"no illusions, circumstance or tradgedies / this is just what i need." -michael kovacs
cast parties are such a fantastically strange breed of event.
the show yesterday went bumpily, a lot of dropped lines and missed cues and whatnot, but i think everyone was really impressive about covering for each other and being there when they were needed.
in general, i've very much enjoyed being a part of the drama program here. in part because drama kids are drama kids, and i can't think of any better way to find a good-sized handful of kindred spirits in one place than to walk into the green room before a performance. and also because these people are just plain talented. from my little black box of curtains and stairways on stage left, i can't see anything but the occasional entrance and exit, and my knowledge of the play is almost entirely auditory.
but still, almost every night, i discover a new favorite part, some new layer to the play, some new complexity that has been revealed by the actors. on the basis of vocal inflection alone, there are times when i am genuinely moved by what's happening on stage.
and to see that talent supported by a real stage, with real curtains and complicated lighting and an audience that numbers in a high plurality of dozens...
sigh
it just warms a little dork's heart.
"i am not a pretty girl" -ani
just because dichotomy is such a cool word.
i've always had this weird sense of duality when it comes to the idea of femininity. i wrote my sociology midterm about this, beginning with, "The development of the social self is beset on all sides by the insuppressible clamoring of the world."
from birth, we are inundated with the expectations of society, by the ideas that other people have of who and what you are, and who and what you can or should be. through the media, parents, teachers, the world at large, we learn what it means to be a person - male versus female, black versus white versus asian versus mexican versus all the subtleties of ethnic culture, gay versus straight versus bi versus all the subtleties of sexuality.
as a child, the label was "tomboy." as i've grown up, it tends more towards "intimidating," "confusing," and "strange."
which is okay.
at a very young age, i began what was to become a long-running tradition of surrounding myself with male friends. i rode bikes with them, climbed trees with them, made mud pies with them. i did all the things that little boys do, to paraphrase dar. i just did them all in pink frilly dresses.
in kindergarten, my two favorite things in the world were pink frilly dresses, and dirt.
that's still a fairly accurate synopsis of my personality - just the pink frilly dresses have evolved into leather pants, dangly earrings and high heels, and the dirt has come to include kickboxing, swearing and charcoal.
i can roll out of bed, into clothes and out the door in five minutes, and i can spend six hours getting ready. i've questioned my sexuality, been mistaken for a boy, been told i was the "perfect woman." each on several occasions. i go through stages where i don't cry, ever, at all, followed by stages of intense emotional vulnerability. for all of my life, i've felt like i'm dancing on the line between what society defines as masculine and feminine, somewhere between what i'm told i should be, what i think i should be, and what i am. i've never wanted to be the flutter-eyed simpering soap-opera maiden. there was always this feeling that what the media declared "woman" was less than the whole truth - a feeling that i think was rooted deeply in the role my mother played as a strong and independent person. it never seemed to me that she had to sacrifice any of what she was to her marriage or my dad.
it took a long, long time before existing outside the bounds of traditional femininity was recieved as anything approaching good.
though i suppose nobody really enjoys middle school anyway.
:: 01:26
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...
:: february 6, 2002 ::
"stop me, won't you, if you've heard this one before?" -ani
so there's this dichotomy of my personality, which i suppose is a fairly common thing to have. its not like a clean break or anything, there's certainly only one of me, mumblings to myself aside.
but there are definitiely at least two distinct sides to the way i see myself, the way i interact with myself - the "inside" me, and the "outside" me. i mean that in a few ways - there's the me that exists inside myself and the me that gets presented to the world. similarly, there's the me that i present to the world when the "world" consists of my room and the people i know - inside - and the me that is presented to the world outside. i have a weird internal elevator ritual, and by the time i'm out the door and in the sunlight, i've consciously dropped every insecurity about my appearance or capabilities.
ironically, there's an easy way to label this change. inside, i'm caitlin; outside, i'm kat.
that wasn't a purposeful distinction that i ever cultivated, but it works fairly accurately. i introduce myself as kat, and the people who've known me the longest nearly all call me caitlin.
it's not as though one of those is the "true" me and the other is some contrivance. i'm just as much one as the other, each is an equally valid part of my personality and myself. and it's not as though there's really any change... it's just which part of my personality i choose to reveal, how much of myself i put into any particular situation. and in the elevator on the way out, i'm choosing to be a person who has self-confidence and a short attention span and a large vocabulary. it doesn't mean that i'm not that person, or that i lose any other part of who i am in the process. ::shrug::
i don't think there are very many people who can honestly say that they behave the same in every situation - different situations demand that we assume different social roles, and i know that i act differently at home with my parents than i do at the coffeeshop with my friends, and for that matter, differently depending on which friends i'm with. i think that's a natural and healthy psychological response to the fact that different relationships involve different interactions.
i think this is just an umbrella bracketing, the first distinction in the branching of what becomes an infinite number of interactions with an infinite number of people and situations.
interesting, though. :: 14:07
(speak)
so today i went and played with the first graders... i totally adore those kids. my desire to be a parent has sixteenth-toopled over the past three weeks. they're totally insane but they adore me right back, and a big handful of them came up and gave me hugs today, and one little girl told me she loved me... awwww... makes me feel bad for teaching them ruthless capitalism.
it was interesting. in university last week, the teacher was asking us about our classes. she asked us if our kids were being 'good.' there were a number of responses, then she posed the question of whether 'good' means 'obedient.' personally, i think that's a really good question. we discussed it breifly, in the usual manner of discussions in that class - she says something, the class responds with deafening silence, she repeats herself, one person volunteers a timid answer, deafening silence, and we move on. the irony, of course, is that she's very much a methodical teacher and has a hard time when we don't give her the exact answer she's looking for.
so the question - does 'good' mean 'obedient'? i know that my class is generally quiet and attentive and that i consider those 'good' qualities, and that i am guiding them towards an answer that I want, and when they give that answer, i say 'good.' but i believe very strongly in the idea that a better education comes through questioning and pushing, rather than accepting and obeying.
am i a hypocrite?
i like to think that if i were a real teacher with a greater familiarity and affinity for the subject matter, that i would be able to allow a number of varied responses to any particular question, or at the least, a number of thought processes to reach a particular answer.
my university professor teaches us very much the way i teach the first graders - there is a set of objectives to be met, a set of concepts that are supposed to be absorbed and understood...and any straying from the most direct path to those goals is dismissed.
that is absolutely my least favorite class.
am i a hypocrite?
sigh...
oh yeah, and i've got a link to susie's page now (hey nika, didja know susie has a page?) :: 15:55
(speak)
...
:: february 4, 2002 ::
that was one hell of a fucking fieldgoal. yeah football.
:: 00:46
(speak)
"if i was beautiful like you/i would never be at fault/i'd walk in the rain between the raindrops/bringing traffic to a halt" - joydrop
played guitar for the first time in a long, long time last night. remembered a few songs i'd written, threw some music out for a few more that had been floating around in the realm of silent lyrics, and wore my fingers down to a pulp. i haven't written anything new in a while, so far as songs go. i've been very much in poetry mode, coming up with long streams of mixedword rambles and stacatto rhythms, nothing with rhymes or logic, and, more importantly, nothing that has accompaniment in my head when i recite it to myself.
but poetry is good, and random, wordless guitaring is good.
in theory, this page is going to archive itself every week... and the old posts are going to be in the link "go back" since the old page is under the link "archive" - just for the sake of confusion, you understand. however, it's not yet been long enough for that to happen, so wait a while before trying the link. as of now, it goes nowhere.
carpe diem.
carpe diem. :: 10:59
(speak)
