And love others – so repeated and so in need of repetition

I saw The Reader with Sara and her mom today. Sara’s mom is a rare kind of person. She seems to genuinely enjoy her daughter and even me. You feel funny and entertaining around her, and I realized it’s probably a good deal of her being an avid appreciator of others. Both Sara and her mom speak in a more hushed way than the rest of the world. Sara’s mom possesses the gifts of being both practical and a detailed, softly-emitting storyteller. It’s so nice.
We ate at (ha, at first I just typed “at”, like “Eh, that covers ‘ate at’. ‘At’. Yeah.”) Sweet Basil thai after the movie… The popcorn, basil fried rice, and tofu are simultaneously expanding in my stomach at this moment.

My friend turtle is doing a student-directed scene for her directing class. She asked around for people to be in it, and I responded “I would! But I’m in class at the performance time.” Oddly, spatially enough, my housemate Ashleigh was going to be in it but became incommunicado. So then turtle asked her teacher if the scene could be performed at a different time, and the answer was yes, so… I’m going to be Joan of Arc opposite a tall guy named Morgan as Charles le Dauphin in a scene from G.B.S.’s play St. Joan ! We’re performing it in two weeks. My first step is to memorize the words, so that they come welling out of my heart automatically… turtle recorded us reading through it and burned CDs to aid memorization. I listened to it in the car. Previous to doing that, I experienced a brief spasm of freak-out that I would be hearing my own voice, open to all sorts of expressive criticism… But then I became calm. After all, I want to improve, and I can move so much farther if I don’t get neurotically self-involved.

So I listened to it, and I noted discrepancies between my perception while speaking and the reality of how it sounded, and I was kind to my recorded self, and it went by as a smooth, small event. Not a neurotic freak-out. I was even happy with some of the choices I made.

As Twiggy said on America’s Next Top Model that was playing at the gym today, “Your job is to be focusing on what you’re doing… You have a fault, don’t even think about it…” Something like that. It’s interesting to see the translation and transition from ancient religious texts –> agnostic messages –> motivational speaking –> pop psychology. They all end up dancing around this thing that challenges you to play larger than the set-up of human games.