Am I ever going to have a normal acting class?

Yesterday we had acting class and as always, it was freaking weird. It's no mystery that I'm uncomfortable with acting and get extremely nervous when I have to. This week we did much more watching rather than doing and I'm okay with that. After "walking the dog," we all sat down and got to watch each other fire or get fired. Improv has always been something that frightens me, I normally avoid it. I can't even remember the last time I did it (it was probably during Jim Bonni). Of course I was last to go along with Matt. I was put in the position of the boss even though I wanted to be the employee which was bad enough, then of course Luke decides to make our thing "flirty" which effectively freaked me out. I'm not good at flirting in real life so I wasn't exactly sure what to do when put in the position of flirting in front of everyone especially with Matt. The improv started and I was shaking uncontrollably, I really couldn't stop. My feet were taping really fast, and my whole body was shaking. For a quick second it all felt very real to me. I wasn't trying to act, I hardly even remember how the conversation went. I really felt like I was firing jim. Even after Luke told us to stop, my legs were still shaking and I was on the verge of tears. It took about 5 seconds for me to realize it wasn't real and to finally snap out of it. When I went home later that night I was thinking about it and I tried to move my feet that fast again and I couldn't even get close to the speed. It was a one time thing and oddly enough it happened in a fictional world.

My mind is a mess and I'm trying to make sense.

I hear people talking all the time about how a movie, a book, a band, or a song has changed their life, and I always find myself thinking as to how that is possible. I always understood what it was like to really like and value something but to find it life changing? really? I've lived my life thus far with a practical view on everything, whats right is right, and whats wrong is wrong. Nothing else. Life for me has always been black and white, there's no grey. I never made something out to be much more than what it really is. This is a terrible way for an artist to look at things and I understand that now. I blame a lot of who I am on how I've grown up. Living in a house where we're encouraged to experience things but feelings are banned. I live with an open mind but a closed heart. It probably sounds like I'm contradicting myself, which I am, but it all makes sense in my head.

I guess what I'm trying to get at here is that things are changing for me. Over the summer my best friend (and I know that these days that phrase is used very loosely but she understands me more than anyone else) pretty much shoved a book into my hand, forced me to read it, and I've never been more grateful. It changed the way I look at things, it changed my life. I don't think I'll ever be able to explain what it did to me, and after all of these years of wondering why things have the power to change lives I finally understand. And most of us probably won't till it happens to us. That book has become something very personal to me and is slowly shaping my outlook on life. Soon that beloved book is going to be a movie, and not only is it going to be a movie, but its going to be one with major actors in it. I'm terrified. I feel by putting these faces I've seen a dozen times before to the characters I feel so close to, makes it less personal and more public. Believe me, I don't want this book to be kept all to myself, I want others to experience it as well and to learn from it just like I did. But I don't want it to become something it's not. I don't want it to be just another way to make money and that girls all over the country will love for all the wrong reasons. I don't know, maybe I'm just being stupid. It's just that when something is so close to your heart you become desperate to keep it there.

I wish I was a better writer. I have all these ideas but I can't seem to get them down and make sense of them, maybe sleep would help. Hopefully I won't regret this post in the morning. I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from this book:

"We are who we are for a lot of reasons, and most of them we'll never know."

My comfort zone.

So as Luke promised acting class did get much less emotional, but now I'm not so sure that's a good thing. On the day of the hat exercise I had a feeling of accomplishment and that I finally did something right in an acting class, but now it's back to that feeling of  "wow I'm terrible at this." I'm aware is a terrible attitude but I'm having a lot of trouble changing it. There's a lot of things I don't do simply because of the person I am and acting just seems to fall under those things. It pushes me way out of my comfort zone to the point where it makes me incredibly insecure and I can't handle it. I'm trying, I really am but acting isn't something I can do (not right now at least.) I can't pretend to scream at someone because I can hardly do it for real. I never act on my emotions in real life. If I want to yell at someone I normally keep it inside, I never start an argument. I feel to bad about it, and makes me feel like a bad person no matter how much they deserved it. The meanest I ever get is short sarcastic lines that I walk away after saying. I have too much of a guilty conscience to yell at someone. I know, I know, when you act you're not really yelling at them, you're yelling at another person acting but I just don't know what it feels like to really yell at someone and try to win the fight. I turn passive and let people do what they want, and I hate it.

Catching up.

So it's been awhile, and there's a bunch of things I want to cover so I'm just going to jump right in.

I was a little disappointed by the museums on the field trip, I don't know what it was but nothing really stuck out at me. I usually love museums and can spend hours in them but I found myself quickly getting bored and looking through things faster than usual. I'm normally the last one out of a museum not the first. The sculpture center was interesting at first, but I found myself looking more at the building rather than the art. Of course there was the huge red lady in the front which give you that "wow" feeling, but either than that, it was nothing special. 

MoMA PS1 was at least a little better. The thing that amazed me the most was definitely the room filled with speakers. As Ashley and I turned the corner into the room we didn't know what to expect and what was awaiting us was amazing to say the least. At first I didn't even know what I was hearing but as I approached the speakers I realized that each one was a different voice and together they created this magnificent song. Our experience with the room was different than others because we walked in there when there was only 3 other people sitting down. We took a seat and just listened for awhile and it was a feeling I still can't describe after a week and a half of thinking about it. I still remember Ashley turning to me and saying "It's funny how an empty room could feel so crowded." There's no other way to describe it. When you close your eyes you can feel and see the people signing around you closing in on you but when you open them it's just you in a nearly empty room. But after experiencing that the rest of the museum just wasn't anything special to me, nothing stood out, nothing left me thinking about it, MoMA was just simply okay. 

I now feel like The Whitney museum had much more potential than what I saw that day. I looked at all the pieces but after  a few they all really started to blend together in my mind. Nothing stood out to me and nothing made me think. Which actually worries me a bit. I feel as if I'm losing my interest in art which was really the only thing I still cared about.

What the field trip lacked in art definitely made up for it with the play. The Complete & Condensed Stage Directions of Eugene O'Neill Vol.1 was my favorite piece of theater I've ever seen. It was witty without being too intellectual, it was funny without being too silly, and was just plain old amazing. To be completely honest, I'm not a huge fan of traditional theater. I get distracted, lose track of whats going on, and I'm never able to find the deeper meanings other people magically find. It was something as simple as just reading stage directions and acting them out, but it was pulled off so well. Even the 3 minutes of darkness were fantastic. If that was just volume 1 I cant wait for 2.

(I originally planned on writing about acting class in this too but I think a new post would be appropriate, so that'll be up in a bit!)