If you saw a “no homework tonight” post for today, rest assured, it was merely an illusion!
I had planned to get into doing that fourth draft of my pilot for my instructor Thiemme tonight. But when I found the notes I made last class, they didn’t make any sense to me.
I was having a bad note-taking day and the notes were coming too fast and I lacked the assertiveness to tell people to slow the heck down.
And these are the notes I am supposed to integrate into the new draft. So I am kind of inside the brined gherkin right now.
Translation ; I’m in a pickle. But I am sure you already knew that.
The other bit of homework that I need to git done is that I have to generate notes for tomorrow’s TV Pilot 3 class. That will probably take what remains of the evening after I am done blogging. And me with a brand new video game to play.
Oh well. It will have to wait. Maybe I will play it a little before breakfast tomorrow.
If not… oh well. It can wait.
After all, it’s just some goddamned video game.
It’s hard to wrap my brain around the entire concept of school ending soon. I am on week 5 of 8 in the term. That means I am over halfway through Term 6 out of 6. I am basically on Term 5.5 right now.
VFS is what I have been doing for almost a year of my life. Not having that as the focus to my life is going to be weird. From experience, I have learned that time off only feels like time off for around four days.
After that, it’s either action or ennui. I have chosen ennui for a long time, and quite frankly, I am sick of it. I need to hammer it through my thick skull that there is a cure for feeling lost and adrift, and it’s called actually getting shit done.
So I see my post-VFS life as being one of great creative output as I harness the spirit of play to all my creative outlets and even to ones I have never tried before, or even heard of.
All true art is play on some level. The fingerpainting child is not thinking of anything other than pleasing themselves in the moment with what they are making.
The play cycle is simple :
- Discovery : the child discovers that a certain manipulation of objects produces an effect which pleases them
- Repetition : the child repeats said manipulation in order to enjoy it again, and to make sure they know what did it. When that pales, you get…
- Variation : the child varies the manipulation in search of other pleasing effects
And when you think about it, that’s all art is. We creators discover things (or are inspired, same thing) and try them out, and if we like the result, we repeat it to make sure we know how to do it and what,. exactly, was the part that produced the effect. Then we engage in the generation of variations we call “creativity”.
I think that’s why there is always a sort of childlike quality to great artists. The truly great art comes from people who retain their childlike curiosity and sense of fun even when they are creating serious art. They are still exploring to find those pleasing effects, mastering that which pleases them, and then looking for other pleasing variations.
Had therapy today. Not a great session, or at least, not that good compared to the truly excellent one I had last week. What I was trying to avoid happened anyway : I ended up caught up in talking about trivial details of my current life instead of doing the kind of deep dive into my traumatic past that produce real, tangible changes in how I feel.
I don’t blame my therapist. I tend to lead the sessions the way a big dog “leads” its owner at the end of the leash. Often my therapist is struggling to keep up.
It’s one of those little things that suck about being a genius. Even highly intelligent and educated people have a hard time keeping up with your thought processes. What I wouldn’t give for a therapist who can operate at my speed all the time.
But then again, that’s always been my problem, hasn’t it? I was smarter than most adults by the time I left elementary school. That is probably why I had no fear of adults at all. I knew I could out-think them. That made it impossible for them to exert true authority with me. I was too goddamned smart for my own good.
Part of me still longs for someone above me. Someone who can challenge me, give me some pushback, show me where the limits are, and teach me the lessons that no amount of IQ or education can teach.
Someone who can be a goddamned role model for me. That doesn’t necessarily mean they have to be smarter than me. But it does mean they have to give me the impression that they have it together better than me and that they know how to live their life in a balanced and socially integrated way.
I’ve not had those people around me much, maybe not ever. Maybe the sort of person I am talking about doesn’t exist. Or they do exist, but I don’t see them because I am so good at seeing through people that sometimes I don’t see them at all.
Wow, that’s kind of deep. I will have to remember that one.
So maybe, due to my gifts and my messed up mind, there is nobody alive… maybe even nobody at all, even in theory… that could be an authority over me.
The problem with that, though, is that the lack of said kind of person have left some rather large empty spaces in me, and as of this moment I don’t know how to bypass those spaces so that they stop blocking my growth.
I dunno. I’m a writer, maybe I should write myself an authority figure. Someone with a strong will, a strong mind, and a strong personality. Someone who is not impressed or awed by my mental acrobatics but is, instead, interested in helping me grow the hell up