assemble a jigsaw puzzle...of me and my husband Mark putting in the final piece of another puzzle. (Mark's wee nephew Milo was looking on from the side.)

In June 2007, my mother-in-law, Helen, had brought together her three sons with two spouses, one long-term boyfriend, and three grandsons to a big house on Kiawah Island, South Carolina, to commemorate her sixtieth birthday.

I found a puzzle in the house and obsessively spent a couple of hours a day, over 3 or 4 days, putting it together. The others would walk through and comment as they passed by or wandered onto the porch, while I stayed dedicated to my self-imposed task. (I like to finish something once I start.) Mark has helped from time-to-time and Milo had often come in and stared on rapt. Someone took a photo to memorialize the finishing it. So we all got into the picture.

That Christmas Helen had the photo made into a puzzle, which has sat on our dining table in the box, unopened ever since.

Today I scattered the little pieces on the table and started to put it together. "Oh," I thought, "I'll work on this for an hour or so and leave it off." Of course, I'm not that person so I spent the next several hours putting the pieces together.

Separating the edge pieces from the others. I started with the most recognizable parts - which were Mark and my smiling faces. Milo came together in fits and spurts. Other parts of the picture began to emerge unexpectedly - like the puzzle within the puzzle. Edges of some pieces would give clues to their destination because they contained the hard outline of some object - a chair, a table.

After putting together the middle and center, the outer edges challenged me. The detail in the photo was fuzzy and the colors and shapes simliar. Then my friend John called to catch up and make plans to meet later today. As I listened to him I still scanned the pieces looking for something to come into recognition. As occasional but close friends do, he asked about the state of my marriage. "It's good. Solid. Sometimes stale. I tend to focus on what needs to be fixed - in any circumstance - so I have to remind myself that a stable, happy relationship is a good one; especially a marriage that is almost five years old."

Our cat - Mills - walked across the table, threatening to disturb the unassigned pieces. He was quite likely to nudge bits onto the floor. I picked him up and tossed him away. He returned to the table top so picked him up and set him further away. All the while John listened to me curse the cat - "goddammit Mills!" - as the cat squawked back at me. I said goodbye to John and Mills left me in peace.

I returned to the gaps in the picture and the scattered, unintelligible pieces. I stared at some and then the fuzzy details started to make sense; not entirely but enough to try them out with the grain in the wall that would line up a row or gradation in color and light that made a piece of the puzzle more appropriate to one place than another.

Flashes of success were followed periods of staring and seeing nothing. Sometimes I would take a bit and try it here-and-there and - not often - it would snap into place. I finished the last area - of blurry grasses and leaves in a sprint. With fewer pieces to consider each one found its logical spot quickly and in a neat succession.

The picture of two smiling men - married - and a little boy looking on had been reconstituted.

A Cry for Help?

My husband sent me an email last Thursday with a subject line matching the title of my most recent posting.

ok so that made me sad again. We can go somewhere for the summer, just not while I have this job.

It just how passive aggressive a blog can be even if that isn't your intention. I hadn't blamed him or even thought much about him when I typed out my bit of melancholy.

It's nice to know he reads what I've written.

Where Did Everybody Go?

I boarded the L train yesterday morning with no trouble; at 8 o'clock in the morning. Without having to push myself into the mob inside the subway car or wait for the next (or the next-after-next) to arrive, I walked right on to it.

The gym has been quiet too. Relatively. Yesterday there were only two people per lane in the basement pool at Equinox on Greenwich. Ah the luxury of it!

But I'm suspicious. The men at Equinox are getting fatter and hairier. Or the handsome, fit men have migrated to the next happening gym. It happens. Gay men who work out slavishly move from gym to gym every year or so like birds in search of the ideal nest. David Barton has a live DJ during prime time, so they may have set down their wieghts and relocated there...for now.

I've never been clued into the next thing. I always seem to pick up on a trend a little late, just as the bleeding edge has already found the next "it." Or maybe the A gays have gone off to Fire Island for the summer, having spent the Fall and Winter sculpting the perfect pecs for shirtless dancing in the Pines.

All of this relative emptiness has me feeling left out. I have no plans for the summer. No vacation to look forward to; no summer share.

I should appreciate the extra room in the pool, on the sidewalks, and the occasional seat on the subway.

In a city that suddenly feels deserted when it is still quite crowded, not participating in the summer rituals of sun and fun can leave you wandering around like a wallflower waiting for a dance.

A Younger Man in Dublin

Last week I spent a few days in Dublin; mostly for work with a Saturday for myself tacked on to the end of the trip.

The last time I'd been in Ireland was the end of September 1997. I tried to resurrect those memories so I could compare the then to the now. My remembrances were more like flipping through a set of random snapshots. "T'anks a million," I heard that 100 times when the Irish would get off the bus. I took a lot of buses back then. The All-Ireland Gallic football tournament had filled the city to overflowing, so I had to stay at a bed & breakfast in Donnybrook, which is a suburb just outside of Dublin proper, but it made me think of the failed Broadway musical based on the "The Quiet Man." (I didn't know any of the songs or even the plot though a vague vision of the LP cover would flash into my mind each time I boarded that bus to Donnybrook.)

I met an Irishman in a gay bar and asked him to dinner. I had wanted a proper Irish dinner.

"You'll have to bear with me, but if I wanted to eat Irish food I could just as well go home to my mom and dad." I asked him what he'd like. "Mexican," he replied.

I remember pints of Guinness that had to sit and settle before getting topped off. It looked like black sludge but tasted piquant and creamy. That hadn't changed in thirteen years.

Mostly I had this sense of my 27 year old self compared to the man who will turn 40 this Fall. Dublin had been my third trip out of the United States in 1997, after Warsaw and London. I had a job that had sent me to those cities for a month or more at a time. Dublin was tacked on to the end of the London trip. Those had also been my first trips abroad in my life. Coming from New York I had felt so cosmopolitan, but my almost 40 self knows that I was really a young man, a boy perhaps, wandering into a world that was much, much broader than I had any sense of.

New York New York Makes You Feel Brand New

I'm at a hotel in Dublin; near Temple Bar. That means I'm staying in the part of the city I would caution people against because it's overrun tourists. Dublin is so small in a way that you can't apply the same principles.

It's Friday night at midnight and through my open window I heard "New York! New York! Makes you feel brand new." Ms Alicia Keys. I'm home.

The place they aspire to is the place that I live...when I'm physically there.

NYC is a state of mind. I carry it with me as I place my foot onto each Irish cobble stone.