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.