What to do

How chilly this morning. Had the heat turned on a week or so ago, but we both smelled what we thought was the faint odor of gas ... but only around the stairwell. In any case the weather has been mild, but no longer.

I have been working overtime on "Cloud 9" and deserve a break, my traditional break. Last year, after Sin opened I think I went to the zoo and got very depressed. I can't decide whether to go to the Rainforest or the art museum.

I also need to rake the leaves.

Housework

Spent the morning, since I rose at 7ish (7:30?) washing dishes, taking care of Toni, making breakfast, taking care of Toni ... feels like so much time spent doing housework but I'm not really doing any. I am always doing something yet it feels I am further and further behind.

Which is to say nothing of how Toni feels, by her own assessment "four weeks behind" in her homework, she was written a play and is acting as its sound designer (she is there, at a sound design meeting this morning) as well as being hideously fraught with morning sickness. She has been unsteady and unwell for three days. I hope she shakes it off by this afternoon, the mornings can be treacherous.

I was formerly sad and depressed because I feared we would never have a child, now I fear sometimes she will hate me for forcing her to have one.

Accutane

Just read an article on Salon about a teenager who shot himself, and the parents are suing the manufacturer of Accutane, or their doctor or something.

In 1998 the FDA instructed doctors to warn people to whom they prescribe Accutane that it has been linked to depression. I took Accutane in 1987. By the following fall, I was almost entirely despondent, angry, irrationally upset ... that drug (almost) cured me of disfiguring and extremely painful acne. It also brought on rather swift hair loss as well as extreme sensitivity to cold weather and eternally chapped lips. I cannot tell whether or not that was a good thing.

My ex-wife took Accutane during our first year of marriage. Hmn.

Success

Toni is pregnant. This is a good thing, this is something we planned, something we worked together for. I wanted a baby, and I wanted one now. I felt, I have felt, that I have been waiting my entire life for when everything was on the right order - right career, right mate, right time, house clean, office organized, head in a good place - before I could. By those criteria I would wait forever. I asked Toni if we could, she said yes, some time ago. Only now we have done it.

I worried it would never happen, that now that I was ready she wouldn't be, and wasn't for a time, like I wasn't ready for marriage, and yet here we are. She's been off the pill for ages, taking B vitamins, trying to be in good health (though, again, can't wait forever) and last month we began trying to get pregnant and bam, it worked. Damn, I'm good.

This morning was a monster. We have both been doing so much work, getting little sleep, and the stress is telling on her - pregnant, in grad school, and having a play she wrote produced at Dobama's Night Kitchen. She was very unhappy this morning.

Tech Week

Last October, as Roger began directing 'Compleat Works', he shared with me some ingiht into his anxiety about the project. We had just opened 'Sin" at Bad Epitaph, and there he was, with me and Nick and Al, Don McBride, and he was panicked - how would we do this show? How could he get everything done? There wasn't time for this!

And then he stepped back and realized he was still in Tech Week from 'Sin.' This show wasn't about to open, we had some five weeks to get it done. Five weeks is a long time to get anything done.

I have been in Tech Week for months now, and I do not know how to get out of it.

I suppose a great deal of this has to do with my actually fulfilling the promises I made to myself years ago. I have my own company, and all the stress that comes with (how do I produce an entire season right now, during Tech Week?) Or that I have a part-time job doing web design for the ACLU (I work five hours a day there, but they can't expect me to charge their entire website during Tech Week!)

And the baby. We are trying to get pregnant. And she's going to have a baby tomorrow. Because it is Tech Week. And the house isn't ready for a baby yet.

Nine months is a long time to accomplish anything. Tech Week isn't.

I am wearing a sweater Toni picked out for me from land's End. It's cozy, warm, a nice, homely cotton sweater. In green. I used to hate green. When the baby comes we will paint one of these rooms green for it.

Beginnings

In April 2011, I HATE THIS will be produced at Cleveland Public Theatre. These will be the first public performances in Cleveland since 2004, and the first time I have performed the show at all since 2007.

The events described in the play occurred ten years ago, and at the time I kept a journal. I will be providing edited version of these journal entries on the I HATE THIS blog through next Spring. - 8/27/10

We are trying to get pregnant - that needs to be on my list, to read the 'pregnant books.' Sometimes I think she cannot be serious, and there she is, wearing her fecundity medallion every day, the one Nicole lent her. The things we trust in.