Why I (A Man) Call Myself A Feminist

I have always been confused by the aversion to the word "feminist."

Particularly to men avoiding calling themselves "feminists."

And I don't want to conjure up or play into that stereotype that we can all imagine, at times, of the bros who all graduated together from their fraternities, slobber-mawed and grabby-hands, who respect women about as much as they respect the dusty beer pong ball they lose after a night of intense binge drinking, because I a) don't believe in the truth of stereotypes and b) know plenty of "bros," culturally, who are absolutely feminists.

But they don't call themselves that.

Take it from CBS. In 2009, they did a poll on the whether the Women's Movement (I guess another way to call the Feminist's Movement) has made your life better. Good news: 77% of women attribute the women's movement of their mothers' generations to contributing positively to their opportunities in life. The system works! Progress is inevitable! Yay female power!

Now for some bad news. 

Only 47% of men say that the women's movement has improved their lives. 46% say it hasn't.

But the kicker here is, for both women and men, when asked if they consider the label "feminist" an insult, a compliment, or neutral:

Men

The term feminist is …
Compliment
 10%
Insult
 24%
Neutral
 59%

Women

The term feminist is …
Compliment
 12%
Insult
 17%
Neutral
 64%

This is clearly a problem when only 10-12% of those polled believe being a feminist is a compliment. For men, almost a QUARTER believe it's an insult.

Why?

Is it that people are uncomfortable about being defined by something that causes confrontation? Something that upends the status quo? Are men who don't like to call themselves feminists just not calling themselves that because in mixed (or all-male) company, they don't want to be misunderstood as aggressively anti-men or anti-capitalism or anti-bras, and don't want to rock the boat?

Now try this. When they were given the DEFINITION of feminism before being asked, the numbers shoot up dramatically:

A FEMINIST IS SOMEONE WHO BELIEVES IN SOCIAL, POLITICAL, AND ECONOMIC EQUALITY OF THE SEXES.
DO YOU THINK OF YOURSELF AS A FEMINIST OR NOT?

(Among women)

Yes
 65%
No
 32%

Men

Feminist (definition provided)
Yes
 58%
No
 39%


Men are still overall less likely to call themselves feminists than women, but a majority of them still, once they hear the definition, go "oh yeah, duh, of course, women and men should be treated equally."

So where does the insult come from? 

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, an incredible speaker and writer whose Ted Talk "We Should All Be Feminists" is highly worth viewing (linked here & also inserted above). She makes a good twenty amazing points about men and women and the label "feminist," but I want to draw up one point to get to something I want to add.

She says, very fairly, that in general men don't think about gender very much. They don't think about dressing too "manly" for an important job interview (unlike women, who have to think, do I want these people to take me seriously? I shouldn't dress too feminine, a much more reasonably imagined and actually lived out scenario). 

Men don't think about the privileges they receive, unasked for, for being men.

An amazing director/theatre artist and blogger and continual source of inspiration for me, Adrienne Mackey, wrote Thank you for not assuming on her blog Swim Pony Musings, and helped frame it for me in the best way in her post. 

She quotes another writer who describes a story of a man biking home from work one day, whizzing by all of his usual landmarks much quicker than he usually does. And he thinks to himself "huh all that hard work and training is finally starting to pay off! I'm really going fast today!" and then he flies by a flag pole, and sees that the flag is blowing the same direction he is. So he stops and realizes that a very strong wind that has been blowing at his back the entire time. Hence the advantage.

That gives a sense of what male privilege is. Unseen, unfelt (most of the time, or particularly when you're focused on striving for something), but it's there. And it creates an advantage.

The fact that I am a man means that I am more likely to get a job that a woman is just as qualified for as I am. The fact that I am a man means when I make a piece of art involving masculinity, I am not seen as a "masculine writer" or a writer only interested in masculinity. I am represented in democracy and in leadership positions around the world way way WAY more than my fellow women, even though globally they actually comprise 52% of the population. (These points are culled and repeated from Mackey's article and Adichie's talk, echoed in my own language.)

I don't feel the way the wind is at my back. Unlike these guys:

There are a lot of psychological reasons for men's lack of notice (a bias we have towards attributing all our successes to our own efforts and all our failures to factors outside of ourselves comes to mind), but it also is a hugely cultural reality that many men simply do not acknowledge, at least not openly.

Why?

To return to the notion of "feminist" as insult, I think the "insult" comes from an socialized, emotional place. 

Men are taught that they have to be invulnerable, strong, in control. They cannot be to blame. They can't be weak, or guilty, they have to always be in command of their world. Quite literally, men are socialized to "man up," provide for themselves and their families, be independent, be strong. There's no room for failure.

So when someone asks a man if they're a feminist, knee-jerk reaction could be, "well, no, I heard something about feminist women hating men for being oppressors, you must mean I contribute to this imbalance of masculine dominance, I'm at fault for benefiting from sexism, I'm guilty of being an oppressor, I'm not wrong, I'm strong, no, no, no, I'm insulted! Grr! Arg! Let me show my power by being angry!"

Then, you add the definition. 

"Oh. Equality of the sexes. Well, that's not so bad. I can agree with that, intellectually. I myself wouldn't want to be treated unfairly. I guess I am a feminist."

The definition deflects blame, puts the focuses on the present and the future, and not on the past.

Though I will say, being a feminist DEFINITELY means you have to acknowledge and own the past. Because this world IS imbalanced for a reason, and it's not because men biologically have more muscle mass than women. 

We still chose, over centuries, to use our physical prowess to rule, to take power, and to oppress and deny power to women.

I'm doing a lot of research on women in antiquity, since the project I'm directing and co-producing with amazing feminist theatre artist, blogger, and my partner Colie McClellan over at Feminist Musings, involves Greek myth and modern feminism. 

And it strikes me, going deep into a book like Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves by Sarah Pomeroy, that women were all oppressed, back in early Greek and Roman times, because men predominantly transferred their stuff, their money, their power, through blood lines, through heirs, because you didn't exactly have credit cards back then, and the number one cause of anxiety and strife amongst men and women was knowing whose child it was, who would inherit all their stuff.

The simplest answer to knowing who fathered a child was to shut the woman off from society, control her every move, and place their only responsibility and right on producing heirs. 

Now there's a whole other capitalist issue I see here (why is the STUFF so freakin' important??!), but apart from that, men very often in antiquity only dealt with their wives when it came to procreation and solidifying family, and ultimately, political power.

Love and lust and sex and meaningful relationships? Not in marriage. More often than not in concubines, in fellow soldiers (homosexuality was pretty much not a big deal back then), or slaves. Wives, legitimate citizen wives, were for the baby-making and legacy-leaving. Men only married when they were in their late thirties (too old to fight in wars), but their wives were fourteen, thirteen. They didn't exactly have too much in common anyway.

Obviously in dark ancient Greek times, physical prowess was everything if you wanted to survive, and if you wanted to thrive, holding the most power, the strongest city-state, the largest population of male soldiers, involved producing more of a population. Eventually, as war made producing a population harder, the laws surrounding women's rights were mildly relaxed (thanks Peloponnesian War!) and men even were encouraged to have multiple wives (now citizens) to produce more citizen children, to keep fueling the war effort.

But all of this was artificial. Stuff, money, power, control, it's all illusory, as I'm sure it was felt in Greek life in ancient times as it is in Greek life in modern colleges across the country.

Which brings me back to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Another great quote in her Ted talk, which I'm going to all-caps here:

"CULTURE DOES NOT MAKE PEOPLE, PEOPLE MAKE CULTURE"

I am a culture maker. I make plays. I write them, I direct them, I perform them, I produce them.

I want them to reflect the world as it is. And men and women are equal. And deserve equal rights. Equal representation.

And that actively involves correcting an imbalance. It involves placing women in more roles of authority, of creativity, and of visibility. It means hiring more women, creating more parts for women, collaborating more with women than with other men. All in the service, I might add, of telling better stories.

All the Way, the Bryan Cranston vehicle about LBJ and the Civil Rights Act that's getting TONS of attention because of Breaking Bad & Broadway? BORING. 

Why? 

Mostly men, mostly white, jockeying for power that no one else has access to. Three women in the 20-odd numbered cast, and they maybe said 12 lines between the three of them. And when they did, they were entirely sexualized or victimized. They were never powerful, even the First Lady. 

BORING.

Being a feminist means living your life like a feminist.

I recently discovered that I actually love the role of caretaker, which is predominantly a "feminine" role in society. I like taking care of my partner. I like doing certain chores. I'm even getting better about laundry (I know, Mom! Who'd've thunk it!). But I ultimately see myself, when I have kids, as wanting to be a big part of their lives, as a primary care taker. I want to be a stay at home dad.

Which isn't to say I don't have career aspirations, or I'm not ambitious in my desires or dreams for my career as a culture maker. 

And, actually, I don't think most people would think that of me anyway. In fact, they'd mostly applaud me for being so forward thinking, even though that really is the last thing I want. 

Why the applause? Because I'm a guy. A woman wants to be a stay at home mother, and today it still is, "well what about your career?" Because apparently all careers need constant pressure and upkeep and capitalist engine fuel to be successful.

A woman wants to be the major breadwinner? Callous. Unloving mother. An ambitious, venomous Lady M. 

BORING.

I do want to raise a son or a daughter someday. I do want them to watch movies and read books and have their minds blown by amazing plays and go to museums and travel to cities and indulge in the world, both as it is, and as it could be.

And I want them to feel, no matter what body they are given, masculine, feminine, transgender, bisexual, homosexual, asexual, heterosexual, I want them to feel like they have every right to exist as everyone else. 

So I want them to be feminists.

Feminism is about a present, historic, cultural, sociological, and economical imbalance. It's not an insult. It's not about blame, but it is about action.

And, really, honestly, it's about realizing that life is not a zero sum game about STUFF, Men Vs Women, who has more, who has less, who wins, who loses, etc. It's about nurturing and empowering everyone to succeed at what they alone can do, given what they have. It's about lifting everyone up.

So, to my fellow men, please, ease off from the defensive position. You do not need to front on this issue. Be men. Love everyone, men and women included. It's okay, you can do it. Call yourself a feminist.

What's Spanish for Inches?

When I looked outside my windows this morning, or, really, a little into the afternoon, it looked mildly cold. Wet from an earlier rain, the first of browned and oranged leaves pasting the ground, like the oversized paper ones that plastered my kindergarten and grade school halls in my forever-fall Halifax memories.

My espresso grounds were old, and I wanted caffeine before I tackled the mountain of dishes I had vowed to myself and my girlfriend I'd clean in the morning. She made dinner, I do the dishes. It's only fair, and I rarely accomplish anything before 4pm anyway. A good goal, baby steps, to start a mite sooner.

So groundless and caffeineless, I threw on my oversized cardigan I got as a Christmas gift last year, which I love in a "I can imagine myself being an old guy, maybe a professor, but definitely a writer" sort of way, and shuffled off to the corner Starbucks, lost in remembering teaching theatre to kids in similarly autumn leaf-adorned kindergarten and grade schools, thinking of all the Starbucks cups I drained waiting for the trains to get there.

Inside, the Asian-American barista took my order, and while she did, half asked her Hispanic-American colleague, who started to make my coffee, what the word for "inch" was in Spanish. He earnestly shook his head, and said he didn't know. I said I didn't think there was a word for "inch," because both Spain and Mexico use the metric system, which, I then felt necessary to mention, doesn't use inches.

If I could measure seconds in centimeters, we swam an Olympic sized swimming pool together, entirely doubting each other's knowledge and education, before she smiled pleasantly and handed me a croissant. America, it seems, goes on for another day.

Felina/Finale, the Uncertainty Principle Breaking Bad Thinkpiece

***If you can't tell, this is going to involve major Breaking Bad spoilers. So, don't read any of this if you don't want to know what may or may not have happened in the finale.***

So.

There exists on the internet these days a certain subgenre of thinkpieces that have generated themselves all summer at an exponentially rabid/rapid pace. This is, of course, the Breaking Bad Thinkpiece.

And of course, now that the series is over, and we've had a few days to digest the experience and implications of the finale, these kind of thinkpieces are replicating themselves with wild abandon.

I am throwing my hat into this well-traveled ring because I am, like all other writers of these thinkpieces, an unabashedly devoted fan, I can't help but have strong opinions about it, and I was honestly fairly disappointed with the story of the finale. Not the production of it, nor the experience of it entirely, even, but the story, and its implications for the series as a whole.

I went onto Gchat and spent a few hours in post-show analysis over several days with my best friends. I gorged myself on every review of the finale, every point of view I could find about what had happened. I just couldn't decide what I felt. What I was settling for. What I wish had happened.

It was sincerely difficult to articulate, because I felt like I was missing something that maybe I wasn't even really supposed to catch on to. My brain, which always tries to make things the most complicated they can be, couldn't figure out how to reinterpret this fairly-straight-forward and ultimately-semi-victorious hail Mary pass by Walter White, which, miraculously, it seems, all works out in his favour. Is it really ending this simply?

Walt dies on his own terms. He finally tells Skylar the truth, that he did this all for himself, because he loved it, because he was good at it, because it made him feel alive. He ends Heisenberg's career in an epic badass rain of jerry-rigged machine gun murder, he finally refuses the seduction of MORE money after he has safely used his fearsome alter ego to threaten his former colleagues/privileged khaki clowns into ensuring the money he DID save from calamity will end up in his family's care after all, and he even gets to be the guy who, when he learns of his former partner/son-turned-rat's suffering, lets him go, freeing his enslaved Ariel to the winds, where perhaps he can find true freedom and peace with his resplendently-lit woodcarved boxes.

It all felt so good, to see him do that, it was nearly perfect, 92% pure, it was fantastic. A fantasy. And, therefore, not what I was expecting from the series that had just pummeled us into the To'hajilee burial ground with the consequences of Walt's Heisenbergian ways.

I read desperately all the tweets and reviews that said the finale was perfect. I convinced myself to justify that Walt really didn't get everything right, that he still caused all this mayhem and is still dying alone, having destroyed his family and the empire he fought so hard to create. That the long-anticipated final finale surprise was, as Vince Gilligan said, the fact that there were no surprises.

That it basically went as mass-hoped, as planned. That we all were slavering to see some redemption, and Walt started to get a little but it was too late. That he broke bad, only to break good again with not enough time to make it all work. We wanted to see this show go out in a blaze of glory, and we got it, Walt's glory. Walt wins, but it's a thin victory. Surprise! We didn't surprise you this time, and that's the best surprise!

Hm. Maybe.

Then someone tweeted about Norm Macdonald's finale theory just as I was trying to go to sleep the night before last, and I spent the next three hours awake by the glow of my smartphone, reading every letter of Norm's tweets. And my too-complicated-by-half brain found what it had been looking for. Another way to read the finale.

This is worth digging through on your own, though the later you read this the more it will be obscured by football tweets, but basically, Norm puts a slightly different spin on the New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum's disappointed review of the finale, which says that the finale DID feel like Walt's dying fantasy of what he WOULD do, if he could get back to Albuquerque. Maybe this Felina finale is his dying wish, that he really dies alone in that car, mid-plotting and planning, and really we'll never know what happens to Jesse, Skylar, Marie, the neo-Nazis, Todd, Lydia, or any of the horrific machinations he set in motion the day he started cooking blue meth.

Norm goes further than Emily, though, because what he suggests isn't that "it's all a dream" and that Gilligan even overtly expresses this in the finale. First off, Norm doesn't care what Vince has to say about it at all, actually. The work speaks for itself. Even though all the writers basically say they meant the finale to be taken literally, Norm isn't having it. Not the way it's written, executed, cinematographed, etc.

No, when Walt exhales as the harrowing world-ending sound of police car tires against snow pull away and the red and blue lights of capture fade, it's his dying breath. From the keys dropping from the sky onward, things work out for the broken bad Mr. White, because they are symbolic. He works out how he would end his life, had he the time, had he the ability. What we see is a largely egocentric fantasy of this truly broken man setting it as right as he can.

The evidence that Norm brings to this is heartening, too. This is a supposedly nation-wide manhunt, that necessitated Walt being shipped in an oil truck all the way to New Hampshire, yet he glides back into town in a stolen car after calling the cops to him. He creeps into the Schwartz' new house unimpeded, and does so everywhere else. Skylar's new place, where the cops are watching. His old house, staring at his reflection in broken mirrors. He watches his son through double windows, a la Christmas Carol. Carol's name, of course, is made a big deal for no otherwise apparent reason. He is gaunt, his movements are slow, shuffling, unfrantic as we've known him, finally sure, finally, it seems, at some kind of peace.

The cinematography certainly lends itself to almost a dreamlike state. Jesse's fantasy of wordworking, the "clue" for the finale that everyone harped about in press events, is lit in single-source, golden, holy organ music-playing light, all sensual, tactile, a Creator with his creation, all going right. The same single-source, half-face-shadowing light, happens in Skylar's apartment. At the end, in the Nazi's clubhouse. The camera moves slower, lurking, Walt is revealed in places by magic. It is shot, Norm posits, intentionally, for us to feel it is unreal.

A note, too, about the shadows. Jesse is tortured until he really seems to have half a face, and is lit, and shot, in that half-face darkness. As is Walt many times. Repetitions of images of Gus, with half his face blasted off. And the pink teddy bear from the plane crash. Manifestations of Walt's destructive power. Two-faced. Janus. We see what the lies of Heisenberg has wrought. And Walt dies by his own hand but saves his surrogate son, and has the time to go be with his equipment, his Precious, a distorted shot of his face and blood on the only thing he ever truly loved. He did it, it wasn't all for nothing.

Or, if you believe Norm's theory, he didn't do it. He didn't actually do any of those things. He died in the car, frozen, alone, still plotting, fantasizing about the final gambit he never actually gets to make. The cancer gets him and it is, indeed, all for nothing.

If you can't tell, I rewatched the last two episodes of Breaking Bad yesterday, to see this theory in action for myself. And I have come to the conclusion that it does work, but probably not for the reasons you think.

There are definitely holes. If Walt is imagining this final conversation with Skylar, then how does he know about Todd's visit to their house, threatening her not to reveal anything she knows about Lydia? There definitely is not a jump cut in Walt's scene in the car, where we think he might be dead but then he flips the visor and the keys fall out! It's one continuous cut. Walt doesn't clearly seem to die and then revive.

And in terms of everything going right, magic things have happened for Walt all the time. He is incredibly lucky, and resourceful, and admittedly brilliant, even if his arrogance and pride cause him to miscalculate, or, in the case of Jesse, completely underestimate his allegiance.

Breaking Bad has had otherworldly-seeming things happen more than I remembered. The Cousins are shot and move like Death itself, coming for Walt's life in ways that are beyond human. I mean, Walt meets Jane's dad at the bar before he goes back to Jesse's place and watches her die, and this causes a cataclysmic plane crash? WHAT are the chances of THAT?! Hank discovers Walt's true identity because he leaves a copy of Leaves of Grass on his toilet seat?? HOW would that have actually happened?!

So Walt evading all the police forces of Albuquerque isn't too terribly hard to believe. Him sneaking ricin into a Stevia packet doesn't seem to be too farfetched, when he knows she always sits in the same cafe at 10am on Tuesdays, and she always wants Stevia. He put a fake ricin pill into a cigarette and planted it, somehow, in Jesse's Roomba, so that Jesse would stop worrying about accidentally poisoning someone.

Walt takes advantage of a universe that offers him up chances all the time. This universe offered him up some big breaks at the end, and he took advantage of them like he always did. He just now has his priorities in order. Which, given months in solitude in the woods, dying of cancer, paying a stranger $10,000 just to stay for a game of poker, isn't a stretch to see him come to the conclusion that with his dying strength, he needs to nut up and provide for his family at all costs. Gretchen and Elliot appear on Charlie Rose, and suddenly he has his plan. He sees his way out.

But should he be allowed to carry through his plans? The show, or, really, MY experience watching this show, has always been so UNCERTAIN about Walt. He's bad, but we still identify with him. He does worse after worse thing, and especially after Ozymandias, we SEE just how much of a monster he truly is. But he's not all monster. So should he get a chance at redemption?

Well, I think yes and no. And I think this finale actually gives us the chance to see both, even though they are diametrically opposed. At the same time.

I think Felina/finale is actually a quantum finale.

Heisenberg, remember, is the name of the scientist attributed mostly for coming up with the uncertainty principle, which, in quantum physics, is all about the fact that we can't know everything about a particle all at once, and whenever we "check" to see, for example, a particle's location, we can't determine the direction of its spin exactly. You follow this to the Schroedinger's cat conclusion, and if you put the cat in the box with poison, until you check, the cat is both dead and alive at the same time. Truly. Actually. You can't know for sure until you check. 

Breaking Bad has always been hyper aware of its audiences' expectations. Its job is solely to tell a good story, and it has definitely done so with the Felina finale. But what it's also done artistically, which the literal finale sort of walks back, is create a truly Shakespearean, Euripidean character of negative empathy.

Paula Vogel talks about this in this video, which I can't figure out how to embed but will try to more later.

Her gist, though, is that great dramas used to be made where we are meant to struggle, as an audience, to decide what is right and wrong with these characters' actions. They are compelling, human, faulty, destructive monsters and we identify with them, we see the human inside them, we see the monster inside us. We don't like these characters, but we also really do. What should happen to them? Should Hamlet kill Claudius? Should Richard III gain control over everything? Should Lear get Cordelia's love back?

In most cases, the characters both win and lose, and tend to get more glory than actual peace or happiness.

I think, now that I've seen the finale, I definitely wanted Walt to fail. I wanted to see him denied the glory he sought. I wanted him punished for his sins, somehow, even if he gets everything he wants, because I don't want to live in a world where there aren't consequences to doing wrong, to doing evil. Breaking Bad, for me, is about how possible it is to delude yourself into thinking you're doing good, even as you set in motion actions that cancer everything around you, that destroy all you claim to be fighting for.

Is the world that just, that fair? Does karma exist? Can a man, even as loathsome as Walt, be judged so harshly, if he attempts to make good at the end?

I don't know. And I don't think Breaking Bad does either. But as artists, I think Norm's theory IS there, really, like any great work of literature does, to offer the alternative to the sexy, ratings-and-audience pleasing version. The literal interpretation.

I think both exist simultaneously. I think Walt's both dead and alive in that car, and until we check, until each one of us goes through that thought process for ourselves and determines what we truly believe or value about the universe, about America, about the actions of this flawed anti-hero, he has to both accomplish what he does, and also fail to accomplish it.

THAT ending, that sophisticated, do you really trust your senses, what do you think of this story, you be the scientist, you decide, or, if you'd prefer to be an artist like me and keep both options in mind at the same time, and/both instead of either/or, you get to decide what world you live in.

Breaking Bad is, therefore, to me a quantum reflection of what you think bad is. And what the world does with the bad and the good. You check, you decide.

An Open Letter to Open Letters

An Open Letter to Open Letters,

I would like to write an open letter to open letters, but I have found I do not have anything to say, except that I appreciate the opportunity it provides to showcase openly how open and transparent I am about my process, as a human being and an artist, which of course can hide all the shadowy other reasons I am seeking attention by posting an open letter in the first place.

Writing an open letter is, in fact, much like shutting down the government, one does it for its own sake. One declares openly that one is a writer of open letters by writing an open letter, and ipso facto, mission accomplished. You don't even need to read this letter to know that I am a writer of open letters, and must be incredibly confident, smart, sexy, and artistic, to write my letters so openly.

This is something we all desire, sure. I write so you will read. I need you to understand me. I need you to love me. I need validation from the eyes and pageviews and downloads and listens and retweets and reblogs and Likes and hashtags and blog posts that show me to the world for who I want to be seen as.

I used to wonder what it would be like to be conscious of when I am in another person's dream. Like, if I killed someone in another person's dream, then in my real life I'd carry around that knowledge, that guilt. I am a murderer in your eyes. How awful, to not be able to tell that person, en medias dream, "No, you don't understand! That's not me! That's not who I am!"

If there is anything I can say to end this open letter to you, Open Letters, it's that this day and age, we are all our own Public Relations Managers, and we keep nothing "private." Except, of course, for all the things I am not saying in this letter. I mention others' dreams and my appearance in them. I will not mention my own.

Five Paragraphs At A Time

This isn't going to be anything. I mean, it's going to be pretty much whatever comes to my head first, because what I've noticed with myself is that I tend to stop most, if not all, of what I think from coming out into the world for fear of it being rejected.

This is what happens when you perpetually doubt yourself. You play crystal ball strategist, you think you know the cards that are coming before the flip. You rely on your intuition, solely, to decide whether you should take any particular risk, stick your neck out at any particular angle.

Malcolm Gladwell says in order to overcome writer's block you need to break the expectation of writing perfect prose, and simply write a few paragraphs a day. He said four, but I like to be ambitious and like odd numbers better. I will likely arbitrarily edit these sentences so they appear as five paragraphs. If I haven't done this when you're reading, I apologize for wasting your eyesight.

Fear, I think we've all heard and hardly internalized, is the only thing to be feared itself, but I have to admit it's Shame that really gets me crumbling. Shame is a kind of fear, I suppose, but it's not private, like anxiety can be. It's not secret. It's wrapped up entirely in others, in your perception of their perceptions.

Right now I'm a little ashamed to admit (though hardly too ashamed to post on a blog), but I'm pretty lost. I don't know what to do next, for my career, for my art, for my life. I have no specific reason to be ashamed, of course, I am with someone I truly love, I live in a great place, I work hard at a hard job that pays me well for my hard work. But I want to make something. I want to be an artist. And I am blocked, right now, and five paragraphs at a time, in spite of all fears, I'll attempt to change that.

Stray Observations About Time Passing, or, You Guessed It, It's My Birthday

Time is only your enemy when you try to kill it.

I have a very boring job a lot of the time. I mean, not all the time. For spurts of my five hours a night, I am engaged, present, smart, eloquent, passionate, talking about theatre, selling memberships, listening to people, giving and giving and giving and taking them to that sale. I sell hard, and when it works, it works. It's always a thrilling feeling.

But then there are hours, and I do mean hours, where I barely make contact with anyone. I dial number after number. I tick away the minutes and I try not to think about what else I could be doing. I do make a decent hourly wage, but the money's not in sitting around listening to answering machines. It's about making contact with people. Connecting. Inspiring them, with passion, about the season of theatre they need tickets for. Bringing them around to the sale. Now's the time! No day but today! It's about being a human being on the phone, already a mission of translation, and being a human being who can mobilize others into action.

It's hard to stay an action-inspiring human when the hours are rotting by. When there is no action. When you're bored. David Foster Wallace has a whole bit in The Pale King, where he has noted that the use of the word "boring" as an adjective appeared at the same time the word "interesting," one of the most soporific and un-useful words to ever cross an artist's brainpan. How "boring" also comes from the verb to bore, meaning to pierce with a turning or twisting movement of a tool. Violent image, eh? How you can imagine that tool going into your skull, because something's got to when no one will answer the damn phone.

I think we as a culture have become pathologically afraid of that particular kind of pain, of boredom. I certainly am. Normally I do whatever it takes outside of my shifts at work to escape boredom. On trains, on days off, even when I want to do nothing and relax, I feel guilty for letting myself get bored. For wasting time. I open up 16 tabs on my browser, I refresh Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, I read news sites, I look up useless facts, I play Dominion on my iPhone, all so I can avoid being alone with myself. All so I can avoid being bored. All so I can avoid feeling like I'm wasting the precious minutes I have, rotting down until the moment I have to return to work.

David Foster Wallace would say that if you can break past the initial pain of boredom, though, if you can handle that slow dull tool making its way millimeter by millimeter into your skull, you can actually break past onto the other side into a feeling of deep serenity, of calm, of presence. A Buddhist, meditative notion. A kind of self-acceptance.

Louis CK says it even better here. He talks about boredom leading to being alone with yourself, which inevitably opens you up to all kinds of intense feelings of unknowable sadness you feel about yourself, about your existence, about life in general. And how if you can let yourself feel that sad, if you can stop the urge to contact everyone you know, and say HI I'M HERE PLEASE LOVE ME, you can actually feel happy you get to feel sad, you can appreciate its beauty and its place in your life. Everything has to be someplace, even your sadness. You come to acknowledge and respect it as part of yourself. You come to love yourself a little bit more. And then you move a little bit on.

Which makes me think about perspective.

This Wait But Why article about Time's Perspective, using all kinds of simple, beautiful graphics to illustrate just how much of a blip in time we as human beings really are, in the face of so many years, billions of years, it made me feel the same way I felt first hearing Carl Sagan's speech about the Pale Blue Dot. About how infinitesimal we are, but also how momentary, how effervescent. For as how long it's taken for us to learn language, to develop technologies, to create civilizations, to make the art that fills the great museums of the world, it barely takes up an inch on the scale of how long we've been anatomically human.

As the Wait But Why article says, "If the Earth formed at midnight and the present moment is the next midnight, 24 hours later, modern humans have been around since 11:59:59pm—1 second."

When I worked at the PMA as a telemarketer, we'd get breaks. 15 minute breaks every hour and 15 minutes. And I used to really look forward to those breaks after a mind-numbing hour, because at least I'd be able to stand and stretch and grouse with the other callers about how I wasn't making any sales, etc. But I also used to physically dread those breaks, too, because I would usually spend most of my time anxiously looking at my phone, watching the minutes of freedom bleed down until I had to go back to work.

I'd waste my entire break from work dreading about going back to work. Not that I necessarily hated working, I actually like it most of the time, even when I don't make sales or get a slue of assholes on the phone, I generally like talking to people, I generally like talking about art and theatre. I like my current job a lot (which doesn't offer the trap of breaks, we just use the restroom when we need to). But I still dreaded getting back from those breaks so much, I rarely took an actual break.

Don't tell me you haven't done this. Don't tell me you haven't wasted a day or two of a vacation occupying the same space of dread.

Why do we do that? Why do we waste time dreading going back to work?

Or, to pose another question, why do we consider time we have not worked to be wasteful?

I'm being a little care-free with the "we," I mean you totally could be one of those enlightened people or Europeans who believe in the value of relaxing and promote a lax sense of time and due dates and long siestas and time really slowing down, so you can appreciate the small stuff and enjoy all that's around you. I envy you, if you exist in this world. I want to carve places in my life where I can live by those rules.

But we have to be productive to be in American society, don't we? In Western society, in North American society. We are a capitalist nation, you either win or you lose, you either waste or you produce, and being bored, being idle, being, well, that doesn't generate anything, that doesn't make anything you can sell society, so it's useless, it's bad, don't do it, stop daydreaming, Mark, get back to work. Quit being lazy. Quit thinking so much. Just do it. Get it done. Work harder, work faster, dial dia dial. These are things I tell myself frequently, especially when I'm feeling guilty for losing my way into a reverie.

Of course I can't actually day dream on the job, because in sales you have to be present. You have to be at the top of your game. And when I'm on a call, nothing else matters. No day but today. (I work for the theatre who created Rent, so excuse the constant reference) When I'm doing it right nothing else matters, which is very hard to do.

When I drop off the last 37 minutes of non-starts and wrong numbers, and I simply focus on connecting to the other intelligent living breathing being on the other line, minutes fly by. Work becomes play. I love talking about the upcoming season. The plays. The excitement. How meaningful membership is. I know they get it. I just need to bring them there.

And when it works, when it's the right time, when I've done my job right, out comes the wallet, and in comes the sale. Because it's not about cheap tickets or dollars and cents. It's about the theatre. It's about the mission. It's about the art, and wanting to stay connected to it. In those minutes I'm just being that guy, the guy who loves to talk about those things. Who means what he says.

My job is teaching me how to be better at doing that when I'm not talking to someone else. When I'm idle, dialing numbers, waiting, trying to keep a positive outlook, keep my energy and focus for the next call. I am trying, outside of my work, to both embrace the time I have to focus, to do things like write, create, research, read, stay in touch with people. But I'm also trying to do something that's maybe harder than all that other stuff: I'm trying not to feel bad for wasting time.

Because there's no such thing as a waste of time. All the errata, all the bullshit, all the nonsense, all the long lines in the supermarket, all the boring surfaces we attach our butts to as we wait for trains and planes and postal office workers, all of it matters. It does!

All of it contributes to that one second we as a human race, in the history of the universe, have been in existence. And there are more things in heaven and earth than can be dreamt of in our philosophies, we have no idea what bit of information we glean from those resting moments will be the KEY to our future endeavours, if we stop resisting the times when we feel we are wasting away, we might actually eventually be able to pay attention and see what's in front of us. We're the only ones who think that negatively about it. And it's a choice, to think about it that way.

This, too, comes from David Foster Wallace, in the deeply moving excerpt from his Kenyon 2005 graduation speech, the excerpt being redubbed This Is Water. If you haven't clicked on any of the other hyperlinks, click on this one. I dare you to wait in a line at the grocery store the same way again.

I'll wait until you come back.

At the end of this, I wanted to draw some larger conclusion about perspective and time and human history and art and life and boredom and pain and how that deep feeling of aloneness and the fear of the meaninglessness of our lives, how all of this can simply be overcome by not thinking about it. Don't pay attention to it. But I don't really think that's true. I certainly can't help it, when I'm down, that I criticize all my choices, I beat myself up for the mistakes I've made, I wish I had used this time better or said this thing to this person. I am constantly trying to overcome my own ruthless inner critic.

I think it's resisting the resistance that's the problem. I think it's feeling bad for feeling bad. It's not letting the defeatism be defeated. It's thinking that your struggles right now are more significant, more important, than the grand scheme of your whole life.

Last year, I made a few decisions that radically changed my life. I decided to visit a college friend for her birthday, took the time waiting for the train, riding the train, walking through the night air, the first time it smelled like fall to me, to arrive at my friend's door. I agonized over missing out on Fringe shows and on risking delays getting back to run my own. But something made me want to think bigger than just what was happening right then. I think I wanted to network with this friend's grad school friends, since I was thinking about applying myself. I put up with a lot of boring inaction, I went through a lot of motions, I sank and sunk into all this negative thinking, but then I met this woman who became the love of my life.

Now my life is almost entirely different. In the span of a year, which is now 1/26th of my life, everything has changed.

And I sit alone, with myself, writing to you, which is really also writing to myself, too, hi, and while I'm still plagued by wanting to be productive, to launch this New York artistic career, to make things happen, and simultaneously feeling lazy and slothful and afraid of taking steps and being wrong, afraid of trying and failing, afraid of feeling the bad feelings that one needs to feel to learn, even in spite of those fears, for the first time in a long time, I am very much looking forward to the years and years ahead. I can see them, dimly, stretch and stand in the horizon. Seeing it, knowing it's possible, that long view, takes the pressure off making every moment of now count, I think.

It all counts, but there's a lot to count. A lot. Life is very long, as a mentor near to my heart told me in New York a year before I moved here. It's time to remember, continually, to let it go. Or, as any Viewpoints teacher worth their salt would say, hold on tightly, let go lightly.

I think I've finished moralizing for the day.

//

Oh, also, a moment of unabashed excitement:
I finally did this! I finally wrote on my blog again! Happy birthday to me!

Stick, Ball, Veil, Walt, Jesse, Mike, & Nike

*Spoiler alert again for any non-initiated Breaking Bad fans. This will contain spoilers up to about halfway through season 4, as my girlfriend and I have only watched up to that point. I know what happens after, I'm rewatching, but I want her to be able to read this, so, you know, I'm gonna avoid spoiling plot points from episode 8 of season 4 on*

I've been thinking a lot about thinking recently. And how it frequently can hurt more than help me.

Last night, while watching an episode of Breaking Bad (Season 4, holy shit, we're almost there, 5.2 starts tomorrow!) my girlfriend explained to me the Michael Chekhov strategy of thinking of characters in three ways, as either a stick, a ball, or a veil, and how their shape, the rhythm of their movement, and what that represents energy-wise, could be used to break down and classify different types of characters.

Sticks, for example, are thinkers first. They are rigid to the world, appear impervious, they jut out into space. They can be bendy, sure, even like a twig, with many offshoots, but in general, they do not take in energy smoothly or receive it with any sense of ease, they stop it. They analyze. They process. Walt, in my opinion, is a steel rod, or a fire poker. Gus, a smooth, polished yardstick.

Veils, on the other hand, are any kind of fabric, really. A leather glove. A t-shirt. A piece of chainmail. They take in energy when they are acted upon, they move, they flow, they react. They are feelers first. Mike, in this case, while a toughened, weathered, worn, fisted glove, is a veil. He's an emotional man. He absorbs energy, and I tend to see him process emotionally first, in his eyes, even if it's distant. His mouth gives him away. But he's supple that way, he moves with the world. He endures and survives, as best he can, obviously.

And then there are balls, like Jesse Pinkman, who my girlfriend likened to a hard rubber ball, almost like one you'd use in wall ball or something. It'd really hurt if you were pelted with one. Bouncy, fast, darting off in sharp directions. Always moving, always doing. Acting first, feeling later, thinking later. We all know the ball-types in our lives, always a little unpredictable, always at the ready to take a leap, to do something. I really do envy ball-types, a lot of the time. Their kinetic energy, their ability, it seems, to not worry about what it is they're going to do, their easy sashay over the tiresome build-up and dread to the event of doing whatever it is you're about to do, not fearing the consequences, or really, rather, trusting that you'll be able to handle the consequences of whatever it is you do. They do that later, I imagine. They do things first. I am not a ball. I always need to prepare for what I'm doing.

Just do it, though, has become my motto for the past week or so. I've been getting bogged down at work, where I make sales on the telephone for memberships at an amazing New York theatre, because I have been constantly thinking about, preparing, analyzing, and dreading my performance, or really my prepared-for lack of performance, because I feel great responsibility to do well and constantly worry I won't, especially recently as I've had a couple bad weeks.

Sales, of course, is all about performance, it's all about actually doing, accomplishing something. You need to close, you need to convince, you need to get the payment info, you need to get people to commit. And I've been having trouble doing that recently, as the actual kind of sale I've been making has changed, and I've been wading deeper into true salesman territory, no longer just reupping former members, which is practically a customer service job, but convincing new people to take a leap of faith and commit on the phone to a season of theatre I have to make sure they realize is absolutely going to be amazing.

I've been thinking/writing a lot about telesales & telemarketing, which is figuring largely in my play I'm working on, but I've been having this impulse recently to sort of "save" those stories, or ideas, for my play, and not write about them here. Even though it's a major part of my life, I mean, it's a huge reason why I'm here in New York, it's my personal challenge, to get better at sales, to make more money so I can continue to be financially stable, so I can use my non-sales time to write and eventually to network, to direct, to produce, to do all the things I did in Philly but on my own, actually-self-accepted terms, I mean, the sales is the means by which I can eventually do all that. So it's been a bit all-consuming, and a bit writing-resistent, to obsess over just 25 hours of my week. I keep thinking I have to wait to write about the job, to only write about it in my play (which I maybe write two or three hours once a week, if that.)

But something my boss said, who's essentially the coach in the room, making sure his athletes are on the ball and improving, and most of all, making sales, something he said to me has stuck in my craw this week. It is, of course, a quote immortalized in song-in-everyone's-head by Rent, the notion that there is "no day but today." And it's true.

In telesales, there's always the escape valve of the callback. You get someone on the phone super convinced to go for the sale, but they have to talk to their wife or their husband, they don't have their credit card handy, they're about to go to dinner, about to feed their dog, whatever. When can I call you back? It's frequently a polite way to say no, or a polite way to chicken out, though sometimes, if you've built trust in the right way, you can still get them another time. With the leads I have right now, though, it's a bit of a kiss of death. And my boss has been saying, don't chicken out yourself, don't fall back on the callback, because tomorrow never comes, you need to get them today. Now. Inspire them. Today is when things happen. Don't wait for later. Now's the time to get life-changing theatre. Now's the time to commit. There's no day but today.

This, of course, is coming at a time when I'm painfully aware of mortality, of health issues that have been plaguing people I know. And of course my Uncle Frank, who passed away a short 8 weeks after he was diagnosed with cancer, comes to mind, a lot. There is literally no day but today. You never know when it's going to be your last. Why wait to do something meaningful, something important with your life, until you're ready? You're never going to be ready, and you might not get the chance tomorrow. If it's worth doing, it should be scary. It should be hard. It should be a risk. Just do it. You can feel, react, suffer, breathe, release, later. The readiness isn't all. The doing is all.

And it's a bit inspiring for this INFJ, this introverted, intuitive, feeler, judger, who takes things in by intuition, who deals with things by feeling them through, who imagines and analyzes and interprets every possible way of something happening, frantically trying to do it before it happens, so he can protect himself, protect himself from himself, from his feelings, protect his few close loved ones, protect his friends. As someone who's suffered quite a bit with an inclination towards anxiety, your classic neurotic worrier, I find myself constantly in a state of apprehension, of the pause on the starting block, holding your breath, just waiting for the gun, lost in every dimension of how the water'll feel when you hit it, who'll come out in front first, how I'll blow all my energy in the first ten seconds of the race because I've built up too much nervous energy to not let it all out when the gun finally fires. I am a cycle of oppressively humid summer days and random thunder storm releases. I am a nuclear reactor, trying to maintain myself before meltdown. I've gotten much better at the maintenance as I've gotten older.

It's become increasingly clear to me that a way to deal with my nerves, with my energy, with my imagination, with my will-to-stop-time-and-process-everything-internally-first, is to simple allow myself to not think about it. To trust myself as a functioning human being, and to Just do it, as Nike has imparted it to me. Nike, incidentally, is the Greek goddess of Victory, which I didn't really know until I looked it up today. She's one of the few winged goddesses, who swoops in on the battlefield to shower glory and fame on the victors of war. Victory. To the victor go the spoils. Those who act, those who do, the balls in life. The Just do its. They are victorious. Fortune favours the bold.

Growing up, I made a bit of a self-fulfilling prophesy of an internal myth about myself as someone who usually does not win. My clown, for example, is as mature as a little child, a sad, slow, heart-burst-wide-open, wide-eyed, love-seeking, sad little clown, who is so small in such a large world, wanting desperately to be loved by it, always just quite out of reach. The kid picked last in gym class for dodgeball, who goes "Okay guys. I understand. Thanks anyway, for picking me at all." Self-pitying. Inert. Sweet, but doing nothing to help himself. I think I learned at a young age when I was bullied to just accept their violence, as a way to get them to stop. I made it not fun anymore for them to tease me, I made it just sad, a passive-aggression, for sure, but a survival technique, from my serious-minded, literal, they-must-actually-think-I'm-awful kind of way. I still am such a serious guy, and have trouble being teased. Rarely do I ever imagine Nike to be visiting me. Because I just assume I'll lose, if I am attacked. I am not the victor on the battlefield, I am the corpse in the ditch.

But I'm definitely capable of victory. I do make sales, and I improve every time I've been given adjustments to my approach.  I am a very quick learner, and I rarely make the same mistakes twice. As I get older, I am starting to treat myself with much more care, much more love.

The stick-ball-veil approach is also used as a way to analyze how characters behave in the world. When something happens to them, do they think about it, then do something about it, then feel about what's happened? Do they do something, immediately, then think about what they've done, then feel?
Do they react emotionally, then think about that reaction, then do something once they've processed it? What's the time in between those, the qualities of each? Walt uses his iron thought to smash his problem into analyzable pieces, then he quickly strikes at the problem, and then vibrates with the reverberations of what's happened, shuddering, boiling, crackling. Jesse leaps into action, bounding from one moment to another, then pitches and swerves with waves of feeling about what he's just experienced, and then, after a pause and the stillness, things dawn, pieces come together, he thinks.

Stick, ball, veil. We all are all three, it's really just a question of which one manifests first, which one dominates how you deal with the world.

What I've been working on, and it's brought a relief to some of the lower level anxiety and suffering I put on myself daily before work, worrying about how I'm going to do today, is simply to believe that thinking about it really actually, at a certain point, doesn't help, that there's nothing to do but just do it, just focus on the task when the task is at hand. No day but today. Ball, all the way, stick & veil later.

It's funny, because changing which state I naturally incline to first, at least for a good portion of my day during the week, it really doesn't feel like a rejection of who I am, you know, as an intuitive thinker/feeler, as a person who does deal with the world internally first, who can be very expressive socially but needs a lot of alone time to recharge. I can bring out the inner Ball when need be, I'm discovering. Perhaps this is a little bit what growing up feels like, learning how to highlight your strengths and forgive and negotiate with your weaknesses, to unlearn your childhood trauma coping mechanisms, to accept when you fail to do so, and pick yourself up for next time. To be at ease with who you really are.

Something Walter White is unwilling to do, forgive. Something Hamlet was too late in doing, acting, at least as far as conventional wisdom goes. "The readiness is all," sure, but readiness is not action. "Nothing is neither good nor bad but thinking makes it so," sure, but no matter how hard you try not to think about death, it's still there. Bad things do still happen in the world, even if you equivocate over whether they're bad or not. Doing, then, taking action, making something concrete in the world exist, that is what is all, that is what allows thinking to do what it does, that is what allows feelings to be had. Stuff has to happen for your rich complex inner life to respond to. Echolocation still needs sound.

My job is pulling the ball, and balls, out of me a bit more, and I am grateful for it. I am beginning to see myself make noise, and I am glad to be moving in this direction.