i live in confusing times. too many choices, too little choices. what to do?

i'm trying hard and i'm trying desperately to be. i'm eighteen. i'm me, a person, not an intern or the girl behind the cash register or someone who sits across you on the train. i am my own person. we are all people. i think we spend our whole lives trying to be a person and trying to show everyone else that we are one. our formulative years are spent trying to grow into our bodies and learn how to use our hands and senses. trying to get used to this bizarre world outside our mothers' bodies and the food it offers us, the cloth we drape over our bodies and the way of life where we live. cars, technology, sounds, tastes - all one big adaptation. and then after that we spend the rest of our life trying to feel like a person, like a completion of something we can't explain. and it never ends, not even when you're eighty and characteristically wrinkled because there will always be people who will never see you as a person.

i do it sometimes and i hate that i do. i look at people but i don't really see them. it's so sad how we know nothing about so many people - and obviously it's impossible to know the whole world intimately, but i feel it's just too lonely. not knowing them as the people that they are and knowing them only as the waitress or the shopgirl or just for the things they did.

i'm not even sure what i want to do anymore. there's art. there's food. there's poetry. there's theatre. there's film. believe it or not i seem to want to do all of it. gayle once told me, 'mel you have so many options. you write, you cook, you draw and you like film and drama.' it's natural for everything to overlap i guess, life is art. but to combine it all? sometimes i think i'm a purist at heart. not very experimental when it comes to theatre. i talked to someone about my tastes in books and plays and she concluded that i was a very 'classical' person - just words, words, words. i mean there are so many ways of writing nowadays, stream-of-consciousness and all those modernistic styles but when it comes down to it i'm just more than satisfied with a Graham Greene. his writing is beautiful without being delicate, alive without being contrived. which explains why i really haven't read much of murakami or zadie smith or jonathan safran foer and all that. which i really should some time but i'm too busy getting through the 20th and 19th century lit i like best. i think shakespeare is king of all, and i think that says a great deal about my taste when it comes to plays. i do like pinter and beckett though. basically the 20th century intrigues me endlessly - the whole obsession with existentialism, theatre of the absurd and all these theories. which is why i might just end up doing comparative literature. these days what is it that's shaking us and showing up in writing? gay politics ... and then, more politics? or exquisitely beautiful books that are a bit too dainty and surreal. what happened to the raw reality of love, existence, life?

i think of Language and i feel like that's enough. just people talking to each other, meditating on love, life, relationships and the way people are. i really want to get back to art and catch up on all the lost time. i want to spend a year doing my coursework, gathering photos, thinking about my piece, sketching and resketching - piecing it all together and then exhibiting. i want to do all that.

the incredible thing about art and poetry is when it comes down to it you could make do with a paper and a pen and it's all you. it's so easy to start writing or drawing - millions of dollars don't have to be spent.

i missed out on the theatreworks 24hr playwriting competition this year and am quite upset about it since i promised myself i would take part this year since i had no other worries. i had no idea the deadline was past. an old classmate asked if i wanted to volunteer ... i was frustrated - i refuse to help out and watch people write when i should be writing.

sometimes i think life is one big 'i'll try'.

+ posted by M @ 5:54 PM