TravisBedard.com

Actor, Puppeteer, and Teaching Artist

What’s Making Me Happy: Overlap

A few years ago my friend and producing partner Will Hollis Snider did a Photo 365, taking one “publishable” photo a day. He discovered as the year ground on that he was continually framing photos throughout the day looking for something he didn’t hate by the end of it. This week has been similar as I was honestly a little petrified that I would sit here looking at the blank screen with no idea what it was that was making me happy this week. Instead I found a million little things making me happy in the fits and starts of what passes for meditation in my brain on Am I happy Now? Why? The ginger and okra tomato curry made me happy but was it happy or Happy? Can I seriously spend an entire blog post shouting how how great Siggis Orange and Ginger yogurt is? Or how great it is to discover that there is such a thing as Orange and Ginger yogurt because it’s been left out with your coffee for breakfast? Which is what Breakfast Christmas would be like if Breakfast Christmas existed.

Now I want to plan Breakfast Christmas.

Maybe. But what made me Happy this week was overlap.

We asked my sister Ariel and her then pending husband Matt to sing Ani Difranco’s Overlap at our wedding and it was our wedding and they would have felt like jerks if they didn’t do it so they did it and it was lovely.

I later repaid them by not singing at their wedding.

For those of you who don’t know the song the and choose to not listen to it here, the relevant portion for today is:

I know there is strength in the differences between us,
and I know there is comfort where we overlap.

After spending our time in the space of Marfa and the road between Marfa and Austin I spent the week marveling at the fact that after 15 years Megan and I still have anything at all to say to one another.
15 years ain’t nothing and I can talk at quite a clip.

I’ve half-jokingly said on a million different occasions that I was blessed with a wife who fascinates me.
I’ve been known to grow bored with people I’ve figured out, who have no mystery left to them.
It’s not that they’re not fun or somehow valueless it’s that they’re not as shiny.
I haven’t begun to figure Megan out. I learn new things every day. New knots to untangle.

But here’s the thing, the fifteen years of shared history, the things we have figured out about each other… they become the resting place. When you’re tired or sad and don’t feel like figuring out how to fight for reproductive justice or inexpensive but dynamic aesthetics for Austin Theatre right now  – you want to crash on the couch and have some gin and watch some Orphan Black -there’s a partner there for that who can tell at a look what kind of day it has been and whether or not we need to order pizza.

In a week where I flitted from one end of that spectrum to the other it was honestly a comfort to recognize that my partner is in step with me and I don’t need to explain.

come here
stand in front of the light
stand still
so I can see your sillouette
I hope you have got all night

’cause I’m not done looking
no, I’m not done looking yet

 

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