Will you hold my hand as the world ends? Will you still think of me?

Today marked the first wedding I'd been to as an appreciated personal invitee, rather than an obligatory extended family member. It's strange that family members who I've known all my life and who I'm supposedly important to usually leave me feeling distant and out of place, but this gal and her hubby whom I've known for barely a year and haven't spent a whole lot of time with left me glowing and tearing up with all the rest.

Actually it's not strange at all: of course someone who I'm connected to by choice will touch me more deeply than someone who I'm connected to by cultural obligation. Which is exactly why marriage is so strange to me--it turns voluntary relationships into obligation.

Now you have to stay with me and love me and share with me. Don't want to? Too bad, you made a vow.

Obviously, the divorce rate is evidence that these vows aren't quite that sacred and unbreakable. But if you believe in divorce, and intend on leaving yourself an escape route should things turn sour, why make vows in the first place? There seems to be a belief that's beaten into us from childhood that love is only "true" if it lasts forever. In order to believe that they are loved, people want that promise as proof. This is the ideal that most of us are taught to seek, but eventually most people need freedom, and promises are broken. How many young couples (maybe old couples too, I don't know) swear that they'll always be together? How many actually are?

"I've never been in love before. I only thought I was."

Or maybe you were in love, but something changed and things didn't work out. People aren't static, so why should relationships be?

The other thing that confuses me about marriage is how public it is. Even if it's a small wedding for family and a few friends, how can two people reveal their feelings to anyone but each other? I imagine myself in the position where I actually want to promise the rest of my life to someone. No one else in the world would be able to truly understand what that meant except for that one person, so why should we try to communicate it to a group of gawking spectators? Marriage is like a common ground for lovers to land on so that onlookers can watch and say yes that is or no that isn't love. An attempt to communicate the incommunicable.

Why put boundaries on something so wild and boundless?

So glad to meet you, Angeles

I decided to take up recording my dreams again after a long hiatus. I woke up three or four times last night before waking up for real, and the above is the result.

The bottom (legible) portion reads:

I was in Japan crossing the street back to where we were staying and Eddie Hoffman walked up.
"Excuse me."
"Yeah?"
"Is so-and-so on this trip?"
"I don't know who that is so I don't know."
Eddie kept walking and ran into the kid he was looking for. The kid yelled across the street that I didn't know he was there because I'm Gay! GAY! blah blah blah.

So apparently I even give off that impression in dreams. I'm not gay, I just have a dancer's body and unusually sparkly eyes.

The upper (illegible) portion reads, as best I can discern or remember:

Dr. Faustus flops horribly but just a rough night. We are all do--[I tried to scribble out my mistake but missed] going to hell. Trying to figure out if it's all worth it.

Only my parents and sister [somethingsomething]
We're all dreading if we [scribbles] excercize [scribblescribbles] someone from an overflowing ship.

[I believe the following hyphen is to indicate a new, separate dream]
--no I didn't. That was the new Pixar movie. I seated us and we had to look to find each other.

............

I hope that tickled you half as much as it tickled me.

On another note, I transfered all of my dates into my little calendar majig and finally realized how daunting my schedule is for the next few months. At the moment I'm at school all afternoon then go straight to either a Faustus performance or Shady Shakespeare rehearsal. In a couple weeks I'll be at work at 9, leave for school at 12:30, then go straight to rehearsal in the evenings. After that week school will be out so I'll have a little break in the afternoon. After looking more closely at my rehearsal schedule I am surprised to see that I am called almost every night despite having small roles in both shows. Rehearsal for Strega Nona starts the week after As You Like it opens which is the week that Richard III opens and also happens to be the first week of my acting camp at The Dragon. I rehearse for Strega Nona every day that I'm not performing with Shady, and then that opens the week after Richard III closes. We perform in Berkeley until Octover 4, then move to San Ramon until the 18th, and then embark on my first tour the following Tuesday. This means that I'm going to be gone for my birthday and Halloween. I'm still very excited, and I think I'm going to love travelling around with a show for the first time, but it's a little disheartening that the first week after we embark is the week that I'm likely to miss being home the most.

After that I'm home from November 23 to January 10. This will be the first time between now and then that I have a break of more than two consecutive days, which means I'll finally have time to get my wisdom teeth removed and safely recuperate.

In conclusion: holy shit.