There are some schools of thought
that claim the most profound pieces of art and bouts of creativity come through times of great sadness and severe existential crisis. An extremely small percentage aside, I call horseshit. For me, when I’m depressed, I’m usually uninspired and too down to lift a pencil, and on the rare occasion when I’m depressed and have the gumption to force something out, it’s usually half-assed, merely passing an attempt to create something just to create. It never has the intended effect.
In my experience, if you can’t find the source of the problem, distract yourself from it with something that is, at the best, helpful, and at the worst, neutral, until you can find it. Relating to people with similar problems can lead to just wallowing. I know, I’ve been there. If I’m in a group of people who all have the same kind of problems as I do, it just brings be down more. It seems like it only nourishes the negativity.
Well hullo
The default ringtone on the loudest setting on a cell phone that is receiving texts roughly once every fifteen seconds.
Apologies. Is it possible to go on a tangent if you hadn’t actually started? Suppose that’d be more like a non-sequitorial ante scriptum. Maybe a vignette. Yeah, let’s go with that.
Deadmau5 on YouTube. Diner coffee and free internet. My computer may be purple, but at least it’s more of a royal purple than a loud flamboyant purple.
I’ve forgotten how to write, well, compellingly. Then again no issue is particularly pressing itself to the front of my skull at this particular moment. I’m sure something’ll come up sooner or later, but it’s been less frequent lately. The complacency I so long feared.
Cast in a new show with Iris. It’s been a long time coming, in more ways than one. We’ve played a stage couple twice now (technically three times, the first time being as two couples), and we have a nice rapport (never actually used that word in writing until now), but it’s always been in minimal roles or background characters/dancing partners. But we have a certain amount of respect for each other’s acting style, and I’ve been excited to play something a bit more dynamic opposite her.
Acting opposite a real life partner as an onstage partner seems to be one of those things like doctors not being allowed to (or at the very least heavily discouraged against) treating family members or loved ones as patients. Too many real emotions getting in the way of your scripted words and actions. That sounds derogatory but it’s not. In both situations you’re not able to completely think clearly because of so many fears and connections and connotations clouding your vision and your hearing, so the end result is potentially disastrous. Some pull it off. Most evade it, from my understanding. Maybe that’s why it amuses me so much when an actor’s wife will play his sister in a film with him, or something to that effect.
And even in cases where it does work, where a stage couple is also a real-life couple, well, it almost feels like PDA. I guess I don’t notice it acutely when I’m watching it (unless uncomfortable with the real-life couple in the first place), it’s more a matter of how I would feel were I in that position. I could never act opposite Nina onstage in an intimate fashion. I’d feel too exposed, too vulnerable to the audience, like I was starting to splinter the fourth wall. We did, however, discuss after an exhileratingly vehement Chicago audition how it’d be fun to yell at each other onstage since we do it so rarely in real life. Maybe that’s how it works, an inversely proportional relationship between reality and fiction. Perhaps that’s why the most engaging couples onscreen are not real-life couples.
Now you’re just rambling, Black. I’ve missed writing, for quite a while, in fact. And part of this is just writing to write, letting my mind roam and hop from train station to train station, writing because I missed the sound of my own voice in the vessel of digital letters, the feeling of long-out-of-practice pianist fingers continually sailing across the keyboard. Part of the lack of writing was getting a tablet a few months back, a decision I quickly regretted. Typing on a tablet is like trying to talk without a tongue. Or maybe talking with a prosthetic tongue, if those existed.
I should stop before I tread into the waters of pretentious and misanthropic. Not feeling especially like either of those things, but they are prone to surface, given too much time and too little sleep.
Toodles. Good to see you again, internet.
