Three

Last night was the third class in a row where I have not worked. I think I was close, but one guy had a stronger point of view than I did (though they were similar; he was just a little farther to one end of the spectrum than I) so I didn't get to work. It's funny - in the first class, I was okay with it if I didn't work in a day. There were days when I hoped I wouldn't have to, and I enjoyed sitting back and watching. Now, I want to work at just about every class. I love this exercise. I love these situations. I love going up there and following impulses and feeling intensely. I like watching, too, but I'd much rather be doing.

I wrote this the other night after watching "Hamlet" with David Tennant. I put it in my normal online blog, but I think it is appropriate to put it here, too. This has moved beyond just taking classes for fun so that I feel like I'm doing something to an overwhelming passion.

I know what my life is supposed to be. It is supposed to be passion and love and fury and anger and fire and tears and laughter so loud it shakes the mountains. It is supposed to be glory and heartache and triumph and turmoil and beauty as far as the eye can see. It is supposed to be magnificent.

But those things don't often happen in the real world. At least not for me. The closest I get is a laugh so loud it disturbs dogs in a three-mile radius. The real world is censored and muted and safe. There's nothing wrong with that. It is censored and muted and safe for a reason - so that we can all function in it and carry on the usual business of being alive. Nobody would be able to do their jobs if they felt the anguish of Hamlet every time someone did them wrong. Nobody would eat if they felt the passion of Juliet as she drank the vial of poison. The world would cease to function if everyone walked around experiencing the world as intensely as characters in books and plays and movies do.

But I want to. I want to feel everything that intensely. I want to live that fully. I want to experience every aspect of the human condition the way they experience it on stage and screen. I don't like to do things halfway. I don't like to be missing out. And in so many ways, I'm missing out already. I'll never marry my high school sweetheart because I didn't have one. I'll never have the four day Vegas marriage because I'm too smart for that now. I'll never even know what it's like to grow up in another country because I only get the one childhood. I'm tired of missing out. I'm tired of capped emotions. I want to live the life that the characters on the screen do.

I know, I sound like a crackpot. I know I can't live that way all of the time. But if I am one of the characters on the stage, I can live that way for a very short time. I can scream and weep and leap for joy and boil with rage and love with my whole heart until my body aches. I can experience...everything.

I know what my life is supposed to be. I know what my life is supposed to be and it is not supposed to be this. I know what my life is supposed to be. Please, oh please, oh please let me get there one day.

The teacher last night said that there are three kinds of people - those who make things happen, those who watch while things happen, and those who wonder what the fuck just happened. I want to be the sort that makes things happen, and I think for the most part I am. When I wanted to learn to dance, I did it. When I needed to find a job, I found one. When I wanted to try veganism, I made the change. When I wanted to go to Australia or Europe or New York or San Francisco or Texas, I went. There is very little that keeps me from doing the things I want to do. By the same token, though, the acting coach I went to last week (and who I will be seeing again tonight) said that one thing I can do to try to keep myself from screwing up auditions (I psyche myself out. I think, "I should have chosen a different piece," or "I should have entered the room differently," or "I should have worn the other pants," or whatever and I get nervous and then you can hear it in my voice, which makes me more nervous and I get cottonmouth and it all just starts to come out horrible) is to think back to a time when everything was just working for me without me really trying, and then enter the audition room in that state of mind. There have been times in my life when everything was working, but I was working my ass off to have that and to keep it. When I had my band. I felt invincible with my band, but I also felt the pressure to not let them down. I had to coordinate rehearsals and book gigs and write new material and make us feel like we were moving forward as a unit. It was a lot of hard work. I loved doing it and I loved the way it made me feel, but I had to work super crazy hard to have that band. And when I used to dance, I worked really hard at being a good dancer. And when I was with my theater company, I worked my ass off for every single show I was involved in. I don't know that there has ever been a time in my life when I have had something good that I didn't have to work my ass off to get, and then work twice as hard to keep. And even if there was such a time, I'm sure I feel differently about it now, as that time has past and I've lost whatever it once was.

I don't know. I scheduled a slew of auditions for myself in the near future because I need to get back out there and do this. I need to do this every day. And I'm just going to have to go into each and every audition knowing that a) they want me to be good, b) I am good, and c) what I have chosen to do is exactly what I am supposed to be doing. I just have to know it.

Here we go with that whole "growing an ego" thing again...