I've Got the Power?

Talking to a random stranger on the Internet tonight who decided that I was a gregarious, outgoing individual.  Since he was a random Internet stranger, I would have dismissed this entirely but for the fact that I'm finding that, compared to normal people, I am.  

I used to believe that I hated people, I wanted to be left alone.  And this is true, I am an introvert, I need time away from people.  People exhaust me.  

A friend cancelled plans with me today, and I didn't feel relieved.  I talked to a friend online I haven't spoken to in a while, and told them I missed them, and realised it was true.  I miss people.  

I typed that last sentence and then deleted it, because I don't miss people.  But I think that's the difference.  I don't miss people, I miss the idea of one person.  And it's not him I miss, it's that relationship.  I missed it when I was in the relationship with him.  

I miss the feel of someone else.  I miss touch and trust and everything that the combination of those two things can mean.  

I tried so hard not to.  

Risk Is Wearing a Christmas Sweater

Some days, everything looks possible.

Then there are days like these.

Being an adult is when you have to look at a person half your age, having a problem you have never had, and summon the ability to be as strong and competent as they must believe you are.  I've had to do that a lot this year.  There is nothing quite as awful as a 15 year old matter-of-factly telling you the worst thing you have ever heard, except maybe letting the 15 year old know that you're on new ground here.

When I was 15, I dissolved in to tears over book characters, over life and death situations like cast lists and homework projects and the unfairness of a reality where the universe was not subject entirely to my whim.  I was tired and ugly and strange and never good enough, but I was lucky enough not to be too terribly broken, and nothing ever happened to break me.  Very few people actively tried to destroy me.  Why is everyone trying to destroy teenagers?  Why does it immediately get easier once you're out the other side?

I spent most of today worrying about the next 25 years.  Which will sort themselves out as I make decisions.  As I make choices about what I need to do.  2040.  Children will be born and grow up and start their own families and make their own incredibly poor decisions in that time.  It makes everything smaller, more insignificant.

I was sent a Hogwatch Night card this year.  The only holiday card I received, reminding me that invisible things matter.  Invisible things don't matter.  Time.  Death.  Life.  We rely on Truth, Justice, Love and all the rest because of those big three, but we use the others to pretend that the big ones do mean anything and that must be some comfort.

I am an existentialist.

Of course, if that's true, I suppose my role ought to be to look for those other things, not to reject them.  That way lies nihilism.

Sometimes when you fall, you fly.  The rest of the time, I suppose, you die, or maybe you don't.  If you're standing at the edge of the cliff while the avalanche bears down behind you, you have the option to find out what might happen if you jump, or to let the avalanche take you.

I usually let the avalanche take me.  I'm allowed to change that.  Only if I want to.

January Horizons

I was involved in over 26 shows in some capacity last year, either as director, stage manager, coordinator, dramaturge, playwright, designer, technician, and even more if you start to count the shows I worked front of house or box office.

Last year doesn't feel big.  I don't feel I have much to show from that work.  I wasn't doing anything new or different from anything I've done before.  There was a lot of work, but not a lot of growth.  And maybe that's because I've had to grow as a person, and that's the difference.

There is no excuse for being jealous of anyone for doing what you won't do.  Wisdom to live by.  It's time to write.  It's time to admit that no one in this town is going to give me the opportunities I want and look for them elsewhere.

At the same time, if I can create opportunities, I can create them anywhere.  Wasting time here is wasting it anywhere.

I own a house I have no intention of selling, no plans to rent, and I won't even have a hope of paying it off for another 7-8 years.  What am I thinking?

I'm thinking I'm lonely and sort of unfulfilled.  As though going anywhere is going to fix that.

Every time I think I know what I want, something changes.  Focus on being where you are right now and making that work.

There is no excuse for running a playwright's workshop and not working as a playwright.  None.  You need to fix that first.  Which means writing.  Which means having an idea.  Which means getting out of your head and typing.  A play.

That would feel big.

Of the Art and Pigs and Chickens

A day spent reading creepy/unusual stories on Reddit.  Ghosts are traditional to Christmas, you know.  The barrier between this world and the others is thinnest on the Solstice and ghosts may still linger in the long nights after it.

I remind myself that celebrations are when and what we make them.

I didn't do as much theatre as I would have liked to do this year.  Or rather, I missed devised theatre.  This is, of course, problematic.  My comfortable opportunities to do that work are limited.

American Theatre Magazine had an article with a playwright about my age who went to the same physical theatre school as friends.  I've seen the difference it makes.  And the article sums up why it's not for me.  My drive has never been to be a performer, and it's always my least favourite part of the process.  I would much rather help make it happen and then not have to perform.

Why does devised theatre *have* to be physical theatre and mask?  And I presume the reason is that to build that kind of company, that's how you have to work.  Separating off the skills of the performers leaves you with a group of people who are learning one set of skills and another set of people learning another set of skills and you're back to the traditional theatre model which doesn't rely on everyone coming from the same place and thinking in the same way.  Of course, once you learn that and go out in the world in to traditional theatres, that's where the difference is obvious.  Or so I think.

But I'm not interested in learning clown or tai-chi or any of those hard physical skills.  And I definitely don't want to learn it in a highly disciplined, insular environment.  If I were capable of that, my movement teacher wouldn't have thrown me out of his class.  My acting teacher wouldn't, in a fit of frustration, have asked me, "How the hell I thought I was going to be an actor?"  My response was that I didn't intend to be.  I don't.

The process is appealing because it is comprehensive.  I never wanted to have a BFA, because I never wanted to have to choose one thing.  My degree is a general degree, neither Technical nor Performance nor Education.  I took directing classes and design and acting and education.  I took a Theatre Management course.  I took a course on Musical Theatre.  In spite of taking Playwrighting three times, there's no specialisation in my transcript at all.  I did what I wanted.  Devised, collaborative performance lets me do everything I want, but I can't pursue it because I'm not to the place where I want to do everything.

A friend mentioned pursuing grad school on Facebook, because he wants the networking and experience, but is discouraged by the price.  I told him, if he wants to gain experience and network, that doesn't require grad school, that requires doing it on your own.  If you can't do it on your own and you need the framework of grad school to force you to commit to it, maybe that's not a bad idea.  But the only real reason to go to grad school is because you want a specific experience that will help you fulfill a specific goal.  I've seen people who only want the MFA as a piece of paper so they can go back to the working world and say, "OK, pay me more."  It used to irritate me, but I've come to see that that's what they wanted, and determined that paying for the experience was better than merely putting in the years of professional work to equal that paid experience.

For me, I didn't really have a goal.  Grad school didn't work out; it was specialised and I'm not.  This is why I shouldn't even try to get a Theatre Studies or Performance Studies degree, because I would miss designing and building and directing and writing and everything else at the expense of just learning how and why those things happen.  And then I start looking up Devised Theatre degrees, and I see mask and clown and dance and pull back, because I don't want those skills.

The answer, of course, is to make revolutionary change to the landscape and figure out how to turn the application in to a theory and teach it.  I struggle to teach representational acting to ninth graders.  Reforming the entire collaborative theatre around my personal need to avoid wearing a red nose and doing a lot of self-discovery is probably not something I'm capable of.

Que Sera, Sera.

I was invited to a Christmas party that I'm not going to go to.  I planned on it, but I didn't have the motivation to go.  Being with people is exhausting.  I went to a Christmas lunch yesterday, too many expectations to eat food, to talk to people about nothing.  I don't really want to do it again tonight.  So I stayed home and watched Trains, Planes & Automobiles and The Star Wars Holiday Special.

I spent Sunday regaining the closets.  My closet space is, oddly, tripled due to closet space that was going entirely unused.  I like that when I make a mess, or stop a project in the middle, it doesn't get worse without my knowledge.

I don't think I was intended to live with other humans.

I want next year to be over.  2016 is a test year, a waste of time to set a benchmark.  I keep doing things I probably shouldn't, justifying them as a change I'll make when I find out what things look like.  They look like you spending money you don't quite know that you have on the grounds that you don't know what the year looks like, yet.  I mean, I *have* it, I just don't know if it would have been better spent some other way yet.

No.  I'm spending money on things that make me happy.  What's it for if not for that?

I just want to make it through to May.  In May, I'll see what I know.

And It Started to Rain in Southern California

I'm working fifty hour weeks and devoting my weekends to working more than that.  Or being sick.  I think I'm almost over the I'm-pretty-sure-it-was-bronchitis I've had for a month.  I haven't done laundry in 3 weeks.  I struggle to get to the grocery store regularly when it's open.  

The new schedule is totally screwing with my ability to maintain a schedule.  

I want to disappear over Christmas.  I'm torn between a desire to just stay in bed with the dog and to run away.  

How do people do it?  Presumably they don't do it alone.  

Which is a dumb thing to say because this is the exact same time every year that I determine I can't cope and I want a stage manager to run my life.  Which of course indicates that if I want an impartial task master to get shit done, that person is me and I need to stop being so neurotic about it.  

I'm going to lose a friend this year.  She wants me to direct a piece she's animating.  She and I have done group projects in school, but never for school.  She's many things, sensitive and smart and very very concerned with doing things right, well, and on time.  I get along very well with people who also have time management problems.  And I know she has a benevolent need to do me a favor, so she wants to pay me.  

I've known her since I was 12, and I know we've had at least four major disagreements I didn't know were happening until she decided I hated her.  It's worrying. That's more arguments than I've ever had with anyone other than a family member or authority figure.  

Christmas is next week.  I keep trying not to pay attention.  I keep seeing Facebook posts from friends who aren't feeling Christmasy because it's a temperate climate and this year it's been 50 degrees.  They have no idea how Christmasy it is.  I'm dying on the hill in the War on Christmas at work.  

I don't really care, but I decided I wasn't going to be bullied in to it through guilt, etc just to put that out there as a personality trait, because it exists.  

And maybe I'll survive through the year.  

What's Next

I keep reminding myself I don't need to look for a job anymore.  It became part of my routine, as soon as I run out of things to do online, start looking for a job.  

And, now that I'm there, I don't really have any goals.  I have immediate goals, but they're all working themselves out- filling out paperwork for various things, finagling my schedule to let me do the things I want to do, working on the divorce, all stuff that's going to happen, slowly, eventually and without my really needing to do anything.  

Many of the biggest things that have happened to me aren't things I anticipated five years ago.  I found a list I made in 2009, and I discover that I was incredibly bored and unmotivated, because everything on that list I haven't done is trying some kind of dumb activity in some kind of generic self improvement.  Keep bees.  Seriously.  

So what have I done?  I went to Canada.  I directed a musical.  I stage managed a major college choir concert.  I've devised weird theatre.  I've taught technical theatre to kids.  I've written.  I've struggled to save my marriage and let it go.  I took an aerial class.  I lost 30 pounds.  And most of that's been in the last two or three years, because 2009 and 2010 were sort of bad years for me.  It's when my marriage ended, I just didn't know it yet.  

Mostly, I want to discover if I can live on my own.  I know I can, but I think I want to take a couple years and just be me.  I'm pretty sure a couple years is probably going to turn in to the rest of my life.  That's not being down on myself, that's just speaking realistically.  I don't think I want to give another person as much as I gave my husband, and I don't think I'm willing to have a relationship where I'm not willing to give someone that much.  

That's, like, a perfect explanation of why I'm not a good actor.  I know acting requires giving that much, but I don't want to open myself that much to anybody.  

Except I probably will.  Someday.