Stream of consciousness.

Atonement is on HBO right now and I'm falling in love with James McAvoy again. I could watch the tracking shot of Dunkirk for hours and totally be okay with the fact that I just spent hours watching it.

There's a Little House on the Prairie musical at Paper Mill Playhouse right now and I'm not sure how I feel about that. I'm pretty fond of the books and they were basically a staple of my reading material for my entire childhood, along with the Little Women books, the Anne of Green Gables books, and the American Girl books. And a bunch of others but those series, those were big. I never particularly cared for the TV show. Melissa Gilbert's teeth annoyed me. The Little Women musical was pretty disappointing, minus Sutton Foster, and I'm pretty sure this would be worse.

Matt Doyle is playing Melchior in Spring Awakening in Toronto and it's ridiculous how much I'd love to go see it. He's pretty much one of the main reasons I'm seriously considering working in theater / going to grad school for theater studies, and the chance to see him in one of the most powerful, moving shows I've ever seen...sigh.

I really like the word "awakening." I was thinking about this the other day. I was trying to think of a way to describe the way I felt, and "awakened" was the most fitting I could find. Not "awake," only, but "awakened." I feel calm and at peace, yet eager and exhilarated and restless and ready for whatever comes next. I feel determined and alive and I like it.

Only when I stop and think, do I feel overwhelmed. The rest of the semester is incredibly hectic and I'm almost afraid it's going to fly by too fast--so many of my friends are graduating, and I'm going to miss them so much next year. It's a good hectic though, mostly. Relay for Life is going to be draining but amazing. That weekend, I have tickets for a screening at the New Directors / New Films program that the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA are doing. The weekend after I'm going to see Guys and Dolls with Dad. The weekend after is Easter. (Toronto? Haha.) The weekend after is the Avenue Q trip with school. Yay for going to school close to New York! Haha.

I'm watching Erin Brockovich. Rugged, disheveled, old-school Aaron Eckhart cracks me up. "The looks of a matinee idol and the soul of a character actor." Love him.

Secret source of pleasure: when my comments on IMDb are high on the list because other people find them "useful". Haha. My comment on The Wrestler is second most useful out of 300, right now. My Persepolis comment is 2 out of 103. My Cassandra's Dream and September Dawn comments are both #3. El Orfanato and Love in the Time of Cholera, #7. I also really like it when I look at an IMDb page and my comment is the automatically generated one that shows up at the bottom of the main page. Hehehe.

I had more but I put it in a separate post. Too much goin on.

----------------
Now playing: Vampire Weekend - Ottoman

the process of discovery

learning = opening mind

open mind = discovery

discovery = awakening

awakening = new perspective

new perspective = freshness

freshness = renewal

renewal = life

I don't understand.

We're so selfish
We're slaves to our impulses
We're afraid of our emotions
And no one knows where the shore is
When divided by the ocean
And the only thing I know is
That the answer isn't for our eyes
That the answer isn't for our eyes...

- Feist

I was thinking:

We have words, but we don't use them.
We have words and we don't want to use them.
We use them, and we don't want to share them.
We have actions. We have means of expressing ourselves.
We don't express ourselves. We don't share ourselves.
We're given everything we need and we don't use it.

To be human. To live. Is to share an experience.
To experience together.
To give your experience to another.
To take in another's experience.
To connect with another through an experience.

Selfishness goes beyond hoarding material possessions.
Selfishness is refusing to give or accept sympathy.
Selfishness is refusing to experience.
Selfishness is refusing to share pain.
Selfishness is refusing to share. To talk.
Selfishness is refusing to show love.
Selfishness is refusing to love.
Selfishness is refusing.

We isolate ourselves.
Hide in comfort.
It's not human.
I suppose it's defense.
It's not living.

Why are we so fearful?
I am.
But why?
It doesn't make sense.
I don't understand.

Poem thing.

Hahaha. I put this on my livejournal but I'm amused by it so it's going here too. It started out hopeful and then my mood changed and now it's kind of ironic and a bit dark.


Let us go then, you and I . . .

Sail to the sunset
Slip into the storm’s eye
While madness whirls around us
Chaos racing wild
     without, within
At the heart of the horizon
The gold, the soulful
Smoldering of scarlet
     the pools of light
Like an island in the ocean
A falling fairy in the night
Carrying promises of the dawn
To a starfish in the storm
Swallowed by the sea
     certain of the sun
All will be all right
The light won’t let him sink
     he winks
So we dive into the darkness
Embrace the cold that shrouds us
Face to face with infinite pain
     immersed
     dispersed
Whisked away across the waves
Waiting out the roughness
Of a world torn up inside
Refuse to hide the fear
     near the daybreak
A lake incarnate
A mirror of glass so smooth
Drifting on our backs
     we sigh aloud
     side by side
     alive

. . . Til human voices wake us, and we drown.

Too much perspective? (Even this is too long still.)

Sometimes I feel like I see everything from so many different angles that I don't know which one is the one I believe in the most. I think I have this fear of being too absolute, too extreme, too single-minded. There's something to be said for stability and more to be said for permanence and legacy, but I like transience, too. I like being able to change my mind. To me, seeing anything as absolute is a trap and it hinders growth, it stops you from being able to learn and grow. I like being flexible and I like the fluidity of being open to multiple possibilities. I often don't like having to choose one way or another when I relate to both. I prefer to evaluate case by case, and not choose a blanket answer that is intended to encompass everything.

I'm in between about a lot of things, and sometimes I worry that I don't have definite, assertive opinions or beliefs of my own. I know I do. I just also know that it's not important to me to have absolute opinions on a lot of things, and I know I feel different ways at different times in different situations. I don't like feeling chained to one concrete belief. I don't like the feeling of being trapped that accompanies that. I like feeling free. I don't like narrowness.

Or maybe it's that I don't like broadness? I mean, I hate it when someone asks me if I'm pro-life or pro-choice. I don't think it's that simple. I understand logically and emotionally both sides of the argument. Sure, it's ethically shady, but I also think it's wrong for a baby to be born into a world that doesn't want it, where it will only be abused and mistreated. In that way it's cruel. At the same time, I'm usually an "everything happens for a reason" kind of a gal, and messing around with a potential life isn't something I think I'd ever consider. But my life is a piece of cake. I don't have to endure extreme adversity and it's easy for me to believe in some kind of fate. It's not like I'm a fourteen-year-old rape victim who's pregnant by her attacker or something. If I were, I don't know how I'd feel. I can't say. So I generally say that I think a woman should have the right to choose, but I also think most women shouldn't choose abortion. Even that's simplifying it more than I'd like.

I can choose to see things the way I want to. I can choose to see people as a bunch of foolish, ignorant jerks who are going to lead to the demise of all humanity, or I can see them as the last pillar supporting humanity from crumbling. I can be cynical and realistic or romantic and idealistic. It's not just that I can be these things--I generally feel like I am all these things. I'm sarcastic and cynical and pessimistic by turns, but eternally hopeful and idealistic at the same time. I want to see the best in people but often, they just show their worst. Being optimistic and idealistic can translate into naivete, though--like Gatsby or The Quiet American--and I don't want that, either. I see it sometimes in others and I know I know better than to have blind faith in people; I'll just end up painfully disillusioned if I do.

I go back and forth between the two outlooks all the time. I can try to be one way or another but I don't like doing that, because that's not me. As I told someone last night, I just am what I am, and that happens to be a lot of different things at different times. I hate it when people make me feel like that's wrong, like things have to be black and white, one way or another. Like I'm wrong for seeing things so many ways and relating to them all. There's a lot that I don't understand, that I can't relate to, that I can't imagine, that I disagree with. But I love it when I meet someone who is able to explain the unimaginable to me in a way that I can understand. Without being open to other perspectives and trying to identify with others, how could you understand anything?

I also decided today that I don't like it when I feel like I have to "try" to be myself around people. I don't like pandering and I don't like compromising myself, even though intrinsically I like making people happy, and there's a lot of things I don't mind doing or just don't care about that I'm willing to compromise on, if it'll make others happy. I hate it when I realize that I'm acting in a way I don't like around certain people, because then I have to make an effort to be myself and not to let them bring out this behavior that doesn't feel like my own. It's just not that frequently that I find people that I feel comfortable being myself around. I hide a lot, even though I know I shouldn't--that's just how I am. I suppose it's because I know there's so much that's contradictory about myself that I don't let myself show that unless I feel like a person will understand that I'm not being overtly, obnoxiously hypocritical or mockingly facetious and arrogant. I suppose. I don't know.

People close to me are always telling me to speak up more, or be more assertive, and stuff like that, but I like flying below the radar. Sometimes other people will tell me I'm the kind of person that doesn't say much, but when I do say something, others listen because it'll be good. I don't think this is necessarily true. Often when I do speak up, people still talk over me or just don't listen. I'm also quiet a lot of the time, though, because I don't have anything to say about the topic at hand. If I don't have anything to say, it's probably because 1) I don't have a definitive opinion or 2) one of my biggest pet peeves is people who talk pompously about things they know nothing about. You want to talk about how Michael Phelps smoked pot? Congratulations, talk away. I don't really have anything to say about it, other than I think it's been blown way out of proportion. You want to talk about philosophy or music theory? Awesome. I'll listen, and I'll be interested. But I'm not going to tell you what I think of Plato's Republic, and I'm not going to argue you when you say Beethoven is better than Mozart, because I wouldn't have a bloody clue as to what I was talking about. I know who Plato is. I listen to Beethoven and Mozart's works. But I'm not going to pretend I am anything more than vaguely familiar with them in a very rudimentary way. I'm not going to bullshit about it. But if you want to recommend a piece to listen to and explain why you like it and what I should listen for, then fantastic.

And if you want to talk about the injustice of the admissions process at tier one colleges and universities, or modern American playwrights, or why TV news programs make me angry, or pretty much anything I write about on here, then just try and get me to STOP talking. But who wants to have a conversation about any of that? Hell, that's one of the main reasons I write so much on this stupid thing--who wants to ponder all this shit with me. Hahaha. Someone told me the other day that I should write a screenplay, and I asked what should I write about? They asked me in return, "Well, what do you have to say?" I said not a heck of a lot, but that was a silly untruth, and I didn't realize it until later on. I have a lot to say--I just can't always find ways to say it, let alone creative ways, or people who care to hear me. That's how it finds its way here. Which isn't exactly an awful thing. I'd hate it if I had absolutely nothing to say about anything ever.

I realized one of my problems when thinking about the "Future" is not that I don't know what I want to do--there's just way too many things that I want to do, and I can't make myself pick just one. I can't shut out everything else to specialize on one thing. I keep telling myself that I'm better off for picking one thing and learning a lot about it than knowing a shallow amount about a lot of things, but I don't feel like anything works like that. Everything's interdisciplinary, especially in the arts. Everything overlaps. There is no one single field. Even my specialized classes overlap. Everything in both my majors intersects all the time. And I know I mention this all the freakin time, but it's true. And I don't want to pick just one thing to focus on. I don't want to end up cornered into one field. Even though I sort of know in the back of my mind that that will never happen. And I don't want my voice to be any more limited than it already is. Which is quite a lot.

Meh. Too much thinking.