Revisions

New play going up this week. I find myself exhausted after rehearsals. They're only three hours long, but I am dead and spent. I'm also sick, so that's not helping. Waking up with a neck ache and face full of mucus. Avoiding coffee. But it's amazing how I sit in a chair listening and jotting notes for truly minimal time and feel maximum drainage. Then I wake up and have to submit all the new pages by 3:30. It's like how when I started working at the Writing Center I'd get ungodly hungry after my shifts. I mean, wow, I'd meet with three students and then call in an emergency pad see ewe order, wolf it on break. Urgently text Puhg when I was getting on the train, "Start dinner now!" He'd reply, "It's four pm!" Staying at Kale's house while I'm here. I had all these fantasies of enjoying my days, bustling about the places I used to go, but instead I'm hunched over this laptop frantically chopping lines and rewriting scenes to make more metaphorical sense. The stakes are low, but I've never been good at not trying my best.

Really Feel

My first General meeting I was confused. I thought I was meeting a new friend through a different friend for coffee to talk about how weird Hollywood is. I didn't understand that I was actually trying to sell myself until I was back in my car. I had worn shorts, like we were going to walk down the boulevard and grab lattes and ask ourselves why we even try. Instead we sat in a conference room across a huge table, and she grilled me on shows I was or wasn't watching. There are right answers to these things, I learned. Or maybe right attitudes to the answers.

The next meeting I knew not to be sad. That's not what they want to hire. It took me a few more meetings to learn to pitch and then a few more to learn, oh, I'm just here to entertain. Do bits, make them laugh, essentially put on a play called I'm Positive About Everything. No one wants to know how you really feel. At least I know now, and my manager has been getting these post-meeting emails and calls "We just love her!" Meaning, "We loved the play!"

But that's work. That's not necessarily unique to this industry, I guess I guess. But everyone is work. I am my work. Cobra visited and I could sense at first she was enjoying the tragic stories. I mean, they're juicy, but then when I wasn't happy at the end of them, that was less fun. I can't get her anything, she realized. She cancelled our next plans. She read my most recent script and said, "I read it." I feel like I could lose my mind for less. I feel the need to tell a couple people about my disappointment, but it makes them uncomfortable too. I try to keep a mental tally of who would allow me to need, and it is a short list. I don't think actually you could logically call so few people a list.

Is it narrative structure that has ruined us? "But you struggled with that yesterday. Shouldn't today be better?"