Technically, this is a On The Road post as I am currently eating lunch at school… for the last time ever!
I can already tell how bad I will miss this place. It’s been my second home for almost a year. It’s been the focus of my life the whole time. I’ve loved my time here (mostly) and when I go home today, I will never see it again, at least as a student.
I am definitely a way, way, way better writer for having been through this program. Every workshopping of my stuff taught me so much, so fast. It was way better than simply being told things because it all related directly to my own work and therefore I could immediately contextualize the information and thus better integrate it into my own method.
I wasn’t the best at being a student. Oh well. I am still wickedly talented and crazy smart and goofily charming, and fully committed to spreading my works to every nook and cranny of the Internet until, don’t look now, but it’s soaking in it.
I originally wrote that as “spreading my seed”, but that means something else.
Still, the forecast for the next week or so is for intermittent showers accompanying a moderate to severe nostalgia system, with a tsunami warning as waves of sentimentally, some as tall as a four story building, are predicted for Friday and possibly straight on through the weekend.
I am still scared of the upcoming existential void. Come Saturday, I will be released on my own recognizance, and I always get nervous when I have to be my own keeper, because historically, I have not been very good at it.
But I am trying hard not to worry about the details. The most important thing is to free my mind and find my motivation and (and this is the most important part), feed it.
The more times I follow an impulse to completion, the more I will be rewarded for it with a sense of accomplishment, and that will make my sad little id grow into a healthy, hearty, robust id that easily counterbalances my overdeveloped ego and punitive superego.
And maybe then, I will be a whole human being, and not the half-formed creature I am and have been for such a long, long time.
When I was a kid, I was told I was sure to grow up big and strong.
Well I got it half right.
Time for me to go to Last Class, whatever the hell that is going to be. Knowing how things are run around here, my guess is that it will be half-assed, disappointing, and insulting.
But I could be wrong
I am sort of worried that grad will be deeply underwhelming. I mean, I’m not looking to throw my cap in the air, but a little pomp and circumstances would go a long way toward making me feel like the staff values us.
That says a lot more about me than them. For them, this is one graduation ceremony of the six they will do in a year.
But for us…. it’s the only one we will ever get.
Gotta scoot. More when I get home.
Here’s more, but I am not home. And I am proud of that.
Here’s the thing. I have finished my last class. The head of the writing department showed us a great pilot called The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and I will not attempt to summarize the plot because it would not do the show justice.
What the show has is quality. Everything is done so well that the whole thing goes does effortlessly and the era (early 1950’s) is expressed with such exuberant excellence that it feels realer than real. I have never seen era expressed this well, ever. From the fashions to the speech style to the buses going by in the background., everything is era-perfect to the point that is feels like you are watching a documentary from that era.
And the script is full of that rapid-fire verbal fencing Bogey and Bacall dialogue that I love so very, very much. And the humor is genuinely witty. Not surprising, considering that the show comes from the creator of Gilmore Girls.
That show had a lot of faults, but a lack of witty dialogue was never one of them.
In the morning, we did a table read of one of my scripts (Episode 2 of Sam), and I was very pleased by all the laughs my stuff got. Everyone loved the script and that was just the shot in the arm I needed to bolster my confidence.
I write super funny shit. Someone will see the value in that.
Right now, I am hanging around until the screening my classmates and I are putting on tonight. We are going to watch all the student movies we made, and it should be a hoot. We’re doing it in the Main Theater and it is a lot like a tiny movie theater. Lots of my classmates are bringing people, so it should be a full house.
The part where my pride comes in is that I was not, initially, going to hang around. I was going to go home like usual and not attend the screening at all, and presumably get super depressed when I knew that my classmates were together and having fun while I was home in Richmond being miserable.
But I stopped myself. Not all at once, but fairly quickly. I realized that going home would be the exact kind of thing that leads to my social isolation, and gives people the impression that I don’t like them.
In reality, the problem is that I don’t feel like I deserve to be with them. I avoid social engagement because it brings on the social anxiety and makes me feel conspicuously vulnerable and exposed. A very loud voice in my head screams that nobody wants me there, everybody hates me, everyone wishes I would leave, and if I don’t leave, it will bring on the social nightmare of rejection, ostracization, and expulsion.
And I know that, behind that enormous wall of fear that my anxiety disorder creates, are people who enjoy my company and want me around.
And yet, just typing that previous paragraph took a large act of will. I had to overcome a lot of deep resistance to the entire notion that anybody, anywhere actually wants me around ever just to make my fingers type the words.
And right now, even though I typed those words five minutes ago, I still feel shaky and out of sorts from the experience. Part of me wants to delete the words out of a pseudo-superstitious feeling that daring to claim such an outrageous thing as truth will bring doom and annihilation down upon my head.
It’s a powerful thing, and fighting it takes a hell of a lot of mental horsepower. But there is no way I am turning back. I am committed to the fight and I will jump atop this monster with a live grenade clenched in my teeth before I give up.
It’s so hard to believe the truth sometimes. It seems so unreal.
But I will triumph.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.