A new approach

Hello friends!

Time again to catch this thing up. I'm gonna cheat a bit, and plagiarize from a letter I just wrote. (It doesn't count if you're stealing from yourself, right?)

I'm doing extremely well.

Long story less long – I had about a month off after leaving Canada, during which I tried to pull myself out of the slump I’d sunk into and visited Brown, friends, family, Paris + London and planned my next move.

In mid-January, I began my 3rd post-grad West Coast adventure, working on the tallship square-rigged ketch The Hawaiian Chieftain, sister boat to the Lady Washington, who appears as The Interceptor in the 1st Pirates of the Caribbean film. These two boats are sail-training vessels, so you can pay a bit to do Two Weeks Before the Mast and “learn the ropes.” [You can learn more about this program at historicalseaport.org and I think I have a few pictures from the boat on my facebook page.] It was an amazing experience and a huge challenge – in some ways the most out of my element I have ever felt. I didn’t know anything about boats or sailing when I arrived, except a bunch of sea shanties, and real-life sailors aren’t super keen on pirates because it’s all the public visitors ever talk to them about. I also got off on the wrong foot with the crew because I started fraternizing with the captain 4 days after I got there, and then (unrelatedly) I got a paid officer position about a week later. So it took a while for me to make friends and become happy and competent. But, I learned a LOT from the whole thing (and so did several other people) and my last couple months aboard were truly wonderful.

I have WAY too many stories from the boat to put them all here, so I am hoping to make this a somewhat more interactive forum. Please post or send me questions, things you want me to tell you more about. And look out for my next post. It will treat on near-death moments.


I had another sort of break in the action in May. I took the whole month off and spent it mostly bumming around Providence, playing with friends and indulging in a few of my favorite vices. May is my favorite month in Rhode Island and it was beautiful and restorative.


Since early June, I have been out here in San Rafael, just a few miles north of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge. The weather is consistently gorgeous and just about perfect. Sunshine and trees and flowers everywhere. I live in a beautiful house on top of a hill in a beautiful town, and get to see lots of stars at night. An absurdly kind old couple affiliated with the Marin Shakespeare Company, where I am doing an acting internship, are housing me in their daughter’s former room for FREE until the play finishes in late September. Then I will either go stay with other nice people I kind of know in Oakland or Berkeley or try to find other (cheap!) housing somewhere around the Bay.


I am planning to stick around SF until next summer, seeing if I can figure out this whole “being an actor” thing. Then I want to go back to Alaska to work on a whale-watching boat surrounded by glaciers. Fuck yeah! :) I’m also hoping to make a long-awaited journey to New Zealand + Australia in December with a couple pals, [thus sealing the deal on my goal to touch 6 continents before turning 25 :) ] and to squeeze in a couple visits to my native coast.

It’s hard for me to choose favorite things about living here or there. [As some can tell you, I have difficulty whittling myself down to One Favorite anything.] My internship has been awesome. The group of young actors I’m working with is wonderful—kind, supportive, talented, funny, smart…great. Made it real easy to strike up friendships right off the bat. In general, I like the vibe here, especially around San Francisco. People are easy-going, not really high-strung or in a hurry, open and friendly and helpful, etc. Just like the stereotypes all tell ya. I’ve also really enjoyed the way you can kind of choose your own weather, based on which part of the coast you hang out in. There are places you can go for sunshine, or rain, or snow. It’s kind of weird. I’m glad I grew up with seasons, but I’m also glad I managed to opt out of winter this year. Perhaps my favorite thing about living in CA is the ease of access to fresh produce. I’ve become addicted to avocados. I eat one almost every day.

My least favorite is being so far away from most of my family, friends, loved ones, local haunts and support network. I’m a stranger in a strange land, and no matter how restless I am, how much I love traveling, challenging myself and adapting to new environments and circumstances, I think Maine and New England (and New York) will always feel like “home” to me. Luckily, my aunt lives nearby and my brother and his girlfriend are in San Diego, and having a baby in a couple months!, and there are some Brownies around, so it’s not too intimidating.

As for my reading and writing…Well, I have read very little so far this summer. Tried to take another spin w/ Ayn Rand + Atlas Shrugged, but although I’m a total egotist, I’m not much for capitalism [there goes the last shred of my hope for a successful political career in this country--lolz!], so sometimes her philosophical belaboring annoys and turns me off. I’ve also been reading a Lot of plays, especially Shakespeare, for my internship. Revisited The Tempest, an old favorite –the first play of His I ever read or acted. (I played Prospero in a camp out here in SF 12 summers ago.) That’s about all I’ve had time for.

I have been writing a lot though. Mostly I just keep a super-detailed journal, partly because it’s the easiest way to feel like I’m writing regularly, but also because the Master Plan of my life right now is to have as many exciting, crazy and awesome adventures as possible and keep track of them all so I can one day mine the material for novels, short stories, or at least a good blog, or something. I’ve also come back to my thesis a couple times, including earlier this week, actually. I still think of it as a work in progress, so I go back to cut and edit when the mood (occasionally) strikes. No publication plans quite yet. I’ll keep you posted. ;)

I’m also discovering more and more that the form I seem best suited for is story-telling. Some blend of writing and acting and living, with a keen eye for the comical, the outrageous, the divine and the absurd. And details. Trying to hone that.
We can only hope I will one day unravel brevity!


Hope you continue to learn and thrive, readers. I try not to flatter myself that there are many of you (I know you're out there Mom and Dad!), but if I have caught your interest, tell me what you'd like more of. I am feeling enthusiastic about collaboration these days. All my favorite art forms seem to desire or benefit from it--theatre, story-telling, friendship, relationships. Even the most introspective of painters and writers tend to create with some kind of audience in mind, right?

A long over-due segue-teaser

Well, it seems it took longer for me to find the spare time than I expected. Nine months have passed since my last post, and they have been action-packed! I will attempt to catch you up.

Within a few weeks of arriving in Shawnigan Lake, I started to have misgivings about the situation. Even before I took the post, I was rather hesitant about the 9 month commitment. Generally, I max out on an experience after 3 or 4 months, and it had been my intention for this year to have a series of shorter adventures rather than one extended one (post-Alaska). Still, at the time that I made the decision to go out there and give it a shot, I had what seemed like good and compelling reasons to do so.

It was hard to tell at first if my discomfort in Canada was simply the result of typical growing pains. The more I do this, the more I detect a pattern that the first third to half of a new adventure is largely an adjustment phase. I don’t always open up to new people, particularly new groups of people, right off the bat. I like to sit back and observe for a while. And because people and friendship and community are so important to me, this habit tends to make that first segment of an experience rather lonely and frustrating at times.

After a few weeks of soul-searching, existential angsting, and sinking into an ever-deeper pit of inactivity and apathy towards the work I was doing, with far too much free time on my hands, I finally resolved to tell Tim I had changed my mind and that instead of staying through June, I ended up leaving after only 2 months, towards the end of November.

Tim was, as always, a princely man, and extremely understanding and cool about the whole thing. I felt a bit guilty about abandoning my students, who were all great kids, though they all had miles to go before being easy or ideal pupils, and Sonia, who is a truly great teacher and human being, but it became clear that the cons outweighed the pros for me to stay there, and I needed to find a situation that was better for me.

Of course, reaching that decision still left me with the very weighty question—what to do instead? I openly admit, I am outrageously blessed to have the problems I do. There I was, with complete and ultimate freedom. There are many things I am interested in and I’m so sure of myself and good at interviews and such, that it is more or less my belief that I could do anything if I set my mind to it. I’m done with school, I’ve paid off my loans, I still have some money in the bank from my work in Alaska. I have no expenses or responsibilities to meet. So, with all that freedom and possibility comes the problem: it is entirely up to me to decide WHAT I want to do. If I can’t find a way to be happy, it’s pretty much entirely my own fault. So what is it, Shana? What is it you most want to be doing right now? Where do you want to live? Where do you want to work? What’s essential? What’s a time-sensitive priority?

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The answer?  I want to go sailing. I want to go work on a tallship and learn some new, hands-on, semi-practical life skills. I want to see if my “someday” fantasy of having a little sailboat of my own on/with which to live and travel and visit friends is something I would actually enjoy in real life, because if not, I should probably replace it with another life goal. After I get a taste for life on the high seas, and have one more thing on the resume that I can pursue for intermittent employment in the future, and get through the winter somewhere mostly warm and sunny, THEN I will be ready to try acting.

I have loved acting since I was a little kid. The theater is a place I have consistently felt happy, comfortable, and surrounded by a loving community that makes sense to me. It is a great place for me to practically engage my skill and passion for psychologically dissecting and attempting to understand other people. It is a thrill for me to be onstage. I know it is a nearly impossible field in which to achieve “success” or even to earn a consistent living wage. I have few illusions on the subject. But I think I would be doing myself a disservice to never even try. And I might as well try sooner rather than later, before inertia sets in or I get caught up with other projects.

So that became my intended trajectory. Boat then acting. Read on to see how it’s going.