2.5 Hours Thinking in 30 Minutes Typing

The universe gave me the gift of a tech schedule that allows for significantly more sleep than I should be allowed to get during tech week, especially as a stage manager. But here I am, approaching 3 in the morning, and wide awake. I just spent the better part of the last 2 hours (or at least from like 12:30-2:15) having brain explosions and thinking both internally and aloud about my life and what it is and will become and has been in the last year and a half and in the last three and a half years. It's mind boggling and that's why I'm still awake.

I realized I had been spewing all these really complex personal thoughts at Joel, essentially just letting fly my internal train of thought monologue, largely without stopping. And I realized that must mean I trust him, a lot, because I haven't done that with anyone, anyone, in years. So of course as soon as I realized that, it scared the shit out of me. Having that level of trust in a person should be the most liberating thing in the world, but in that instant, and now, I suppose, it terrified me. I have always been a fiercely independent person, since the day I started preschool with barely a goodbye to my mother, and that has caused some problems in my family life. I don't like to be dependent on others, and so sometimes I push away or don't show as much interest as I should. Maybe I'm afraid of seeming to eager.

But why not be eager about life? I guess I just get freaked out when I think of the not-very-likelihood of long-lasting relationships of any kind. Of the people I have considered to be among my best friends in the last 6 months or so, only one of them is someone I knew before high school. And I hardly talk to anyone from high school anymore. I don't know how to operate on the level that those relationships existed on. They have remained suspended in time, in that moment, never to change and therefore never to surface again. I went home for Thanksgiving break and spent four days with my family. I didn't spend any time with anyone outside of the three people I am directly related to by blood. That was slightly due to circumstance and timing, but largely due to my nonexistent effort in making any plans to see anyone, especially people from high school, while I was home. I very much enjoyed my time with my family and of course my dog, and now I am happy to be back with people who speak my language and are attempting to navigate the same paths I am.

Yet as these last few hours have gone by, I've wondered about time. My life has been flashing before my eyes in mash ups of moments longer ago and more recent. I've been simultaneously experiencing my memories in both first and third person. That's really trippy and actually happens to me a lot. I don't know what to make of that. Sometimes I can remember emotions and they're incredibly powerful. Other times I just experience them as a movie, watching someone I know pretty well going through a situation I've seen. I've seen these movies before. But it's just that I've seen them, not lived them. And I come back to time slipping by without me having any way to mark the days and weeks and months that pass until suddenly I don't know where all the time between the end of August and the beginning of December went, including the last five days.

All this thinking and more has happened in Joel's company. I had every intention, when I got done with rehearsal, to simply fall into bed and go to sleep. But then I started getting stressed about acting class tomorrow and this scene I'm working on for directing, and so when I got back I just wanted to vent for a few minutes. Somehow a few minutes of venting about acting turned into attempted self-analysis of my entire world view/life/relationships, and now I can't shut my brain off. And once I at least shut off my mouth so Joel could go to sleep and I could just keep thinking things in my head, I realized I didn't feel better to have someone else next to me anymore while this was happening. I wanted to talk to Michael or Danny or Erich or Jack, the latter two of whom are not speaking to me, for whatever their reasons, and so then I got really freaked out about being so detached from someone I care so much about, who was right there with me. (I'm sitting on the floor now, by the way.)

So I arrive at love. Love is something I've had issues with ever since Jack left. I desperately seek it and am terribly afraid of it. I often doubt if I can experience it. Then I realized tonight, as I was thinking about how Joel and I came to be in a relationship, that I love all the people that I have a relationship with. I used to think romantic relationship love and friendship love were different things. I don't think that anymore. I'm not sure how I could think that after mid-2007, but I did, until just recently. (And I didn't realize that had changed until tonight.) Anyway, I have realized I must love people. I must love them, absolutely, if I am to be friends with them. This came up as I was thinking about how Joel and I, like many new couples, do not say "I love you." Saying those words is, for some reason, a big step in relationships in this society. Yet I say I love you all the time to people I do love, but am not as close with. And to me, it seems ironic, backwards, and ridiculous to not say I love you to someone I care about so much. In my previous two relationships, neither of which lasted more than 3 months, we always said "I love you." And I discovered this was because, whether we had a long previous friendship or not, we were both UUs, and came from a place where it is understood that we love one another. This is a crucial part of being in any sort of relationship with a person. And I can't believe anything else, even if loving all the people in my life scares me a lot.

Long thought processes like this are the kind of thing that gets in the way of my acting. Once I try to figure out one thing, it train wrecks into one tangent after another of impossible queries and curiosities I will never be able to answer. This is exhausting gymnastics for the constant left-right brain battle in my head. Let me tell you, if I ever figure out how to get those two up there in my head to work together, I will be the most unstoppable creative genius this world has ever seen. Trust me. I understand how awesome that would be. I'm working on it.

I posted a poem on my poetry blog earlier. It's from a little over a week ago, but I still like it.

Dear tech week gods, please don't smite me for still being awake. I'm sorry!

(E)Strange(d)

I realized this evening that my ex boyfriend feels like a complete stranger to me. After we broke up, I shut off thinking about him as much as possible. Shortly after, I got back to school, and it was easy to focus on things that had nothing to do with him. But he's coming to visit NYC the week after Thanksgiving, and so we've been talking recently, since he'll be staying here for a while. And while we were talking tonight, I was thinking about what it will be like for him to be here, for us to actually see each other in person. It will be so weird. I feel like I don't even know him anymore. Not that either of us has necessarily changed so much that we're completely unrelatable people, just that he hasn't really been in my life (largely due to my own choices) these past three months. To think I was so close to him this summer and now he's coming here but I don't even really know him... it's weird. Really weird. I'm not really sure who the person is that's coming to visit in two weeks. He certainly doesn't fit into the context of the life I've been living since September.

I'll have to introduce him to my friends. I'll have to introduce him to my boyfriend. Oh, strange. It's always odd to experience people outside of their normal contexts. I saw Brianna once in St. Louis over the summer, and it was so confusing to see her outside of New York and school. This is like the reverse of that. I guess it kind of happened when Victoria and Sean came to visit, but I basically spent all my time with them that weekend and no time with school people, so it still felt separate. Nic coming to visit will no doubt be an integration of worlds because I'm still in school and in fact in tech, so if he wants to see me it will have to be in the context of people I know as my New York people. That's weirder than seeing teachers on the street (that clearly aren't supposed to exist outside of 440 Lafayette).

Right now I should be learning a monologue for an audition I have tomorrow. I've been trying to learn it but my head keeps thinking about this situation, since I just had a conversation with Nic about him coming here in like two weeks. I'm excited to work on my monologue, but it's almost 2:30 in the morning, and my roommates might not appreciate a loud angry voice while they're trying to sleep (Cassandra), do some awful pre-med homework (Afaaf), or mess around on facebook (Shea). I would like to say that I do in fact have more work than any of these people. Shea is almost always sleeping or watching TV/talking on the phone/chatting on facebook when I'm in the room. I think I've mentioned before that she only has class 2 1/2 hours a day four days a week. It kills me. I have that much class on any given Monday or Wednesday. And I also have classes Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Plus tech. And homework. And rehearsals. So please, people, stop telling me I can't possibly have a lot of work to do because I'm a theatre student. (Or because NYU is not an ivy league. *coughCARRIEcough*)

I often wonder what it would be like to go to college. I go to theatre school. It's a completely different beast. I only take two academic classes a semester, but I also have eight studio classes (nine, actually, because I'm retaking African dance for fun). I essentially have class from 9-6 on Mondays and Wednesdays and for a decent amount on Fridays. My days don't typically end "on campus" until 11 pm or midnight. Then I can start homework. I also wonder what it would be like to live on a school with an actual campus. This is not what I want; I wouldn't trade going to NYU for anything in the world, but I just wonder what that would be like. I am very aware that I am not getting the "college experience" really, other than living in a dorm and living away from home. (Plus, my dorm has a kitchen and a bathroom. So I'm totally missing out on some crucial communal facilities experiences. Darn.)

This was a really scattered post. I'm going to try to learn how to feel like a badass Spanish peasant woman now. Goodnight.

[I Need] 16670 [Hours of Sleep]

It's essentially Friday, but my desk calendar still thinks it's Tuesday. I've literally been too busy to tear off the pages that mark the passing of days. I don't see the minutes slipping through my fingers, but suddenly entire months have passed. Where did September and October go? Hell, we're halfway through November. There's only like four weeks left in first semester. Early decision kids (of the class of 2014, wtf) have already started auditioning for the drama program. Why is time passing so quickly? I feel like I'm drinking in every moment and yet days, weeks, months, are just blocks of time that have disappeared from my future into something I call my past.

I am physically, mentally, emotionally exhausted. I have never worked this hard this constantly in my life. I have never been this committed to my work and at the same time felt like I am not giving anything as much attention as I want to. This whole semester is in fact an exercise in continuously attempting the impossible. It's thrilling, in the rare moments when I'm actually awake and conscious and my brain is functioning properly.

Saturday night will finally end three straight weeks of tech with the closing of 16670. I have lighting/sound designed in three different spaces, assisted/been assisted by three different people, worked for three different directors with a total cast of 14 people, and countless hours spent in booths or atop a ladder or in near-darkness. I haven't slept nearly enough. Even on the few nights when I have gotten 7 0r 8 hours of sleep, it is not enough to make up for the days I have. I'm doing incredibly intense emotional investment in a scene I'm acting in for directing class, and that takes so much energy that I feel like I've been running all day after I work on it. But there is much else to do.

I'm auditioning on Monday and Tuesday for a Tisch "mainstage" (they don't call it that anymore - now it's "Stage works" because we don't really have a main stage...). It's Fuente Ovejuna by Lope de Vega, and a company from Chile is coming in to work on it. I think it would be an incredible opportunity to work with interesting people, and to perhaps get to use some Spanish again, and of course to perform in something lots of people would see. Then the week after I'm auditioning with Amy for Tisch Twisted, a benefit for BC/EFA where girls sing guy songs and vice versa from the music theatre canon. I'm excited. We're auditioning with What You Own, which is one of the numbers in the show, and it's my favorite song in RENT. Hopefully it will work out.

My brain is now going to rest for hopefully 8 hours before it has to prepare for directing rehearsal, run directing rehearsal, spend two hours in form and content contact improv, work on a design project, do voice and speech work, see some shows, go to rehearsal... etc. And that's just Friday. Thinking about it makes my brain hurt more right now. Goodnight.

Halloween Musings

I love Halloween. Especially in New York City. I think it's probably the coolest day of the year here. More than Thanksgiving or New Year's. Supposedly it's about dressing up as someone you're not, but I think in reality everyone gets to be exactly who they are on Halloween. That confining sense of shame goes away for one day, and everyone gets to let the proverbial freak flag fly. Theatre people do this all the time, though not always in public (unless you're a college theatre kid, and then you are almost only weird in public). Someone literally dressed up as a garbage bag last night, and sat on 3rd Ave looking like a trash bag, and then jumped at people (i.e. me) and scared them shitless. All I need in my life is to be scared of trash bags in this city. Haha. But seriously. I saw so many amazing/ridiculous/hilarious/confusing costumes last night, and so many people being real. Not that I know what real means.

I didn't really dress up this year, actually. I couldn't really come up with an idea. Plus I was in tech all week. So I wore an old dance costume to the pre-Halloween party and some fake eyelashes and fancy make up to the post-Halloween party. It was fine. I had a good time anyway. I did ensconce myself in aluminum foil to be a burrito and get free Chipotle on Halloween.

That was a great achievement. Here's Joel and I, triumphant. (I know, really cute, right?) So at least I did do something ridiculous. And that burrito was so damn good.

Quick recap of this past weekend's schedule: Friday - studio until 6, rehearsal until 7, box office training until 9, party in Brooklyn until sometime. Saturday - Sleep. Brunch at 12:30. Run uptown to get clothes and homework. See The Winter's Tale at Playwrights, 4:30. Dress up, get burritos. Strike Ohio Impromptu (I assistant lighting designed), 9-11. Party in SoHo until sometime. Sunday - get up and to Brooklyn for church/Sunday school by 10:30. Go from church to load-in, arrive at 1, circuit until 4, with no crew. Fix paperwork until 5. Shower and eat food with Joel, try to do homework until 7. Paper tech. Back to circuiting from 7:30-11. Clean up the evil Moss theatre. Get home around midnight. Consider starting homework.

So that's all over now. I sort of am doing homework; I'm largely procrastinating by writing this blog instead. I'm delaying monologue work. Again. I had a great conference with Jessica on Thursday about what I think I'm doing in studio and how I can better facilitate myself as an actor so I can really figure out if I am or am not interested in acting right now. I think I am; I saw Hamlet on Thursday and I wanted to be doing that. I wanted to be in that show. I also had a lot of fun in class last Monday, so I wonder if I'm just not working on the right material for me right now.

The lyric "you'll never share real love until you love yourself" popped into my head a little while ago. It got me wondering about whether I do actively love myself right now. I remember thinking earlier today, as I was walking from church back to the subway station to leave Brooklyn how beautiful it was, and how much I love my life and how everything is going so well right now. I believe all those things, but I wonder if that equates to loving myself. How do I know if I do or I don't? It seems like it should be pretty obvious one way or the other, but I don't feel like it is.

I feel myself fearing commitment again, this time with Joel, but as always happens when I near anything remotely like a relationship. And this is more of a relationship than I've ever had before. But I think I'm starting to freak out about spending every day together, just because I haven't experienced it before, or at least not in a really long time. I am scared that I will hurt him to avoid him hurting me. It has happened before. And then it doesn't happen, I get hurt instead. I like him so much, and I don't want to screw that up, in any way, but I keep sensing myself wanting to do things that would cause problems so that I can have an excuse to run away, or he could run away, giving me the opportunity to I don't know what.

My sentences are getting non-comprehensive and I have work to get to. (Great combination, right?) Long day tomorrow. What else is new.