BLOG

An actor who also writes, how novel.

The One About the Bachelor - February 1, 2021

There are two stereotypes of people who try to control their emotions. The first is the Katherine Heigl archetype in a romcom. She wears tight buns, is an expert at the Aaron Sorkin walk and talks, and will eventually say “I never do this” while she does something. The other is the girl in overalls who cries twice in one day because Philip Seymour Hoffman died seven years ago. I am the latter in recovery. So that’s why I want to be in complete control of how I feel . Even the nice ones. The light ones where it feels that someone has replaced your blood with espresso just by existing. It’s like living in the chorus of The Beach Boy’s 1966 hit “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”. This feeling when you can’t stop imagining the two of you in a music video and they sing to you in public and sound kind of good and kind of bad at the same time. Normally I would hate that. Has anyone ever played you a song they like in the car? It would be like that but worse.

I was charging my phone behind a column at The Met. It was raining and we were about to hang up, “I love you”. Saying it felt like breathing or avoiding the cracks on a sidewalk. There was a pause on the other end, “Yeah. Lots of love!” and then I tried to end the call as soon as possible.

By nature I’m obsessive. I can eat the same thing for dinner for a year. Editing this I just realized I’m on minute 28 of an hour loop of “Here Comes the Sun” on YouTube. I can listen to a podcast that recaps seasons of The Bachelor that I’m not going to watch. I’ve spent a lot of my life dissociating. To the point that at 14 I wrote it as a prayer request and put it at the front of my church’s stage. I try very hard to not get that espresso feeling.

So. Anyways. The Bachelor.

The show is high school sweetheart cattiness with detox tea influencers. I had watched only one episode before quarantine. It was a few years ago before my grandmama passed and I was visiting her. We never had had that much to talk about. She was a retired bank teller who was the sub for the local senior women’s bowling league. I am whatever kind of person that would choose to write this. It was one of the only times I had seen her drink wine and for three hours we were in-sync. We watched Bryan A. propose to Rachel L. and agreed they were doomed (I write this in 2021 and they have remained together). I wish I had kept watching so that I would have had a reminder to call her. I like to think she’s in heaven right now, calling all the mean girls on Matt James’s season bitches.

The Miss Tennessee pageant was hosted in my hometown. It was a weeklong Olympics that actually isn’t dissimilar from The Bachelor. Pretty girls and a shiny prize. A family we knew moved to another state and their daughter went on to become Miss Oklahoma (or something), “She’s a pretty girl” my mom had said, “But there is no way she would have won in Tennessee”. Each year Miss Tennessee does a victory tour of all the elementary schools in the state. I remember saying on the way to that year’s assembly, “Bet she’s a blonde, they always are” with a surprising amount of callous for a nine year old. It was our yearly reminder that this was true femininity and was the ultimate goal. They were that certain kind of pretty that will ensure that they will always be loved. Or pursued. Or something. For years I would try to do my eyeliner like the pageant contestants and I would straiten my cow lick until it got crispy.

I was working at a Starbucks one summer when one of the TN pageant contestants skittered in hours before the competition. She was wearing an adorable crown and was a few years younger than me. I made her coffee while she adjusted her silver stiletto ankle strap. The store was so quiet you could hear a bobby pin drop. I’m getting back to my point. Promise. 

The franchise (called Bachelor Nation by the most devoted fans) has a good amount of beauty pageants winners. During the 2020 season 1/6 of the girls were pageant winners. In the current season Catalina M, Miss Puerto Rico Universe 2020, arrived in her official tiara and sash. This seasons oblivious villain, Victoria L, has been calling herself a queen all season. Last year she competed in the Miss California Pageant. There’s a video of her walking across the stage while the host announces, ““Victoria Larson. Be the change you wish to see in the world” while the number 122 is pinned to the top of her thigh high slit.

“So glad my daughter has women like this to look up to!!” a mom I know posted on Facebook, her daughter next to a 19 year old blond in a cocktail dress. 

The Bachelor contestants wear beaded evening gowns that aren’t exactly ever in or out of style. The dresses cling perfectly and I wonder if it’s genetics or if those 5 Minute Booty Blasts actually work. A former boss of mine said I had bird legs and shouldn’t come to work in a skirts (I quit after that, but probably not as soon as I should have). Since watching the show I’ve been made aware that I don’t have a defined separation from the back of my arm and the rest of me. I didn’t even know that was a thing.

I asked a friend who sends me Bachelor memes why we still love it, “It’s reassuring because even in a perfect petri dish of dating the “ideal” specimen of women and men, they are still rejected the same ways we are in the real world”

I think it’s more than that though. In reference to the espresso high, I can get it indirectly while watching it and still being safe. Richard Curtis (the rom-com king who wrote the line, “I’m just a girl standing in front of a boy”) said about dating shows “I’ve spent all my life trying to get actors to act these things as convincingly as they can. And suddenly it’s happening right in front of you”. Since watching the show I’ve reinstalled a dating app. The variety of suitors so varied that either I’m everyone's type or I’ve met the standard of not being dead. Meeting someone this way is about as realistic as meeting someone on reality tv. 

I have possibly cracked the code on why Youth Group Southern Christian Girls (YGSCG for short) cannot stay away from this show. They aspire to look like the contestants and it lets them fantasize that one day a guy will not be weirded out if they cry. Also, I think it is because they are horny. In Bachelor in Paradise Season 3 they show Amanda S. and Josh M. breathing very heavily on a bed and then cut to flowers blossoming, a train going into a tunnel, and then fireworks.

My real life type is not Bachelor Hot. My type is Unavailable. I’m sure this has something to do with having five siblings and wanting to be everything to just one person. Like I’m trying to redo my childhood and be noticed or something. This show is the perfect place to pursue that fantasy. The lead doesn’t know I exist and I have been raised to think that their options are better than me. Also, it’s like, really good tv.

I Feel Inferior to Laura Linney - November 22, 2020

I’ve just paused The Squid and the Whale because onscreen Laura Linney is writing about someone French on a typewriter. I pause on this portrait of literary New York and feel inferior. I watched the first eight minutes of The Squid and the Whale while in treatment for high anxiety but moderate depression a few weeks ago. Now I’m on my childhood bed trying to start it again. When I describe the state of my life to medical professionals they say it makes sense why I’m experiencing my symptoms. I’m an actor who forgot to be good at acting. The only talents I’m now sure of is that I make pretty good breakfast tacos and I can name an animal as soon as I meet them. A lot of our pets have two names because of this particular gifting. My family, not wanting to discourage one of the last things I have confidence in, thank me for the newest name of our cat. I have also been told repeatedly that I lack confidence. Being told this is both validating and counterproductive.

Laura Linney has a glass of white wine on the table that is 1/3 full. It’s a full arms length away while seated and even then she may need to stretch to get it. This makes me think she lost interest in the wine once she started to write. Being so thrilled by typing in French. I haven’t had wine out of a glass in six months. And at 2/3s of a glass I am only capable of reading a biography in the tub about a women who was once beautiful and now is dead. Laura Linney also has two candlesticks at a staggered distance away from her and I don’t see a means for her to light them. Near her is a landline phone. I know she doesn’t intend to look pretentious in 2020. But if you have a phone that isn’t just one screen it looks like you read the articles in print that we read as Twitter headlines. It is night time and she thinks that someone will need her to answer the phone very quickly.

In treatment it was brought up that I am very critical of men. Now I would like to make the rebuttal that of course I am. Being critical is just the frosting of it. We talked about childhood trauma and I wept like a dignified widow. Dating apps were brought up and I started sweating so badly that I took a shower right after and had to change sweatpants. A year ago I went on two dates with one guy from an app and I didn’t pay. He was nice. I felt guilty because I couldn’t afford the dates and I didn’t really know if he could either. I wasn’t going to pay for them on the principal that I didn’t want to. He moved back to Boston after the second date. He texted me a few months ago and it stressed me out so much I didn’t respond. Sir, if you are reading this I am sorry. If it is any consolation I can tell that one day you’re going to make a lot of money and I probably will always have high anxiety but moderate depression. There was one guy I possibly could have talked into marrying me and he’s also going to be very rich one day. I don’t know if that says more about them or about me. I attract nice guys and it makes me feel like a terrible person. As if I’ve tricked them. 

There are books open on the table next to Laura Linney. The two on her right look like dictionaries and the two on her left are closed and stacked on top of each other. Under the two on her right is a legal pad with notes. I like that they are mostly covered though by the dictionaries. As if being 2/3 full of the white wine has carried her into a world of her own. With thoughts so large and expansive that she needs more words to sift through to even find a way to express her thoughts. 

I was told to watch The Squid and the Whale by Noah Baumbach’s babysitter. This makes me wonder for which child but out of respect I didn’t ask. Without looking it up I think he has two children. One with a woman who isn’t Greta Gerwig and one with a woman who is. I like to think that now if I ran into Noah Baumbach I would have a fully formed set of questions about the props used in this scene. I feel like he would be thrilled that someone had noticed the candlesticks. He would say that he liked the idea of her moving them from the center of the table because she was learning to take up space. A year before I met Noah Baumbach’s babysitter there was a morning with a deep need to listen to every interview that he had ever done. At this point I had only watched Frances Ha and Mistress America, but I was suddenly hungry for any information on him. It was a blackout binge because I can’t remember anything besides that he had a handsome voice. The kind of voice that was handsome on its own and didn’t need a certain sort of face to justify it.

The boy from the app told me at the end of our first date that he hadn’t ever been on a date with a person before. This made me feel worldly and jaded even though my casting type is victim or naive victim. Going on this date made me feel like I was constantly grinding a cigarette underneath my shoe. I smiled with no teeth. He said I had beautiful eyes and that it was the first thing he had noticed about me. No one had ever liked my eyes before. Or had at least told me so. I have round, sad eyes that go well with victorian collars and old coats. I feel bad that I couldn’t answer him. I somehow felt terrible about myself and also completely fine with my decision.

I was so ashamed of this trist that I didn’t even tell the therapist who brought up using dating apps. She suggested wearing a hat on the first date to alleviate stress. At the time of the dating app fiasco I accidentally started paying Bumble ten dollars a week and my roommate who use to model at department stores met someone that she dated for almost nine months. So I was out maybe forty bucks but she eventually cried more. So, yes. The dating app thing was brought up and I started chafing. 

What haunts me now most on my paused Netflix screen is the box with the lid off next to the landline phone. I can’t wrap my mind around- no wait I figured it out. The paper in the box is for the typewriter. Maybe she’s just begun to write because I don’t see any finished pages. The two books on her left appear to be a third dictionary and a paperback novel. It wouldn’t surprise me if the novel is the only thing by this French person on the entire table. 

I began typing this because of a deep sense of inferiority to Laura Linney. Or the Laura Linney that Noah Baumbach has created. I’m sure fictional Laura Linney would give me notes on what I’ve written so far and ask if I’ve ever studied German. I think she would need to put down her glass of wine two sentences into this essay because she already has found things to mark. I know she isn’t real. I know I was introduced to her by the directors babysitter. But I can still see her using red arrows to link the bits that don’t connect. Boyfriends? she would write in the margin. She would see that I used the word “pretentious” twice in one paragraph and mark through the second. I have yet to finish the film. Watching her type in 2005 reminded me that I had promised myself today that I would write. Together we study my words at her kitchen table. I write about a boy who made me scared of myself and she writes in my margins. 

The loneliness in April 2018

This marks the almost year since April 2018. A month that is its own little world of weird and important that I probably will continue to pull out and look at for a long time. The month I told the world I travelled alone and for a month sat in busses and trains and planes. It was one of the loneliest times. I was told I was living everyone’s dreams on mornings where I couldn’t get out of bed.
I’ve been in lines where no one speaks English. I've ordered dessert and wine for one in the middle of shiny cities. I’ve turned up to manors where no one knows where I live on a map. I’ve sat in classrooms where people explain sports.
In those weeks in April and around seven countries I got the most restless. My tutors told me the next month at drama school it was, “so American” that I packed them all in together. Back to back. Binging on cities and cultures and food and places like late nights and checking your phone after a breakup. But it’s easy to pack it all in when you only have an old backpack and you leave for breakfast in the morning with everything you’ll need for that night. The only lost item was a sandel in Venice on the very last morning towards the end of the trip. An early morning with a ivy supported balcony and a dark morning without espresso.
I prefer to travel alone. Years ago I had sat across from a family friend over breakfast in London. French waiters and a basket of cold starch that she requested and then refused to eat. She told me that I wasn’t to come back to the flat after I finished in Oxford. That I would have to find my way through the spare weeks I had on my own Surely there would be someone by the end of it. Surely it wouldn't end surrounded by confetti alone. I had made my way to a few cities. Shaking as I had hugged my friends goodbye and let go of their hands. Years later at the same little black and white tiles booth I told the woman over champagne and long emails where I had been for April. “Darling. Alone?” she said, as if she hadn’t told me in the same booth years ago that I would be alright.
I don’t like people looking at my itenerary and punching holes in it. My plan is always this, “Get there”.
And that’s it.
I have a list of places I want to eat, and paintings I would like to see, but none of it is set in stone. To avoid disappointment. To not bother with too much collected stress if I don’t make it. To not disappoint someone when we realize we misread the time for the bus.
In Germany I discovered there was a pink palace outside the city on a tram an hour before it closed. I raced there and did the group tour by myself as everyone else had gone home.
In some ways it’s strange. I become hermit-y and will do almost anything to stay isolated. I don’t let Americans know I speak English in long lines. I go out of my way to be left alone. My heart is racing for no reason and I remind myself that I've learned how to do this. I tell myself I prefer the quiet when my lips have begun to grow together and I haven’t heard my own voice for a few days. The city has enough of a personality that I tell myself I’m not alone.
There was a group tour in Paris that I almost didn’t attend. I paced up and down a road for a few times one morning to buy a croissant and an espresso. Not wanting to return for the free city tour. Only doubling back when I realized my fear wasn’t being alone in a country. It was being with people.
I documented the trip very well. Not even particularly flashy. But grabbing pictures of statues and food and chatting to my phone even though it was eating my data. What I didn’t say was how a new thing would make me cry daily. I realize I was waiting for someone at home to ask if was alright. To tell me to come home. To see if I was tired. But I’ve learned the best way to not have friends ask if everything is alright is to travel Europe by yourself. Which if you’re running from something is perfect. But it also ensures that no one is going to come find you.
Some days I was counting down the hours that I could check into my Air Bnb. How at one point I was so tired and lost in Belgium that I almost wanted someone to steal my luggage just so I could have a reason to stop walking.
You can’t stay still too long when you’re traveling by yourself. Too easy of a target. People start to notice you. So you walk. And becuase I’m always nervous about money because of the expense of traveling I also don’t stop to eat. There was a day in Rome I kept wandering a square for an hour in tears. Too delerious to stop for food, but too hungry to think strait. I do that a good bit. One of the other things that make traveling alone easier. Less stops for food. Less questions. Less worry for someone else.
Finally I went into a tea shop near the steps and read and hid.
Along the way I met up with school friends in three of the countries. One of them at random. I was with two Danish flight attendants. As they were explaining how to catch my next train my roommate and classmates pressed their faces against the glass on the other side of the train stop. They shouted that they loved me as the current of people took them away and back to London.
I was in my final city and I was counting down the moments to being back in London between my four white walls. Where I knew the man who bagged my groceries and there was always someone I knew at a pub down the road.
I was in Amsterdam. I had met some really interesting people as I had pushed forward. A man who booked talent entertainment for cruises and bought me dinner. A Greek man who told me I would need to visit his island and his son would teach me how to have a good time. A blonde traveler whose boyfriend had cheated on her in a public park and was going to be gone until she could resist having sex with him as soon as they were in the same room together. Her name was Fia and she was my favorite. We had both turned away politely when someone on our group tour had passed out on the lock bridge. We became best friends for the day the same way you used to be able to in Kindergarten. We drank cheap red wine and cheese and hiked and took each other’s pictures next to tourist spots. We hated everyone that had ever done the other wrong and the next day we had Lenny Kravits favorite falafel. “This” (please know she had the best Australian accent, it just makes it better), “Is the most romantic day we will probably ever have” I’m pretty sure she was smoking. It was Paris. We had found someone to eat cheese with in a park and we watched the sun set together, “it’s just so fucking romantic” she takes another drag from her cigarette.
We shared stories in a way that you do with someone you know you’ll never see again. Fia diagnosed that I fell too hard for people I loved and made excuses for them. It meant my heart got broken more than it should. Harder. She wasn't wrong. I knocked back the bottle.
We parted ways in the strange way you do in cities where you’ve met. Unsure if you’ll both find time to go to that park again. Not sure if that talk was your last.
In Amsterdam I was so excited to be home soon. But right as I had booked my tickets to see the Anne Frank House and was about to read a biography until I fell asleep (You know, like a normal grad student on the town in literal Sin City) a group of Teenage Israeli soldiers on their week off came into the room. Two of them insisted on speaking clipped English, the other was Canadian and spoke flatly. The youngest, Pria reminded my of a sparkly tinsel person. She opened a bottle of rosé and passed it across the bunk-bed, “Are you sad? You must come out with us! It will be fun! You must! Don’t be sad!” Just enough rosé to make me say yes. When I told her yes she danced and grabbed my hand, “You will have so much fun!” She said. It was like talking to a kid at a sleepover party. She reminded me of the Israeli Teen Soldier version of a popular cheerleader in a teen film. I couldn’t say no to someone made out of tinsel.
We arrived at a coffee house (Weed, they sell weed there) and a group of us exchanged stories. All of the guys paying attention to the tinsel girl, Pria. She decided she wanted to go dancing and showed the table her flyer that someone had gave her earlier that day. I will never understand the people that have that kind of magnetism. The kind of girl that can make a table of ten relocate to a club across town for no reason other than it might be fun. This was where my night would end. No sketchy club on a flyer that was advertised as a dungeon for me. One of the guys jogged up to me as we started parting ways. I had decided I was going home, and planned on announcing it once there was enough frenzy so I wouldn’t be missed.
“You’re going?” he said. He was the kind of handsome that your boyfriend wouldn’t like. “You should see the city like we do” he said, his accent and blue eyes saying he was a local. He didn’t seem as silly as the boys at the table inside. I liked that he didn’t say I shouldn’t bail. That I should have another drink. That I was no fun. The other girls would also tell me the next morning that, “Red head guys are either hot or not hot. He is hot”
“You’ll want to ride on the front bike” he said. I think there was something as exciting as meeting a strange girl in the middle of his familiar city as it was for me to meet him in the middle of this trip. A time where I had only wanted for someone to know my secrets like the width of their hands and not be afraid. Now there was someone looking at me like we were on chapter one of a book I would have read in high school.
We went back to where his bike was locked. There was something that assured me that he wouldn’t try to murder me since the bike ride in itself seemed much more dangerous.. He told me it was very safe. I jumped on as he righted it. “You are very light, so it will be no problem. If you were very heavy I would not have suggested”. In a world where people want to tell you what you want to hear what they want to hear, I had stumbled into a place where things were straightforward. It’s a cliche but the Danish are very strait forward. They don’t hide and poke. They tell you what they are thinking and I never felt like he was there from obligation. He told me the next night that I was nice and interesting. I actually believed him. I never believe them.
So, the bike ride through Amsterdam. It was like flying. I was under the night sky and I could drink it all up. It was just for me.I do not know what inspired the Van Gough starry nights, something that is now cliché to the art viewing lexicon. But to get a fresh take on it I highly suggest everyone riding on the front of a beautiful Danish boys bike after learning how to do a shot with salt and a lime. My hands finding his as I screamed over a curve in the road, we wove over stone streets and wooden bridges and the sky is now only shooting stars. Wondering if he could make me feel safe. Wondering if this was what it felt like to not be alone