This is ridiculous, what am I doing here? I'm in the wrong story!

I went to church this morning, and now I don't have anything scheduled until my design meeting at 9pm.

WHAAAAAAAAAT?!

Plenty to do, of course. But since I've been in tech for the past three weeks, usually for multiple shows in the same week, this is basically unheard of. I've loved working on these other projects, but it's really nice that they're all ending and I get to pour so much more energy into my own show. I've reached a really fun point in the process, too. A huge part of "the first directing piece" is getting the beginning feelings of how you work as a director through the entirety of a process (preproduction, casting, rehearsals, design work, tech, performance). I consistently feel like the least creative person in the room, and that's NOT me being self-deprecating. I tend to have huge ideas and sweeping Philosophies About Life and How To Live, which I bring to my collaborators to make them excited. And I have an overarching idea of how to say what I want to say. I'll throw some of impulses at them. Then, if I've gathered the right people and inspired them enough, hopefully they'll start impulsing back at me, and I spend a good amount of time gathering their impulses because beyond these overall ideas, which are usually very abstract, I have very little idea of specifics. Then I'll start to take their impulses and my impulses and knit them together, edit them, specify them. This the phase I've just started. I thiiiink this phase is my strength, both from how it's going so far and my own personality. We'll see how it works in performance. I'm having a lot of fun. It's all choice making. Whee!

It's funny and oddly appropriate that my process as a designer (so far) is enormously detail-oriented, whereas it's hard for me to get to that point as a director. I think it's because my job as a designer is ultimately very specific. Even though I must always keep an eye on the bigger picture, I'm the one responsible for one specific element within the big picture. As a sound designer, I go into tech knowing exactly how everything is going to be hooked up and able to problem solve that with barely any extra preparation on my part, because that's my job ("Okay, I need two powerstrips, each on extension cords to reach the sound cart on one side of the booth, and my violin amp and pedal on the other. We'll daisy-chain the grid speakers and run them into the right main, and we'll put the floor speaker under the booth as the left main. We'll run a quarter inch speaker cable from the floor speaker, connected to a quarter inch to Speakon adapter using a female quarter inch coupler. The wireless transmitter will be plugged into the sound cart and run to channel one with a quarter inch cable. The mic will be in a holster underneath the windowsill. I'll need 4 9V batteries.") In tech as a director? I'm USELESS with details. How does that prop get offstage again? I don't know, it magically disappears? If someone asks me a question like that, I'll have to just problem solve it again ("Where does it start? Who has it? Where does it need to go?" and then figure out how it has to happen). And the next day of tech, I'll have no idea the answer I gave the day before.

I think what happens is I become so fascinated so easily that when I'm in charge of the big picture, it's far too much. One of the most accurate descriptions of me I've ever heard was a comment from my design teacher towards the end of my first year. After telling him I was obsessed with my final design project, he said, "Well, that's not hard. I could have you do this," and he stuck a pushpin into a bulletin board, "and you'd be obsessed with it for a week." What makes this extraordinarily dead on is that, immediately after he said that, my mind's eye zoomed in on a slow-motion, extremely magnified view of what it must be like for a pushpin to stick into a bulletin board. It must wreak absolute destruction! Havoc! Chaos! The boulders of cork that once seemed so solid tumbling away by a fierce sharp metal spear! The landscape of that section of bulletin board would never be the same!

...yup. That's actually where my mind went.

I work much better under restriction. Deadlines. I use religion to strictly order my life because I need it. There's nothing more paralyzing than limitless possibility, at least for me. I think that's why I specifically have a lot of trouble asking questions in class particularly when it's an open question session. It's not that I'm not curious... it's (usually) that I'm so curious the state of being curious overwhelms me until my mind is blank and I don't have a question. As I'm preparing for this design meeting, I have a TON of questions, which is a really good sign that shows we're getting into specifics.

So excited for this design meeting. So excited for my final class presentation on the piece because I think I'll actually have my collaborative team with me. So excited for this show.

So excited also to do more work on this show, do work for Dead Sea Scrolls, shower, do laundry, and take a break to experience the entirety of TSO's new CD with the lyric booklet in these hours I have unscheduled before the design meeting tonight. Hurrah!