Theatre gets me high & then Romance pulls me down, but I lived happily ever after anyway. Yayee.

Well, I’m sitting in my granuelita’s walker next to her in the emergency room lobby. She’s feeling a whole lot better, thank goodness. We’re just waiting on the Doctor’s final ok. Anywho, she’s making friends and talking up a storm with the ladies in emergency. Lol! As usual. My grandma — The Cool Chick.

So I’ll take this time to blog it up. Theatre in LA rocks my socks off. I’ve seen a lot of killer underground shows here. Live performances that leave me feeling high. Higher than alcohol and oreo cookie shakes ever did in my wild-thing years ;p

Alas, Art calls blackjack.  I’d rather be conscious of, fully attentive to the real manifestation of fabu BRILLIANCE than lulled into satisfaction with mediocrity by belly-warming frontal-lobe butchers. What I’m trying to say is that I saw a HILARIOUS genius theatre show and didn’t sacrifice any of it to go chug Mickey’s Malt in the trunk of my Ford — not once!  If you feel like getting high on the arresting brilliance of the unpredictable human imagination — FairyTale Theatre is your show.  It basically warps childhood fairytales into moral fables that twisted adults can relate to, laugh with, and — strangely enough — learn from.  I ate lemon rinds & cackled for an hour straight, like a hyena on shrooms.

To think I wanted to cancel so that I could go home and work on my book promotion til’ my eyes dried out! The spiritual nourishment and replenishing creativity I would have missed. One of my beloved best friends & spirit sisters — Kunteemonster — generously got me a ticket.  I wanted to see her and promised I would go. I’m working on cultivating being impeccable with my word — for the purely selfish reason that estimable acts seem to fortify my self-esteem.  27-years into this game and now I figure it out!  😉  SO I threw a 30’s hat onto my overgrown greasy hair and lugged my makeup-less eyebags from the hood to the westside. I’m thrilled and grateful I did.

As I elatedly sauntered back to the car after the show, I thought of 3 people who would especially LOVE this show: 1) My mom “Mamushka” 2) Baby Dewds — another bestie & spirit sister and 3) An old friend I once fell in love with / got the romance cramps for …

The first 2 people I can actually call via android and vulnerably, passionately invite them to share the great discoveries of life’s madness with me — like this show.  The last woman though … well she’s traveling the other way, in the opposite direction of my trek — so I can’t.

It made me sad to think of her.  It makes me sad to think of her.   Side Note: I hope she finds the used Ella Fitzgerald CD I bought in Paris when I was 19 / 20.  I miss singing “I got a pebble in my shoe” while reminiscing about watching shape-shifting cobblestone streets through speeding amtrak windows.

Once a dear friend she’s now not even an acquaintance … a love of mine that never was mine.  Ah vell, life ticks on in the hands of train station clocks and beings fall in and out and in and out of love until the end of Nature.  So it is with me.  Although often times after having seen some great piece of theatre, I do still miss her friendship and then a tinge of ache about what never was but could have possibly been between us shoots to the tips of my nerve endings.  Both sentiments, however, have waned and faded into memory with passing days.  They’ll eventually take on the look and feel of photos developed at a Thrifty’s fotomat circa 1992.  This I know from past experience.  Thank GAWD! ;p

Another notable came after her. Conversely, this other young woman had a bountiful of love to share with me.  Through her, the world revealed that its vast seas of sweetness stretched far beyond the horizon. Her gentle transparency brought the embarrassed tenderness guarded within me out of dark corners into the light and lulled my dejected cynic to sleep for a brief lovely while.  In a breath, our paths intertwined and then diverged again.  Having reached a perpendicular fork in our road, we mournfully followed our selves away from each other and bowed in respect with “goodbye.”

Sometimes, on a night like yesterday’s, I feel the singe of halfness echo through my chest again.  After which I think to myself, “Maybe if I had a girl, I’d finally feel whole.”  Melancholy wonder warms my healing, pockmarked heart as I remember gazing into sundry pairs of eyes whose circular shades of blue sky, green bark, and velvet turquoise hugged a fixed black dot.

That being said, personal experience has taught me that the romance-solution is a “quick-fix” falsity.  I know better by now.  Wholeness has only come about through honest self-search and service to others.  A romantic partner is much like Life herself — palpable and powerful, but transient.  Relative to relevance.  Some girls accompany you for a month, others for a decade … All of which depends on whether you’re walking toward personal wholeness together or away from it.  The more I accept the romance process for what it is, the less I try to curate and manipulate my romances.  The more I appreciate each circumstance exactly as is, let it be, and, if needed, let it go.

Que Será Será.

Okay, now onto Awesome Photos I Found on The Internet!!! Let’s end this post by reflecting on these images, shall we?

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Making A Movie Day 7 — The Penguin gone Cray Cray

Alright, I realize blogging on a daily basis about making a movie is not as exciting or fun as just ranting.

I’ll tell you why — Making a movie requires completion of a lot of technicalities, which take time to execute.  Such as creating main website for film, updating synopses, researching desired producers and production companies, etc.  Although that may be a Noah’s Ark Boat load of fun for me, it’s not that fun to write about and I imagine read SO until the process gets JUICY, I won’t bore you or myself with A) The emotional highs and lows of such a process and B) The practical highs and lows of such a process.

Blogging about cooking Julia Child meals on a nightly basis as Julie did in Julie & Julia is much more enjoyable for writer and reader than blogging about surfing IMDBpro and starting a tumblr account.

So, although I continue working on my first feature Dear Dios over the next year, I’ll only blog about the scandalous, enticing, and J-U-I-C-Y details.

MAN, doing this group therapy-mandated whole life inventory and consequential, resentment breakdown has me crazier than Danny DeVito as The Penguin in Batman Returns.

Wrapped up in the world of ME proves more than a tad unhinging and by that I mean absolutely maddening.  Sifting through the suckage and okayness of my life over a 26-year period has flared up ALL of my character defects/defenses: narcissism, control-freakishness, perfectionism, workaholism, self-flogging (which I almost called “self-flatulence”), and gorging on Entemann’s chocolate cake and countless bowls of “Honey Bunches of Oats.”

YUCK.

Spiritual & Psychological growth is one painful ugly sonumabitch.  A procedure I must undergo if I don’t want to rot inside until I my dying day 🙂

Yes, next Tuesday I read the inventory to my group therapy mentor.  Hopefully then, just maybe, I’ll be able to pull back from the transfixing pond that reflects back to me my visage a.k.a. NOT DROWN in mah’ B.S.

While attempting to finish this inventory for the past 2 weeks, I haven’t really spoken with or spent quality time with … well, hardly anyone …

It’s a self-imposed solitary confinement driven by the belief that when I FINALLY finish the task at hand I will deserve to reward myself — with connecting to other human beings in the world.

Gawd, I take myself SO seriously!  Gah!  It makes me want to eat ENTEMANNS!!

Last night, however, I experienced a nice deliverance from the well of echoing imperfection that is mah’ self-reflection when I hung out with two buds, Mama Geee & Sass, at House of Pies.

At one point during our discourse about cheating spouses and famous celebrity cheaters, Mama Geee commented, “”EW, Lance Armstrong cheated? But he’s ugly & has no balls!”  It connected me to my spiritual center and made my night.  Thanks Mama Geee!!!

Much has happened in the world today, per the usual.  Great things, miraculous things, awful things, terrifying things, spontaneous things, unforeseen things …

It’s great to know that when I want to stop my ego from swallowing me whole — during this intense period of personal healing — I can always look outside to the world’s ongoings and take peace from the fact that there is much yet to experience, much yet to learn, and much yet to re-watch like Batman Returns.

 

Making A Movie Day 5 — Killing & Burying the Ideal Self

Okay, after a couple of hours of wallow and nap, I’m up and active.

Today, as my previous post affirmed, did suck.  Not because anything awful happened to me (thank baby jesus in da manger), but because personal growth is hard.

I spent most of my waking hours this past weekend working on my whole life inventory’s (80 pgs, 9 point font, written over the last year and a half ) — resentment breakdown list, which is about 30 resentments so far and about 15 pages or so.

I was supposed to have it finished by this morning so I could read it in one sitting to my group therapy mentor and then we could begin work on my character defects. To keep healing and growing, you know, but the truth is I wasn’t able to finish the resentment breakdown so we rescheduled the read aloud for next Tuesday.

I wasn’t able to finish it because my obsessive attention to detail and enslavement to thoroughness, makes it quite impossible for me to skip or skim most things. Especially anything art and spirituality/emotional & psychological healing related.

Yet my obsession with the passage of time — my race to accomplish more, BE more constantly tricks me into setting unrealistic deadlines for myself.

Deadlines that bludgeon me with a clock hand — the size of the metal ones you find in train stations.

I set deadlines that prove unrealistic and unhealthy for my detail-oriented nature. It’s not that I can’t make the set deadlines, but that I’m usually pulling all-nighters and sacrificing other areas of my life to do so.  Often times, I don’t make many of the severe “around the corner” deadlines I set for myself because I can’t bring myself to sacrifice the quality of the task at hand.  I know I’m cheating it if I do.

Of course, when I inevitably don’t meet said austere deadlines — I pummel myself with a large block of wood that has the word “F-A-I-L-U-R-E” spray-painted across it. So then I set another deadline (the one I should have originally set for myself) and meet it.

Instead of blindly following the pattern, as usual — today I heard my mentor’s voice when she said to me again what she’s told me for a long time, “Your life is not a race.”

My life is not a race.  What a brutal yet liberating concept to assimilate…

I’ve always felt that I’m falling one step behind if I don’t race to finish the book, finish the film, get the grant, get the awards, make high honor roll, etc.

I’ve lived in an incessant relentless competition with my ideal self since I was about 7-years old.

Focusing on my ideal self obviously means, however, that I’m never enough now.

I compare my body, my career, my romances and lack thereof constantly, relentlessly with those who seem to have all their chit’ TOGETHER.

As Carly Simon once sang about Warren Beatty:

Well, I hear you went up to Saratoga
And your horse naturally won
Then you flew your Lear jet up to Nova Scotia
To see the total eclipse of the sun
Well, you’re where you should be all the time
And when you’re not, you’re with
Some underworld spy or the wife of a close friend
Wife of a close friend …

That’s the person I compare myself to — never those “worse off” always those “doing better.”

As Martin Luther King Jr. once said (By the By, Happy BDay Papa King!!!):

I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the “isness” of man’s present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal “oughtness” that forever confronts him.

This “oughtness” is my greatest and gravest obsession — to become the best me and all the while I’m not the best me, I feel that I’m just wasting my potential.

It’s clear to me today, that I fail at this feat because it’s an impossible one to achieve — Likened to trying to reach the Sun on foot.

Worries swim through my head all day and all night: If I don’t finish this resentment breakdown then I can’t work on the “To Do’s” for my film then I’m pushed back a week, and then and then and … Always falling deeper into the “isness” and further away from the “oughtness” …

The question is: Do I continue relating to my life this way?

If I am ever to be happy, to take enjoyment in the things I do — in the variations of the Self I become — I must humble myself to the moment that is, raise my white flag, and embrace that I’ve failed.

I will never win “The Race” I’ve imagined myself winning since I was a little girl because the race never ends … but the body, the mind, and the soul do tire …

I’m tired.

Thus, I surrender to the process of living — the one life has set out for me — and drive a stake through the heart of my beloved Brass Ring.

Making a movie — making this movie Dear Dios — isn’t about proving to myself that I can do it or that I can do it as quickly and as perfectly as my ideal self can — It isn’t about the Nicholls Fellowships or the Sundance Labs or the Cannes Film Festival –It isn’t about getting signed by CAA or backed by the Weinstein Company…

Dear Dios is about learning to make a movie with other creative people I’m inspired by in a manner I enjoy — learning to make a film that I artistically respect and love — learning to cut out the unnecessary middle men and make my work available to people all over the world through forums that are affordable for them and economically lucrative for me — learning as an artist/filmmaker and business woman to work from a place of principle not of fear so that humility, quality of craft, and accessibility of art are my aims not the Brass Rings.

On that note, this blog — which follows the making of a portion of my first feature Dear Dios over 365 days — will focus primarily on making the movie while achieving balance in my life as a whole person — spiritually, psychologically, emotionally, socially, romantically.

There is no race.  I have nothing to prove.  I have failed my ideal self and exchange its dead body for a chance to enjoy the great unknown — like a nomad, a wanderer, an explorer.

A groundless, frightened, passion-driven thing that admits she knows nothing and exists on earth for the sole purpose of learning.

That being said, I’ve made my tumblr account for Dear Dios, which will illustrate the film’s press kit a.k.a synopses, logline, tagline, artistic inspirations such as paintings and photographs, music links, articles, ETC.  I’ll also include a paypal button as fundraising, starting on the smallest scale, will begin shortly.

I plan on buying a domain name and forwarding it to the tumblr account and of course, linking that up to this blog and my main website.

I plan on updating my director’s reel, resume, main website, and official news/press blog.

Oh, yeah, and I haven’t seen Baby Dewds in almost 2 weeks, which means I have to get in some Baby Dewds University quality time ASAP.

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.