Good news, everyone!
After Spring Break, ONLY SIX WEEKS TO GO!!!
God, I can't wait until sweet, sweet graduation.
In other good news, I'm almost current on these journals...
In fact, here, have another one:
Journal Six
Last week was week seven of the yo-yo I like to call improvisation. As usual, I started off slowly and began to pick up around the end of the class. Maybe it was that I have trouble being a five year old, or maybe I just like being Russian, but whatever it was, I had a lot more fun trying to be a Russian bodybuilder than a preschool aged buffoon. Each week I seem to alternate between two extremes in this class: being good and being terrible. I guess that’s a pretty gruesome (or grim, rather) prediction for this week, but I will try my hardest to do better.
Speaking of predictions, it is funny how I’m fitting the pattern I worried about in my old journal. The one week while we were still in boot camp, I still remember writing about how much I had improved, and how great I was doing, and my one worry that I would oscillate like a sine function on steroids. (I’d quote myself exactly, but Trules took my journals this week).
Uh, oh. I just realized that I’m supposed to read my journals this week. That’s one thing that worried me when I took them…I’m not sure how the class will react to the personal craziness in my mind. I often feel like these are too introspective, too egotistical…I want to write about something and someone else, or stick closer to the facts, like the journals I hear every week. But then I wouldn’t be writing like me, I’d be writing like someone else…maybe that’s the point? That reminds me of a rather salient part of last week-namely characters. I have too hard of a time losing my own personal identity and picking an arbitrary new one in stride. The number of times I heard “I see Maurice, I don’t see a fat guy!” or “Sounds too much like ‘Maurice’” in the last two weeks was vexingly frequent. I’m struggling to get this down, and I think I’m improving…but honestly, how are you supposed to lose yourself when you have trouble understanding who you really are? I don’t think people understand how traumatic identity crisis really is. Some of the best stories ever written are those when the main character has to face their own worst enemy-their lack of self-understanding. If you don’t know who you are, then any statement beginning with “I” is a falsehood. That’s why self-identity is important to this class: to commit to a character, you need to make physical and vocal choices that are far enough away from your identity in order to become someone else entirely. Like Eric Hoffer said, “Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil or ugly in us, but the emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.”
God, I can't wait until sweet, sweet graduation.
In other good news, I'm almost current on these journals...
In fact, here, have another one:
Journal Six
Last week was week seven of the yo-yo I like to call improvisation. As usual, I started off slowly and began to pick up around the end of the class. Maybe it was that I have trouble being a five year old, or maybe I just like being Russian, but whatever it was, I had a lot more fun trying to be a Russian bodybuilder than a preschool aged buffoon. Each week I seem to alternate between two extremes in this class: being good and being terrible. I guess that’s a pretty gruesome (or grim, rather) prediction for this week, but I will try my hardest to do better.
Speaking of predictions, it is funny how I’m fitting the pattern I worried about in my old journal. The one week while we were still in boot camp, I still remember writing about how much I had improved, and how great I was doing, and my one worry that I would oscillate like a sine function on steroids. (I’d quote myself exactly, but Trules took my journals this week).
Uh, oh. I just realized that I’m supposed to read my journals this week. That’s one thing that worried me when I took them…I’m not sure how the class will react to the personal craziness in my mind. I often feel like these are too introspective, too egotistical…I want to write about something and someone else, or stick closer to the facts, like the journals I hear every week. But then I wouldn’t be writing like me, I’d be writing like someone else…maybe that’s the point? That reminds me of a rather salient part of last week-namely characters. I have too hard of a time losing my own personal identity and picking an arbitrary new one in stride. The number of times I heard “I see Maurice, I don’t see a fat guy!” or “Sounds too much like ‘Maurice’” in the last two weeks was vexingly frequent. I’m struggling to get this down, and I think I’m improving…but honestly, how are you supposed to lose yourself when you have trouble understanding who you really are? I don’t think people understand how traumatic identity crisis really is. Some of the best stories ever written are those when the main character has to face their own worst enemy-their lack of self-understanding. If you don’t know who you are, then any statement beginning with “I” is a falsehood. That’s why self-identity is important to this class: to commit to a character, you need to make physical and vocal choices that are far enough away from your identity in order to become someone else entirely. Like Eric Hoffer said, “Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil or ugly in us, but the emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.”