Questions! Interest in my Life!

The First Set of Questions

1) You've worked on a group film and on your own. In which situation are you most comfortable - group or solo? Which do you work best in?
I feel like I do best on my own. Mostly because it takes out the large portion of worrying that tends to go towards other people. Working on my own, I only have to worry about myself and that takes a bit of the pressure off, and the pressure that's left tends to push me to be better. I'm also quite the follower in group situations, which I need to work on, because it ends with me feeling like I haven't contributed enough which I'd like to change.

 2) What did you learn that you expected to learn?
That I could get it out. That I still had 'it'. I could write a monologue and it wasn't complete shit. I didn't do a lot of writing over the summer which is really starting to bug me, so knowing that I'm not a one trick pony is a nice little boost to my self-esteem. As I constantly restate, I am quite the spineless jellyfish when it comes to my own work, because of constant self-doubt. Hopefully this will give me enough of a push to stop whining all of the goddamn time.

3) What did you learn that you didn't expect to learn?
I'm getting back into slam poetry. I was already into listening to it, but after this I'm really interested in the performing aspect of it. Acting still kind of scares me, but poetry is in a completely different section of my brain. And I'm really curious as to why that is, why I have such different relationships with things that are quite similar in nature. So I guess what I learned is a new, different facet of a love I already had that my brain doesn't connect to what I was actually doing.

4) What didn't you learn that you expected to learn?
Whether I was good or not? I thought trying out this acting spiel would give me an opinion on whether I was good or not at it, but I just don't know. I still don't know. I think a better way to explain it is that I don't know if I like it. If I'm good at something, it tends to give me this push to continue with it to stroke my own ego. But not knowing if I'm good or not is just leaving me in this wierd space. I really don't like talking about how superficial I can be.

 5) Praise your amazing achievement and explain your brilliant plan for pulling it off.If you know me, you know I can turn into quite the nervous wreck in under a minute. But I stayed up there! I put on a brave face! I didn't pass out! Big steps for me, guys. Huge.
But in all seriousness, I'm really proud of myself for not giving up. For not buckling under my own sets of standards and pressure. Also, I really liked the script. It got through a few of the issues I've been hiding from. I definitely haven't cleaned out my closet, not by a long shot, but letting myself run with personal ideas and not thinking "No, I can't let anyone see this, it's too personal, too much of me... etc." was really releasing. Not as much negative energy in the creative process. All of the negativity went into the actual script and the astoundingly winding blog posts.

The Second Set of Questions

1) How much time did you spend working?Working or worrying? I got the writing done considerable quickly, around four hours. All of Monday and a bit of Tuesday. At the same time, I feel like it should have been quicker. For the length of it, it really shouldn't have taken me that long. I put quite a lot of thought into each line which takes up time, but ends up having a lot of meaning to me which people either relate to or don't.

2) How much time did you spend thinking about the work - sort of sitting there and staring at it, or listening to it over and over again, etc.?
I'm embarrassed to say that I spent way too much time mulling it over, reading it over and over and worrying and embossing it in braile onto my frontal lobe. Once it was all over, said and done, I loved it and there weren't really any changes from the first draft, but it took a while to get to that point. I wasted that time without realizing it, about another three hours.

3) How much time did you spend doing other stuff that seems like work to that make you think you're working but you're not?
I sat for too long worrying and thinking that I was revising when I was just sitting there, my brain exploding in a stream of consciousness word document which has been burned to preserve my dignity. I hate it when I do that. Gotta stop. Moving on.

4) How much time did you spend socializing?Now that I look back, surprisingly not as much as I'd thought. It was much more community than socializing. Once I started worrying, though, I didn't socialize as much as I threw on a pair of earphones and tried to calm my shit. Sure, it's really hard not to socialize and I'm not going to lie and say I didn't. But it's less than I expected and I kept to myself more than I usually do while under pressure. Or maybe not. My memory might be slowly getting away from me and maybe I'm in a Nursing Home and it's 2068 and my daughter won't visit me because she's a brat who lives in Colorado and didn't want to take her ailing, senile mother with her.

5) How did you use your community?While I was writing, I sat with the little dead-end community and just having people around you, seeing that they're getting stuff out really motivates you. I also used my community to keep myself from running around like a chicken with it's head cut off, sqwacking that the sky would fall which no one would understand because they wouldn't speak cock. Talking about how I was worried out loud really kept me from worrying so much, if that makes sense.

6) Rip apart your awful project and how did such a disaster happen?Jessica, you have no idea what you're doing when it comes to a lot of things, and acting is one of them. I had no idea of where to focus, my eyes were like a rabid rabbits. My palms were sweaty and I went to fast compared to the pace that I had found comfortable. Also, no matter what I say, I played it safe with the script in my opinion. It was like a bunch of stuff that I'd written before in different mediums, mainly poetry. Also, I'd like to think that I'm open about pretty much everything if you ask politely, but a new issue has come up in my writing that I'm becoming more and more frightened of to the point where I'm deliberately trying to take out it's references from my writing and it sucks because it's such a big part of my life and it's really impossible to take it all out but I'm honestly scared enough of it to run. I shouldn't feel like I have to run from things in my own writing. So what? People hear something in what you write and perceive it a certain way? Usually that doesn't bother me, but I don't know. This topic irks me. I don't even really want to talk about it but it's affecting me to the point where I feel like it's effing up my writing and so it at least has to be covered, at least vaguely.

7) You've completed a step on your path. What is your next step?I'm at a bit of a crossroads, I don't know if I should take a closer look at writing scripts for films or performance poetry. They're quite different things, and I'm really interested in both, but for completely different reasons. I started reading scripts for films over the summer after watching the movies and I really fell in love with the Social Network script (after first seeing it over and year ago and it's progression into being in my top ten favorite movies) and how it exported into the visual medium. I'm really starting to crave reading scripts, after seeing movies and tv shows I just want to get my hands on them and sink my teeth in. The movies I saw this summer just really inspired this spark in me. I was also pretty terrible at movie scripts last year, so it'd be quite nice to improve. With Slam Poetry, it's just something I thoroughly enjoy. I've taken to reading Dickinson and Siken out loud in my spare time, when I have no real commitments, and it's very soothing and therapeutic to get my buzzing emotions out of my system or to at least acknowledge them.