Eat, Pray, Love... Read, Write, Watch, Live, Think etc etc etc!

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo why must you be over beautiful book! I never wanted you to endddddddd. how could I not love it? It was the story of a woman trying to create/recreate/find balance in her life! It is one of those books that reminds you how wonderful it is to let your imagination run wild and makes you feel like there is nothing else in the world you could possibly need or want except to get lost in this beautiful piece of literature. The book ended with the author's favorite Italian word, "Attraversiamo!" (lets cross over). She said it as she and her Brazilian lover jumped over the edge of their boat..together.. into the (presumably) beautiful waters on their (most likely) beautiful Indonesian Island. I read it at a park next to some water. The first thing I did after I closed the book was jump in (onto a concrete step about up to my ankles.. that counts right?). Then I did a cartwheel. Then I sent a text message.
I'm going to document the things that jumped out at me.

"He laughed with me, not getting the joke, of course, but loving the idea that people make jokes."
Perfect. I think this is how I live my life most of the time (or at least how i strive to), why I love good theater and "bad" theater and all theater and things that are happy-go-lucky and things that are sad and depressing. I just love expressions of humanity and people trying to give life and breath and meaning to their time here on this Earth (although I think I tend to veer towards expressions of light and optimism). I think that maybe I will start to include this in my definition of love and my formula for living. When we are too busy studying a piece of media/outpouring of emotion (a play, movie, Hallmark card, letter, etc.etc.etc. for its latent intent and when we extend all our energy towards trying to uncover its "true meaning" or what the author/producer of the material "really meant to say" when he/she created it and then using the information gathered during our speculation as a way to judge the relative quality of the material in question (hahahahahaha this sounds so scientific I just laughed out loud) then we miss out on...... wow I just lost my train of thought and don't feel like going back to find it. Something about humans being fallible. So we should let them experience that aspect of themselves. I just like to find reasons to be happy and spread happiness even if the way I interpret or the fragmented pieces I take away from the material I consume might be classified as "wrong." Who cares? Creative genius is half misinterpretation anyway!... I feel a tangent coming on... maybe in a new blog...
I think it will work if you allow/appreciate that I am like this and if I allow/appreciate that you are exactly not...
Anyway, omg I am in love with this idea... and the idea of new ideas.. which is why I'm going to grad school hahaha!

"To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life."
Oh man, this sounds delicious!

And while I'm on the subject of balance... which I tend to be a lot... I LOVE BALI.. or the idea of it at least!

"The family compound is so vital that the Balinese think of it as a single, living person....When this system works - which it does in this healthy society almost all the time - it produces the most sane, protected, calm, happy, and balanced human beings in the world. But when it doesn't work?... The outcasts are lost in airless orbit"

Sane, protected, calm, happy, and balanced. sweet. so cool and spot on. People go crazy when they are afraid and they are afraid because they can't trust/rely on the people/things in their lives. Imagine being surrounded by a family/person that would love you..or at least stay with you.. unconditionally, no matter what. It's what we claim to do in America, although really we don't... but we also don't really put love on a pedestal here.. we put things like intelligence and money and success and fame and fortune on it instead. Damn Americans! =)

This is from a book that my one of my Aunts told me about... it's called The Outliers. It's about a group of people in Penn who's life expectancy (on the whole) was extremely high...

“There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didn’t have anyone on welfare. These people were dying of old age. That’s it.”

The Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell... “They looked at how the Rosetans visited each other, stopping to chat with each other in Italian on the street, or cooking for each other in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town’s social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded.”

This sounds completely ridiculous, but I can't wait to have a family! Are there more important things in life than thisssssssssssssssss? I can't wait to create this safe place and give my heart to someone and know that they will give me theirs in return and then have some kids and love them too and teach them how great it is when you have someone you can rely on and then grow old and sit around doing nothing but experiencing old age with my husband who will be as content as I am!! How great it must be to be a grandparent.. your only job in life is to love... you don't have to raise or scold or put up with any of the stuff that parents do.. you just have to sit back and say things to your kids like "now you know how I felt!" and cook homemade donuts and buy presents and sit back and enjoy the dynasty you've headed! What a family does, I think, is eliminate one less variable from the mystery of life and success and realizing our potential and all that jazz. If we don't have to worry about having someone stand by you no matter what you get yourself in to then you can worry (connoted positively) about other things. And there is a lot of stuff to worry about!

Love is always the answer! (sidenote.. I was listening to "All you need is love" in the car the other night and I was overcome with this intense warm lovely feeling.. which was weird because that's the only time I've ever even really enjoyed that song.. it's always been sort of annoying to me for some reason.. anyway..) It always has and always will be! Love is a many splendored thing! Love lifts us up where we belong! All you need is love!

On a slightly different note, I watched The Nightmare Before Christmas the other day. It was equally as awesome and really funky and ingenious and dark and I was totally enthralled. I have to watch it (yet) again though. (laugh out loud) The two-faced mayor really freaked me out. He reminded me of this one scene in Pippin when we had to walk through the audience with an expressionless face and say excited things like "We're so happy to have you here!!" I'll have to sit and ponder why stuff like that freaks me out some time. Anyway, I thought it would be funny to bring up the Nightmare right after that passionate paragraph about love.

hahahaha!

Some more Love stuff!

I chanced upon both of these ideas during the same morning and I think they sit nicely together. And they make me wonder...

The first....
We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifetime. It's easy. The first girl I ever loved was someone I knew in sixth grade. Her name was Missy; we talked about horses. The last girl I love will be someone I haven't even met yet, probably. They all count. But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is suppose to feel like. These are the most important people in your life, and you'll meet maybe four or five of these people over the span of 80 years. But there's still one more tier to all this; there is always one person you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it always happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of those loveable qualities are self-destructive and unreasonable. You will remember having conversations with this person that never actually happened. You will recall sexual trysts with this person that never technically occurred. This is because the individual who embodies your personal definition of love does not really exist. The person is real, and the feelings are real- but you create the context. And context is everything. The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, and they're often just the person you happen to meet the first time you really, really want to love someone. But that person still wins. They win, and you lose. Because for the rest of your life, they will control how you feel about everyone else.
-Chuck Klosterman

And the second....
From Eat, Pray, Love..

"Your problem is you don't understand what that word means. People think a soulmate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soulmate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. And thank God for it."

... so how do we know when we are done peeling away layers? How do we know when we've arrived at the layer we want to stay at? And how do we differentiate this kind of a soulmate from someone more lasting? And why can't a soulmate be the one who sticks around? You know what I think? I think people should come with labels! Then when you meet one of these soulmates you'll know what he/she is and you won't have to get your heart broken going through the tedious process of falling in love and building up a relationship only to see it crash and burn because this person's function was only to peel away another layer and not stick around. And maybe we should also have a "layer label" that warns people what layer we're on. So, like, if you've been totally stripped of all the baggage that needs stripping then you'd have one that said something like "Good to go!" or if you'd never had anyone chip away at you you'd have something like "Has barely scratched the surface!"

Then life would be less tricky and more methodical.. the way it should be! That's sort of a joke.. I like figuring it out. But it's also annoying sometimes. Like when someone tells you a really simple riddle that they know the answer to and you rack your brain trying to figure it out and they keep saying "it's so simple! it's so simple!" and you're like "shut up I can't figure it out!" and then when you do finally figure it out it really does seem so simple, but only in retrospect... that's kinda how life is. And you can either get pissed off at this inevitable reality or laugh at the process of life unfolding before your very eyes. It's cool that we can choose. I'll take the second option please.

I wonder what you think...

There Might Be Blood....

...was soooooooooooooooooooooooo spectacular! I'd like to watch it again in, oh maybe a year or two after I'm all recovered from it, but suffice it to say that I think the same reason why Daniel Day Lewis grew to hate everyone and live an ultimately miserable life is the same reason why we can choose to love everyone and live a pretty meaningful one. I think the preacher was the most glaring representation of this idea. In all of his heavenly splendor and divine demonstrations he could not help but also demonstrate his extreme humanity. Stressed by the pressures of financial hardship, he renounced his faith.. and I loved it! Priests and and oilmen and fathers and brothers and anyone else are not Gods. Daniel Day Lewis' downfall was, I believe, that he expected them all to be infallible, or, at the very least, unconditionally good and trustworthy. And we cannot be any of these things all of the time. Daniel Day Lewis expected the characters in the movie (namely the preacher and his "brother") to be who they said they were, and when they failed to do this he killed them. But no one is ever who they say they are. We crack under wordly pressures just like the characters in the movie did. So I think that instead of saying "I see the worst in people. I don't need to look past seeing them to get all I need. I've built my hatreds up over the years, little by little..." we can say "People are silly" and build up some love for them and all their silly antics, little by little.

Summer - done with you

This is probably not the most ideal time to blog about summer since A) it is not even over yet (close enough) and B) I'm not feeling particularly objective, but what I am feeling is nostalgic for some odd reason and my hope is that it might translate into objectivity. Or maybe I don't hope that.. I don't know. Anyway, throwing care and caution to the wind and in order to get the ball rolling, I'll start with a cliche - summer flew by so fast! That's a very normal thing to say, but they always do! Especially the good ones! Which they usually are! I think I started remembering, or rather, seperating Summers from the rest of my time on this Earth some time during High School when I realized that Summer was an actual event. This was a good one. It basically consisted of Pippin, working at the Gym, and Hilton Head Island with a side of some other important things/people/books/ideas that I guess can also be classified as events.

Hmmm an event. What is that? A person can be an event right?

1. something that happens or is regarded as happening; an occurrence, esp. one of some importance.
2. the outcome, issue, or result of anything: The venture had no successful event.
3. something that occurs in a certain place during a particular interval of time.
4. Physics. in relativity, an occurrence that is sharply localized at a single point in space and instant of time.

Seems as though an event requires some sort of change or at least seem tangible occurence. Pretty vague hahaha. Maybe therein lies the beauty of creating something meaningful in life? Making everything an event? A person, a walk to the fridge, feedings the cats. I guess what I mean to say is that infusing life with intentionality is where it's at. sometimes. hmm. And why are some things events and other things not... I guess that is a nice segue into theater where intentionality is the driving force.

Pippin was sweet. It was the big event of my summer and the one I will most likely remember when I reflect back on 2009 in years to come. There are alot of things I want to say about it - the people involved, the plotline, the characters, the process, the audience response, theater in general, the life I lived while I was involved in it etc.etc.etc. What I can say right now is that theater makes me hyper-sensitive to life and the whole process of living and I really love that about it. When you are onstage or preparing to exhibit your skills on stage for an audience then every little movement and thought matters. Man, I really wished I had kept a daily blog of the whole experience because there were moments when this idea seemed so poignant that I now am having trouble grasping ahold of. I remember reading about a stagehand for Charlie Chapman or someone once whose job in the show was to come out for a brief 10 seconds at the beginning of every show and hold up a cue card of some sort that the audience had to read. When he wrote about this "event" he talked about how hard is what standing there and trying to be in character, feeling every fiber of his being placed or moving or being still in some specific way... even though he was essentially just a prop (aren't we all....). I felt this way at times when I was lying in the back of the stage, playing dead, behind all the dancers, essentially out of sight, yet still assigned a role to play. There were also these weird moments when I was singing when I felt like dance and movement and sound where all the same.. when I could actually feel my voice and what was coming out of my mouth as if it were something tangible, as if I had to train my throat to move in a similar way every time it wanted to emit sound so that every show wold be the same. Maybe this is not some big revelation because I haven't been trained too intensely in vocals, but it's cool nonetheless. I also felt intentionally running through every fiber of my being when I did this really slow, sexy (I hope!) walk to the middle of the stage during one scene. I had to squeeze my stomache and engage my cheek muscles and allow my fingers to hang loosely and feel first the ball of my foot and then the middle and then my heel all wedding me to the stage and every muscle seemed so important. I remember feeling really grateful that yoga happened into my life during these times because it has taught me so much about mind/body/spirit multi-tasking.

I think that in this sense, theater is so therapeutic. Know thyself. That is what I think of when I think of theater. Know thyself from mind to head to toe to breath to spirit to ego and use all of these different parts of yourself to create yourself into a character who is capable of taking on another character onstage.

There was also this one time during our run when our director said something along the lines of "you're not acting anymore; you are just being." I felt that hardcore. Especially during Corner of the Sky and Simple Joys and the Finale. I was purely and simply just enjoying being on stage, dancing, being, the people, the audience, the whole experience. I remember when I first learned the movements associated with each of these songs..I had to try really hard to smile. Imagine that? I thought I had to rack my memory for some good times and remember what it felt like to smile. Then, just by virtue of rehearsing and repeating I realized that this came naturally to me and, magically, I was able to just be and not act anymore.

I love theater. In and of itself. I love watching it and learning about it and doing it. But, as with anything in life, it is not all encompassing. What I don't like about theater is the lifestyle is requires. Don't get me wrong, I loved everyone involved, because we are all essentially the same, but at times, actually a majority of the time, I felt like if I wasn't at a party or in a dance or at a rehearsal or just there and I missed out on something then I was out of the loop... and I'd feel disconnected... and I think that a big part of theater is about being connected to the people you are involved in it with. But I don't want to feel personal connections with that many people. They are too fleeting. Just one or two lasting ones seems to do the trick... in life. Which is why I'd rather keep theater as a hobby than make it a lifestyle.... I'll actually write more about this..

but it's nice out.. so i'm going outside. later Blog.

..... maybe I'll just leave this one with a little summary.

This summer was nice. I saw myself moving forward for the most part, backward in some moments of weakness, but I was caught up in the stream of life, staying active and involved, but also grounded and disengaged when it was necessary.

I am slowly learning how difficult unconditional love is. But I'm not giving up on getting to that point. Thank God that I have an abundance of people in my life, some of whom are there to try my patience, others who are easy to love, and still others who are a bit of both. I'm grateful for them all because they are helping me develop in a way that I would not be able to if I didn't have such an eclectic mix of individuals helping me to do it.

Before this summer I did a lot of watching. I watched my thoughts, myself, my reactions, my resposnes to other people. This summer I was very much inside of myself, an active participant in my own life instead of an observer. Who knows what I will be now.