Posts tagged love.
Theatre, Love, Life.
This class has taught me so much. Yes, I learned plenty about devised theatre and its different incarnations (inspiration, adaptation, verbatim, site specific) but the most important things that I have taken away from this class concern their application within the larger scheme of things.
Being forced to work in groups with some people who, within any other circumstances, I would not normally choose to work with has taught me a lot about myself. There is a relationship and dynamic established within each group and sometimes it works out wonderfully and sometimes it’s an immense headache. Given the opportunity for reflection both within a class discussion and in a personal journal shared only with my professor (the amazing and talented Catriona Leger), I’ve come to realize some things about the way that I work and the way that I treat my relationships.
Louie/Pamela.
- Louie: I want to be your friend, and it’s okay to me that there’s nothing else. But can I just, can I just tell you one time the way I feel about you?
- Pamela: You wanna tell me?
- Louie: Yes. And I’ll be your friend, and I won’t press to be anything else if you’ll just let me get it out one time.
- Pamela: You wanna tell me.
- Louis: Yes. Please.
- Pamela: Go ahead…
- Louie: Pamela- I’m in love with you.
- Pamela: (Head in hands), Oh God.
- Louie: Yeah. It’s that bad. You’re so beautiful to me.
- Pamela: (Hand over ears), Oy, eww!
- Louie: Shut up…let me tell you, LET ME. Every time I look at your face or even remember it, it wrecks me. And the way you are with me and you’re just fun and you shit all over me and you make fun of me and you’re real. I don’t have enough time in any day to think about you enough. I feel like I’m gonna live a thousand years cause that’s how long it’s gonna take me to have one thought about you…which is that I’m crazy about you, Pamela. I don’t wanna be with anybody else.
- Pamela: Louie…
- Louie: I don’t. I really don’t. I don’t even think about women anymore. I think about you. I had a dream the other night that you and I were on a train…we were on this train and you were holding my hand…that’s the whole dream, you were holding my hand, and I felt you holding my hand. I woke up and I couldn’t believe it wasn’t real. I’m sick in love with you Pamela, it’s like a condition, it’s like Polio, I feel like I’m gonna die if I can’t be with you…and I can’t be with you…so I’m gonna die. And I don’t care. Because I was brought into existence to know you. And that’s enough. The idea that you would want me back…it’s like greedy. I’m doing a bad job of this.
- Pamela: No you’re not.
- Louie: I’m not?
- Pamela: No. It’s a good job; it’s a really good job.
Dating in New York.
- Dating in New York is extremely difficult.
- Dating in New York is extremely difficult because women get hit on all of the time, in every way imaginable.
- Men are inherently lonely people because our defaults are either fucking or fighting related (not counting sleep; eating, obviously), and the New York City default is all about ‘survival’.
- Combine the two previous bullet points and you have a recipe for disaster; a city full of angry dudes at half staff trying harder and harder at a game that women become increasingly bitter at ever being involved in it in the first place.
- I don’t know what it must be like to be a woman in New York. It must be really difficult / freeing / one or the other, but not both.
- Last night I was outside of a bar, and this woman dropped something from her purse and kept walking. It was one of those “buy 9 get the 10th free” things and I figured she’d want it back so I tapped her on the arm and tried to hand it back to her. “You dropped this”, I said, and she gave me a look as if I had just vomited shit out of my eyes. She didn’t take the damn card. This was in front of five people.
- Her friend saw it and whispered “Don’t worry, I’ll take that”, but holy shit, how bitter can someone be when they drop something and someone tries to hand it back to them?
- Perhaps its got to do more with the human condition.
- Perhaps we are all just very, very lonely and defensive. We are all just monkeys still with money and guns.
- That’s what I initially thought.
- But then I saw a guy fingerbang his girlfriend over her skirt while at the bar, and it made me think.
- Perhaps there are two types of men in this world:
1. Guys that fingerbang people at bars, and
2. Guys that don’t.- I looked around the bar and saw everyone else just stand around, waiting and wanting to be looked at. Men, women, everyone.
- Perhaps we’re just looking for a hole to fill. I mean that metaphorically.
- Or I guess the other way, too.
- The human heart doesn’t want to be bitter. The brain does not want to be angry. These are not our default settings. These are switches and dials in our heads that have taken years, sometimes decades to change that way. It’s easier not to remember those original settings. It’s a lot easier to become what the world wants you to be, instead of making the world become what you want it to, which takes years, years, years.
- Positivity is a marathon, not a sprint.
- It’s just that these people have made many smaller decisions, split second ones, hundreds of them, to ignore that and turn the other way.
- It’s a lot easier to focus on your own problems and project them.
- Which is why I think she didn’t want to take her card back, because she thought I was trying some sort of maneuver.
- Which is worrying in and of itself, because it’s just a card, lady. It’s not a proposal nor am I trying to fuck you.
- Which, I guess, made me feel kinda sad for her
- And people like her
- Who look at an exchange like that and their take home is “Stacey, this guy outside the club tried to hand me something!” “Oh my god!” “I knooooow!”
- And they don’t look at it any other way and chalk it up to their “Well I Never!” category in their head
- And that whole cycle just breeds loneliness.
- And you see people walking down the street hand in hand, and you wonder how they did it.
- I guess through just ignoring everything I’ve just said, right?
- It’s like that Bret Easton Ellis line “People are afraid to merge”, except he was talking about people on the freeway, really.
- And I’m just talking about a lady dropping something on the sidewalk.
(via gregrutter)
Bandages - Hey Rosetta!
There is so much that I love about this music video. Watching this was the perfect way to end my night.
As artists we come to the theatre by accident or trauma. We remain out of fortitude and stubbornness. We return to each project with the knowledge that true discomfort is humanizing and that it is never too late for hope to stimulate change…I have always believed in the innate power of the theatre to change people’s lives because it changed my own.
Howard Baker, Arguments for a Theatre (via againbyheart)
“Sometimes you can tell how much people love each other without even seeing their faces.” - Color Me Katie
5 Tips For Finding Work You Love ›
Pay attention to what you envy. Jealousy is an ugly emotion, but it tells the truth. You only envy those who have what you desire. Back when I was a Wall Street lawyer, some of my former law school classmates got together one evening, and compared notes on alumni career tracks. They spoke with admiration and, yes, jealousy, of a classmate who argued regularly before the Supreme Court. At first I felt critical of their envy. More power to that classmate! I thought, congratulating myself on my magnanimity. Then I realized that my largesse came cheap, because deep down I didn’t aspire to the accolades of lawyering. When I asked myself whom I did envy, the answer came back instantly. My college classmates who’d grown up to be writers, or psychologists.
Ask yourself what you loved to do when you were a child. How did you answer the question of what you wanted to be when you grew up? The specific answer you gave may have been off the mark, but the underlying impulse was not. If you wanted to be a fireman, what did a fireman mean to you? A good man who rescued people in distress? A daredevil? Or the simple pleasure of operating a truck? If you wanted to be a dancer, was it because you got to wear a costume, or because you craved applause, or was it the pure joy of twirling around at lightning speed? You may have known more about who you were then than you do now.
Pay attention to the work you gravitate to. When I was a lawyer, I never once volunteered to take on an extra corporate legal assignment, but I spent a lot of time doing pro bono work for a women’s leadership organization. I also sat on several law firm committees dedicated to mentoring and training young lawyers in the firm. Now I am not the committee type (I’m an introvert!), but the goals of those committees lit me up, so that’s what I did. Today I’m doing a version of this kind of work with my writing and consulting, and I wake up every day excited to get started.
What makes you cry? This one comes courtesy of Steve Pavlina, over at Personal Development for Smart People. He advises that you sit down with a blank sheet of paper, ask yourself what your life purpose is, and keep writing down answers until you come to the one that makes you cry. I experienced a variation of this many years ago. I was having dinner with my good friend Katie Orenstein. I mentioned that I’d always wanted to be a writer but could never find the time to actually write anything. We were having a casual conversation, but I saw the depth of my emotions reflected back in Katie’s face. And I burst into tears. Now here I am, with my first book coming out next year. (Check out Katie’s inspiring Op-Ed project here; she may change your life too.)
You may think I’m conflating work with life purpose here. I am. In an ideal world they will be one and the same. For many people, however, it’s not an ideal world. In that case, try to earn your income from work that doesn’t take too much time and energy. Then spend the rest of your time doing what you truly love.
You Love Me, little book, letterpress, for a show in NYC…
Adorable. Headed to Paper Ya tmw to seek out more Carissa Potter cards.
things we love.
I need one of these in my home.
