Understanding Yourself

Christine Frezza is known to say that every play is about a character's journey from ignorance to self-awareness, and Shakespeare once mentioned that we are all just players on the stage of life. So, I suppose you could say that we are all going on journeys of ignorance to self-awareness every day, and that each is a new play for God to watch.

This semester I've been on several journeys, most of them at the exact same moment in time. The funny thing? I didn't even notice. It probably works best that way, all things considered.

My major path, though, has been one of coming to accept myself. All my life I've had ichthyosis, and for most of time I let it define who was. I wasn't just Kirstin. I was Kirstin, the girl with ichthyosis and a sharp tongue. But living like that... It is so draining. This semester I, somehow or another, ended up writing a creative nonfiction story about what it's like to live with my disorder. As I was writing it, I noticed that my disorder was a part of who I am, but it was just that: a piece. I don't know when or how, but sometime in the past year I've moved on, and have really let myself live. Even on days when my face looks absolutely horrible, I still go out and smile at people, even when they give me looks that their mothers would not approve of. I think I may have even come to love myself, to love what I see in the mirror. I may not be stunningly beautiful in the eyes of the world, but... to me, I'm starting to be someone worth noticing. It's the most amazing thing, really, to realize that you love and accept yourself. I feel like nothing can really stop me from doing what I want because I've tackled the hardest thing: myself.

I think I am really going to enjoy the new year, and I wish all of you the best.

Poem #2

A poem about what I don't like:

To My Friends

Every little look you gave me
with your plastic little smiles and glazed eyes:
I get it now.

You lied.

I told you not to do it, to not hide
what you thought and felt.
But you didn't bother to listen.

You still did it.

Manicured little dreams,
pretty realities that are so empty--
They're crumbling all around you.

I tried.

Now you wonder why every look
is suspect, scrutinized in expectation;
But you can't say I didn't warn you.

I told you so.

A poem about clothing:

My Battlefield

I can see it, from where I'm sitting on my bed:
A single lifeless mass of knitted cloth and soil that seems
determined to crawl onto my side of the room.

I snarl at it, thinking to banish it with a thought,
But it remains, gloating in its filth as it toes the boundary.

Stupid sock.

Poem #1

Unwritten

The words spill down the page
Stark and curled
On the lined surface of the paper
Meaning. Meaningless.
Words.



Let Me Fall

Words imposed on music
A tuned thought
Heart crescendos with each beat
Breath catches
The soul falls into the rhythm and
Perfection is found

Sickness and Excitement

Well, life has been... interesting. Elephant Man has completely stolen my life, and I have been feeling like a trainwreck lately. I've had two states in the past week: sleeping and wishing I was sleeping. Beth has decided to put me on vitamins to see if it helps, and if not I am forcibly being carted to the doctor.

Interestingly enough, in the total of an hour when I had time and coherency in the past week, Kinsey attacked my hair. Yeah...

A Thousand Words

Currently at SUU the Braithwaite Gallery is a display of photographs from National Geographic, and it includes some absolutely breathtaking works. My creative writing professor, as part of our class, took us down to the gallery and told us to come up with a story to tell where one of the photographs was the climax of a story.

The story I would write would be based on the photograph that I considered to be the most striking: that of the Afghani girl.

I can see this photograph being the climax of a story about a girl who has lost everything and has been sold into slavery. She would struggle through the psychological difficulties of being without her family and friends, and she would also have to face the impending problem of becoming a piece of property. The moment of climax, which this picture would capture, would be when she is being sold and suddenly a bid of an unusually high nature is placed on her. She turns her head, and it is her brother who has just placed the bid.

It May Be the Death of a Salesman

Well, I managed to cut Death of a Salesman down to six minutes and thirty seconds. Peter Sham was impressed when he overheard the mention of that, and I bet he is wondering what all I left in. My group was really excited when they got the script, but I forgot something... We have a group of six instead of the five I originally thought.

Luckily, Professor Sham was perfectly willing to let me be director since I had done the cutting of the script myself. So the parts were given out to the other members of the group. Everything seemed to be fine right up until this morning's practice. I was ready to smack Scott. I really was.

You see, in Salesman there is one character the play can't function without: Willy. Scott's playing the Willy that is known as "sane Willy" (even though he is the one driven crazy by the other and commits suicide... yes, it's irony on my part). The problem? He is not memorized and has not yet displayed a willingness to act. No matter what we did, no matter what was asked of him, he did the same things over and over again. If he is not ready by Saturday night I get the fun job of telling him he is no longer in the production.

But wait! That would leave us without a Willy, right? Wrong. The group decided I should memorize Willy just in case. So much for no stress this weekend. I may just rip my hair out.

Death of a Salesman... In Seven Minutes

Yes, you read that right. No, I am not crazy. It just happens that for my dear Acting I class I get to do yet another abridged version of a play, and this time it's Death of a Salesman. Oh joy. I was tossed into a new group composed of myself and five others, and between now and next Monday we have to put together an entire seven-to-ten minute version of the play.

Now, I am not entirely afraid of this assignment because we have already done something similar with Hamlet, which I think is a harder show to cut. It also happens that my group for the Hamlet project got extreme props from the professor, and we all earned A's on the assignment.

My fear? Well, two of the people in my group did rather badly with the last assignment, and in a play if one person slacks off the entire production suffers. It's an unfortunate fact of the theatre. However, I have decided to go into this project thinking like a director. I actually had an idea about how to stage it, since we have six people and probably about five roles. I thought it would be interesting to have two people play Willy. I figured one person could do "sane Willy" and another could do the one that is trapped in the past. What that'd do is give everyone a role and create an interesting transition as "trapped Willy" takes over the play. Besides, we have very little to work with on staging, and that would help it out a bit.

I don't know what my group thinks yet, but it was a thought I'd had and figured I should write it down. Either way, at least I know my creative juices still exist.