it never occurs to you how much you need something until it's broken.
of course.

which is why here i am eating cold spaghetti (a usually wonderful kind of food that has been butchered by american popularization in general). no, i'm not xenophobic, there are some things about american culture i truly don't understand. perhaps specifically american middle class culture. but that's another topic for another day.

also this happened a few days in the summer when i was out of power because my roommate didn't pay the electricity bill for 9 months and i realized just how essential lights were. i mean, really. also, we have been living without heat in our apartment for a few weeks now because we want to save money, and it is actually kind of killing me. our microwave is broken, in case you haven't figured it out, and i haven't had time to cook for two weeks and i kind of hate myself for it.

i've received certain messages of alarm from people RE: my last blog post. it's so weird that you friends still check this place considering exactly how sporadic my posts are. i'm trying to make the promise to continue again, but we know how that always goes.

no, i don't dislike theater. and i don't always dislike that it's my life now, basically. but sometimes i really wonder if i'm going down the right path, and sometimes i don't think so. i'm drawn to costumes because i don't have to be in the rehearsal room and deal with actors, but i like thinking about characters and clothing them and people and the choices they are making when they wear a certain shoe or tie. i'm pretty open, as a designer, to talking to the actors about their feelings when they try on a costume. i like to get any hint of 'yes, this makes me feel powerful' or 'this makes me feel _ like my character' so that i feel i've actually contributed to their performances.

there is a whole ritual that i've created when i start costuming a show. everything must go in a certain order, of course, because i like to know exactly what i'm doing at a certain time ... but more than that there's the ritual that happens when i'm starting to build a piece of clothing. i think i've built more than any other student costumer at UT has attempted in the past two years, simply because it's so much easier to pull from stock. but it's in my personality to want things to be exactly a certain way and the only way i can get that is if i create it myself. even then it doesn't always turn out how i've planned.

i lay out the fabric, i put pushpins on all four corners and sometimes in between, i pin the pattern pieces to it, i make sure everything is smooth. i look at it over and over again, checking for mistakes. i take a deep breath - and then i cut.

+ posted by M @ 1:12 AM