March 29, 2022

I had acting class last night. My scene partner and I did our showing last week, so I just sat and watched others perform yesterday. The professor is tough and doesn't pull punches, but he's also fair and insightful. I like listening to his feedback because to me he seems right on. Granted, I don't know anything about acting really. He just seems to be right about what's important in story telling. What's important in engaging an audience. What's necessary to make things seem real and feel like they matter. 

We watched a scene from Agnes of God between a psychiatrist and the titular Agnes. The woman who played the psychiatrist hadn't memorized the lines very well and English wasn't her first language. But more than that, she was playing psychiatrist like indifferent psychiatrist. When our professor talked to her about it, she said she found the character boring more or less. Our prof talked about how if the actor is not interested in the character, the scene, her scene partner, the audience feels that and isn't going to be interested either. He encouraged her to be curious about the character and to make a choice that was interesting to her. 

I'm applying this thinking to my recent -- and now several-months-long -- malaise about writing (trying to write) in the film industry. I have not felt excited about it. It seems impossible and frivolous. How can one build one's life on it, either practically or philosophically? I've had a hopper of screenplay ideas for a several years. This morning I was thinking that maybe part of my problem is that those ideas don't stir me anymore. Maybe what I need is not to bonk out of writing altogether but to make a stronger choice within my writing. Okay, so these screenplay ideas don't seem to matter? Make a stronger choice. Feel around for a story idea that does seem to matter. Something that will get me off my psychological butt. There's interesting, stirring stuff out there. I just need to do the work to find it. 

(Maybe.)  

March 24, 2022

Thinking a bit about the benefit of negative feelings -- anxiety, grumpiness, pessimism, unhappiness. Cultish (which I'll BLog about below) partially prompted these thoughts. Montell talks about how grumpy people are less likely to join a cult because they're more likely to call bullshit. I think maybe we make decisions based not on the choices at hand but how we're feeling at that moment. This might just go down to my impulsiveness, but the choice of marriage felt impossible to me, back when I was 22 and my boyfriend (now husband, spoiler) wanted to get married. I told him no way, I wasn't ready to think about it. But then we were out one night at a happy hour, and I had a few beers and some garlic fries and, feeling good, figured Eh, why not? So I got married. In Chicago, my husband and I were having brunch and bottomless mimosas. I knew I wanted to move to LA, but I figured we'd give it one more year in Chicago. But we were feeling good that morning, and we both thought Eh, why not? Basically, maybe it's a bad idea to drink any alcohol or allow yourself to relax and feel good if you've got a big decision on deck. 

Okay, BLog time. I'm going to post this on Goodreads! We'll see how that goes. 

Montell, Amanda – CULTISH

Published: 2021

Read: 3/2022

Cultish analyzed the language and special vocabularies that Cults (like Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate) and cults (Soul Cycle, MLAs, CrossFit) use to create in-group/out-group dynamics, cultivate belonging, and curtail skepticism or critique. Actually, it’s part analyses and part authorial anecdote. Montell’s father grew up in the Synanon cult in Santa Monica. She also talks about her online experience with multi-level marketing schemes and her exposure to cult-y exercise trends ever present in her home city of Los Angeles. (She mentions that she lives in LA a lot.) She talks about how groups can use platitudes – termed “thought-ending clichés” – as a way to shut down critical thought. I have a friend who will often reach for the phrase “It is what it is” as a kind of thought-ending cliché. It soothes his anxiety a little bit, but it also shuts down his problem-solving drive. Anxieties and doubts are unpleasant to feel, but they can help drive us to necessary action – like, for example, leaving a cult. Montell applies the phrase “thought-ending cliché” so often, however, that it itself started to feel like a thought-ending cliché. I enjoyed learning about some of the intricacies of these popular cult-like work out communities. It’s pretty incredible to me the lengths to which people will go to lose weight. Although, of course the book points out how belonging to a community is a huge draw as well. She doesn’t want the reader to be suspicious of all groups, and she acknowledges the benefits of belonging to a community, even maybe communities that can be harmful in some ways. Her distinction between Cult and cult is that cults allow you to step away from ritual time. You get on your Soul Cycle bike for an hour, and you push and scream and cry or whatever it is. You buy that fancy matching exercise get up. But then you go home. You unclip and get back to your life. And if you bonk out of Soul Cycle, nobody’s going to try to ruin your life over it. 

This book left me with some good things to think about. I’ll be noticing the language groups use a bit more acutely, I think. Looking out for those obscure acronyms or neologism. For that expectation to talk in a certain way or to refer back to simple mantras. I also was surprised to learn about the kind of people Cults attract. I figured it would be mainly really depressed and vulnerable people, but the book argues that it tends to be optimists, activists, idealists. People with open minds who want more for themselves or for the world, who are willing to take a risk on something. (People like me… yikes!) On the other hand, the writing style was uneven. Montell writes in a internet-y style for most of it and now and then throws in a bookish word to let us know she’s smart. Her anecdotes weren’t very deep or all that interesting – I would have liked to have seen the memoir-ish angle developed better or cut entirely. Overall, it was a book! Worth a read. 

Rating: ★★★

March 23, 2022

My husband and I bought airline tickets to London last night. We're leaving in late July, with any luck. This is the trip we were planning on taking for our tenth anniversary in 2020. Now it'll be in celebration of our twelfth anniversary unless the world closes again or one of us gets sick with COVID at an inopportune time. I'm excited, though. we're going to fly into London and have seven hours to go from Heathrow to Gatwick airports. (I hope we can stop and grab a pint somewhere.) Then we're flying into Oslo, late, and hopefully catching the last train up to Hamar. Getting in a bit after midnight. We'll stay with our friend from college for a few days and then take the train across Norway to Bergen, on the west coast. We'll stay two nights in Bergen, giving us one day to hike around and eat cinnamon buns. Then we'll fly out in the morning to Edinburgh, rent a car, and drive to Glasgow for the rest of the day/night. We'll spend the next two days driving around the Scottish countryside, checking out whiskey distilleries hopefully, and then on the third day we'll drive back to Edinburgh and drop off the car. We're staying for four nights in a dorm room at Edinburgh University so that we can experience the Fringe Festival. When we're done there, we're going to London -- or wherever Arsenal is playing that weekend -- and then we'll fly from London back to LA. 

I was supposed to work on my script today but got distracted with the trip planning instead. Both have to get done, I guess. It's amazing how much better just planning this trip has made me feel. I'm going to get out! In college at Whitworth my freshman year, I had an unfortunate and consuming crush on a junior in my dorm. It went on for a year and a half, and I hated it but couldn't get, like, my body to stop walking me towards him. I went to Europe for the month of January my sophomore year. I rode public transportation for the first time, I exchanged currencies, I went to those museums, I got through my first pint of beer, and I learned about Western Philosophy (because that was the class). I got back and never needed to hang out with that guy again. I guess I'm sort of hoping that will happen this time. I'll go get some perspective, figure Hey! the world is big and cool, then be in a better place to go about conducting my business. 

Something else -- I think I'm going to start posting my BookLogs (BLogs for those in the know) on Goodreads. Maybe that will be a better social media platform for me, and I write the posts anyways. I'd polish them up a bit before posting to Goodreads. Take out spoilers and stuff. But otherwise they're good to go. 

I was supposed to BLog about Cultish today, but I was really distracted. Tomorrow!