Flat Like Paper

A few things -

This past month has been full, and yet empty. I've spent the last few weeks apartment hunting day in and day out, as have my parents (they are the greatest parents in the whole world, I can't express how grateful I am), and most days doing intern work for the lovely and stupidly talented Ken Schatz. I'll begin his classes next month, so hopefully those will shift my gears a little.

I was on my first film set yesterday and the day before - Production Assistant sounds all fancy fun, and it certainly had some wonderful moments (sugar glass is AWESOME stuff), but the biggest lesson learned is that I am not cut out for menial labor. But doesn't everyone say that? And then doesn't everyone who says that get stuck in it forever? I met some amazing people, and I'm super stoked to possibly stay in touch with them, and Ken was involved, so it was obviously delightfully fun, in that aspect, but it was an all night shoot, averaging 90 degrees in the building, and I didn't get to watch much of the shoot at all, which was unfortunate. A fabulous learning experience nonetheless.

Learning a lot about the city's neighborhoods as I travel miles around the subway system to areas I've never been to, places I've never heard of, and realizing that being a little ginger white girl in NYC on a small, post-grad budget kind of sucks.

Need to get in touch with Laura, see if and when I'm back on at the store. I'm poor and I hate it. I'm still incredibly financially dependent (another thing I can't express enough gratitude for, since my parents are goddamn saints), which I also hate, and the grind that is apartment hunting and being extremely poor and having none of my friends around and feeling so empty, creatively, is leaving me with disturbing thoughts and a startling apathy. I don't know if it was the mental and emotional abuse of this past semester and Caesar, or if it's just post-graduation mental fluctuations, or something deeper, and more dangerous, but the apathy and hollowness of my creative desire is upsetting. What do I need to do? I'm stuck in this not-quite-real-life state, with my time at this apartment running out and no foreseeable place to call home, no job, no steady schedule, no income, and no real direction anymore.

I'm sure it's a thing for everyone, questioning their purpose and what they're doing with their life, but I don't like it. I don't like it at all.

Take What Is Yours

"I will be dead to myself, alive to the outward world. I will observe and participate in an imaginary world. I will wake up with my heart full of dreams. Sweet poison of an empty theatre..."     - Boleslavsky's "Acting: The First Six Lessons"

Hello again. I'm all gradamutated, as my friends tell me. I'm a mutant "adult" now.
The ceremonies were wild and incredible and startlingly lonely, being my only friend in a sea of purple. I had Commando and my parents there, and then Unicorn came to the Radio City ceremony, so afterwards I had lots of love and fun, but doing the graduation thing itself was surprisingly solitary, simply because I was one of two graduates from my studio, and the other girl isn't really a friend of mine. But it was exhilarating, and still doesn't feel real. I bet it won't feel real until August, when everyone goes back to school and I'm still off working and auditioning. Then these wet and paper-thin wings that have just cracked free will finally be dry enough to use.


Needed some space to myself, and it feels deliciously good to be home (and by home, I mean this wreck of a city that I belong to, now). I'm infected by this place, and I don't ever, ever want the cure.

I'm interning with my dear friend and incredible teacher Ken Schatz this summer, and, with any luck, will be continuing to work with him indefinitely from here on out. I'm taking his acting class in July, and will be assisting in the production of a trio of one acts starting this summer. It doesn't go up until the fall, but the process begins months in advance. I'm finally going to get to see how it all happens, the workings of making a production go, the process, which, until now, has been some cloudy mystery off in the distance. Unfurling the wet wings on my back so they can be seen.

Hanging with Ken also gives me the bonus of being exposed to some seriously incredible theatre. He somehow has a distinct knowledge of important and meaningful theatre, art that wants to be something, art that is made out of scraps of soul and life and sewn together with words and given as gifts to a listening public. I was fortunate enough to catch Erica Fae's Take What Is Yours the day before it closed. It's almost impossible to describe, aside from saying that, yes, this is the kind of theatre that needs to be happening. This is art that matters. This is relevant and powerful and striking and it is real in every sense of the word. Have a video.

Got some reading done today, hopefully more tomorrow, maybe I'll see some friends in the city too. Still working on sculpting my hair into some fun retro things, just to defy the pin-straight curtain it has always been. Working on embracing me, finding out where I'm going, what I want, how much I want, because I want so many things, now. It's all there to be taken, it's just waiting, and I don't know how to get it all yet, but hell, I will find out.


I love you all. Share love. Love is warm and wild. Love is cool and peaceful. Love is silence, love is music. I feel so much love I don't know what to do with it, sometimes.

Inappropriate revelation of the day: Painting your nails is awesome. Having your underwear ride up awkwardly with wet nails is far, far from awesome.

Empire

I just emailed my final paper of my college career. There's lighting cracking the sky every so often, and the Empire State Building is lit up purple tonight in honor of the graduates from my school.

This can't be real life.

I'll be an official graduate of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts at the New Studio on Broadway tomorrow afternoon. Ready, set...

Live.

Trial Run

I think I like the way this style is working out... Day two, commence. Pictures to come, maybe.

Dreams

I had a "business" meeting yesterday, discussing the nitty gritty of how the business of the business works. It was incredibly enlightening and educational, and I'm so grateful for it. I'll share those agent-style tips in my next post, but for now, this is about the gut feeling and realization I had. I felt a bit naive and wounded afterwards, only because I've been struggling so much about graduating and where I fit in the real world, am I ready, can I do this, do I really want to, et cetera.

I felt naive and hurt because I realized, for the first time, really, that all of these dreams I've got, all those dreams I listed in a recent post, everything that I want out of my life, I realized that I probably won't get to have them. Not all of them. That I'm going to get old and there will always be something I haven't done. It's not that I'm giving up, it's just that I don't know if there's enough time in one life. And that's something I've never come to terms with before. I don't want to feel this way. I want to believe that I can have everything I dream of. Isn't that what my generation was fucking raised on?

My last academic acting class, my last academic voice lesson, my last dance classes, my last scheduled Wednesday, it's all just hitting me in a way that makes me feel like I'm being edged out of a circle I never had a place in to begin with. All of my friends, my classmates, they're looking to the next year, ready for new opportunities and the safety of guaranteed housing and organized schedules, and I don't know what direction I'm looking. I'm looking down a road and I don't know what road it is, where it's going, I can't see potholes, I can't see turns, or doors or whether it just stops completely. I'm floating in space and I really, really don't quite know how to move forward.

It's been a day of being pushed away from anything inspiring. Cancelled appointments, a miserable dance teacher, professionals who are anything but, elitism, and then just plain exhaustion and sickness. So it's been a trying sort of day, but through it all I managed to somehow build myself back up in a moment of quiet, and it gave me a little more strength to make it through my last, 3 hour class post-studio. Which I'm currently typing this blog in. So clearly I'm utilizing my time well.

Later I'll fill you in on more important things, like the technicalities about agents and how I'm going to attempt to conduct myself in the next few months, just to really chronicle the very awkward struggle of a post-grad actor alone in the real world for the first time. But now it's just making it through to the end, and thinking too deeply on the nature of dreams and aspirations.

I don't want to give up.

Henry Rollins' Letter to a Young American

If you don't do anything else today, watch this.

Part One:


Part Two:

Normal

The real concept of my imminent graduation didn't sink in, really, until today. I thought I knew for sure, and I thought I felt it in all of my heart and body, but today was the last of a few of my classes in Studio, and it really struck me, for the first time, that this is it. This is REALLY it. Done. For good. No more. After the 7th, that's it.

And now I feel like I'm floating in this strange in between - I'm not really a person, in this limbo, but I'm stuck between student and exposed, inexperienced young adult. My last steps in the bubble of studentness are just about past, and I'm not in there with my classmates anymore. An outside observer of everything. I don't quite fit in anywhere yet. And I'm very, very uncomfortable being so unsure. I can't stay where I am, but I don't feel like I belong out there yet. I'm scared.

In other news, we sang the Overtly-ture from the Jerry Springer Opera today. Enjoy.

Revelation at 9:34pm

There are people who I was good friends with not two months ago who now hardly talk to me, and I'd say it's just show alliances fading, but the "group" I was a part of is still a "group," just without me. I just really realized it today. I don't think I'm a bad friend. I'm not. Everything that's happened inside of my head for the past two months has done something to the way I affect the world around me that I'm not seeing.

Sometimes I wish things were very different.



Also, Ludo. Rock on, geeky angsty boys. Rock on.

View From A Fire Escape

Once school is out for the summer, I swear I'll be back on track. It's just been a really, really tough semester, and I want to share all of my battles and bruises with you, but I have to make sure I get through first. I am 14 days away from being completely done with classes and 23 days away from my commencement ceremony.

It's been a never ending stream of circumstances and things trying to bring me to my knees since January of this year, and a few times I've fallen pretty hard. Getting back up when you feel alone is so incredibly hard, but the days keep spinning through and I keep waking up every morning, so I know I'm still moving forward, no matter how awful things seem. There were a few weeks that pushed being some of the darkest I've ever known, and the lingering effects of that are making me jumpy, sometimes. I'm not going to lie, I'm fucking scared to death of life after graduation, but it's the thing I want more than anything else in the world right now.

I've pushed NYU and the bureaucratic system that runs it for help at every turn, and I've received almost none. So there's a lot of disillusionment and frustration, but also this raging, feverish senioritis that's about to put me over the edge to a degree I've never known. I've been so warped and by the past few months that my dream life is worlds apart from what I ever imagined it would be, and it's scary that I don't care.

If I could wake up one morning and have the life that, in this moment, would be perfect for me, I would live in a West Village apartment over a bar/brewery I co-own and run with Commando. It's a mix of classic Irish and geek culture, with a back room for a game cave that doubles as a cabaret space. I write plays and books and paint. I perform in meaningful, artsy shows that start downtown and move to Broadway, and maybe I'll write a few too. My art and the bar will pay off all debts and I can pay my parents back for everything they did for me while I was in school. I can afford physical therapy and a psychiatrist who actually helps. There's a medium coat tabby named Chell, and a rotund little Scottish terrier named Wheatley. I have a tattoo. I don't cry anymore.

So, yeah. I'm scared, but I need my own life. I need to start being able to try. I want to rely on myself, and be self sufficient. Going to class every day is so hard, because I just feel like school is making me unhappy more than anything else these days, and that's not a healthy way to feel.

Fourteen more days. I have to push and dig in to finish it all. So I spend way too long typing a blog instead of memorizing my final scene. Whatever. I needed to express. I needed to do something for myself. And for you - I've neglected my readers (if I have any left... sorry, guys), but once I'm out, I'll be back. Different, but back.

Counting down.

zzzz

Going to bed already? I shouldn't be this tired...

Vibrations

Sorry I've been gone for so long.

Caesar is finally over - it literally took up every waking second of my life, along with academics and studio and bureaucratic, departmental bullshit and sickness and too many things to list. I had a couple of breakdowns, I might have cracked and been put back together a few too many times, and the hairline fractures are starting to show in my brain.

But it is over, it happened, I lived, Brutus beat Caesar, Brutus beat him(her)self, and it was a wonderful experience and I love my Roman ladies and I'm glad I got to play him. But then I got to sleep and start recovering. Spring Break. Woo. Went to Boston for St. Paddy's - excellent and so fun. I do love my Irish darling, Commando. <3 What would I do without him. Go nuts and eat crappy food, that's what.

Been having consistent nightmares for about a week, now. Lots of disasters, floods, massive destruction, submerged planes with rotting corpses in windows, trucks jack-kniving into storefronts, murder, the works. Half of Boston underwater. Even if I can't remember, I've woken up in a startled, groggy panic a few times. I've never been one to dream much, and nightmares are usually few and far between. These are disturbing enough to make me nervous to go to sleep. I've never felt that way before. They're robbing me of rest. I wake up feeling exhausted and nervous.

Hoping it's just a phase, and the lingering edge of the damage Caesar did will soften and fade. I feel like I'm overreacting, my brain is not happy with me, but inside, when I just sit, I can feel how paper-thin something is, how the visible shaking that accompanies anything even remotely stressful is just waiting to come out again. I'm afraid something broke. I'm different. I've been more anxious. I cry more. The fact that NYU isn't making it easier and still screwing with my potential ability to graduate isn't helping.

But I'm alive. Harlequin is still alive, and tomorrow is a new day. And right now, I'm going the fuck to sleep.

Paris Makes Me Feel Like Dancing

Another example of why I love music from overseas. I cannot get enough.

13

Happy Friday the Thirteenth! :)

Just an update post (mostly to motivate myself and rewrite and organize my To-Do list FOR THE FORTY FIFTH TIME THIS WEEK) on what I'm doing:

PRO: One internship application sent out!

CON: They begin reviewing them March 9th.

PRO: Figured out one project monologue to do!

CON: Sacrificing Caesar time in order to do it.

PRO: Contacted teachers who I need information from!

CON: They won't email me back.

PRO: Began working on class music!

CON: It's impossibly complicated and stupidly long and I hate it and can't play piano.

PRO: Have a to-do list!

CON: Keep revising it to make compromises because there's no way in hell it's all getting done to my standards.

PRO: Have an idea for my big acting project!

CON: IT'S NEVER GETTING DONE IT'S NOT RIGHT I DON'T HAVE ANYTHING READY I NEED EMAILED ANSWERS PLEEEEEEASE

PRO: 24 hour trip to SCSU next week!

CON: ... Only 24 hours?

Yuuup.

Magic

I'm just bad at posting regularly.

Some magical moments from my winter break.

Got to see this fantastic, mind blowing production before I came home for break, and literally the only words I had to describe it afterwards were "baptized with joy." It's beyond explanation - "Fuerza Bruta" means "brute force" in Spanish, and the whole thing is simply an explosion of non-stop visual, audible, and emotional impact. I'm a better person, somehow, for having seen it.

Got about two and a half weeks of hometown happiness with my family and cats for the holidays. We all managed to get sick in rotation, so that kind of sucked, but it was wonderful being home.

Back in NYC now, got to spend the weekend with Commando (who I saw Fuerza with and don't have the words for how much I love him), and went to the most magical little gathering I've ever been to on Sunday night.

Ken Schatz (the one and only, who else?) hosts an event known as Exceedingly Good Song Night, in which men and women of every age and creed cozy up in a tiny back room of a bar, drink beer, eat food, and entertain with folk tunes and sea shanties. A concertina ( CLICK THIS LINK ) appeared from the recesses of the group, two guitars, and one instrument I can't quite name, something like a fretted dulcimer, but part of it was upright, and they would join in when they knew the song. It was close and warm and almost hazy, and the songs had such history and some were so rollicking I could hardly keep in my chair. But that room seemed a step out of time when some of the men closed their eyes and in their old, rocky voices began singing ballads of miners and Irish pubs and friends lost in war - I've never seen anything like it, and I'm dying for next month's installment. Perhaps next time I'll have a ditty prepared and earn a few friends in the folk tune crowd.

Hunkering down in my quiet apartment and trying to get a lot of schoolwork done today. But my heart isn't in it. I ache in lots of ways. When I bid Ken goodbye after the folk songs, he hugged me and asked, "When are you free of this school? The school that is holding you down and keeping you away from making art?" Slightly in jest, of course, but he did mean it. He introduced me to his fellow theatre friends as 'a very good actress' and he has never once seen me act. I want my own life. I know I need to be here right now, but I want my own bedroom, I want to work normal hours, have weekends off, live the life I want to live. I'm trapped in a cage I put myself in and pushed the key just out of my reach, all on purpose. And it's just a matter of hanging in there for a few more months, but I'm itching to scream and have what I want.

A week or so of freedom before I'm pinned down again. Let's see what I can do until then.