Shake It Out

I've never done this before, so bear with me. I'm trying to post a video onto my page and until I hit "publish post" I'm not even sure it's gonna show up. So... here's to taking risks! (If it doesn't embed, you can find the music video here.)

I first heard "Shake it Out," the single off Florence + the Machine's second album (which will be released on November 1st, Dios de los Muertos, fittingly enough) a few weeks ago and I sat back and thought, this is going to be my theme song for October.

And it still is.

"Regrets collect like old friends
Here to relive your darkest moments
I can see no way, I can see no way
And all of the ghouls come out to play."

It's true that I regret very little in my life, the choices I make and have made. Part of what is wonderful about being a "present-focused" person is that I live in the immediate here and now. Of course, this does provide an astonishing lack of perspective occasionally, but most of the time, I am happy because I am not wishing for the future or longing for the past. Things settle on my skin and the tip of my tongue and I stay with them, allowing sensations and memories to melt and breathing it all in. But October is always a month to look back, to dig up the dead, even for me. I find myself looking at the past, not with regret, but certainly not without sadness. October, of all the months, is the month in which we grieve, and stand in front of death and birth, and feel the changes that are happening in our lives the most.

I've spent the last month and a half surrounded by tasks, tasks that required me to be fully present and 100% on my game, even as there were things swirling around me at all times. The last forty days required absolute focus and left me with very little room for error. As soon as I got back from Yosemite, I spent 11 days on set, from 6 pm to 6 am, and since this project was strictly a labor of love, I would then drive to my job at 6 am and work an 6 hour shift before returning to set.

In the middle of the shoot, I planned a lecture for my church that required me to organize reaching out to the community, advertise to other churches in the area, plan to feed everyone who attended, pick up the speaker at the airport, and do generally everything else that goes along with planning a huge speaking event. And it went fabulously, without a hitch.

Towards the end of the shoot, I was also blessed to officiate Lira's wedding. You can check out pictures here (I'm in a couple) and I have to say: the wedding was beautiful. Even running off the tiny amount of sleep I was going off of, I was able to officiate quite well, marry Lira and her boy Anthony correctly, and then designate myself Wedding Coordinator for the rest of the day, making sure Lira and Anthony actually got to eat, sit down, and enjoy their own wedding.

As soon as I was done with the still-under-wraps mysterious horror project that I will plug as soon as I can, I went straight into pre-production for season two of Hell Froze Over, the web-series I was in in 2009, and started shooting ANOTHER web-series, Living with Frankenstein, a supernatural British comedy where I play Mary Shelley, who, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley (and Frankenstein's monster) is living in modern day Los Angeles. :)

"And every demon wants his pound of flesh
But I like to keep some things to myself
I like to keep my issues strong
It's always darkest before the dawn."

And it's true that I like to keep some things private. It's always tough with a blog to balance what belongs in the public and what belongs in the privacy of our own hearts. When I am having a tough time, my friends and family are not always the first to know. But I am learning to put into words the feelings I feel when I'm not quite sure how to react or deal with the things that upset me. And I honestly think I'm getting better.

"And I've been a fool and I've been blind
I can never leave the past behind
I can see no way, I can see no way
I'm always dragging that horse around."

What October teaches me, more than anything, is that it is not letting go of the past that is the most important. It is coming to peace with the fact that the past will never be let go of. I grieve but I also sit in the grief, carry it like a blanket, and it keeps me company and the less I try to shoo it off my porch and the more I just let it keep me company... the quieter the past becomes in my head.

"And our love is pastured such a mournful sound
Tonight I'm gonna bury that horse in the ground
So I like to keep my issues strong
But it's always darkest before the dawn.

"Shake it out, shake it out, shake it out, shake it out, ooh
Shake it out, shake it out, shake it out, shake it out, ooh"

So I shake it out. I shake the grief, the tension, the sleeplessness, the stress, the frenetic frenzied energy, I shake all of it out my body and I keep on doing what I've always done. Which is put one foot in front of the other.

"And it's hard to dance with a devil on your back
So shake him off, oh woah

I am done with my graceless heart
So tonight I'm gonna cut it out and then restart
Cause I like to keep my issues strong
It's always darkest before the dawn."

I am done picking fights (did you SEE my last post?), done with my own graceless heart that cuts impatiently across conversations and memories and full-bloodied emotions, done being tired and less than understanding towards what others are going through, done being less than sympathetic and done being a full-blown workaholic who puts her best friend's wedding on her to-do list instead of her to-celebrate list.

Because it's hard to dance with a devil on your back, and October has more devils than most months. But man, you gotta just shake that crap out and restart. Because October has a lot of endings, for sure. But it also has beginnings, too.

Rape is not a metaphor.

I did NOT want to write this post.

I tried my damndest not to. But it kept boiling inside me, all the things I needed to say, and if that's not what a blog is for, then I don't know what is.

I would love to be filling you guys in on the new web-series I've been working on, or how the horror movie I've been shooting was 11 days of fun and blood and screaming and sleep deprivation, or how Lira's wedding (which I officiated) went.

But first, I have to get this off my chest.

A blogger that I absolutely adore and respect to the highest degree (whom I STILL adore and respect to the highest degree, but I absolutely disagree with on this point) blogged about the Johnny Depp Incident. Basically, Johnny Depp, in an interview with this month's Vanity Fair, compared the act of sitting through a photo shoot to being raped. His words were: "Well, you just feel like you’re being raped somehow. Raped.... It feels like a kind of weird –- just weird."

And this blogger said there was no need to apologize (which the lovely Johnny Depp did, after being called out about it by RAINN) and that we had become too hypersensitive in this day and age about the meaning of words. Commenters agreed with her, saying that many, many things can be raped, including Mother Earth, celebrities by the media, etc.

So this is what I wrote:

"I'm going to have to disagree and say that I'm pleased that he apologized. Part of what is now Rape Culture is using the word "raped" to mean things that do NOT mean raped. When Johnny (whom I adore to the highest degree) said that he felt raped by a photo shoot, he did not ACTUALLY mean that he physically had someone shove a body part into an orifice of his while he repeatedly said NO and that he will have to deal with the guilt and shame regarding what he was wearing and how he was acting for the rest of his life. He will not have to deal with society judging him, labeling him a slut, telling him he "asked for it" and to just move on. He will not have to take a pregnancy test and wonder if he might be carrying the baby of the person who violated him, he will not have flashbacks of being raped while he's trying to be intimate with his wife, he will not find himself afraid of the dark or back alleys or wonder "What if" for the rest of his life. He will not spend a large amount of time (perhaps the rest of his life) being ashamed and afraid of his own sexuality.

He will not do any of this because he was not raped, yet he used the word raped. I don't think it's Political Correctness, and I don't think sexual abuse survivors have "hijacked a word." I think they know all too well that rape is serious and horrific and loaded and comes with a slew of baggage put upon it by society, and it is Rape Culture that says that is acceptable to use that word casually and throw it around and take the seriousness away from it. Rape Culture is making it casual and funny and when people STOP wincing at that word, then fuck it, we have a much bigger problem on our hands.

Thanks for listening."

And I thought that was that, and I moved on with my day. Except for the fact that I didn't move on. I couldn't. I got more and more frustrated the more I thought about it. Because I don't think the word "raped" should be used as a metaphor, much like I don't think the word "retarded" or "gay" should either. The definition of rape is not "whenever I feel particularly violated." It is an act of sexual assault, and if you take the sex out of rape then you are watering it down to a PC Diet Coke version of something very real, very tangible, and very traumatizing that happens to a lot of people. The very definition of rape includes sex; the word "violate" does not.

A few years back my car was broken into. Did I feel violated? Sure. Did I go around telling people I was raped? No, I did not. Violated is not the same as raped.

But people are now raped all the time. They are raped by Netflix raising its prices, raped at gas stations due to raising prices, raped at copy centers due to raising prices.. come to think of it, I don't hear people use the word "rape" as a metaphor NOT related to money very often. How do you think that makes actual rape victims feel? Do you think if someone came to you and tearfully told you that they were raped, that you'd nod and say, I was raped last week too when I was asked to pay more than I thought I should for a goods or service! We have so much to talk about now!

No. You wouldn't do that.

Celebrities are also raped, sometimes for hours on end... on red carpets, at photo shoots. In interviews. So let's imagine that scenario, shall we? Imagine a loved one calls you up. You ask how they are. Not so good, they say. I was just raped. Oh my God, you exclaim, what happened? Your loved one goes on to explain that he or she willingly showed up to a job, where he or she proceeded to work at this job for several hours, didn't express any feelings of uncomfortableness or reservations about this job while the work was being done, was paid for this job, and afterward felt taken advantage of in some way. Now, I'm not undermining this experience. To feel taken advantage of, even when you are getting paid, and you showed up willingly, and you expressed your feelings to no one (because if you had, people would have rushed to rectify this) is not a fun one. But it is not the same thing as being raped.

You cannot have rape without sex, my friends. You CAN.NOT. If you have rape without sex then you are taking the very loaded, complicated, horrific aspect of this crime and putting glitter on it. The Mother Earth can be violated, trashed, taken advantage of, used, spat upon, and neglected. But until someone finds a way to sexually assault an entire planet, no, it was not raped.

There are millions upon millions of people out there who have suffered sexual violence. Some are women who have been forced to marry their rapists to protect their honor, and so they continue to be raped. Some women were raped on dates, some men and women are raped by their partners, some men and women who are raped while passed out at parties. Rape is humiliating, and shaming, and is rarely punishable or provable in court (leading to the statistic that only 1 in 20 rapists will ever see a day behind bars, and that a rapist, assuming correctly that he will not be prosecuted, rapes an average of 6 times in his life time. Yes, even date rapists.)

Rape is a struggle for one person to exert power over another. Rape is something that happens to everyone, of all races, incomes, religions, and cultures. Rape seeks to silence people by creating a bubble of shame around it. Society encourages this by saying "she's asking for it" and putting the sexual history of rape victims on trial when the very rare incident of a rape going to court actually DOES happen.

Rape is many, many things. But rape is not a metaphor. And it should not be used as one.

What I did this summer: a visual book report

Oh, I'm fully aware that my posts this summer, have, oh I don't know, sucked righteously? (As Bath pointed out: only I can get away with posting about how I'm going to post something. But I only get away with it because you guys LET ME, you enablers you.) But I guess that's what happens when you step away from the computer and put yourself into perpetual motion for three months straight, and I guess I'd say that even though I've missed you all terribly, and missed blogging regularly, I wouldn't have had it any other way :) I sort of had to take a step back from blogging about how ungrateful I was and instead get off my chair and go live myself back INTO gratitude. If that makes any sense, or maybe it just sounds like it belongs on the side of a Starbucks cup. But either way, it worked.

So behold: What I Did This Summer, by Tracy Clifton.

Both my brother Jeff's and Benni's birthday is Independence Day, so we caught an Anaheim Angels game and then watched the fireworks at the stadium. (cough:: go Red Sox ::cough) And if you were at all a little doubtful that after eating a huge hot dog and an ENTIRE bag of Cracker Jack by yourself at a baseball game you would still be able to devour ice cream birthday cake, people, consider me your Myth-buster.

I have no idea what I was wearing to make it look like I have
awesome cleavage in this shot, but hey, I'll take it.

baby, you're a firrrrrrework

Next up was San Diego's Comic Con, where all things nerdy and geeky unite. I went dressed as Neil Gaiman's Death (it was a Halloween costume a few years ago) and Benni went as the Eleventh Doctor from the Doctor Who British television series. Fun fact: dressing up as The Doctor gets you more squealing fan-girls than I would have thought. Benni was a lucky man at Comic Con this year. :)

Benni posing in front of his blue phone booth, complete
with the Doctor's sonic screwdriver.

Me posing with Wendy Pini, creator of Elfquest
(my first comic-book!) and all-around feminist bad-ass.

Darth is the MAN.

I met another Death! She was more old-school but super-sweet.

Benni and I battle it out in front of the Emperor's Throne from Star Wars.
C'mon, people, if you put a sonic screwdriver up against a light-saber,
who do YOU think would win?!

Yes. Yes, that is Mark Hamill, Luke Skywalker from Star Wars.
I about died. I was going to tell him that when I was little,
I wanted to be Luke Skywalker when I grew up, although
that's obviously a lie. Everyone knows I wanted to be Boba Fett.

Benni and I in full costume.

When Benni and I got back from Comic-Con, we got to go to the new Dino Hall Exhibit at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum (I'm a museum geek) and it was awesome! If you're in LA I highly suggest going.

grrrrr argh


A few weeks after that, Benni and I were invited to go The Magic Castle in Hollywood, one of the top places to go and watch magic. We got to see a lot of sleight of hand tricks in the close-up gallery (I was sitting two feet from the magician and I STILL couldn't see how he did his tricks) and a lot of illusions in the big theater room. It was fantastic. The Magic Castle has a dress code, too, so women have to wear dresses and men are required to wear coats and ties, so you feel super fancy when you go. :)

super fancy clothes require that you kick one foot into the air behind you. FACT.


And then two weeks ago I started shooting on my top-secret horror film (so no pictures allowed, sadly) and then I went to Yosemite National Park last weekend with Benni, my mom and aunt, my brother Jeff, my cousin Tom and his girlfriend Val. We road-tripped up with Tom and Val in his SUV and opened the sun roof and just soaked up the fresh air and sunshine.

View from the back of the car.

bliss.

When we got to the campsite, we set up camp and had dinner, then got some rest. The next day we all hiked to Yosemite Falls and then my mom and aunt took a break while Benni, Jeff, Tom, Val and I rock-hopped over to the base of the falls. Here's Yosemite Falls:

We then took a drive up to Glacier Point, where you can see almost an entire 360 degree view of Yosemite Valley, and I took a picture of Half Dome in the valley:

and got a picture of (from l. to r.) Benni, Val, Tom, and Jeff standing on the wall that looks out over the valley. Gorgeous, no?

I also tried to be artsy and take a picture from inside a rock shelter of the valley outside, complete with Half Dome in the forefront. If you notice the bunny ears on the right hand side, that's my mom(!!) photo-bombing my picture. As you can tell, my mom has as much emotional maturity as a I do. Which is to say, zilch.

The following day was our big hike day. My mom and aunt decided to accompany the rest of the gang to Vernal Fall, which is a 2.5 mile hike round trip, and then the youngsters would continue up to Nevada Fall, which is an 8 mile hike round trip. Here we are at the top of Nevada Fall, just before a huge thunderstorm rolled in:

(l. to r.: Tom, Val, Jeff, Benni, me)

Here's an unobstructed view of Nevada Fall:

And here' s Benni and me at the top of the fall:

Right after that picture a huge clap of thunder sounded, we put on our ponchos, and hustled our butts 4 miles back down the trail so as to not get fried by lightening. Good times!

The next day we relaxed and drove all around the park. Here's a deer tail for you! She was just sort of cruising a parking lot, looking for fallen apples off the apples trees they have, and wasn't really intimidated by people at all until they got a little too close for her liking.

The final day we drove to the national Sequoia park that Yosemite has on the outskirts of its own park, and saw The Grizzly Giant, which is roughly 18 stories tall and guesstimated to be approximately 2000 years old. I left the people there at the very bottom in the picture so you can see the scale of this thing. Absolutely amazing - if you put a full-sized jet alongside it and propped it up on its end, the tree would still be taller.

Overall, I had a wonderful experience camping and hiking, but I'm glad to be back where there are warm showers, soft beds.... and cell phone reception. Check out what this guy had to do just to have a conversation :)

And that's my summer in a nutshell. I've still another week of shooting The Sunshine Project, and I've got a road-trip up to Santa Barbara for a friend's wedding this weekend, and I'm officiating this pretty girl's wedding at the beginning of October. So I'm still staying busy but I'll always remember to post pictures! Even if they're three months late! YAY!

September

(photo credit: I got it from here)

“Here is the truth about September: it sneaks up on you and all of a sudden it’s autumn, and you don’t know what to do with your recently orphaned August daydreams so you tuck them between the pages of brand new notebooks and leave them in the corners of your sweatshirt pockets to gather lint and you set them on fire until all the trees are smoldering red and orange and yellow.” - unknown (meaning: I don't know who said it. If you do, please let me know in your comment?)

I am busier than I have been in a very, very long time... but tomorrow I leave for Yosemite National Park and I plan on not turning on my phone once, not answering a single email, just spending time with my family and boyfriend and taking photographs and hiking until my heart quickens and my breath deepens and I am grateful for every last ounce of my life.

I will be back next week with a GPOY post (Gratuitous Pictures of Yourself) that will cover everything from the Fourth of July to my new headshots to a few pictures on set of the horror film I'm still shooting to Yosemite, and everything in between.

Have a beautiful week, everyone. I'm so grateful to be a part of this blogging community.

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.

I'm not dead/ just floating

The problem with using your blog as a diary and simultaneous motivator is obvious, when you look at it: it's the very simple fact that when things are hard in your life, you don't want to make a record of it to go back to; but then you can't really blog so you end up feeling alone. And as someone who considers myself a fighter, with that very New England spirit of hating whiners, even more so when it's myself doing the whining, I basically boxed myself in, and left myself with no one to talk to. And I shut you all out. And for that, I'm sorry.

I think blogs are supposed to represent us at our most honest: the good days and the bad. And when I'm doing badly, well, I tend to push people away and not want to talk about it, because I'm pretty sure you don't want to hear it. And I hate talking about it, I really do. And I sometimes think this blog is supposed to be the place where I put my best face forward (except for the occasional hilarious story about me knocking myself unconscious on a tree) and I think I need to just knock that the hell off.

So many of you left beautiful, wonderful, amazingly supportive comments that I just never even responded to - which is crappy of me - and I want to say belatedly that every single one of them made me light up inside and grin and tear up and feel like you guys really do understand me. And a very special shout-out goes to Bathwater, who not only left me incredibly supportive comments but also tirelessly emailed me to check in on me. Bath, you are an amazing man. I can't thank you enough for being such a good friend.

Things are moving ahead slowly and steadily. To be absolutely and brutally honest, which I'm trying to be a bit more, I have stopped being able to make it to my martial arts classes and without those natural mood-lifting endorphins I get when I exercise, I relapsed into my depression. I don't talk a lot about my depression, mostly because when I work out three days a week I'm usually beating it, but sometimes it gets the better of me, and I hate feeling like I'm admitting defeat when I post about it. But there it is. It is a constant weight on my shoulders, and I am always aware of it, looking for signs of it, looking for when I open my mouth and instead of it being ME who speaks, it is the depression - and it knows all of my back doors and cracks and buttons, this demon, and it's really damn good at making me want to give up.

So I have that to wrestle with, and I'm going to try meditation (if you just rolled your eyes, believe me, I did too, but I'm out of drug-less options at this point) so that I can actually sleep at night and concentrate and not tear up when things aren't 100 percent perfect. I'm also going to be buying a new car in September that I can't really afford, but the constant repairs that I ALSO can't afford will cease and I will be driving a car that I actually like for my two hour daily commute, and that will make things better. I am also auditioning more, moving forward with a second season of my web-series, and I'm going to go restore my soul by camping at Yosemite in early September.

So good things are happening and are on the horizon. I'm horribly behind on reading and commenting on everyone's blogs - again, my apologies. I took a giant step back from this blog, but honestly, now that I think about it, I moved in the wrong direction. I see now that with blogger friends like you guys, I didn't need to step back. I needed to step forward and really listen to how amazingly supportive you guys were, and I'm gonna try to work at doing that from now on.

Much love and light,
Tracy

Gamblers All (by Charles Bukowski)

sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think,
i’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside
remembering all the times you’ve felt that way, and
you walk to the bathroom, do your toilet, see that face
in the mirror, oh my oh my oh my, but you comb your hair anyway,
get into your street clothes, feed the cats, fetch the
newspaper of horror, place it on the coffee table, kiss your
wife goodbye, and then you are backing the car out into life itself,
like millions of others you enter the arena once more.

you are on the freeway threading through traffic now,
moving both towards something and towards nothing at all as you punch
the radio on and get mozart, which is something, and you will somehow
get through the slow days and the busy days and the dull
days and the hateful days and the rare days, all both so delightful
and so disappointing because
we are all so alike and so different.

you find the turn-off, drive through the most dangerous
part of town, feel momentarily wonderful as mozart works
his way into your brain and slides down along your bones and
out through your shoes.

it’s been a tough fight worth fighting
as we all drive along
betting on another day.

**************************************************

I've been reading this poem a lot lately. Not much new to report, still suffering minor setbacks and minor triumphs. But as Bukowski also once said, "It's been a beautiful fight. Still is."

I'm making my way back.

(I WISH the fort I've been hiding in looked like this. I got it from here.)