Lego Of God

This is my first blog that I’m writing directly onto Blogger. So, mostly this is a test to see if it will work.

The weekend consisted of: Going to Lego Land with Mulan. My friend Robert joined us. Robert is a musician friend who is producing the Letting Go Of God CD, which we talked about -- a lot -- during the day. More on that later.

Robert sang Hank Williams songs and played guitar all the way to Lego Land. We got there just after it opened on Saturday. It was overcast and almost drizzling with rain. It wasn’t even all that crowed. PERFECT. And Mulan had a blast. I learned something about her, something I probably should have known before. She loves roller coasters. This girl loves to go FAST. We went on two different ones over and over again. She could have gone on them for the whole day. The kids I’ve been around in the past were afraid of roller coasters at this age. But Mulan was sooo into it. She kept saying, "One more time!" Even before we got done with the ride. Robert and I kept laughing because that is the first three words Mulan ever said. I can see her already in the back of a convertible, sitting on the back like a beauty queen in a parade, her arms in the air and some boys in the front seat, and Mulan yelling, "One more time, boys!"

Jeez. Do I need to move to a remote island? Rejoin the Catholic Church and send her to the convent? Or just hold my breath and see what happens?

My favorite part of Lego Land was mini-town. We left around three and went to eat at a restaurant that Robert knew about. He used to live right by there in Carlsbad. Then we drove home and Mulan slept the whole way. I promised to take her to Magic Mountain next. I cannot wait.

So, I’m doing my darndest to get the CD out by December 1st. I already have over four thousand people who’ve e-mailed me and said they wanted it. I’m going to do a four cd package: the live version and the spoken word version together. I want it to cost less than $20, or maybe just $20. I couldn’t decide between the live version and the spoken word and so this is how I’m going to do it. I’m recording the spoken word version on Thursday and Robert is editing the live performances. I am getting my picture taken on Monday for the cover. I am so late getting this together.

Things are going to start going crazy in the next week or so and stay that way until Christmas. The shows at the Groundlings, then to New York for three weeks, then on the family reunion cruise, then back and Christmas will be here. All the while, squeezing in three days a week at Desperate Housewives.

On the way home from Lego Land, Robert and I taught Mulan “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” Sometimes I think there are songs that just have to be filed in your head for inevitable moments that will crop up. I already taught Mulan, “I Want To Be Around.”

“I wanna be around, to pick up the pieces, when somebody breaks your heart. Some somebody twice as smart as me. A somebody who will swear to be true, just like you used to do with me. Who’ll leave you to learn that misery loves company! Wait and see!”

Oh that’s a great one. Maybe not a song that every five year old needs to know, but certainly every adult!

I spent the rest of the weekend making my big vegetable soup and reading Peter Singer’s “In Defense Of Animals.” It’s a collection of essays that Singer edits. It’s really good.

I keep getting lots of letters about hearing my show excerpt on This American Life. That is so cool. I can’t wait until the CD is done…

Charlie Rocket is dead

Oh I am so sad. I am at work at Universal Studios, and it's a rainy day. And I'm very depressed. Because Charlie Rocket is dead. I just heard today that he killed himself on Oct. 7th. He was a fellow actor in It's Pat and he became a friend.

I would see him a few times a year, he'd come to parties at my house. I always loved to be around him. I am so shocked and sad. I was thinking about the last time I saw him. I think it was coming out of some Hollywood party and we were both waiting for our cars fromthe valet. Was it at Kathy Griffin's house? A year ago? It must have been two years ago. Oh dear, how time flies.

We gave each other big hugs and stood (if I remember correctly) in the rain, (just like today) waiting. I liked how tall he was, he could engulf you in a hug. He was wearing a tweed overcoat and he looked British -- a chimney sweep -- a Dick Van Dyke with a sinister side.

He always seemed so happy. His wife, Beth, was always warm and conversational, a real glow by his side. I can hardly concentrate on work, I'm just so depressed about this. And it makes me think that maybe I didn't know him all that well, that he could have killed himself. And it makes me wish I'd spent more time around him.

We had this one big scene in the Pat movie, where his character, Kyle, tries to seduce Pat with wine and music. We laughed so hard that day, we could hardly shoot the scene. He was so hilarious in that scene, and every take he had something new and it would take me by surprise. I remember thinking it was the most enjoyable day I had ever spent on a set -- and that movie had plenty of great, memorable, funny days -- Dave Foley playing Chris and Kathy Griffin playing Pat's neighbor. Julie Hayden, a friend of mine, played Charlie Rocket's wife in the movie and they were just great together. Later, Julie got cancer at the exact same time as me. When I went for radiation, she was getting chemo and we would sit together. Once we called Charlie up from the hospital to just chat.

And now both of them are dead. Come to think of it, my brother Mike and my Dad were also in the Pat movie. For some reason this all makes me want to move back to Spokane. Like that's going to slow down time for some reason. Or that Spokane will allow me to just digest everything. Or something.

Anyway, I can't imagine what pain Charlie Rocket's family must be in at this time. I just remember laughing around him, always laughing. He was so clever and dark and his voice was soothing and disturbing at the same time. He always looked so dashing. He always seemed so genuinely happy to see me. And I always lit up around him.

There's another moment in the "It's Pat" movie where Charlie's character, Kyle, hacks the code to Pat's secret computer diary. He's so happy, he grabs a Pat doll he has in his room and kisses it on the lips saying, "We're in! We're In! We're in" as his voice gets deeper and more sexual. And then he tosses the Pat doll behind him and starts to read the diary. And it was so funny to me, his take on that. And whenever I hear those words, "I'm in, I'm in" - I think of him. And I laugh again.

Anyway... It's still pouring rain. I wish I were home. I wish I were making cookies. I want to be quilting and a fire in the fireplace. I heard around the office that the electricity was out in my neighborhood, but I just called home and they have power. But still, I feel like fleeing home, rushing in the door and just grabbing Mulan, like it's a natural disaster. Like -- yeah, she's alive. It's so weird how this is effecting me. Or maybe typical or appropriate.

Another thing about Charlie. I loved how he talked about his wife. Beth is an artist and he always spoke about her with such admiration. And they had been married for a long, long time. And I just loved that about Charlie. How much he loved his family. How he would tell funny stories about his son, Zane, and things that happened in his house with such enthusiasm. The mundane twists of everyday life were so amusing to him. Oh. I am just so sad. I've got to just go home.

My dear friend Jim Emerson, who co-wrote "It's Pat - The Movie" with me, wrote something about him for RogerEbert.com that I will reprint here.

Charles Rocket, R.I.P.

Jim Emerson / October 17, 2005
Actor, comedian and musician Charles Rocket had roles in such films as Robert Altman's "Short Cuts," Kevin Costner's Oscar-winning "Dances With Wolves" and the Farrelly Brothers' hit "Dumb and Dumber."

But the Associated Press article about his death (he apparently cut his own throat and was found October 7 in a field near his home in Connecticut) began: "Actor and comedian Charles Rocket, who had roles in a variety of movies and TV series and briefly gained notoriety for uttering an obscenity on 'Saturday Night Live,' committed suicide, the state medical examiner ruled."

AP devoted nine paragraphs to Rocket, and four of them referred to "the incident." The first line of his IMDb entry is: "Once uttered the "F" word live on "Saturday Night Live" (1975)." In some way, I think he must have known that would be the stupid piece of trivia that followed him to his grave.

It's so strange and unpredictable the way a person's "public life" can be encapsulated for mass consumption. I worked with Rocket briefly on a little "SNL" spin-off movie ("It's Pat," 1994), and he was a genuinely funny guy. (He played Kyle, the obnoxious neighbor so obsessed with the bizarre sexual "mystery" of Pat that he fell in love, not knowing or caring if Pat was a him or a her; the not-knowing both fed Kyle's fantasies and drove him crazy.)

There's a surfeit of "down time" for the actors on a set, even a low-budget, tight-scheduled studio picture like this one, and I remember one afternoon in particular that could have been dull if it hadn't been for Charlie Rocket. He kept a group of us (Julia Sweeney, Dave Foley, Kathy Griffin, among others) laughing with his stories -- including, eventually, his definitive account of the notorious "f-word" incident. He didn't do it on purpose, and didn't even remember saying it; they had to show him the playback before he was absolutely sure he'd said it. And, the record will show, he was neither the first nor the last "SNL" cast member to have made this particular mistake -- but because he was on the show in 1980-81 (with Eddie Murphy, Joe Piscopo, Gilbert Gottfried), just after the now-legendary original cast had left, the profanity struck many as a deliberate, desperate act on an unfunny, dying show. Charlie Rocket, who died at age 56, deserves better than that.

An obit in _Variety did feature a few interesting tidbits:

Rocket appeared in feature films including "Earth Girls are Easy," "Dances with Wolves," "It's Pat" and "Dumb and Dumber." His last film role was in the 2003 Sylvester StalloneSylvester Stallone film "Shade." On TV, he appeared on shows including "Law & Order: Criminal Intent," "Cybill," "Touched by an Angel" and "thirtysomething."

Rocket played accordion in many bands, performing (with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein of Blondie) on a tribute album to Fellini composer Nino Rota. And I was happy to find a personal appreciation in the Providence Phoenix. It mentions the "f-word incident" only in passing -- but it does note that the group he co-founded, the Fabulous Motels, was virtually the house band at the influential Road Island School of Design for a time in the 1970s: A news anchor job lured him to Colorado Springs, and when he later moved to Nashville, the network affiliate insisted Claverie [his real surname] was too weird a name. Picking from a number of suggested monikers, he chose "Charles Kennedy."

Then came what we all hoped would be the big break. Charlie was selected to star on Saturday Night Live for the 1980-81 season. He would anchor "Weekend Update." He would finally get the type of audience that his talent demanded and deserved. But this was the year that Lorne Michaels left in a disagreement with NBC. Jean Doumanian took over and hired some very bad writers. Charlie was stuck in the middle, trying to do his best in an increasingly untenable situation. Those who knew Charlie were not surprised to find that his best SNL moments were the "Rocket Reports," filmed skits of his own design. Before the season ended, he blurted out the f-word and was tossed off the show.

Moving to Los Angeles, Charlie appeared in dozens of films in supporting and starring roles, and
more than 50 episodes of different TV shows.

But that’s just the "Hollywood career" stuff. To his thousands of friends and fans here in Rhode Island, Charlie was the kindest and most generous type of person. We loved him without reservation, and he gave us that love back. He was a towering figure in the underground arts scene in the Providence of the 1970s. He heavily influenced Talking Heads, the Young Adults, and dozens of other bands. Those who were active then will tell you that Charles Rocket, in many ways, helped create the template for the underground/hipster/bohemian art scene here and elsewhere. We love you, Charlie. Our hearts are with Beth and Zane, and the rest of Charlie’s family and family of friends. He was our hero.

To Charlie.

Moving my blog to blogger

Well, I'm moving my blog to blogger.com. This was all started by a person who wrote me about all that was wrong with my blog and site -- too small of print, no way to respond in the way you can on other blogs, etc. And I realized he was right! So I have been consulting with my website people and I'm changing my site -- new home page, etc. Also, I'm going to have it link to blogger.com because they clearly have the best set up as far as I can see. It will all be much better. So, in the meantime, I'm not really blogging. Waiting for the remodel, you know.

I did my first of my Sunday morning shows on Sunday and it seemed to go well. I leave for Spokane on Wednesday to do the benefit and then I have two more performances of In The Family Way before I start Letting Go Of God again. If I can get an audience, I'll continue the Sunday thing between February and May -- then the goal is to shoot the film then.

I saw a sneak of the movie In Her Shoes this weekend. I sobbed the entire movie. Like... the whole movie. I couldn't stop crying. It's a formula chick flick that completely works and is engrossing and stylish and funny and ah... a tearjerker.

More when I am on blogger.com...

Like everyone I know, I cannot stop reading, watching and listening to news about the flood. It’s just so depressing. That’s an understatement. Even the understatement is understating it. Having just read Jared Diamond’s “Collapse” and having just finished (at midnight last night) “Tomorrow Now” by Bruce Sterling and having just read (Bill McKibbon's article) in Grist Magazine, I just…I’m so terrified and disillusioned and resigned and sad about the future of everything. I didn’t realize until I was over forty what a precious and fragile thing CIVILIZATION is. Civilization: I’ve taken it for granted for my whole life. I’m fairly pessimistic about the future of us humans, but I think I was hoping that I would live through the last vestiges of the beginning of the end – I wouldn’t personally see it start to totally unravel. I know it may seem like I’m overreacting. I know that people had the same feelings in the 50s with the bomb and at the beginning of the industrial revolution and probably at the dawn of every new age time and again. I know that I may reread this in the future and sneer at my hysterical negative self. But still, it’s three forty-five in the morning and I cannot sleep. And it’s because I feel so sad about the future of our planet, the future that my daughter will navigate. There’s so many bad signs: a terrible government who wages senseless, needless wars, a government who uses religion to scare people and simultaneously make them more complacent, a government who actively tries to mislead or keep quality education from the masses, environmental disasters, poor planning for the future. We are Easter Island, carving oversized statues – making war with the tribes nearby and cutting down our last tree. What’s next? The Avian flu – some pandemic of some sort? The San Andreas fault ruptures? Oceans rising, millions displaced?

Yesterday, I went to Space.com and watched the little movie taken by the (space probe) headed to Mercury. Watching it was comforting and troubling. We are so small, such a little small blip. We are so teeny and vulnerable. And we aren’t that smart and we’re really violent. I mean, we are creative and lovable and joyous and mad. But oh jeez, calm planning is not our strong suit. Oh god, this all sounds so portentous – I must stop writing this. All these grand “we’s” and “our’s.” What am I, WHO am I to be -- generalizing and philosophizing on such a grand scale? With enough arrogance and authority to actually type it?

But still, this is what I’m thinking about all the time. This is why I cannot sleep tonight.
I am funneling all my anxiety into quilting these days. My friend Julia got me into it. She bought all these old quilts on E-bay and restored some of them. She gave us one that is now on Mulan’s bed. Its all hand stitched, made from feed sacks, and made in the thirties or forties. It’s gorgeous. Then Julia organized this quilting class that I’m taking at the Sewing Arts Center.

Now, our teacher, Russell is a major part of my life. There are three of us women in the class, Val, Maria, Julia and I. We are all nearly the same age, three of us are single, two of us have children. All of us are finding new meaning in life through quilting. (Maria’s not all the way there in her commitment, but I have faith in her.)

I made a small quilt for Mulan’s favorite stuffed animal: a blue-green elephant named Eddie. I am almost done with it. I machine stitched the two-inch blocks and then am hand stitching the quilting. The batting is rather thick and stiff and I have to jab-sew the stitches which makes them awkward and uneven and it’s a chore. But still. I want to do almost nothing else.
In the meantime, I lost my mind and bought almost fifteen quilts on E-bay! I spent over a thousand dollars on quilts and quilt tops. Most were about a hundred dollars apiece. I couldn’t stop myself, I was obsessed. I should have been giving that money to victims. I mean, I DID give money to the International Medical Corps Hurricane Katrina fund, even…almost the same amount that I spent on quilts, but I should have given more. I admit my petty personal obsessions, my lack of total generosity. It seems like the more bad news I hear, the more fearful books I read, the more I need to… to…own handmade quilts made in the thirties! Depression quilts. I like to run my fingers over the hand stitches and imagine the woman who made them. I’ve learned all the names of the patterns: Old Maid’s Puzzle, Grandma’s Flower Garden, Pinwheels, Nine Patch, Irish Chain, Drunkard’s Path, Flying Geese, Bowties, Courtyard Crosses. I dream of buying a nice sewing machine.

Then Julia got a quilt top, an unfinished quilt top that she is finishing for her son: Will. That means that the fabrics were pieced together and sewed, but it has no batting or backing. I kept imagining the woman who made the quilt top – long dead – and now, fifty or sixty years later her quilt top is getting lovingly finished by my friend, Julia. I was so moved by this act. Julia said, “It’s sort of like Mulan, in a way – you’ll never know who her mother was, it’s this unknown person who created this wonderful thing, but you are finishing it.” Maybe this is true, but I find this completing-quilts-started-by-others oddly and yet deeply spiritual. Wow, getting quilt tops and then finishing them! I never knew. I never knew that was even a thing to DO! What was the quilt maker thinking while she stitched? Did her daughters or sons help? How did she decide on this fabric here and that fabric there? Was it even a woman who did it? Was the fabric from dresses that meant something? Or feed sacks long saved? You start to see how some people have an eye for color and fabric combinations and others just don’t.

So, anyway, I now have bought about eight or nine quilt tops! I have two years of quilting to do before I’m done and I have only three beds in my house! What am I doing? I’ve gone batty! Worse, in the end, now that I have eight quilts in my living room and seven or maybe eight more to come, I think I should have just spent that amount of money on two really fantastic quilts. Still, I feel I’ve rescued the quilts I did buy somehow. Some seem like they weren’t appreciated – one has a rip that makes me think it was on a pullout bed and it got caught in the hinges. I will repair it and make it nice. I will make that long dead grandma proud. It’s impossible not to imagine her smiling down on me.
I listen to NPR while I quilt. I broke into tears the other day when I heard about the nursing home – why do I say “the” – I think there were several…where a woman was dead, clutching a piece of paper where she’d written the phone numbers of her next of kin. I couldn’t stop thinking about her – what were her joys in life, what did she create, what did she cook, when did she laugh so hard she couldn’t stop, when did she climb into bed with her parents after a bad dream? Was she a quilter????

Oh jeez, I sound so melodramatic. But I can’t help it. I can’t stop getting teary and even crying when I hear the stories. What a horrible way to die – waters rising, hope receding, a lifetime of thought drowning in mucky, oily, bacteria-filled water. Dogs and cats dying, scratching and whimpering, gulping and gasping, letting it go, stopping the fight for life. The kids trapped in attics. It’s just too much. One guy who drove a helicopter said over half of the three hundred people he participated in rescuing were children. He said that even though he feels he did help save these kids, he knows there were many more times that number out there who didn’t get saved. Who just waited and waited. He described flying by one house and seeing a little hand, a teeny little hand waving from an attic vent. Oh my god, now I am crying again. Jeez. What a disaster! And a gutted Fema run by a republican crony who used to raise Arabian horses and all our manpower trying to secure our rights to oil in the Middle East. And then…it’s oil here too that’s the problem. Those vast streaks of oil. It’s like the oil is our dark side, and now it’s seeping out all over the place. It’s like the old bottle of bourbon hid in the toilet and it broke and now everyone’s just staring at it and it’s all out there in the open and mixed up with our regular old poop. And Bush thinks this is a good time for another tax cut! He wants to make the estate tax permanently gone – a tax that benefits only the rich. We’re making all the classic mistakes. We are not unique – other great powers have descended into dark ages. The way to descend has earmarks: heightened religiosity, greater divisions between rich and poor, it’s a formula and we’re right there on that path. Oh, it’s time to just listen to some music and look at the stars and try to calm down.

Now it’s five a.m. I am going to go watch the Jon Stewart’s I have on TIVO and quilt until Mulan wakes up. Only now I feel almost...tired after writing this. I think maybe I could go back to sleep. I think I am relaxing. Good night. I mean, good morning.
Saturday…

I just listened to This American Life – the flood episode. It’s so sad. We lost total control. And it was totally our fault. There was no big plan. There was no real plan at all. I have absolutely no confidence that our government would protect anybody from and through a big disaster.

Anthropomorphizing Demons and Ideas

It’s early Saturday morning. Last night I went to a party where I met this guy who wrote The Science Behind The Science of Star Trek. Andre…something. I can’t remember his last name. We only talked ten minutes, maybe even less, but it was awesome. I was energized by the whole conversation. We talked about how astronomers really do their work off computers now – it’s not like they are outside at night with a telescope. Like at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, mostly the astronomers sit in rooms a few thousand feet below the actual telescope and they can operate the telescopes from their room. They see the images on the computer. I wanted to go visit Keck. I still do, but after learning that, my interest was diminished a bit. If its just images on a computer screen, why not look at the DVDs from the Hubble missions? Which of course, I have. But then those images are enhanced in certain ways – colors, contrasts and so forth. Which makes you think, well – what are we looking out at anyway? Our eyes only can see a certain spectrum of light and color. Why not manipulate that light and color – it’s just adjusting our personal filter of that image. The adjustment might even cause us to understand the image better. But there’s something lost. There’s something that starts to feel all made up about the whole endeavor.

I still have a dream of traveling the world and visiting the great Observatories.

I have still been thinking about that passage in Mark that I “mangled” in my San Francisco Chronicle interview. Why did I get that wrong? Maybe because, in that story, the character(s) that seem the most alive are the demons. A man comes up to Jesus and says he is possessed by demons. The conversation Jesus has is with the demons that describe themselves as of great number. I think that’s where I got the “people” part – not “person.” And then they ask to get put into a herd of two thousand pigs, which Jesus does. In my mind, that’s images of demons and pigs together. Then they run off a cliff. I think one of my problems is that I can’t think of “demons” as anything other than “people.” I anthropomorphize demons. In my mind, they have goatees and black turtlenecks and maybe even capes, and wings, and long crooked noses: witches, warlocks, but in the end…people. People dressed up to look like demons. I guess you could say: actors. Because all my images of demons come from movies where they are played by people. And when their spirits go into the pigs and the pigs kill themselves, it’s people and pigs killing themselves. When the demon(s) go out of the man, he seems to have lost his personality. I lose interest in his character after he doesn’t have demons. He seems to become a zombie, devoid of personality. It’s like Jesus strips him of his personality and then sends him off to spread the “message” of Jesus’ power.

Not that I am excusing myself for my lapse. It’s just…I’ve been musing about why I made that error. Why did I remember that passage that way?

My friend Kevin Gun, who is in seminary school to become an Episcopal priest, wrote and said that his class is studying this very passage at school, Mark 5: 10-20, and that his teacher starts the year with that passage because it’s so bizarre and unsettling. Here is a nice analysis of this Bible passage that I found: (Mark 5 analysis by Austin Cline)

I woke up thinking about these things. I haven’t come to any conclusions exactly yet. But this is what I woke up thinking about:

So many Christians who write to me feel persecuted and in a minority. They feel they are the underdogs. They also often describe the mainstream culture as hedonistic or without morality: society gone out of control. And they think that a return to the laws of God (their particular god) will make society much better and more loving and more pure.

Then I thought this: Christians don’t want evolution taught in the schools. Not only that, they can’t let themselves even consider that evolution is the means through which we people came to be. Probably because it’s too cold and haphazard and accidental. To think we feeling people came from such an unfeeling universe, a universe that doesn’t even have the consciousness to care about us humans is intolerable. Well, that’s understandable. It is very difficult to accept that, because we humans feel so much love for each other. We are deeply, emotionally connected to each to other. It’s almost impossible to think that the universe doesn’t have those same feelings.

These Christians think of evolution as a survival of the fittest method of arriving at dominance. But it is precisely this formula that they advocate economically. (That is, if they are Republican right-wing Christians.) They don’t want government regulation when it comes to business. They want the strongest to have full reign to dominate over the weak. They don’t want government programs that help the poor, they want those poor people to “work” hard and compete for their wages. Their social outlook isn’t one of taking care of others, it’s very much a marketplace, survival-of-the-fittest attitude.

It’s so ironic, to me that Christian Republican conservatives advocate survival of the fittest when it comes to the harsh realities of the marketplace, but they don’t want children to be taught this harsh method of how humans came to exist.

And yet, they get evolution so wrong! Survival of the fittest isn’t even accurate. It’s survival of the most adaptable, survival of the lucky, survival of the most cooperative. That’s what evolution really is. One of the big reasons our species has done so well is because we love each other. And why do we love each other? Because we survive much better in numbers than we do individually. When we cooperate our children are raised with a greater likelihood of succeeding. If these Christians would just learn a little bit about evolution they might be inspired to look out for their fellow human beings a little more. But they want to keep evolution unknown – they want to just think of it as a hash unacceptable theory. And in the meantime, they want to allow huge businesses to roll over common people, unfairly taking enormous profits and paying the top executives absurd bonuses and salaries.

Jesus talks a lot about the love of the Father, God, the Universe. And while Jesus does tell people over and over again to give all their money to the poor, he also encourages people to dissociate themselves from their families—not to care about father and mother, to live without the cares of the world.

But we know that the Universe doesn’t love us. But our families, at least in theory, do. And the religious, at least many of the ones who write to me, seem to feel that this world is not of our concern, that this world is bad and hedonistic, and that there is another world where God is where there is perfect harmony and caring. And this secular world is bad, and this world of God is good.

I guess to me, I think it’s exactly the opposite. I think the Universe is a cold abyss. A fascinating, profoundly awe-inspiring, majestic, beautiful, terrible, heartless, unfathomable, large abyss. And I think that this world, where I live amongst people I care about deeply, to be lovely and small and sweet and painful and poignant.

And I think we’ve got to always be vigilant against our deep impulses to behave in ways that are like that cold, stark, exploitive, life-giving universe – we have to steel ourselves against greed, for example. We have to watch ourselves not to exploit or unduly harm others – to make life fair as much as we can. That, to me, is our most difficult task. We are products of evolution, be we don’t have to behave in the uncaring ways that evolution often does. (See, it’s almost impossible not to anthropomorphize evolution itself! It’s like my demons, how they are really people – it’s just so hard not to think of IDEAS like they are people!)

All right. So, this is what I’m thinking about.

Yesterday I spent much of the day getting my picture taken for People Magazine. My house was overrun with make up and hair people, a stylist, photographers and assistants. Actually – to be honest, the make up and hair person was only one person. I guess People is doing a Desperate Housewives issue and I am going to be in it as one of the writers. Which is so WRONG. Because I hardly do anything for that show. The other writers do so much, I’m just a fly on the wall. Even though I hope to not just be that – over time. But jeez, I felt guilty about it. On the other hand, it was really fun. Often photographers and stylists make me feel so bad and awkward – but these people were great. It seemed effortless. Of course I wished I was 30 pounds thinner, but other than that, I actually felt…well, pretty. For a moment.

Today I’m making vegetable soup and organizing the house. It’s sort of overcast here today, which is perfect weather for this sort of thing.

Dawn's Demons

Today I was pointed to a blog, by Dawn Eden (dawneden.com). In her August 16, 2005 entry she comments on my San Francisco Chronicle interview.

In the interview (which you can read on this site) I make a mistake when I recount the story from Mark where Jesus send the evil spirits into the pigs and they run off the mountain. I said he sent the people too. That was incorrect.

She writes:

“Further proof that Christians need to continually remind the mainstream media of the most basic facts concerning their faith: San Francisco Chronicle religion writer David Ian Miller's failure to correct Julia Sweeney as she utterly mangles a story from the Gospels.”

And then,

“Apparently, it is too much to expect a San Francisco Chronicle religion writer to have the Bible knowledge of a 7-year-old Sunday-school student.”

This is what I wrote back to her today:

Dear Dawn,

Yes. I misrepresented the Jesus-commands-evil spirits-to-go-into-pigs-and-run-them-off-a-cliff story in the bible. I suggested that that Jesus caused the people & pigs to run off the cliff. He didn’t. He just caused a COUPLE OF THOUSAND PIGS to run off the cliff.

The point I was trying to make is that Jesus does several things that aren't particularly charitable or compassionate or even logical. I mean, if Jesus is capable of anything, why doesn't he just kill the evil spirits right there? Why does he have to kill two thousand innocent pigs to do that? Regardless of the fact that Jews of the period thought that pigs were unclean, we know that this is not true. So if we know this, why didn't Jesus? Why would that action be acceptable to him?

Plus, evil spirits? COME ON. Are we to believe that there are "evil spirits" that can infect a person and then be driven out of a person? And then driven into an…animal?

You say my mistake is the reason that Christians have to remind the mainstream media of the most basic facts concerning their religion. I completely agree. I think you should remind everyone in the mainstream culture (which is predominantly Christian) that their God is someone who sends evil spirits into pigs and drives them off mountains. (Pigs owned by people, by the way. Even if the mainstream culture you are trying to remind the “most basic facts” to isn’t moved by the specter of two thousand pigs hurling themselves off a cliff by Jesus’ direction, they might be upset – in this most commercial & profits driven culture -- that those pigs were owned by someone. Even by today’s standards, two thousand lost pigs have to be counted as an economic loss.)

So yes. Jesus didn’t send some people and pigs off a cliff. He sent the “evil spirits” into two thousand pigs and they ran off a cliff. Is that so much better? Is this the story that you say any seven-year-old Church student knows?

Personally, I would find that defending Jesus’ killing off of a couple of thousand pigs after he infected them with evil spirits a “basic fact” of your faith not worth defending. But that’s just me.

Good luck to you. I hope your mother gets well.

Julia Sweeney


This is the Gospel story: Mark 5:1-20 (New American Standard Bible)

Mark 5

The Gerasene Demoniac
1They came to the other side of the sea, into the country of the Gerasenes.
2 When He got out of the boat, immediately a man from the tombs with an unclean spirit met Him,
3 and he had his dwelling among the tombs. And no one was able to bind him anymore, even with a chain;
4 because he had often been bound with shackles and chains, and the chains had been torn apart by him and the shackles broken in pieces, and no one was strong enough to subdue him.
5 Constantly, night and day, he was screaming among the tombs and in the mountains, and gashing himself with stones.
6 Seeing Jesus from a distance, he ran up and bowed down before Him;
7 and shouting with a loud voice, he said, "What business do we have with each other, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I implore You by God, do not torment me!"
8 For He had been saying to him, "Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!"
9 And He was asking him, "What is your name?" And he said to Him, "My name is Legion; for we are many."
10 And he began to implore Him earnestly not to send them out of the country.
11 Now there was a large herd of swine feeding nearby on the mountain.
12 The demons implored Him, saying, "Send us into the swine so that we may enter them."
13 Jesus gave them permission. And coming out, the unclean spirits entered the swine; and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the sea, about two thousand of them; and they were drowned in the sea.
14 Their herdsmen ran away and reported it in the city and in the country. And the people came to see what it was that had happened.
15 They came to Jesus and observed the man who had been demon-possessed sitting down, clothed and in his right mind, the very man who had had the "legion"; and they became frightened.
16 Those who had seen it described to them how it had happened to the demon-possessed man, and all about the swine.
17 And they began to implore Him to leave their region.
18 As He was getting into the boat, the man who had been demon-possessed was imploring Him that he might accompany Him.
19 And He did not let him, but He said to him, "Go home to your people and report to them what great things the Lord has done for you, and how He had mercy on you."
20 And he went away and began to proclaim in Decapolis what great things Jesus had done for him; and everyone was amazed.

More thoughts on this story:

Rereading this story, I find it even more upsetting. We know that people who behave in the way this man is behaving are psychologically traumatized and need help, maybe even medical help. If Jesus is the Son of an all-knowing God and they are also One, why wouldn’t Jesus know this? Why wouldn’t he prescribe a medication for the man, or offer to hear the man’s story and try to help him with some Talk-therapy? Clearly Jesus doesn’t know about these things. Clearly this was written in a time when no one knew about these things. Jesus was responding to this poor crazy man in a way that was consistent with the scientific information they had. They believed that mentally disabled people were possessed. And they believed that pigs were bad.

I mean, isn’t this obviously a story that would have wowed people two thousand years ago and isn’t relevant to us today? Why does anyone cling to these stories for spiritual sustenance? Why do they look at this story and find it meaningful? I don’t get it.

I must perform these two monologues.

Well, I just couldn’t stand it. I had to figure out a way to keep doing these shows! The good news is that I am going to be making both monologues into films in the next year. I have a great producer (I can’t announce his name just yet) and we are in the planning stages for filming. In the meantime, I wanted to keep both monologues alive in my head. And since I’m doing a benefit in Spokane, performing In The Family Way, on Oct. 7th, I figured I should call the Groundling Theater and figure out some dates where I could do my shows.

So, I’m going to do ten Sunday morning performances. Three of In The Family Way, and seven of Letting Go Of God. I know, it’s weird doing a Sunday morning matinee, but I really wanted to do it at the Groundling Theater (that place is like the house I grew up in, I feel so closely connected to it) and that’s the only time the theater really had for me. Plus, I will admit, I love that time of the day and that time of the weekend. (Maybe that's why Church's do so well...) In my case, I get up so early, and I often have other things I want to do on Sunday afternoons (like go to the Skeptic lectures in Pasadena at Cal Tech -- see Skeptic.com) and Sunday nights are hard because there's work and school the next day to get ready for, and well, to me a Sunday morning show is perfect. Also, I used to go to the eleven a.m. Sunset Five matinees years ago, and it sure seemed like there were a lot of us out there who enjoyed seeing something at that time of the weekend.

Also…I am less interested in bodies in the seats than I am in keeping my performance up and current in my brain. Also…(so many also’s…!) it gives me a chance to serve coffee and scones and drive my publicist crazy because of what a weird-ass idea it is to do shows on Sunday mornings. So, there you go.

Oh!

And ALSO the parking is great on Sunday morning, no valet, plenty of street parking –and great places to go to brunch before or after. I will gather information on restaurants nearby over the next few weeks. I will be starting Sept. 25th and do sporadic Sundays through October, then pretty much every Sunday through the middle of December. And finally, two Sundays in January.

I am going to do Letting Go Of God in Palm Springs on March 11, 2006. I will have more details soon. Then, in May, Ira Glass and I are going to do a joint show in Seattle and in Austin. I will have more details about that soon too. In that case, I will be doing a one hour version of my show, and then questions and answers with Ira afterwards.

What else? Oh yes, I am going to be on a panel at TAM4 in Las Vegas in later January. For information go to www.Randi.org or to TAM4.com. And then I’m going to be speaking at TED this year. This conference is in Monterey, CA Feb. 22 – 25. For information on that, go to TED.com.

That’s all I can announce right now. Whew. In the meantime, I am working at Desperate Housewives three days a week and on my book for two days a week. I know I said I was going to blog more, but…I have so much to say that I can’t actually SAY. ARGH. So, it’s hard. But I will try.

Mulan and I just went up to Spokane for five days last week. I have eight girlfriends who I've known my whole life, and we all got together last Wednesday to boat around Coeur'D Alene lake and drink margaritas and get caught up. We talked all day long. We could have been at it for a week, I think we all felt we were just scratching the surface. We all vowed to do this more often. We jumped off the roof of the houseboat we were in, and we drove past Camp Sweloken where many of us went to Camp Fire Girls Camp when we were young, and we even yelled out our old camp "call" and the current campers answered us back from the beach. It was heaven. The next day Mulan and I went boating with Darcy and her sister Dena, who are among my old pals. Darcy lives on the Spokane River. She water skis four times a week all summer. She works two days a week. Her life is AWESOME. I was inspired and jealous and felt lucky all at the same time.

Every minute I wanted to move back to Spokane. The whole time I was there, I was thinking, "You had the guts to move OUT of Spokane, but do you have the guts to move BACK?" Like it was the tag of a movie or something. Mulan and my mother and my niece and nephew and I went to the movie March Of The Penguins. We all also saw the Imax movie about the Nile. I try to see all the IMAX movies.

We went on the carousel downtown, we wandered through Riverfront park, we went to Auntie's bookstore and got books. The weather was perfect. We had a little wind storm that kept us in one night. WHAT AM I DOING HERE IN LOS ANGELES?

I kept reminding myself that I actually really like Los Angeles. And I really like my neighborhood and the schools and I love show business, too. But still...

One night I drove past my grandmother's house and sat outside for ten or fifteen minutes and fantasized about buying it, remodeling it, and then just...quilting and listening to the radio in it for the rest of my life.

I was recently talking to a writer friend about characters and their "drives." When you write on a show, you are always talking about what the character "wants" and what their "drive" is what they are willing to do to "get" what they want. All these words are so active. And my whole writing career I have had a hard time with it. When I write things on my own, my characters are very passive. Things happen TO them. They don't want very much. I mean, I have learned how to think in the "drive" mode, but this is not natural to me. It's hard for me to think of: plot. I am much better with character and characters reacting to things that happen.

Anyway, my friend said something that just blew my mind. It changed they way I approach much of my writing. He said, "Look. All I really want to do is read the newspaper. And everything that happens is my personal obstacle to getting to just sit down and read the paper. So that's all you need, that's all the drive you have to have."

I know this may seem so inconsequential, but I couldn't stop thinking about it. Yes. YES. That's exactly right. And that's true for me -- at least for the moment. All I really want to do is quilt and listen to the radio. That's all I want to do. I want that like some people want heroin. (I am taking a quilting class on Saturdays now...just so you know. I am making a quilt for my daughter's stuffed animal, Eddie, an object that she has not parted with since we got off the plane from China.)

So, I sat outside my grandmother's house, a house I have only happy and content and loving memories associated with, and I just wanted to buy that house and quilt and listen to the radio. For like...years and years. Till I was tired of it. Even though I couldn't imagine being tired of it.

Okay. Here I am wistfully going on about this when I'm also announcing all this performing. I guess I am full of contradictions, like, I suppose, we all are.

But still! Quilting and listening to the radio!

As The Cook Deals With Meat And Vegetables

I want to write/blog something often. Maybe every day. Maybe not. We will see how things go.

Today’s highlights:

A good quote I read by Eric Hoffer, a writer who lived mostly in San Francisco and died in 1983 after he spent his life being a longshoreman. He kept notebooks with his thoughts as well as writing nine books, including The True Believer which is subtitled, Thoughts on the Nature Of Mass Movements. He writes that true believers are disappointed people, “Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.”

But I am writing all this to get to one other quote of Hoffer’s that I really, really love.

“How terribly hard and almost impossible it is to tell the truth. More than anything else, the artist in us prevents us from telling aught as it really happened. We deal with the truth as the cook deals with meat and vegetables.”

I had a great late-night conversation with Michael Patrick King, my friend who was the show runner on Sex & the City and who is now working on The Comeback. A show I was initially wary of and now find impossible not to watch and watch again. Even though I am not in any way whatsoever an actress like Valerie Cherish, the actress that Lisa Kudrow plays on The Comeback, I think the show is driving me back into therapy. It has gotten under my skin. I watch it more than once.

The scariest thing on television in the last ten years are those two writers on The Comeback. They make me shiver.

I'm sorry. And I'm not moving.

Oh dear. This whole blog thing is NUTTY! Well, first of all I have to apologize. I did get several horrible e-mails from people about not believing in God. But honestly, nothing compared with the positive ones. And now I’m embarrassed that I gave the bad ones so much weight. If you look at it scientifically, and you consider that I got -- let’s see – including all the e-mail I got after the L.A. Times article, about 3500 e-mails over the last two months, and about 100 to 200, I would guess, are negative and only about 70 to 100 were hateful. Such an incredibly small percentage. Teensy weensy. Not worth bothering about.

It’s kind of weird having your blog be quoted in the paper. I think this is the third paper I’ve been quoted in. I keep thinking that blogs are so…PRIVATE. Ha. To me, blogging is like you are blathering to a friend late at night when everything in the world is bothering you and it seems like it should have a shelf life or something. And then, out of nowhere, you get quoted in the paper. I should be more…on my toes! Ready to be quoted!

And yet, the whole beauty of the blog is that it’s half personal diary and half public pronouncement. Blogs are like personal conversations at a restaurant that can suddenly include the people at the next table – sort of private, sort of not private.

In any case, I will attempt to think through what I’m writing a little more. I got sooo many letters from Christians apologizing for the bad spelling and the hateful language. I don’t even care about the bad spelling. I was being catty. And that is so bad. Bad, bad, bad.

I mean, it’s true about a few, a very few of the letters. But who cares about spelling? Some of my favorite people -- people who I consider to be geniuses -- are horrible spellers. And I had my own spelling and grammar mistakes pointed out to me. Oh why, oh why did I say that to begin with?

And the hate part – I don’t even care about that anymore. I feel hate myself. I guess more like anger, not exactly hate. Threats bug me. But I really don’t care anymore.

I sound like I'm convincing myself. I am bugged when people write and say things like, "I see you've gotten yourself more publicity." I don't know how to respond to that. Of course, what I'm doing is not responding to it.

Also, I’m not moving. I was so tired when I wrote that. And I had started a new job and I had been with my mother for over ten days. IMAGINE my state of mind.

I just flew back from Toronto where I shot something for a day. I shot an episode of my friend Bob Blumer’s Food Channel show, The Surreal Gourmet. I think I didn’t do such a good job. I think they wanted me to be witty and have quips and I did not. Why don’t I know in advance that I’m not good at that? It was a hot, long day. But excellent food.

And on the plane ride back this morning, I read a book I picked up at the airport: A Short History Of Progress by Ronald Wright. It’s soooo good. And soooo depressing. It’s almost like a very condensed version of Jared Diamond’s Collapse and Guns, Germs & Steel mixed with Martin Rees Our Final Century. If you don’t have time for Jared’s two big books, this one by Ronald Wright is sufficient. Then I also read the July/August Foreign Affairs issue, which is all about the next pandemic. Which could be the avian flu. Which could happen anytime. And how we are destined for a major population reduction. We are majorly overdue. Wright writes, “Medical experts worry that nature may swat us with disease: billions of overcrowded primates, many sick, malnourished, and connected by air travel are a free lunch waiting for a nimble microbe.” Eee gads.

Basically I am not eating meat (which I have no proof would stave off any type of avian flu) and I’m enjoying the sunsets a lot more. Even though I just ate meat for this shoot yesterday, so see how I’m a hypocrite already? But no more meat. That was the end of it.

I’m going to look up eating poultry and avian flu.

Okay, now I’ve spent an hour reading about the Avian flu on the Centers for Disease Control web site and the CNN website. The CNN website is actually better for information. You can get the Avian flu from handling birds that are infected, or being around them. When I was in China a few years ago, walking through the Qing Ping market in Guangzhou, seeing all the caged birds next to the caged dogs next to the caged cats ready to be slaughtered all together for the purchaser on the very same cutting board – I thought, this cannot be a good thing. And apparently it is not. Anyway, once the flu is entrenched in humans, it can then spread from human to human. Very scary.

I know this has nothing to do with God. But it is one of the side effects of not believing. The world truly does get scarier. Human history, civilized human history anyway, becomes a mere ten thousand or so years. A blip. A crazy patch of stable weather, good for chimps.

My favorite line in Wright’s book is: “Homo sapiens has the information to know to know itself for what it is: an Ice Age hunter only half-evolved towards intelligence; clever but seldom wise.”

Why didn’t I spend more time reading the In Style magazine that I also bought? Victorian blouses are going to be in this year. A return to conservatism!

New camera

Okay, things are moving along. The show opens Sept. 1 in previews and then opening night is Sept. 17th. I am in the process of gathering together my team of people, the sound director, the lighting designer, etc. It's all very very exciting. Also, Mulan graduates from pre-school tomorrow. Also, I just realized that I have either misplaced or had stolen my video camera and my Leica. OHMYGOD. First, I hate myself for not knowing if I've misplaced them or had them stolen. Okay, let's just assume they weren't stolen. Where the hell are they? Oh I am filled with self loathing.

I had to go buy a new video camera just now. Yep. I had to go spend $700 on a new video camera. I have turned the house upside down. I have no Leica Camera and no video camera. The video camera has a tape on it which is basically everything Mulan has done for a year. How can this be? Oh, the cost of being disorganized is high, indeed.

Okay, breathe. Breathe.

I now have a new video camera. The old one was several years old, so I guess it's really good that I have a new one. I will now be able to properly record my daughter's life. Where is the Leica, though?

Okay, let's change the subject.

I got to meet Wim Wenders today. He interveiwed me for a part in an upcoming movie he is directing. I worshipped Wim Wenders for years. I mean, I still think he's great. It's just...looking at him, talking to him. I felt like I was in a dream. He didn't seem real. The whole thing threw me into an entire day of thinking about his movies. I wanted to say so many things to him that I didn't. That "The American Friend" is one of my all time favorite movies and I've seen it eight or nine times. Alice in the Cities, also an iconic film for me. But I was speechless, I just sat there and giggled nervously. He asked me how I could have done a monologue about cervical cancer. And I said something like, "It wasn't just about cervical cancer, it was also about my brother's cancer!" I sounded like a freak. But he was nice. He acted like he was going to see me again, but you know those europeans, they can always sound like that, they are so polite. Oh jeez.

Taking a blogging break

Thanks so much for all your e-mails. I got hundreds more in the last few days. It’s really overwhelming. Over three thousand now. I appreciate them all. I just wish I could respond. So many made me want to jump right in and write a thorough letter back. I am still going to try to reply to people when I can get a moment.

But for the time being, I’m going to take a blogging break. Not that that’s so important to anyone, but… I’m just going to take a break. First of all, since I started my new job, my whole life is wound up in things I can’t talk about at all.

Second of all, I’m getting some pretty harsh weird e-mail. It’s making me take a moment to think about how many people are out there who scare the shit out of me. Granted, most of the e-mail I got - to an overwhelming degree -- is from people who are positive and encouraging. Who feel just as I do. Who went through what I did. Or people who are worried about what's happening in our country and culture with regards to religious fundamentalism and Christian domination.

Of course, I don’t want to restrict my reading to only those e-mails which are from people to feel the same way I do. But…well, I wish I could just show you some of the many frightening letters I have received. They make your spine tingle. They are SCARY. A lot of angry, scary people.

People with poor spelling and punctuation. Mostly.

Not that I’m the bastion of proper spelling & punctuation, but… I have one suggestion for the Christians out there who want to send me a long intimidating, terrorizing e-mail – at least spell your threats properly. It’s distracting to my sense of fear when your spelling is SO bad.

I know, that’s mean. But it’s hard to look past it.

Anyone who has e-mailed me and asked to be notified when the CD comes out will be contacted. I am still on my schedule. It will happen and you will be notified.

I have to keep reminding myself that these people are just people composing e-mail and telling me their point of view. But they are sooo nasty and so outraged and so filled with hate. I think I tried really hard not to be hateful in my monologue. I tried to make the case for faith, and show the struggle with compassion to all sides. But yes, in some ways I am hurtful. I am saying things about a myth and a book that many people believe are sacred. And I am challenging the validity and the sacred nature of those materials. I even feel an imperative about what I have to say. I think the future of our species depends on us wising up and accepting ourselves as animals that evolved on a planet.

Just like the Christians think that my future of depends on accepting their beliefs. In this way, I think I have a lot in common with Christians, or these types of Christians, because I think it’s majorly important if someone is religious or not. Only, I think it should be on the "not" side.

I feel that people who have superstitions have been victimized and do not see the world clearly. And I feel very sad for them.

Also, a teeny bit afraid of them.

But to be honest, I don’t know how much I want this in my life. All these angry people. If I still had an assistant, I would have him or her going through these e-mails for me, but I don’t have one and I end up reading them all. And it’s just gotten to me. I mean, of course, they haven’t convinced me. And I’m not going to be quiet about it. I just think that a daily journal about my views isn’t the way for me to go at the moment. The blogging just seems to goad them on even further.

And today, for the first time, I seriously thought I should move or something. I got a little scared.

Eeek.

I will blog again someday, but not in the near future.

Life Is Not Fair

Mulan and my mother are still asleep and today is a big workday, so I’m going to write a few thoughts down before they wake up. And I guess some might think I’m just spouting off now because of the big response to the This American Life piece and now I’m pontificating or something. And well…yes. I guess so. I am a little bit. But it’s been such an overwhelming response, I got almost fifty more letters just this morning! And I guess I’m indulging the fact that I have a few more people’s eyes to read what I have to say. I have to remind myself that this will all calm down soon and I’ll be back to complaining about five year olds or something.

So, that said… This is what I've been turning over in my head recently.

Life is SO not fair. That’s something my dad said all the time while I grew up and I think probably everyone’s parents said that. Well, without the SO part. So here: Life’s not fair. But I never really believed that. I thought God sorted it all out in the end. I had a vague idea that there was ultimate justice. And this had effects down to the smallest interactions.

For example, I am a person who has a very hard time haggling for something. And I have spent time in South America and Asia where you have to haggle for everything. And I would think, “If they overcharge me for this or that item, then that’s taking advantage of me and that act is on their head and they will deal with that when they meet their maker.” And then I would just pay them the price they asked at first as a matter of pride. Like, it’s not up to me to make sure this person behaves with dignity.

This makes me seem ridiculous, and when I write that it does seem ridiculous. But I’m trying to say that these ideas (like life is not fair) aren’t just in place when one considers the big questions in life, it affects even the smallest interactions.

When I stopped all magical belief, including God, it struck me like thunder that everyone was getting away with everything they could get away with and there was not going to be any God to sort it out. And that’s such a difficult bitter pill to swallow, that life is not fair. Life is not fair in the extreme.

The way nature works is not fair either. Survival of the fittest: not fair. I mean, unless you are fit in the ways that nature dictates is fit.

Anyway, I suddenly realized I had to defend myself against others who were trying to take advantage of me. It was all up to me. It felt really cold and sad. I had to defend myself not just against the big forces of chance, but even against this person trying to charge me four dollars for something she's charging one dollar for right behind me

And there’s no remedy for that cold and sad realization. Not at least, one I have found. It’s stark and it makes me feel like an adult in all the worst ways. But then, I had this whole new appreciation for what does enforce some fairness in life. Like governments and laws. Who said that great phrase? ”Taxes are the price we pay for civilization.” Yes. That’s what society does. That’s why we aren’t animals all out for our individual selves. We come together collectively to help insure the survival of the whole group and in that process we make things a little more fair for those who can’t insure that fairness themselves.

That’s one of the worst things that religion does, teach people to be compliant with gross unfairness. Religion does this by inculcating and idea of ultimate justice after death. This makes the paupers happy and content – they will get their reward. I know that most religious people would say that Jesus inspires them to behave in ways that are altruistic and heroic and that all Jesus was about was helping the poor. And yes, I can see how Jesus is an inspiration in that.

But all I have to say to that is two things: Jesus did use the idea of reward when it came to helping the poor. He didn’t say to help the poor because it’s fundamentally unfair and that a more balanced financial distribution is better for everyone. He said to be good to the poor because if you do you get rewarded in heaven. Also, all I have to say is that Bush says Jesus is his favorite philosopher and look at what he’s done for the poor. Just make them a whole lot poorer.

So, life is unfair. This is one of the hardest parts, for me, of letting go of God. And it’s unfair in ways that no government laws could ever change. People die on the brink of great promise in their life. It doesn’t always work out for the best. We are fantastically vulnerable to having everything we hold dear be killed, betray us, reject us. And that is a harsh and hard way to see the world.

But I think it’s accurate. And I realized that I was willing to trade accuracy for a fantasy. AND, weirdly, this harsh acceptance has led to such a deep appreciation for so much in my life. I would call myself a very happy person. I enjoy every day – or nearly every day that I am alive. It caused me to care about others, to increase the money I give to charity and to make sure that that charity is doing what it says it’s doing. It has caused me to be even more politically active and try to make the world a slightly more fair place for other people. It has made me discover science and the scientific method and it has given me a consistent way for evaluating the world. That is no small thing, by the way.

I have come to realize that maybe one of the best things that has come out of my whole experience has nothing to do with God. It’s that I realize that I respect the truth and that there are systematic methods for arriving at truth -- or what we can bet is closest to truth -- and that thousands of years of scholarship has gone into refining these methods. I truly sit on the shoulders of giants in this way. I am receiving the fruits of many people’s efforts over thousands of years who have figured out how to think systematically and come up with information that is reliable and re-testable and all that. And that gives me a great calm. I have a system for looking at the world.

It’s had all kinds of tangible effects too. Like I don’t spend time, or excessive time, around people I don’t like simply to be nice. Time is so limited and valuable. I know I am speaking in platitudes and stating the obvious, but I have to say, this came to me in a whole new way after I grew up, FINALLY.

Okay, now I have to go make Mulan put on clothes. It’s crazy beautiful here in Hawaii. I really hope I get to retire in Kauai someday. I like Oahu, but my heart belongs to Kauai. Yesterday I think I spent more time in the water that I ever have before. Mulan did this dolphin quest experience – they have a dolphin lagoon here and about five dolphins in it. They give you all this literature about how Dolphin Quest is good to the dolphins and they don’t force the dolphins to do excessive tricks. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that Mulan had the best two hours learning about dolphins yesterday. They gave a class where they showed a human skull (a fake one) and a real dolphin skull and they spent about twenty minutes learning the differences in the skulls and what mammals were and how we can tell they are mammals. Wow. I wish I’d had that when I was a kid. Or maybe I did hear all that stuff (well, I certainly didn’t do a dolphin experience) and it washed over me. In any case, I was so rapt. It was really interesting. Then Mulan got to pet and feed and splash about with the dolphins. It was pretty great.

I remember when I was in the Galapagos and suddenly someone yelled that there was a school of dolphins on the side of our boat. (Is it a school?) Anyway, we all jumped off the boat – there was no island in site, and we swam along with the dolphins. I could hear them clicking and communicating underwater and I was really right next to them. It was one of the most profound experiences of my life. Now, I’ve been reading recently how dolphins are pretty cruel to each other. I guess it turns out that the bigger the brain, the crueler the species. Hmmm…

Biology and Psychology

Okay, I'm on a break here in Hawaii. And I was thinking, after reading more the letters to me, many of them about the real deeper meanings of the Bible stories, that in the end, it wasn't the Bible that did me in about God and all the rest. The Bible did in religion for me. Yes, that's true. Reading the Bible and learning about how the Bible was put together. Reading the Gnostic Gospels and the other "sacred" writings, learning about the traditions of the church and how they became traditions, all that led to me rejecting religion.

But not God.

What did God in, really, was biology and psychology. Learning how our minds work, how we respond to social hierarchy, how we naturally tend toward superstitions and how we see patterns in things, even when no patterns exist. How evolution works, the slow agonizing process of animals evolving, how we living creatures evolve different specialties to compete in this harsh world for survival, how our brain evolved and how it gives us a certain type of advantage, how viruses work and evolve – that’s what did God in.

Many people have written to me about Michael Behe’s book. He wrote Darwin’s Black Box and he’s an Intelligent Design guy who says that there is an irreducible complexity in cells that is unaccountable by evolution. So basically God made cells and evolution did the rest. I have read this book and listened to many scientists responses to it. Basically the problem is that Behe does not account for the fact that certain structures in the cell could have evolved by natural selection and then further evolution caused those same structures to find employment in other novel ways as evolution continued.

Plus, even if a cell floated to earth fully formed, it still doesn’t mean that human beings would evolve or that there is a designer out there somewhere who wants us to be here in particular. I always say that if God got humans here by means of evolution he is a harsh, horrible, wasteful, uncaring God. Millions upon millions of species evolving and dying off in horrifying circumstances. What did the dinosaurs do to God to make him cause them to die in a cloud of darkness after the meteor hit? But for the believer, that’s just what God did. Have 4 and a half billion years of agonizing evolution to get us. Us humans. It makes the creationists who believe that God plopped humans onto the earth in one fell swoop seem reasonable when you think of a God who got us here by means of evolution.

And now the evidence is enormous. Evolution is confirmed over and over again by all kinds of different fields: anthropology, biology, genetics, and so forth. And we understand our own minds much better than we did before. We know the parts of the brain that have religious experience and we understand how people can have those experiences. Experiences I had myself! So, for me, it all points to a world without a God. The world makes sense without a God from a scientific world view. The world does not make sense scientifically with one. (I am referring to a traditional definition of God here.)

I won’t even get into the New Age redefinitions of God. I always say that if God is hydrogen and helium, then yes, I believe in God too.

Some people have written and accused me of a dogmatic fanaticism in my non-belief. I disagree. My disbelief in God is just like my disbelief in Santa Claus. If there is solid scientific evidence that shows a creator God who cares about us humans and offers an eternal life, I am completely open to that and I would change my mind based on it. I have not yet seen evidence that comes close. And yes, it’s true, I am not going to spend all my time searching for evidence that I am wrong. I did do that for years and I came to a certain conclusion and I’m going to stick with it until I find compelling evidence to the contrary. Michael Shermer says you should be open minded but not so open minded that your brains fall out. I think that’s a good stance.

Many people have also said that I selected portions of the Bible that look the worst and judge the whole book in that context. And that’s true. I did do that. I actually left lots out -- I mean lots and lots of passages that are so absurd, like the children getting mauled to death by bears because they make fun of a bald guy in the Old Testament. There are some stories in the Bible that are so ridiculous that I thought that I wouldn't seem credible repeating them! I tried to find passages that people were generally familiar with.

But what I found is that religious folk who argue that the Bible should be viewed in the whole context of the Christian tradition are using that as an excuse to not deal with the disturbing and clearly legendary and folktale aspects of the Bible.

Of course, if you judge the Bible by it’s impact on culture, it’s a tremendously important document. But this becomes a spiral where you can’t judge the Bible by itself and you can’t judge the cultural impact without the Bible. I do not argue that religion has many, many great byproducts. It offers so much. It can do tremendous good. It creates community and ritual and connectedness and Christians in particular are very good at organizing social injustice movements. All that is fantastic. I think those wonderful things are practically worth it to be part of the organization in spite of what it’s based on. I mean, almost.

But some have argued that the byproducts of Christianity – the positive byproducts, the work on behalf of the poor, the community it creates, is the proof that Jesus is the son of God and that God is the only God and a force that created us and loves us and offers us eternal life. However, many other cultures have similar types of byproducts from their religion (maybe I shouldn’t even be saying byproduct, maybe it’s just impacts) and they aren’t Christian. The Muslims have social injustice movements and religious sacred literature with many insightful and great passages, just like the Bible. The Buddhists do too. The Hindus do too. Also, there are secular organizations that offer all this without the religion.

I am here in Hawaii, and I’ve met a couple who went and did the Peace Corps after their six children were grown. They spent two years doing work in Africa and there was no religious organization, it was totally secular. So, the fruit of religion isn’t a good argument for the veracity of Christian truth.

On balance, I think religion has been detrimental. I think it caused the Dark Ages and has set us back over and over again in our human history. ON BALANCE.

So, please, don’t send me more individual examples of religion being so great. I find what I experience as the transcendent in nature, with a full acceptance of who I am and where I stand in nature. Nature may not care a wit about me, but I sure care a lot about Nature.

Last night I laid on the beach and looked at the sky full of stars and the water crashing at my feet and just the thought that the earth is round, just that little fact that I used to take for granted, it just bowled me over. The earth is fucking ROUND!!! And we’re hurtling through space! And who knows how much longer animals like us will be here to look out at that sky and know that the planet they sit on is ROUND? How many animals in the universe know that the reason it’s dark is because their sun is on the other side of their round planet? Or that the sand I scrunch my feet into is made up of millions of years, billions even, of rocks ground up into bits, rocks that were crawled on by other creatures and plants that didn’t have this wonderful gift of knowledge that the earth is round – hurtling through space.

Woooeee.

Okay, that probably sounds all preachy and shit. I’ve just read through (or skimmed through) two thousand e-mails (really, over two thousand letters in four days) and I’m a little wound up.

Thank you so much for your e-mails

Note: this is written hastily as my daughter tugs at my shirt sleeve and I don't know how to use spell check, so keep this in mind.

I really wasn't prepared for the This American Life show to have such a big impact. I have so much to say back to each and every one of you who has written. I almost hesitate to write this because I don't want anyone NOT to write to me. I read each and every one and today has been such a grand day. I wish I could respond to everyone tonight but I can't!

Many people said they knew I was going to get a lot of e-mails from people who were appalled and angry. This is true. But I would say those e-mails represent a very small minority. I also thought that is what would happen. But, for the recond, what I have found out today is that there are lots and lots and lots of people out there who feel just like I do, have gone through the same things I have. What an amazing thing! I got e-mails from people from all over the United States, I mean all over the place. And I am soooo appreciative. Thank you so much.

But really, this isn't so much about me. What thrills me is that I am finding that there are so many of us who have gone through the same experience or are going through the same experience. I mean, in some ways, because of Bush, he has pushed this whole issue to the forefront, for good or bad, you just can't dismiss your views on religion anymore as being a small matter.

And of course, not everyone has jettisoned God the way I have. And I have so much to say in return.

But I will say this here: many people wrote to say that they didn't think I should have gone from rejecting the Bible to giving up on God. The truth is that I didn't do that. It was a long long journey with many other variations on God and if you could see the whole show, you would see that it wasn't just straight from not-Catholic to non-believer. (my show is two hours and fifteen minutes long and the This American Life excerpt was less than thirty minutes) It took years to explore everything and I hung on until I realized that the only God I could believe in was made up of hydrogen and helium. And then...anyway. I am so re-inspired to write the book and get the CD out and the film done. Really, everyone who has written, thank you soooo much.

Also, YES, my newsletter sign up asks for birthdates and the person's gender and that is really wrong. I don't know how I allowed that. It was a suggestion by the person who designed my website and I'm going to change that immediately. Don't feel you have to put that information in. I have never even looked at that stuff and I won't.

And also, for the Christians who wrote about what those passages mean in the Bible. Yes, I know that the passages I site have all kinds of theories and complicated layers of meaning. I know the theories. I know the ways that people explain those passages. I looked into it. But now, it doesn't really matter because when I, after a long learning curve, really understood how the Bible was put together, which stories were kept and which weren't, what political situations were in place and what was useful to emphasise and so forth, then the Bible became a really interesting historical religious document to me -- inspiring but not sacred. Very much the work of ancient man and not the inspired word of God. So, you see, telling me all about the meanings behind those stories is sort of beside the point at this point.

I am in Hawaii right now, and I am so lucky to be here. My mother is with me and she just had a knee replacement surgery six weeks ago and my daughter is here too and it's a little like having two kids to look after while I'm on a work retreat. Not that I'm complaining, believe me I am not. But my time to resond to e-mail is limited. I will try to, I really will. Because people have the most amazing stories. Everyone's story of how they woke up and saw through the workings of their religion and their faith is interesting, even if they don't give it up in the end.

Also, I got many letters from priests and pastors who told me that they too, don't believe anymore, but what can they do? They are in a profession and they have been at it a long time. This is so heartbreaking to me.
Soooo... no spell check and I'm not even going to read this over, but I felt I had to put something up on the site.

Raining in Hawaii

Well, it’s pouring rain here. And I like it. It probably won’t last. I love the daily rain in tropical islands.

I am still getting tons of letters from people all over the United States. Ira says that approx. 1.7 million people listen. (Ira wrote and said they have gotten possibly more comments on this weekend's show than any other -- I haven't asked yet if it's more positive or negative.)

So, I can’t speak about the general opinion. But the letters to me are really positive. Wow, I am so fascinated by everyone’s stories. So many people who feel the same way. Only a few begging me not to “let go of God.” Most are supportive and from people who feel exactly the same way.

You know, when I first “let go of God” I felt it was a private thing, something I didn’t need to share with anyone. But now, as I see what religion is doing in our culture and in our politics, I think we’ve all just got to be a lot more out-spoken about how we feel. I remember being hesitant at first, when people said religious things around me, even benign things like…”Well, it will all work out for the best.” I would just say nothing. I would simply joke to myself “Yes, that’s just what Hitler said…” But now, I do say things like that. Or I say, “Well, I don’t believe that is always the case, but I know what you mean. “ Or something like that. I am proud of being a woman without superstitions, to me it’s liberating, nothing to be ashamed of. I think of it as an achievement, and I’m not going to be quiet about it.

I got a lot of letters from people who were raised in a religion and then when they were around 12, they saw through it all and left. In fact, most of my own friends had this exact experience. I think they are fascinated by how I could have believed for so long. I think it’s a combination of the following:

1.) I needed to believe emotionally and I didn’t want to NOT believe that there was something there that cared about me.

2.) I didn’t think about it deeply. I dipped into my belief when I needed it or when it made certain circumstances more tolerable or more “poetic” and then I went back to a benign skepticism when I didn’t need it.

3.) I had a serious lack of science education. I would latch on to seemingly scientific ideas about “energy” or “the power of intention” or “synchronicity.” I just didn’t have the critical thinking skills or the basic scientific knowledge to not be vulnerable to lots of ideas that seemed to make sense if you didn’t look into it too much.

So, I was never a big believer to begin with. I mean, more than my friends. In some ways, loosing my faith wasn’t the big deal. It was on the other end, it was in accepting myself as an evolved animal on a planet in a vulnerable fathomless abyss. And after you got over the horror of it, the deep realization that we’re merely random flowers blooming in a sea of minerals, then it was all so different. That impact was immensely greater for me. It made me appreciate each day, each moment so much more. It made me grieve for injustice in a whole new way. It made me truly afraid and appreciative. My investment in my own life grew and my concern for others plight increased.

Anyway, most of the letters I’ve gotten are from people who feel the same way I do. And that just makes me feel great – obviously. Thank you so much people!

The letters I got from people who were upset and angry – well… Many of them started out the same way, something like, “I know you think people like me are stupid, and I can tell you even enjoy putting us down.” One person said, “Obviously you get off on humiliating others.” Get off? Get off on humiliating others? Another person started their letter, “I bet you feel pretty good about yourself right now, stomping all over the sacred book that most of us hold dear.” Or something like that. Anyway, all day yesterday I was thinking, “Well, was I gloating? Do I ‘get off’ on this?” I felt I really didn’t. I didn’t do this rashly. It’s not the only topic I’ve taken on. I don’t make my living from it. I have lots of dear relatives who are believers. I tried not to be condescending.

Then I thought, “Well what if I WAS ‘getting off' on it?” What difference would that make to the truth? If someone were attacking me as a non-believer, I wouldn’t -- first thing -- right off the bat, accuse them of enjoying disagreeing with me. Or of happily humiliating me. I would try to counter them with the facts and I would keep my feelings about their state of mind while attacking me to myself. It’s beside the point.

I didn’t know what an ad hominum attack was until a few years ago. Which is horrible because I was a high school debater and my dad was a lawyer and I should have known about it. But basically it means when you attack the character of your opponent as a way of arguing for your view. It’s such a basic thing. It’s sort of what my parents did the whole time I was growing up. “Well he’s an idiot.” Or “Why would listen to THAT guy, everyone knows he’s nuts.” “You are angry right now” and so basically everything you say has no merit. Or I even think of old arguments with a particular old boyfriend where every time I brought up something disagreeable he began to attack me on “when “ I brought it up, or “how” I brought it up or my “tone” when I brought it up. Everything became about everything else and not the facts of the case.

I suppose this is so obvious to everyone in the world, but it sure wasn’t to me. I mean, until a few years ago.

Well, I am going to try to post something every day. I can’t write about my job, clearly. But I can write about everything else. Now it’s stopped raining and Mulan and I are going for a swim before my work starts for the day. Yippee! A seven a.m. swim, what could be better?

The Show Is Closed

Boo Hoo. I mean, yippity yah.

Well, after a Herculean effort by many, the show closed this weekend. We added a matinee on Saturday because of the demand for tickets, which of course, just thrilled me. Doing the two o’clock matinee instead of a three o’clock made a huge, enormous difference when it came to the eight o’clock show. If I ever do this show again, that’s good information. I got to come home, eat something, take an hour nap, and I was as ready for the eight o’clock show as I would have been any other night. The audiences were great and it wasn’t too hot outside. I feel really glad about the whole experience.

I’m saying the show ran for ten months, when I suppose technically it was only nine months. We started to sell tickets Sept. 3, but we were in rehearsals all through August. That’s pretty much a year. And in retrospect, this is really all I’ve done for a year. It makes me feel great that a year ago, I was still writing this show, and now it’s finished the L.A. run. I’m not even sure at this point if there will be any more “runs.” I may just do the show here and there in a specialized way before I film it. And then, there is also still the possibility of taking it to New York, after this next year with Desperate Housewives is over.

My Aunt Bonnie, who is a faithful Catholic, and who is one of the most wonderful people I know in the world, keeps telling me, “Julie, this topic isn’t going away. You could do this show for years and years.” And that statement has stayed in my head and made me feel calmer about closing it. Yeah. I can wait a while and do this show again in a year or so. In the meantime, I will finish the book and the Cds.

Last night, after the matinee was over, we all took down the set. It took two carloads and a small pick up truck full of stuff to get everything back to my house. Steve Mallory helped me put the rug back down in the living room and put the sofa on top of it. We put my Stickley chair back in its place, and the round end table next to it and suddenly my living room was back to it’s old self. It was as if I had never moved that furniture and never done the show at all. Last night I sat on my chair, the same chair I use in the show, and read. Everything old is new again! Mulan was with us all day and sbe danced all around as people took down lights and cables and the star drop curtains and we loaded everything into electrical boxes. I am going to miss Zeke and Sabra at the theater, and my crew, Heather and Sean and Steve and Jamie – I mean we got to know each other so well over this year. We knew each other’s weekly frustrations and dramas. Oh, it makes me sad.

I am going to sell one of my video monitors to the Groundlings Theater, and I’ll keep the other one. Declan, who helped make the set and who did a great job on the book shelves on the set that hid a post that was in our way, suggested that I sell the video monitor to the Groundlings as they need one desperately and have a limited budget. My ex-husband -- Steve Hibbert, who I am still good friends with, is directing the new Groundings show and I bet he'll be happy to have that equipment.

Drew, my video and sound designer came by while we packed up last night and he convinced me that if I ever do a run of this show again, I can just buy another one and that prices are constantly dropping and if it’s a limited run, it’s easier to rent them than buy one. Drew took out his computer that had the sound effects on it, out of the booth. We are going to make all of this into one Keynote file on my computer so I can do this show with one set of images and one stream of sound where ever I go. This way I could perform the show at colleges, which really excites me more than doing a whole run of the show again. In the meantime, I have one more performance to give for the Independant Film Festival on June 23. But for that I only need one computer to run the show.

Heather came over last night at like, eleven or so and brought me the keys to the theater (which I have to turn in tomorrow) and we sat in the living room and talked. It was really a pleasant, easy, smooth closing.

I can’t believe how much Mulan has grown up in the ten months since the show opened. It seemed really stark to me yesterday because I can remember her so well when we put the set up! I mean, she was sort of a little kid then, just out of toddlerhood when the show opened. Four years old. And now she’s five and a half and she pranced between our legs last night dancing and everything about her is now a girl; her body, the way she talks. She can barely remember when I wasn’t doing this show. She has her crayons and dolls in my dressing room that had to get packed up – she knows all the terms, “the booth” “backstage” “the set” “house manager.” I wonder how much she will remember. I used to think, “Oh, she’ll forget all this.” But now, I think she’s in the realm of personal history. She was very excited last night when she realized that we now own a set of walkie-talkies.

I have been sleeping much better. I have been taking Arden on a walk at night. I was only able to do this, this last week, while Lisa was here to watch Mulan. So for three days I got to walk Arden around the neighborhood for an hour around seven or eight o’clock. When I used to see people walking their dogs at night I was so jealous. And it made a huge difference in my sleep. Just enormous.

Well, now I have to get ready for this Saturday when we fly to Hawaii with the Desperate Housewives writing and producing staff. I can’t BELIEVE how great everything worked out. I mean, I just cannot believe it.

I have felt so stressed out lately, with the pressures of the book and the show. But I can feel this deep psychological muscle just…relax. I already feel a thousand times calmer today than I did yesterday. I don’t know if it will stick, but I bet it does. Even though I love performing, I am fantastically relieved to be stopping for a while. This was a really great year. And it just got even better because now it’s over. It’s so funny how that’s the case. It’s like, now this wonderful year working on this show is something I can savor in my mind and I don’t have to be bothered with any of the petty details of making it continue. I was thinking last night, what if I never did this show again? Would it be okay? What if it was never a movie or anything? And I thought, it WOULD be alright. I mean, ten thousand people saw my show this year. Ten thousand! Right there that’s worth it. If only for them. And that makes me so happy, like I already won and anything else that happens is gravy.

Not So Desperate Anymore

Okay, the best thing of all, the very best thing of all, is that I had a great night of sleep last night. I actually slept seven straight hours last night. And this just makes me want to cry with happiness because I have not had any decent sleep for days. Man, my sleep problems are really my number one problem. I figure there are two things that lead me to getting a good night’s sleep. One is working out really hard during the day and the other is not having any excitement in my life or performing to do. The excitement and performing thing is a hard one because, well… I am a performer. And that means excitement. And when I say excitement, I don’t mean, y’know, “excitement”! Excitement can mean bad things too, anxiety, worry, and just wrangling the level of uncertainty that I have in my life.

Now that I’ve been in “show business” for twenty years, I can see that one of it’s biggest plusses is also it’s downside. Which is nothing is ever regular or predictable. It’s a high uncertainty field. And I think my temperament is really made for this in some ways. I can tolerate pretty high levels of uncertainty about my future and I do thrive in some ways on the adrenaline that comes with getting projects done at the last minute or never knowing if your show is going to tank or run for a long time. But I also see that it’s just killing me. Honestly, I feel so worn out. And sadly, although I have become accustomed to this uncertain, this constant uncertain life, the excitement and nervousness that comes with it is getting actually harder to deal with in my body. Which is how I get to the sleep problem.

My father was a notoriously poor sleeper. He had sleep debt all the time. I can throw these types of terms around with confidence now that I’ve read this book, “Counting Sheep” which had a huge impact on me and a book I recommend to anyone who sleeps. FYI: Sleep is really important. Anyway, I think I either learned or inherited my dad’s poor sleep habits. And now, in my mid-forties, it’s really taking a toll. I mean, it can really ruin your life. And now I even have Fear-of-not-sleeping and that just makes it all worse!

What’s sad is that many of my favorite moments of my life, the memories I hope to cherish as long as I can cherish memories, are of performing. I feel I am most “me” and at my best performing on stage. I’m not saying I’m so great at it, I’m just saying, this is the thing I do that I’m most proud of and I get the most enjoyment from. But then the adrenaline that builds up in me is just almost intolerable. I cannot sleep. I just cannot. Now even Excedrin P.M.’s don’t work, I’ve taken so many of them, so regularly. I haven’t resorted to prescription pills because that would mean admitting that I have a sleep problem that is BIG. And it means taking a prescription which, which just makes me sad. I don’t know, but I get a lot of pride from not taking any prescriptions. I don’t know if this is because my parents are/were on ten or so different prescriptions and were my whole life or what. But I just…resist that. Plus, I honestly don’t know if there’s something that would work.

What I’m thinking is that I have to just have a more predictable life and stop performing for a while. Pull myself together. I really feel like doing “Letting Go Of God” has aged me ten years in the last ten months. I am pudgier and puffier than I have ever been. I am tired so much of the time. I am not eating really well, too -- much food on the go and eating too much of it. I haven’t been regularly exercising other than taking Arden hiking five days a week – and we usually go only once around Runyon Canyon which is only between 1.8 miles and 2.4 miles depending on who you listen to.

Oh my goodness, I have gone on too long about my problems. But there is a hopeful future! For one thing. I took a job. A great job. A regular job. That will have, like, some predictability in it. I mean, I think anyway. And I’m not in charge, it doesn’t all hinge on me. And it all worked out so well, I am just astonished that it worked out so well.

So the headline is: I’m going to go write on this little show called, “Desperate Housewives.” The deal just got done on Friday. It’s really -- see, I was gonna write, “exciting” shit! But yes, it’s exciting. The offices are at Universal Studios which is only twenty minutes from my house. I’m like…on staff, a regular employee, part of the team! And everything fell into place the last few days: Lisa, Mulan’s babysitter is available and back from China, so I’m hiring her on a part-time regular basis, my show is ending next weekend and I start on June 4 basically so that worked out eerily perfectly. I am not working full time on Desperate, like…3/4 time, so I will have some time to volunteer at Mulan’s school and work on other things. The writing team is going to Hawaii together for a week in June which is…like…AWESOME. I get to take Mulan with me. So…there you go.

Also, the This American Life show that is going to be about my show, Letting Go Of God, is going to be on June 3 (at least here in L.A. where the show is on Saturdays) and I am recording it on Monday and Tuesday with Ira Glass at KCRW. This is also mind-bogglingly exciting. See, there’s that word again! But still, yes. Exciting beyond belief. And I’m editing the shows together to be a CD and that might be done fairly soon.

The bad news is that I’m going to have to majorly extend or get out of my deadline on the book. Like I’m thinking I have to give back the advance. Oh, that is so humiliating. And painful to even think about. But what I’ve come to realize is that I cannot get this book done in the time that they have given me. Which is already so much time. My book editor has been generous with the time already, and still, it’s not enough time. I AM going to finish this book. I mean, I have so much of it written already! But I want to have a more leisurely time to write it and -- I don’t know -- I am just not dealing with the deadlines on this book well at all. I really want it to be thorough and great and it’s just not thorough and great right now. So this means a really humiliating and awful conversation with my editor. What I wish is that they would let me take the next nine months to finish it. Which I think I could do. Plus, having an office somewhere else is going to help me get things done. And what’s really going to help is stopping performing the show. I think. I mean, the whole thing, the whole book disaster makes me feel like an enormous failure and untrustworthy to boot. I have never NOT delivered on a project. But I just haven’t been able to get the time to do it while I’ve been performing. It’s only been in the last month of so that the Figuring-Out-The-Show hat has been taken off and the Figuring-Out-The-Book hat has been put on. ARGH.

The last few days I’ve been going over the decisions I’ve made. It’s hard to tell if I’ve done the right thing. But I will say, it all feels right right now, because I’m so happy about this job on Desperate, so thrilled, I am just pinching myself. But I basically could have taken his show to New York, and I turned it down. And I think this show is not only my best show, I think it’s culturally and politically relevant right now. And yet, I just could not do it. Six to eight shows a week – moving, what it would do to Mulan. No partner to help me out, it would have been horrible. I even had a last ditch New York fantasy where I went and only did matinees. Matinees are the perfect show for me, plenty of time to come down off the show and get to sleep on time. I would get evenings with Mulan and I would be the one reading her the story and putting her to bed. So I had this elaborate fantasy that I went to New York and only did matinees all week. Wouldn’t that be fantastic!? It would be a job like any other job. In the DAYTIME. Ah, well…

This also means postponing the filming of Letting Go for the time being. I was planning on filming the show in the fall, but now I bet I will have to wait a year. And I want to finance the film and direct it myself, and that means coming up with the $, which I could also do if I borrowed from myself – money I vowed never to touch, or take a mortgage out on the house. But if I save all year and I could probably do it without dipping into that money next Spring. So that’s the current plan. Shooting next Spring. I am doing the show for the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival in June – June 23 and things might change based on that.

Wow, now THIS is a personal blog. Money, sleep, body image – that’s the real personal stuff.

Yesterday was Mulan’s school’s Fair. We went for most of the day and we ended up buying six baskets of stuff. I really didn’t expect our bids to get taken on SIX baskets of stuff. So now my living room is filled with…well, junk. All the stuff I am trying not to accumulate. And we’ve got to clean it all up before the matinee. We got a Hello Kitty basket and a Baking basket and a Arts & Crafts basket and a Beach basket. Let’s just say that I have birthday presents for kids covered for the next three years at least!