I need to blog more often throughout the week so that the “things I want to blog about” don’t snowball up into one massive blog entry that resembles a tree with branches spurting out all over the place, rather than a more sightly lone autumn leaf that people like to pay strange amounts of attention to. See? There is so much crap that has accumulated in a week’s time that my very first sentence alone is far too long and disturbing. Okay.
I want to know – how much do “normal people” let things get to them? How much empathy are most people capable of, especially when it comes to books, movies and music? I haven’t done much in the past week, except I feel like I’ve been on an intense emotional rollercoaster, and I’m not too sure whether I enjoy this or not. And the root of all this spawns off into many, many tangents.
Taken on Ilford HP5 Plus 400 B/W film; Nikon F3. A photo I had used in the exhibition.
For one, the reason I asked the questions above is because I’m one of those people who cry at movies, TV, music, books, you name it. Even a single, beautifully written line can get my tear ducts working on overdrive. I have this unfortunate (I feel, for the most part) ability to perceive, then receive and feel everything on such a personal, realistic level. I’d taken the last couple of days off reading, but ever since starting it last week, I have been disappearing into Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead (just over halfway through it now). I read a particularly painful part of the novel at the boy’s house, and tears started pouring down my face. I felt bad and embarrassed because it’s an odd predicament isn’t it – to have someone crying over a book you gave them – but oh heck, he deals with worse from me. Then I told him this is exactly what I mean by things getting to me. I wish I didn’t feel and care so goddamn much about everything; I hate how everything has the ability to seep right through my rough and tough exterior and pluck and snap at my heartstrings. Felisa (who no longer blogs publicly, I think) and I have discussed how it’s almost like a writer or artist’s complex – that we notice things that other people might merely glance at, and actually register such things. Because we then go on to recreate them. My therapist said I need to stop owning everyone else’s feelings and my mother said maybe I should go into acting.
On the flip side, I can be a totally detached and hardened person. I can force myself to feel an empty hollowness, rather than invest any personal interest or reaction to something. It’s probably better in terms of a “public self”, but do I really want to feel empty and hollow and react to nothing?
Also, this is the playlist I slept and read to for a couple of days in a row. Favourite track from The King of Limbs mixed in with a bunch of Tricky. There is something painfully sexy about it all. And it proved to be a great sober-driving-at-3am-playlist, after a Friday night spent dancing my legs off to music I wouldn’t ever listen to outside of a club. Many people find it surprising that I dance. Sober, even. It’s liberating and I feel kind of powerful. Not because I had seven pairs of eyes glued to me (none of which I was interested in), but because it made no difference to me whether there were any at all. It’s the same feeling I get even when I’m just doing normal things during normal hours, and rather reminds me of Marina having said that she magically attracts men even when she’s not trying. It is the power in that innocence, precisely; yet not at all, and so much more all at the same time.
I think I might have to blog about it later rather than squish it into this post, but I have a 40-minute appointment with the HOD of Jazz on Tuesday. We’re all scheduled in for a 10 minute chat each, mostly about the changes to the Bachelor of Music degree structure that will be implemented next year, but I have broader issues to discuss in terms of what I’m going to enroll in… such a complicated and delicate issue that will potentially affect my future more than it will affect any other jazz students. Urgh.