Well, I tried. Been trying since 6 July 2008, post #1. Tried again 11 January 2009, post #27, but, once again, the words I started with are gone, and new ones have taken their place.
I’ve been thinking about my next post all week, as usual. As usual, I diddled around with the silly notion that I might actually start the post mid-week and get back to it later — that I’d actually get to edit and rewrite my thoughts for a change. Like I said, a silly idea. It was a week like any other; I handled my tasks, meetings, chores and small pleasures with typical organizational aplomb, packing them neatly into the available hours without a moment to spare. Yesterday was devoted to Production Calendars, getting them finished and out of the way, so today’s decks would be clear for writing.
Yeah, but the morning’s email made it plain that at least one of the calendars wasn’t quite as finished as I’d hoped. Leslie can’t make the early afternoon production meetings, so can I just reschedule them, please? Right. Just query the 14 members of the production staff and somehow determine if there’s an entirely different and consistent block of time that we all have free during the various weeks in question… oh, that’ll be easy.
Another email made me realize that we’d never quite decided if we were doing Load-In and Hang & Focus on Easter weekend or bumping up the tech deadlines and doing them a weekend earlier. It’s not an issue I could table. I wanted the calendar done, dusted and distributed before Winter Break; now it’s 3 days away from the next production meeting, and we still don’t have a schedule. I sent out the query; I’m waiting for replies.
Next was the stressed-out phone call from one of my stage managers, the one who’s only managing a show so he can go to ACTF (a college-level theatre festival-competition) and vie for the grand Stage Management prize. He’d have won it, too, hands down. Only we — the Theatre Arts Department — screwed up. I screwed up by not spending lots of time figuring out what needed to be done. As the new kid on the block, I erroneously assumed that the people who’d been sending kids to this thing year after year after year knew how it was done and didn’t need my input. But, apparently, we didn’t jump through the right hoops, didn’t put Ian on the right show, didn’t fill out the right forms at the right time, so he’s not eligible to compete. I wrote and sent a “please, please will you grant him special dispensation” letter. Won’t do any good, but the kid deserves at least that much from his stage management mentor, and I need to be able to look at myself in the mirror.
So, I wasn’t writing all day. Wasn’t writing my stuff, anyway. Come sundown, though, I was ready to go. I had a topic and everything. “Resolutions.”
The word has an oddly contradictory nature, as in resolution, a dissonant musical phrase resolving into harmony or fragmented conflicts melting into agreement (resolution as a process of distillation, breaking down complexity into its simple, constituent elements); or as in resolution, a firm declaration of purpose, determination, a promise, unshakeable intention and steadfast action.
I love words. I meant to explore this one in the context of the resolutions I didn’t bother to make this year, in terms of the broader resolution I have made to spend this year open to new ways to resolve old problems, and from within an antiquated linguistic framework where New Year’s resolutions might be more a process of melting than gelling, more a matter of consonance than deliberation.
That was the idea for today, but when it came time, I didn’t have the time to do it right — to do that whole writing, word-play thing I enjoy so much. I’m not a blogger. The “blog” is not my literary genre of choice. I like to look up the words I’m using and read what others have to say about them. I like to rewrite what I’ve written until it’s got some lilt to it, and a bit of savvy, and it’s saying what I want it to say. I like to write alone and in private — I don’t like people knowing I’m blogging right now, I don’t like writing with people in the room beyond waiting for me to finish blogging, even if they’re waiting to read my blog. My writing process has become too public — though the results are barely so; a weekly missal to a few close friends. I’m writing weekly, but I’m not writing what I want to write how I want to write it.
And I can’t help but be jealous that my husband is. He starts a piece and walks away, comes back and walks again, and doesn’t post it till it’s ready. I can’t help but envy my blogging son who has no desire to scrub-brush his work, but gets all the writing satisfaction he needs by posting some real words in real time.
Silence in the room beyond… the movie’s over. Time to post real words in real time. No schnazzy ending, no pithy wrap-up. No resolution.