I checked my email. Or rather, I tackled the task of my inbox. I’d been away from my computer for almost two weeks and I had a thousand messages. Most of them just needed to be deleted but it’s amazing how long deleting a bunch of emails can take. And in the process I tried to answer the most pressing, the things I hadn’t responded to that I needed to. There wasn’t anything too awful in there- mostly just a lot of business maintenance. But somehow the whole process kicked in an anxiety that I had left behind for the two weeks I was gone. And all the thrilling inspiration of travel and ideas and otherness started to dissolve into the mundane tasks of a life. I had hoped the high of my voyage might sustain me through jumpstarting a few of my projects…that it might help me focus on what is truly important to me before it all disappeared in the daily grind of life here.
I could have fed the muse.
I could have put off those emails for one more day and JUST focused on the dreams and ideas –
Only done things that advanced them.
But no, I had to clear my inbox.
I had to respond and respond and respond.

The best laid plans…my mom and I are flying to Greece today. She was to fly to NYC from Richmond, VA and we were to fly together. But her plane hasn’t gone and is not going so now her flight to Greece has been re-scheduled and they’re working on re-scheduling mine. But meanwhile, I’m due to leave in about a half and hour. Or less, actually. Which scatters all the plans up. I got up at 7:30 this morning, which is impossibly early for me. And hustled lots of cleaning of the apartment I’ve been crashing in and did all I could to make sure I got this small window of writing time – and yet it’s all been taken up with dealing with the re-scheduling and craziness and sometimes in the space of all things spinning out of control – even pleasant easy things like traveling – a small child’s voice in me cries out this very line.

This is a curious assumption to make, Gertie.
Do sons often murder their mothers?
Wives, sure. All the time.
But mothers? Not usually. Not unless they are real harridans.
And what possible motivation could your son have to kill you? He doesn’t stand to GAIN anything – just lose. And do you really think so little of your son that you think he would kill you?

The only explanation I can come up with is that Polonius has somehow so convinced her that he is dangerously mad and must be spoken to sternly or he’s sure to kill. And somehow that helps to diminish the terribleness of what Hamlet is actually about to do – which is murder, not his mother but, who he thinks is the king.
Which is a LITTLE bit crazy given that he just left him praying in another room.
But the heightened atmosphere of this scene is such that NO ONE is thinking clearly.
Gertrude is suddenly afraid of her own child and her child impetuously kills someone without identifying who it is.
There has to be something in the first lines of this scene that triggers BOTH of those characters’ amygdala’s hard core. When staging this, it will have to feel so taut, so like a string pulled from one end of the bow to the other, so ready for trouble that any line could be the arrow loosed.

I read this book about Time orientations – the author talked about how people’s relationship to time plays such a huge role in their lives and personality. He breaks it down to being Future, Present or Past Oriented, with varying qualities within them. I have come to see that I am pretty squarely in a Present Orientation. I do not enjoy planning for things. I will. I can. But – I do not relish it. Even for pleasurable activities. I’m very good at staying in the moment, finding ways to handle the right now.
Occasionally, the future perspective kicks in – and I get a sudden panic of a future I haven’t been thinking about.

This morning in the shower, I suddenly wondered what my life would be like when I got back from my vacation to Greece. As if I had no say in the matter. One part of me asked the other part, “What wilt thou do?” The funniest thing about that wondering/panic was that I hadn’t thought of it once in the last month. I just proceeded, just got on with things, worked slowly toward other goals with the small manageable steps that I have developed to keep myself moving future-wise despite my future blindness. Because the future always shows up whether you saw it coming or not.

Why is that Gertrude feels like she can’t speak?
What prevents her from speaking for herself?
Why does the Queen of Denmark feel powerless to speak to her only son?
There’s a world of conversation around women’s speech lately – the many criticisms of it – the way we are acculturated to believe that nothing we say will be believed, understood or appreciated, if we’re allowed to finish speaking at all.
The many ways a woman can be silenced include:

• constant interruption (1st thing to learn how to say as a girl, “Don’t interrupt me.”)
• disbelief (40 women said Cosby raped them years ago – 1 man said it and finally people begin to believe them)
• extreme self-consciousness (women’s voices on the radio receive non-stop criticism. The numbers of things people complain about: vocal fry, uptick, rising inflections, tones, too high, too low)
• never be heard at all (women speak about 30% as much as men but are thought to be the big talkers. If you say anything at all, you talk too much.)

And more and more.
And even a Queen might be susceptible to these things. Even hundreds of years ago. These patterns are ancient, I’d wager.

I rarely forget people. I am usually the person who can tell you where we met, how we know each other and I probably remember your name. It often makes me feel a little strange that I remember someone when they’ve clearly forgotten me. It makes me feel like I don’t really make an impression on people, like I somehow don’t matter enough to remember.

I comfort myself with the idea that it’s not that I’m not remarkable, it’s that I just have an unusually good memory for faces and circumstances – though I’m not sure if this is so.

Recently though, I’ve run into people who remembered me that I had no memory of. This baffled me – because I almost always remember. I probably meet such moments with more than your average sense of incredulity.

We’ve lost “how now” in our daily speech. It stuck around a little – all I can think of in contemporary(ish) language was a phrase (was it from a TV show perhaps?) that went, “How Now, Brown Cow?”
And that’s about the extent of it.
But many things have stepped into its place.
And a lot of those things were initiated by teenage girls.
I read an article about how almost all language innovations and inventions start with teenage girls. They are the culture’s language originators. Which is kind of great.
I mean, I’m not always a fan of what they invent – but I’m glad they have power somewhere – that they have left their marks century after century in the evolution of the language. And part of that evolution means losing things – even things as useful as “How Now.”

Screeeeech! We got a switch from the informal to the formal right here. A line ago it was thou and thy and now it’s you. Does scolding naturally indicate a switch in tone? Like, when Gertrude told Hamlet to take his elbows off the table, was it all like, “Wouldst thou pass the potatoes? They are there at thy left. What’s this I see? Take your elbows off the table, young man.”

It makes sense actually. I know some parents who have trouble communicating good behavior to their kids because they do not know how to make this switch. It might be helpful in a classroom, too. You could be all cool teacher – thee-ing and thou-ing it up with your cool students – but when it’s time to get them to shut up. . .well then – it’s “YOU all need to be quiet right now.”

The Queen really ought to know better than to call Hamlet’s stepfather/uncle his father. Anyone with a blended family learns this lesson pretty quickly. You just don’t do that – PARTICULARLY when they have a contentious relationship. It’s incendiary. You might as well pour out some emotional gasoline and light a match.
A complete and total stranger could call my stepmother my mother and I would likely lose my shit just as quickly. I would shoot back, “She is NOT my mother.” So fast it would make your head spin.
There are families where the step-parent becomes so much like a father or mother that eventually it can shift to a changing of identifications. But this is very rare and takes a LOT of time. The only examples I can think of are ones in which a step parent really steps up and takes care of a child (and it does tend to be a CHILD) and essentially acts so much like a father or a mother that it becomes possible to be called such. But I’ve never met anyone for whole this was true. Everyone I know is VERY CLEAR that a step parent is not their parent. Even if they’re great. Which Claudius definitely isn’t.

As far as I know, I have never inspired fear in anyone. Maybe a cat by inadvertently slamming a door. Or a friend by walking into a room when they weren’t prepared for anyone to show up.
I generally project a “Have no fear” vibe, I think. It may be why animals are drawn to me despite my general indifference to them.
Or maybe I’m secretly terrifying – so secretly, it’s even secret to myself. I’ve fantasized about inspiring fear – a friend and I used to scheme great super-villain schemes, plotting world domination and so on. But it was funny, actually – since neither of us inspired fear in anyone nor would we want to in reality.
This is also why I made a terrible substitute teacher.