mid-air suspension

Do you ever feel two things at once - 1) like you are moving way too fast, and there's way too much happening, for you to be able to really take a step back and assess, and 2) that you're a trapeze artist, swinging from one pole to the other, suspended in mid-air, waiting, waiting for that moment when everything comes into reach...

That's me these days. Things are moving fast, very fast - there's a lot of change, a lot of things happening that I will catch you up on - but other times I am suspended, weightless, in mid-air, waiting, waiting, waiting.

The movement in my life includes the fact that I SUCKED IT UP and bought a beautiful, brand new car (seriously, not a used new car, which are the only kinds of cars I've had all my life, but a NEW new car), and I participated in the LA 48 Hour Film Festival, where each group gets assigned a genre, a prop, a line of dialogue, and a character that must be used, and each team has 48 hours to write it, shoot it, edit it, and deliver it back to the post-production house. We screen tomorrow, and ours is a dark little comedy that I had a leading role in, and I'm very, very happy with my work and how it turned out in general.

I am also planning an event for my church, which I'm really excited about; I increased my work hours at my job, which will mean a slight increase in my income, which is why I sucked it up and bought the car; and I booked the lead in a gritty, low-budget horror movie that's set to shoot in a few weeks, and then literally the moment I wrap the film I'm going up to Yosemite with my family and spending five fantastic days getting zero cell phone service, taking a lot of deep breaths, walking a lot, taking four thousand pictures, and eating my weight in marshmallows.

Movement, indeed. There's a lot going on, a lot of balls up in the air that I'm using every ounce of my not-so-existent coordination to catch, and there's a lot of responsibility on my shoulders to get everything done, and organized, and taken care of.

Frankly, I'm a little burned out.

And then there's the other side of it, where I'm still waiting for movement, inertia, ANYTHING, to move ahead with me getting a theatrical agent in this town, and wanting to go on more auditions, and create more opportunities for acting for myself. And it just feels like it's crawling at a snail's pace. How can one area of my life move so fast and another move so slow? I feel like I'm permanently getting whiplash. Or at least carsick.

But that's me, I'm here, I am getting back into the swing of things and I'm working out more, which means less anxiety, and I finally bought that damn tree-hugging hippy New Age meditation CD which will probably work wonders as soon as I get over myself and open the damn thing. (Remember, I'm from New Hampshire. Robert Frost musing about giving into frostbite is about as sentimental as we get.)

To quote another poet: We're clear, we're ourselves, we're sailing.