Speaking of undressing-you-with-your-eyes stares, I was discussing how to generate sexual tension on screen with a fellow actor and friend the other day. Apparently the way to do it is to imagine your partner naked, or think dirty thoughts when you look at them. After this discussion I went to the movies and dirty-thought while ordering my frozen coke. I'm not sure if it worked (he was a bit tired and it was the end of the day) but we did have amusing conversation and I went away giggling to myself. It's very empowering I suppose - it's the best in-joke ever!
Also: at the cinema, the girl next to me ate her sushi under the light of her boyfriend's mobile phone.
On another note, I have been thinking a lot lately about my creative state of being, the next phase of life etc.
It's nearly the end of my six month break from study and I have done absolutely nothing. Well, I got into drama school, I guess. But the other five months that weren't spent agonising over monologues ever day (perhaps every other day instead)? Nada. I realised the other day that I spend a hell of a lot more time talking about wanting to write amazing, scintillating, leaping flame prose, but I never actually doing it. And when I do sit down to write it's very prosaic. Stories about affairs, kitchens, housewives. So I'm a little jaded, ha. But I don't even live that life so I don't know why I'm writing about it!
On the other hand, I do find writing very stable for me, it's the only thing I return to over and over again. Other skills like photography are opportunistic and I have to develop techniques - writing I have studied for years and years (although not so much of late) and merely need to turn to a book or other writing for inspiration. It is the epitome of solitude really...despite my need for social interaction (and boy, is drama full of it), I spend a lot of time alone. All those lost crooks and crannies of time go into sitting in front of the computer. The only issue is that it generally goes nowhere.
Have I peaked? Surely not. The short stories and other stuff I've written weren't amazing. Good for their time but not transcendent pieces of work. The best is so yet to come. If only I could write it! Perhaps I need a deadline or a competition or something. I definitely need to be challenged and to push my words in a new direction. Ahh, are you a writer if you've only written and published in very very small publications and competitions many years ago?? My acting woes are satisfied now as I look forward to my three glorious years to purge my demons, but writing, well I've yet to quell that urge...
Oh well. Perhaps I just need to wait. My brilliant novel/play/screenplay will pour from the sky and bring delight and transformation to all who read it!
Another ditty I wanted to jam on (that's not the word...is it scat? Improvise...no, no...meditate but not quite...oh no - I haven't lost words just yet but I'm terrified of it happening again. I can't go through another year not being able to speak proper sentences!) was that of travel...I can't remember if I've spoken about this before. But travel, in all its forms, whether the visitor or the visited. I've always had issue with travel because I always felt like it was all so transient, so unreal...the sense of the place is always a heightened fantasy, a traveller's perspective of the bars and tourist spots. I've always felt like I needed to live in a place. On the other hand, having lived in London for 6 weeks mid-last year I totally hated it. So maybe that's not the way to go either.
(Is the word rhapsodise? No, it's not rhapsodise...)
Anyway, this is so not related, but I wanted to say that when you travel you live in this vacuum on your own. Every experience becomes more intense because often there is only you to experience it. You're packing a million things into a day, being bombarded by new people and places, smells and tastes. Relationships, of course, progress at a much faster speed. You don't have the baggage or backstory or any sort of background to inhibit your new style and so you are free to present yourself any which way you can. You collide with others as individual molecules when you travel, as you have so much spare time. And yet, despite all the sensations and new experiences, brushing a hand accidentally down someone's back, or knocking your knees against the person next to you, will be the most intense experience of your life.
We all want to connect and to be touched. And it's really just the nature of travel, but you can feel a very intense emotion with someone whom you may not normally be familiar with, just because for one moment, amongst a sea of foreign faces, someone has reached out to you.
In a way, travelling is like dying over and over again. You know that you will never be in this situation again with this person in this environment. So you push things, you speed things up, you juice every drop out of every minute. And in doing so you create a million and one mini-deaths in which your soul dies and has to be reborn again. Which is heartbreaking but ultimately life-affirming.
Perhaps the way to live a truly vivid life is to have short, intense experiences and die many times. On the other hand those experiences will never be real. They are not enough to sustain a life.
Nope, I still can't work out what word I want to use. Rhapsodise is the closest. I'll have to leave it at that.
To dine with more friends before the move!
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