Happy Siblings Day

Last night I dreamed that was was talking to some actor friends about parts they were in. I told them that I wanted to sign up to be an extra in a Star Wars movie. That's not a particularly interesting dream, I know, but it reminds of times when I actually did work as an extra. Once was for a movie called Bicentennial Man, with Robin Williams. I was a hippie from the future. I had long hair back then. I didn't get to meet Williams, but we all saw him at the set by Fort Point in San Francisco. He made people laugh with a joke about the whales in the bay.

Today, I made a little more progress toward making life feel more normal. An awful heaviness seems to weigh everything down. I seem to be doing everything in slow motion. Maybe that's why I get worn out when I workout. I didn't work out today. I'm calling it a rest day. I did more tutorial stuff and web stuff, played cat-and-mouse with the news, watching some of it on TV but not all of it. The stay-at-home mandate in Los Angeles county has been extended to May 15th, according to the news. I finished watching A Handmaid's Tale. I'm glad the Season 3 finale was good. After being disappointed by the series finales for Game of Thrones and Westworld, I developed a rule not to watch a series unless the season finale gets a good rating. That's why I'm avoiding watching Westworld. I loved the first season, but the finale for the second season was too much of a head-scratcher for me.  For A Handmaid's Tale, I looked at the rating it got on Rotten Tomatoes before I watched the season.

The highlight of my day was watching Locke & Key with my sister, Monika, on Netflix Party. We're enjoying it for what it is as a young adult horror teen show. It's fun, but not excellent. Episode Four involved a Mean Girls kind of revenge plot with a magic key that let one girl control another girl like a puppet. Monika and I chatted comments to each other about the intriguing plot points.

After the show, we talked on the phone for a while. We started with a more critical analysis of the show. Some of the relationships don't seem quite realistic. The relationships between the teachers and the siblings who are the main characters seem too familiar because the kids are new in these schools, for example. We talked about how are days have been. I'm slowly rising above the dark well of depression that the world has become. I'm finding myself in a place where I can look at sad moments in my life and choose to be happy about them. I became a substitute teacher with the hope of being a theatre arts teacher. That didn't happen, but I learning a lot about human beings from the thousands of students I met. I wrote plays and music hoping to make something as big as Hamilton. That didn't happen, but I did get a few plays produced and I wrote a few good songs, and those experiences will be with me forever. I can be grateful for everything I've lived through and use that to rise above the fear. In the words of Seneca, “Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.”

The fear of sickness and death coming to me and my family and friends has added another layer of dread to the fear of failing to change my career, and yet I can imagine cutting through the gray sludge of that dread with a sword of determined action. By the end of my call with Monika, I remembered that I had gotten an offer to work as an online tutor for the coding boot camp I attending last fall. I found the e-mail with the offer and decided on a plan for how to move forward. My brother, James, would be proud. Here is a picture of James, me, and Monika from the last time we were together during a visit to the Philippines. Happy Siblings Day.