(no subject)

Rather depressed in a hideous unfocused sort of way, but it's something about not feeling anything like a creative genius, hell, just not feeling creative -- and of all the ungodly boring things to whine about....

I'm still really sick. Sick enough that I am not en route to a wedding that I should be. I am wracked with guilt about it, but I've contaminated enough people in New York and I'm trying not to wind up with walking pneumonia.

I am supposed to go to an audition that I _have_ to reschedule as I can't make sounds -- and I feel pretty tortured about that too.

It seems one of the unfortunate side effects of seeing lots of shows and movies and really really caring about art, in the way that I cared (and still do care) about books as a child, is that it makes me feel both inadequate and desperately hungry, terrified of not succeeding and bitter about wasting a lot of time and idealism on (non-artistic and ultimately non-meaningful) endeavors that never produced anything.

I'm wondering if I'm a fool. I'm wondering if my love of loss (that whole mono no aware thing), gets in my way artistically, not because I'm all into it as a thematic element, but because it can lull me into thinking I don't have to jump over certain hurdles, because it's all just so goddamn pretty even if I don't succeed. Dear Rach, don't be Ricky Fitts.

I always tell people -- if you want $5 Million, set your sights on $50 Million -- so even if you only get 10% of what you want, you still succeed. But there are days, and by God, this is one of them, that I look at my role models, and I don't even mean like the current roster of people I really bloody admire and take inspiration in, but the figures that inspired my childhood and really allowed me my own private mental life in an environment where I lacked both privacy and companionship -- and I wonder if it's just too much, if it's always going to hurt because nothing ever really could be enough.

It is without a doubt a really good sign for my sanity that I worry about being like the figures I've always admired, but it also reassures me in an odd way, that I go after such scale in these things -- that I know my heart will be a bit broken either way. Maybe I need to discover that perhaps, because I don't know the meaning of success, not really, not being so hungry, that I don't know the meaning of failure either. Maybe that's what makes it okay to just keep going.

And on my writing -- I have _got_ to get to a place, where I'm willing to wrestle it a little more -- I've had a lot of luck will executing fully formed ideas well, but I've got to face the reality that my best ideas and their execution are only going to come about through all out war with them.

I was all excited to sit home tonight and watch movies and now I'm realizing I can't -- I'm in that mood again where everything is going to make me miserable and restless after fifteen minutes.

It occurs to me that I wish nothing more than to speak things into being -- afterall, so much of my success in life, and so much of what ticks people off about me is that I state every odd little opinion or theory as a fact, because a) it's more useful to my goals and b) I think it's up to other people to decide whether or not I'm full of shit. And that in order to do that, to speak things into being, I really need to find a way to make my disperate interests, in terms of both function and form, coallesce.

[Insert another random and uncontrollably boring paragraph of self-doubt here].

But I did drop off my headshots yesterday to a most peculiar and specific bit of mental meandering.

valentino

Lovely piece in the NYTimes on a new book about Valentino -- http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/books/review/11GEWENT.html who of course interests me as anyone who can be said to have been self-invented tends to, although it occurs that perhaps that is what we say about anyone who succeeds in a way that forces others to bend their expectations -- whether that was the intent or not.

Valentino was someone my parents told me about as a child, in response to my fascination with the song Puttin' on the Ritz (I took tap when I was little, okay? And then there was that hideous 80s hit by Taco). I remember they told me that women loved him, that he was Italian, that his eyes were dangerous and that he had those strange dogs.