I look away from people in the theater when they change. Is it a bar against temptation, an attempt at maintaining polite civility, or simply fear of a bad reputation?

I look away from my code at the series I’m watching so infrequently. Why have it on at all, or at least visible?

I look away from my costars onstage when the eye contact gets too intimate. I look back, but the moment’s broken. Am I afraid? I don’t think so. It’s those moments when I feel like I’m too still and thus, somehow, uninvested. I need training.

I look away from my dogs on purpose when I enter the house. This supposedly makes me their alpha. It has not worked all that well, I don’t think.

I look away from the screen where I’m writing in the vain hope that some thing on my desk will give me inspiration.

I look away from The Witcher when I play it, during the conversations. The story is engaging, but there’s not much reason to watch the automatons onscreen go through looped motion capture which belies no actual acting. It’s interesting that bad movement is everywhere.

I look away from people when I dance with them. I cannot be free in their eyes.

I look away from fights I’ve choreographed to listen to them, but I should do it more. I’m so focused on storytelling and audio, yet I don’t score my fights very well.

Programming websites, when I can make progress, satisfies my itches quite well, I find. Unless I can show some kind of flashy, remarkable animation or something, no one cares about the progress. Which is the correct response, I suppose. I shouldn’t want praise for shoveling the driveway, and that’s the equivalent of making a computer understand a logic puzzle.

I got to learn from the outstanding Marti last night about call and response and Stanislavski and basically how to let go. Guess how well I did at that, noble reader? Yes, good guess. Quite poorly. I exhibited too much control, which is not the point of exploratory work. Ah, well. At least I am aware of it.

Tonight, I get to work with Jamie on some choreography for the Fireside’s Peter Pan. I hope to be able to give him some good ideas. If not, at least I won’t embarrass myself too much. I also get to teach a shred weight experiment class tonight, for which I am poorly prepared. Too much going, as usual, to clear my head for conceptual stuff. Also, the actors have received so much meta-information that I wonder if adding more fooferah to the pile would be a great idea.

Nevertheless, living the dream as they say.

Sent the evening in one of my favorite places, The Alchemist Theatre, with some of my favorite people, including my favorite stage manager from A Lady in Waiting. I also caught up with the prominent director of Penelopiad. On top of that, we were proposed a brand new festival for Shakespeare, and I finished a good number of marketing tasks for many different theaters.

What I found strange, or perhaps strangely predictable, that even when we were deep in discussion of what is needed to solve the widening gap between theatre for fun and theatre for art, we drifted more often into nostalgia and shared frustration with past shows and, worse, people. But it’s par for the course and it’s easier than solving the problem than to blame it on someone. BUT IT IS THEIR FAULT.

Nevertheless, all of them felt the same way as I have often intimated here and elsewhere, which left me with whose conflicting feelings of “Yay! I’m not alone!” and “Boo! I’m not a unique snowflake!”

Still, I’m taking what happiness I can from being simultaneously challenged and inspired to create great collaborations again.