fleef

! Look at this! I just read it in an article for Counseling (the course):

Thus, it helps to begin sessions with children by sharing

something fun and interesting. Games, clay, and toys in the counseling room are

useful when dealing with children. You will find that children generally like to do

something with their hands while they talk; having a child draw a picture during

rhe conversation can often be useful to the child and to the interviewer. And the

drawings often reveal what is going on in the child’s life.

It appears that I’ve retained this… The older I get, the more I notice people sort of peer at me when I pull out the composition book and start drawing while we speak… It’s not something I want to give up to adult custom, so I ignore how it might be different.

 

Kudos to Steven for the new banner inspiration! I was talking to him about how I feel I’ve given up alot of my freedom to be baffling to others for the sake of being easily understood by others, I suppose, and Steven said, “It saddens me that you’ve circumscribed the kook for others…. The kook! The kook!” The murder dreams and the pervading sadness over time grieve this… and won’t let me settle peacably into a slightly-dead-inside adult routine. I know at least three people in my life who have inadvertently discouraged my originality by saying something like, “You always have to be different”, as if I’m purposefully trying to show up the people around me. It just so happens that, in order to be authentic, the difference just happens so. But if we’re all being authentic, not one of us needs to feel less special!

The font is sticking with me from now on, I guess (in this entry).

I saw The Uninvited with Annie and her friend Kendall for $1.50 at Golden Triangle Mall last night. hahahah. I spent half the time hiding my face behind a popcorn bag and waiting for the suspenseful music jolt to be over. I’m glad Annie and Kendall were – and even all eight other people in the theatre seemed – open to aloud banter. Some memorable mome’s:

when dead-mom’s-nurse-turned-dad’s-girlfriend Rachel was trying to make friends with daughter Anna, she said, “I became someone that no one fucked with.” It seems like a writer forgot how most White upper-middle class families speak.

Anna knocked a roast off the counter. Rachel shrieked, “What did you do!”, and in one motion swooped down, stabbed it with a cutlery knife, and slammed it on the counter like a Viking.

In reference to the roast she said, “You know the secret to a roast? Let it sit for ten minutes before carving it. It lets the blood soak in.”

Also, “Some of those people I nursed treated me like dirt, but I knew they would be dead very. very. soon.”

So many bold-faced “I’M A MURDERER” leads.

and yeah I understand what the filmmakers are meaning to convey. I just laugh at obvious speech or the contrast between what most people in real life would do and what people in movays do. I guess Anna was ‘psycho’ in the end, so the world would have seemed like a scarier place from her eyes anyway. Why am I analyzing this.

They were out of large popcorn bags, too, so we paid for a medium and got a free refill! It was delicious. Small, run-down theatres might have better popcorn.

 Annie wore a dress and a plastic crown she’d donned at her flat, and I thought of how INFPs are the princess (or prince) of their own fairytales.

 

 

at this moment

I have many words, but they aren’t the words of songs. I have no poetry.

(yet)

popcorn

I’m not shy enough to ruin my life. I can still attend classes, make okay grades, and talk to people with a nervous, timid, sometimes friendly energy.

I’m just shy enough to keep happiness out of it.

Sleep dep high is gone… Rehearsal sucked. I don’t feel flexible. I fear the stigma of mental illness and fall toward claiming it. Like being ashamed of a deformed little brother, so he runs up to you on the playground and calls out, “Hey, Sis!”

One thing that was neat tonight was Morgan’s house. He immediately showed me his giant cat Master Jones or “Massey”, an orange Norwegian something, who really is bigger than Waffle. Then he introduced me to Hershey the poodle. I enjoyed his house, because there was no pretense of not living in it. Food was on all the counters and in racks like a feast permanently laid out, and good food, I almost nipped a ginger slice. There was a conglomeration of couches and tables around a big-screen tv and people coming and going. I walked out of my parents’ mindset into the freefalling atmosphere of his house… I wish I could have absorbed it more. His initial friendliness made me hopeful, but then I got this sinking feeling that he thought I was bad in the scene, and I was bad. actually. I was bad. I was bad.

It’s sort of freeing to say though. I was bad. I was bad. I was soooooooooooooooo bad. I freakin didn’t change my intonation appropriately, I moved stiffly, I got distracted mid-sentence, I glanced at the director [turtle] more than ever according to her[turtle]… I was so baaaad hahahahaha a I was so bad hahahaahahahahahaah

And I’m still alive!  That’s the thing. Doing a bad job at something becomes less frightening when you are allowed to live after doing so. Not like those other times when they……

It’s about time I sucked at something anyway. Right? Am I right?

But seriously I’ll use spring break to tune myself up and destroy the reverence of those lines so they can live.

a ringa ringa ringa a ringa ringa ringa a ringa ringa ring a ring a ring <–Slumdog Millionaire song stuck in head

I do want to be more friends with turtle and Morgan. They’re intelligent but not swollen.

Note: I originally made this Private, but it turned out not that personal.

Other note: Because I gave up Facebook, I may be coming here more. But I wonder if this is a better place, encouraging me to be generative rather than lose myself in other people? Yes. I’ll decide that now. Yep.

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.

How old are you? Millenia, sir.

I wish that actors lived in caves, emerged to act, and then went subterranean again, never revealing their names or actual identities. Or that they walked around in disguises most of the time (or acted in costume and make-up that made them look drastically different). Something where nobody knew who they really were. I guess this idea is the banishment of celebrities. I suppose I can’t really enforce this to the entire earth, but I thought of it today like, “If I were an actor, this is what I would do…” I would be a mysterious woman, invested in the study of life and its people, embodying that beauty in pieces (plays, films, whatever…), and preserving my art, my self, from the public eye. This is to say, “Hey, you, you who watches me… This art is about you, not me.” So I would shun fame.

~and unrelate~

My Counseling professor (Counseling is a course, I’m not being personally instructed in one hour weekly sessions)  makes the priority of his lessons self-reflection. I like that partially because I could use that in deciding what I do with my life next, and also because it makes it, well, an easier class… Last Wednesday, he commenced the class by asking us to imagine where we would be in 2013. I wondered what he thought looking at us as we all sat there with our eyes closed.

I first registered slight surprise that I would have a future. (see: slightly faulty serotonin receptors.) After moving past that, I started to imagine myself living in a flat in London with Waffle. Flannery lived nearby somewhere. In the morning, I worked at counseling practice, overall part-time. I would be out by the afternoon to grab lunch in Covent Garden with Flann and then go to band practice. Walking home from band practice, I’d pick up Indian for dinner and be greeted by a tail-thomping Waffle at my flat. I’d take him out for a walk in a park. Back home, darkness falling, I would work on writing and drawing up graphic novels. A few hours later, after a soak in the tub, Waffle and I would curl up and fall asleep in an enormously cooshy bed. The bed was a real luxury imagined in there, since I’ve mainly slept on rather monastic things throughout my life. I imagined more forward into that life, where Bible studies and gigs and ballet classes would reside. I could suddenly tack on a conclusion to this… But I just made some brownies from scratch for the first time ever, frosting included in the ‘from scratch’, so I want to leave. I guess I mentioned the imaginal exercise, because it joined in the tide of my restarting. I’m going to keep consciously imagining happy futures instead of settling into the faulty serotonin receptor wasteland. And it’s not that I ever lost optimism that the entire universe would work out okay… It’s specifically myself deemed purposeless in a world full of purpose… so in fighting, I want to imagine specific futures for myself.

Story Idears

1. Helper Man and Guilty Girl – I thought this up last semester. A guy is twistedly altruistic, to the point of furtively causing people problems in order to help them. He lives with his sister and her son. When his sister finds out that Helper Man is the source of some chronic trouble, she kicks him out but honors the bond of kinship insofar as she doesn’t take legal action. Homeless, Helper Man meets Guilty Girl underneath an overpass by a ditch. Guilty Girl believes that she is irrevocably without worth. She floats from place to place, too dark and formless to even initiate suicide. Because she won’t take action to support her existence in this world, she is the neediest person possible.

So they make a great match!

This is about as far as I’ve gotten in planning. The characters and their curiously balanced relationship are what fascinate me, but I know it needs some plot to illustrate philosophical points. Maybe I’ll think up what philosophical points would manifest in a relationship like this. Yeah, that’d be a starting point for choosing plots.

 

2. Something about a girl named Millicent (nicknamed Cent) whose parents become unable to care for her (not necessarily orphaned). So she is raised by an embittered aunt (who shares her nameseake) and uncle with her hateful, rambunctious cousins. When I imagine the story, the strand of relationship between Cent and her like-named aunt is what receives the most illumination. Again, it’s relationships… Also, I want this story to be a sort of diorama of character dimensions. One example I had in mind is how her older boy cousin, who torments her throughout childhood, becomes an enobled war hero revered by outsiders. The other is the relationship with her aunt… They actively dislike each other, but at several key points in each other’s lives they only have each other. I have one scene clearly imagined near the end. Cent is more intellectual than the whole blue-collar family who raised her. She has done well in school and gets accepted to a college… Her aunt, despite the friction and misunderstanding within their relationship, knows that Cent will not be able to go unless she pays – and so she does. That’s a concept I want to express: the disharmony and unity within relationships, the attraction and division, tied to and tugging from. I remember back in junior high, location in classes was as integral to the formation of a relationship as kindred spiritship. I’ve become better friends with some people than others, because, well, they were physically present at drama club or in class or whatnot. And others were not. It really makes my brain slober with fascination to think of those contrasting parameters of relationship composition – positively transcending, spiritual and local, mundane.

So that’s what I would want to explore in this story. It’d also be a chronological story, watching people grow and develop through time. Another pattern I’ve noticed in my writing thanks to my meta-brain skills that neurologically multiply in young adulthood!

 

3. The Girl Who Didn’t Think. I *think* I wrote about this already. Already my main character and I are obviously differentiated.

 This would have to do with the process of realizing that you are a separate entity from the social flow. Abbreviated so’flo’. Abbrev.soflo.

 

There are so many Ben Gibbard lookalikes in Denton. I wanted to note that for a moment.

 

4. Any more ideas? Some inspection of aestheticism and Bohemia. Like that’s not vague enough. I find it interesting that I can arrive so nearly in appearance to alot of people around Denton, but I still don’t necessarily have common ground underneath. Well, besides the common ground I can find all humans standing on (not just literal dirt and San Augustine, but, you know, thoughts and emotions and things with which people are filled). Something about this generation.

Still vague.

 

This list begins a begging exploration that I’ve been ignoring for quite awhile.

Existential Psychology

Life comes in periods of work and rest. Rest is almost here.

I’m going to make a stack of books in my room at home and read them all over the next few weeks. Then there’s a high possibility I’ll be jaunting about the country in a car. I can hardly wait to get home to my room with space, a wooden floor, and a mirror… Because I love staring at myself in it! Not! I want to ballet it up, yo.

There’s only a statistics exam left tomorrow. It’s at 1 pm. Aren’t you glad you know that now?

Want to act… I miss improv.

Have the urge to disclaim this entry as not inspiring.

Now I Go Swimming

I was always sort of distantly aware of the comic book culture somewhere on the fringes of my own artistic interests, but it never occurred to me until recently that I made a good deal of graphic novels when I was younger.  I didn’t give them a name, but I look back through sketchbooks and find them.

Me: I never labeled them in my mind… I just drew boxes with people in them saying things.

Sara: That’s what a graphic novel is, Angela.

 

My uncle Paul’s friend Josh has been immersed in the scene his entire life.  My last day at Opening Bell, our presences converged next to the sugar/milk/half&half bar.  We discussed a little about recent readings, and he invited me to a club that he founded which meets in some museum in Dallas.  I feel like I’m beginning an entry into a secret society.  When someone shares that they’ve read what you’ve read, there’s a sort of flash between each other’s eyes, and you know that you both understand… I guess it would be akin to sharing similar experiences.  If you go through something incredibly intense with another person, you stay connected on some level pretty much forever.  And these picture-full books seem even more experiential than the words-only books.

Atomic Happiness

I had an idea to make a movee about how your happiness is in your own hands.  Cause usually in movies the protagonist ends up getting what they want so that they’re happy at the end.  Well, maybe not totally usually.  I just thought of a lot of counterexamples.  This always happens when I make a point… 

well, anyway,

I guess mostly I’m thinking of the scores of mediocrities that are produced…

now I sound really elitist

 

If I could ever get out of my way, I would maybe elaborate the idea that I had.

I got the idea when I was petting my dog sitting on a mattress in the middle of my Uncle Paul’s loft.  The space of his place can make you feel very alone sometimes, especially when you’re not taking up much of it curled up on a mattress stroking your darling Waffle.  His little brown eyes blink every time I pet his head… awwww… getting distracted…. Tahoe likes to lay nearby to protect Waffle ‘n’ me and also to get in on the belly-rub action.  I got an image in my head similar to my current situation, only around it were painted worse circumstances than mine.  The girl didn’t just feel alone even though her uncle was in the next room.  She was alone, and I imagined other things that had happened to her.  She didn’t get the guy.  She didn’t achieve her dreams.  Her family was fragmented, and her friends were all far away living their own lives.  She was alone in a room in an old warehouse, sitting on a mattress, petting her dog as he blinked his little brown eyes.  I was thinking the whole movie would follow her through her pursuits and how they all failed.  But then she would be happy at the end, even though absolutely nothing worked out.  She would simply decide, “I’m tired of being sad about all of this.  I choose happiness.”  It would take an excellent actress to actually convey that to the audience without words… otherwise the end would be baffling. 

 

Alot of things that I write seem to be psychologically based, probably because the battles of my life have almost always been internal.  Especially the decision to exude happiness/joy/peace from my very atoms even if it came from nowhere else.

 

 

Still craving popcorn.  I was going to go see The Dark Knight again today and get the $5 first matinee price at 10:30 am, but at 9:30 Waffle was laying so sweetly and warmly next to me that I couldn’t move.  Also, I’m not sure if I can subject myself to that intensity again… even though I enjoyed it…  Maybe I could make more observations if I see it again, though, because the first time I was definitely wrapped up in the emotions and suspense.  I mean, I know what’s going to happen now.  Hum.  I could still get the $6.50 matinee price if I went right now.  I have to work at 5:30.  I could still make it.

 

Mayyybe.

I could read Yeong’s copy of Watchmen for free, though.  But that involves no popcorn.  I wish I could just walk in and buy popcorn and leave.  Oh my gosh, is that what this comes down to? 

All other food pales in comparison…

 

I could turn this “nothing works out” story into a Paint comic at least.  Since Steven and I aren’t talking, I feel weird continuing my Angela’s Friends comic right now. 

Why can’t Steven and I decide to be friends again?  That’s how it worked before when we disagreed.  Maybe I felt like I compromised too much.  Maybe I was too idealistic, though (which is very very very very possible).  Then again, I have to separate us in my mind, which space will help me do.  For awhile I think we were just becoming melded together.  Bad news.  We’re really not the same person.  Which is fine.  I know we’ve enjoyed each other’s differences before.  It could happen again.  I think of my friends in places in my life, like “emotional twin”, “pop culture connection”, “intellectual challenge”, “partner in art”… I guess according to what they do for me.  Steven had seemed displaced for awhile up until our official separation.

When You See the Cusp of Changing Circumstance

We clambered into your car

and I watched you and let you talk about plans

And I smiled, a little crookedly, to humor you,

but behind those teeth were sadness, weariness, blue,

because I know those plans will come to nothing.

Because I know, promises hatch from your mouth and their ghosts break in my lap,

and I smile, but I look down at the print of my skirt, forgiving you now for what you will do.

Should I tell you what I see, or would that speed the perishing?

Eh, you’ll get there eventually, and since I never believed you, I won’t be hurt.