relentless tune plays in my head
exposing my angst as i sleep in bed
a figgure of gold stands alone in a field
while the onlookng protegy cant make if its real
on the pillars of earth he stands in wonder
while the world looks to him to remove them from plunder

k well i was gunna copy and paste a website on here just as a reminder for myself, but i cant copy and paste anything on this computer?

mm mhm mhm

so i think i realized why i like to work alone and dislike when the boss shows up.

its probably pretty common for most guys on the job to dislike the boss showing up, kind of a cliche thing i think. ive been working for this guy fixing up an apt. hes a nice guy and seems pretty patient as far as most of my bosses go, hes pretty good about showing me how to do something that ive never done before and ya its a good situation. so my disliking his presence on the job has nothing to do with his personality. i think i realized that it comes from being at home and hearing my dad pull up in the drive way and when he came home, that sorta thing.

i didnt get along very well with my dad growing up, we've always had a really strained and awkward relationship, car rides are typically silent still but thats just the way it is i guess. well when he came home i think i probably just went to my room to draw. i think i spent a lot of time by myself when i was a kid and i guess i got used to doing things with no boss around. now, when im on the job, i work really well when no one else is there, or maybe just one other person, or actually, i think the room could be full of people and id still do fine. theres just something about the boss being there that messes with me. maybe its because i dont recall being encouraged by my dad very much.

like i said i used to spend a lot of time alone and drawing. well when he was younger he did a lot of sports and drove dirt bikes around and was into hunting. i wasnt as interested in hunting when i was younger, and aside from that, my dad really never tried getting me to do anything, he also didnt really think much about my drawing. the only memories i have of any comments from my dad about my art work: when i was younger and showed him a picture he asked why i didnt draw a mountain man or something like that, this happened a couple times, and when i got a little older he asked me why i would draw women wearing no clothes. maybe i mistook my dad, as i said we didnt really talk that much, but his questions seemed less like a curiousity and more like a critisism.

so i suppose at some point i didnt want to draw in front of my dad because i was worried he would ask what i was drawing and i wouldnt have the right answer. well i think the same thing goes for working on the job. i dont think im going to dissapoint the boss, ive been told im not a bad worker, but i suppose i just get this feeling that im doing something wrong. and i guess thats one of the things i can add to the list of things my dad gave me, a constant feeling of being wrong and always on the fringe of dissapointing someone. so thats neat i guess.

but as long as im talking about work i might as well say i work with this other guy, frank, and hes awesome. i was thinking about it the other day and i think that he might be the perfect person for me to work around. he likes to talk, but not too much, he doesnt have to talk to fill the silence, and when he does talk, its not with the intention of getting a response from me, which is good. i really hate working with someone who likes talking but stops doing what they're doing and stops you so they can tell you something. i really hate that. i like being busy at work and i dont like standing around with nothing to do. i would much rather have something to do at every point in the day than taking breaks constantly. and thats whats good about frank too, hes got a good work ethic. a hard working person is actually a turn on for me, something about that is just really really attractive to me. not in franks case however, hes just a pleasure to work around. i really like working with people who have a good work ethic, someone who cares about getting the job done. hes very nice too, and thats great to work with people who are polite and always nice. it makes work a lot better. i was thinking about how i dont really want to do construction stuff anymore cause im just kind of tired of it. but now that i think about it, this job could be a lot worse. i hope i have this kind of impact on people, making their lives a little better. hmm.

today at work i remembered that i could play music on my phone. i got pumped cause i was wondering if the day would go by quicker if i listened to music i like. there were a couple songs that made me think of people and made me nostalgic and o yeah, i had a really interesting thought that was just, i dont know, kinda crazy.

i always have a lot of meaning placed on songs and sets of songs. they usually remind me of someone and a time of year. while listening to some songs and painting a baseboard at work today, i was curious if i just place my effection for people based only on the way things were at a certain place and the convenience of the circumstance. that might be a bit of a mouthful.

i often feel nostlgic when listening to certain songs because it reminds me of a time and a place and people. usually i miss people and start missing them a lot when i listen to this music. this made me wonder if my effection for people isnt based on how i feel about them, but the fact that i want to feel that. like maybe someone who loves being in love, and isnt really inlove. i wondered if i just like remembering the times and the fact that i had these times, and im always stuck on stuff that happened in the past. i dont know i just became cusious if i really have a real effection for anyone, like if maybe i got married to someone and somewhere down the line i hear a song and suddenly feel the same feelings that are as strong as they always are, about someone else. but maybe real people are actually like that. felicity said on her twitter that she wondered if people really love other people the way they do in the movies. i suppose i wonder if my feelings for people mean anything or not.

learned how to play two by the antlers on the piano...kinda. it would sound GREAT if i had more than just a piano though, like a guitar and drums. made me remember when i went and saw them with ben and brian and felicity. dang.

dream i had

Buried my face in your hair, lost in your soft mane, it carried me on a warm breeze beneath a cherry tree, where the deep red blossoms that filled the sweet air danced across my lips as we lay on the concrete floor of my old art room. My nose settled on yours for an eternity, each of us waiting for the other. Your lips brushed mine and a smile broke across your face and mine as you retreated from the embrace. I extended my neck for our first long awaited kiss beneath the sky light, shrouded in the waining light of the evening, alone together in the art room. Just as our lips would meet for the first time I woke.

i had one of those feelings this morning when i woke up, as if something had been pulled from my hands, like a precious, coveted item had slipped from my grasp, falling into the ocean while i was admiring the view. its funny how you can go through so much work, what seems like hours and days and maybe more, of dedication, fooling yourself into thinking youd created and lived within the rules and oh so very fortunate circumstances that have befallen you and grown to become your life, just to wake up and loose it all. its funny how we fool ourselves sometimes, into thinking we had it or still have it, when i probably never had it at all.

mas

so i did some stuff today.

i had an interview...?today for a construction job. i just rode in a truck with a guy who was showing me a few places he was working on and after he had gone through his list of questions he said "well thats it, interviews over" and jokingly i said " im hired" and he agreed, telling me that i was hired before i even got in the truck. neat! but i still have an actual interview for another place tomorrow. Im sure that i wont be working at this other place though, seeing as how i would be getting higher pay starting off at the construction place and how i have more experience in the construction business than i do working at an insurance place.

after getting back from my little snowy ride around the city, i felt like making something or painting or drawing. i think i actually felt like drawing on cardboard, so i did. Doug had showed me a couple boxes i could use to paint on. You might be thinking "wow is that the best he could do? cardboard?" and you might also not be thinking anything cause you arent reading this...cause NO ONE reads this thing but me, and i dont even read it really! i just kinda write in it, sometimes. But anyway, he was being very helpful. I told him that i wanted to create a series out of a few piece i already have which are paintings on cardbaord and that i need more.

last week or so i was in the car with camille, we were driving back from dropping my mother off at her house. I kinda blurted out to camille that i wish we had had maybe a little more guidance or resources when we were younger. I felt like camille rita and myself all had a great ability to acomplish a lot at a young age, but werent given the resources or taken to much of an interest in. i told her that maybe if we had a piano at the house i would have been playing a lot by the time i was ten. it suddenly accured to me that all three of us seemed to have been good at almost anything we tried. Camille was very bright, finding her way to MIT at the end of high school. Rita did very well in school too, she was very smart, got good grades, and was an awesome athlete. Camille did sports too, but i feel like rita had a bit more ability in athletics than camille. camille worked hard to get her grades, but not as hard as rita had to work. and vis versa for athletics. Camille worked hard in basketball and track, but she was never going to be as good as rita ended up being. I feel like rita just excelled at anything she picked up, playing volleyball in the winter, for a very very good marcellus volleyball team, a team that usually went undeafeated. she also picked up tennis and thinking about it now, i almost want to laugh at how awesome it is that she played tennis and was great at it. I think she was just about the best singles player on the team. And then of course she did track. She was always a pretty good thrower, doing shot and disk, but it wasnt until senior year when she started to get a little more confidence in herself that she made some leaps and bounds. she ended up going to states and being one of the best throwers in the highschools history. both camille and rita were outstanding musicians as well. camille first chair flute and rita first chair clarinette. I felt like i was kind of the dud, i didnt do great in school. i was pretty average. i was pretty good at art though i suppose. I was interested in drawing ever since i was about 2 i think. being an artist was probably one of the first things that i hoped to one day become. that and a ninja. it wasnt until the end of highschool and start of college that i realized i could control my abilities pretty well. that is, i felt like i had the ability to pick up anything and excelle at it. i adopted a mentality that i wasnt being arrogant but rather exploring what people are capable of acomplishing, thinking that if someone in the world can do something, there should be no reason why i, or anyone for that matter, couldnt do it as well. I decided i wanted to learn to play the guitar, so i started teaching myself in january of my freshman year of college and improved very quickly, playing complicated fingerpicking songs before leaving for the summer break.

I think i started to get hung up at this point in the way we were brought up, and how if we had parents who had showed just a bit more interest in what we were interested in, we could have done really well. we werent discouraged from doing the things we liked, but there wasnt much interest.

anyway, theres a lot more i could write, buuuuut, camille expressed that she felt the same way i did. She said that she and doug were looking at a little slip of paper i had written little piano notes on. it wasnt sheet music, because i dont know how to read sheet music, it was just little notes that i made up so that i could remember some chords on the piano for a song, and doug asked what it was, and camille could tell they were my notes. doug looked at the paper and said"what a waste" his son goes to berkly for music and was given all sorts of resources to pursue his interest in music as a kid. he got lessons and at one point even had 2 guitar teachers. he is very good at guitar now, but he isnt such a great student. doug was feeling bad that i had all these intense interests in the arts that were never really recognized to their fullest potential.

so later that night, im assuming camille had said to doug what i was talking about in the car, about my parents, doug expressed a great interest in finding a room in the house i could use as a studio for painting and drawing and sculpture, should i get my hands on some clay. i told him that i really didnt need that much room and that the attic would be fine. the only thing is the attic is pretty cold. its a great big room that isnt heated or insulated so i gets to about 30 something or 40 degrees in the winter. i still told him it would be fine, but he suggested that we rearrange one of the rooms in the house so that i can set up a studio room for myself, saying that at some point we can construct an easle. later he was getting slightly worked up about the different business ventures i could take using my art as a means of financial income. it felt nice to see that he was taking an interest.

so basically all of this was just to say that doug showed me some cardboard in the attic that i could use for a canvas. well i didnt think it was going to be big enough for what i wanted, but i still just felt compelled to draw something on cardboard, so i bundled up and slowly started moving my other paintings up there, then my painting bag, then i brought my computer up there and cut the box open and decided that it would work out. i wish i had a camera here so i could upload some pictures of the attic and the drawing i did. i drew a woman laying on the floor, it shows her naked from behind, curled up in a ball sort of, and it shows her bottom half, with her feet sticking out a bit. i get kind of upset when i do this stuff, because i really enjoy drawing and working on it, and when i finish i dont really feel like being done. but what really gets me is this is just the priliminary sketch for what will become a painting. i often paint over fairly well rendered drawings that i would like to keep as drawings, but thats just not what its meant to be.

So anyway, i worked on the drawing and it took me longer than usual, it typically only takes about 20 minutes to 30 minutes to do the initial sketch, but this one might have taken about an hour. i was kind of having a blast up in the attic. i was really cold but i liked working up there a lot, i had my music playing off my computer and used a single light bulb to do my work by.

good grief i write too much on this thing. that is when i do decide to write. but yeah, anyway i ended up repairing a few keys on the piano here with dougs help, actually it was mainly doug who did it, since he had a piano repair kit and took a course on piano maintenance and repairing and knows all about it, but i still helped. then i shaved for my interview tomorrow. to be honest i actually think id like to try working in an office for once in my life. i usually do manual labor, but im not really all that fond of construction work, a lot of the time people have their egos and try and show you the right way to do a job when it just slows you down. i dont know, not saying that office work doesnt have its faults, but really i wouldnt know. its just something id like to try. well ima go to the interview tomorrow and find out what the pay would start out as, hear that its under ten bucks an hour, and tell them thanks for the opportunity but im going to have to accept another job. but who knows.

this just in

really interested in acting again. but i get interested in things that just happen to be in my line of site very often so its no wonder i wanna be an actor again. Watched inside the actors studio with jim carey and it was entertaining. talked about playing andy kaufman and i liked it. made me wonder if there was an inside the actors studio with mickey rourke, so i looked it up and there it was! really like mickey rourke even though i havent seen...any? of his early films. something funny though.

He said that he became interested in acting after watching a movie with marlon brando where he played the captain of a ship. he said the scene where he was burnt seemed very real to him and he liked it or at least it was memerable for him. He didnt know who the actor was at the time but it stuck with him. An interesting thing about this is that i was talking to my mom a few weeks ago about her and my dad and how they were different. She is very animated, not as much anymore now that she moves slower and is inhibited because of her increasing reumitoid arthritis afliction, but she is still very vocal in her emotions and physical with her reactions to any situation. i told her that she would be a great actor because she does it all the time. i told her how the acting she did was very mainstream contemporary acting, almost typecast in a way. it was explosive and expectant, with a lot of passion. i told her it was interesting that she and my dad seemed like 2 different actors, because i was now refuring their personalities to acting and actors. i told my mom that i considered her to be more of a modern actor someone fairly popular but not outlandishly at the forefront of breakthrough acting. someone like meg ryan or a type cast actor like tom cruise. i told her that my dad was much more quiet and reserved but with a lot of built up emotion that streams through the cracks of a tougher exterior. I said he was more of a marlon brando or mickey rourke actor, because i thought they were very similar. the difference between marlon brando/mickey rourke and other actors is what i think of as acting.

I think i remember my friend sam once saying to me that he watched an interview or read about an interview with marlon brando and that he didnt think of acting to really be an art or maybe a skill, because it was something that everyone did. and in this is why i think marlon brando and mickey rourke stand out for me as great actors. i believe that a typical actor is acting in a way so that their intention is felt. that is of course the point of acting, to understand your intention and portray it to the audience. but most actors are acting, they know what they are supposed to portray to the audience and i think they let their intention guide them. but i think that a marlon brando or mickey rourke arent led with their intention and they dont seem to be acting, at least in some of their roles. it often feels as though they arent acting at all and that this is simply just the way they are, which it very well might be, but it is much more believable and interesting to watch than someone who has their heart on their sleeve everytime someone cuts them off in the street or in a conversation. less action often makes for better acting i think. that is, less of a certain kind of action.

My acting teacher, who i adored and felt tremendous gratitude toward, feeling as though he was much more interested in the goal of his students understanding and learning the craft of acting rather than getting a good grade, often told us to go bigger or do more. he would say stakes ten, which means that if the circunstances were dire, how would that change the way a line was delivered. i feel like a lot of actors follow this general rule, but fail to acknowledge the ways in which subtle bodylanguage can create a much more real stakes ten than say a screaming person waving their arms in the air. these are things which i feel make marlon brando and mickey rourke stand out for me as great actors. it feels as though they are acting in a very real way and thus feeling the emotions of the character and bringing these emotions from a very real place.

when my teacher told us stakes ten, this was aslo, i should say, to a class of students who had never acted before. well, not everyone was a complete novice. some of the students had been in a few musicals and high school plays. my acting career at that point had consisted of a few years of stage crew in high school with an off stage voice fill in in the production of...something, dont remember. basically i howled off stage. that and i played the king in my 3rd grade class' production of the dragon and the king er something like that. soooo ya i had no experience. but i had been thinking of acting a lot at the time and felt myself in a strange place. i was becoming more and more aware of the way people acted around eachother and interested in the involuntary action of people, the way our bodies can do almost incredible things without thinking about it, simply because we have done them often. for example throwing a baseball to a friend. the action of throwing a baseball to someone is actually very incredible when thinking about it. to be able to get an object from one point in space to another through the action of throwing is astounding when broken down to all the factors involved. the weight of the ball is taken into consideration, the distance it must travel to reach its destination, the force that must be applied to make the object get there, how to manuver ones body and arm in order to make the ball get to the friend. all of these things in just a matter of seconds and its done. and its all done without really thinking about it at all, just involuntary movements and adjustments from the muscles.

When i broke this down, i guess it made me think of the things we do that arent so involuntary, but try to make seem like nothing. for example the way a girl flips her hair when a boy walks by, or the way a chubby guy sucks in his stomach when a woman enters the room, things like that. this is what got me very interested in acting, because of all the very little things that people do to try and get the attention of someone else. a good actor, i believe, understands these things. a good actor understands the way people work and knows that people often act all the time. it is rare however to watch an actor portray someone who is not like that though. this goes back to the marlon brandos and mickey rourkes. i suppose the people they portray are often filled with some sort of heavey emotional burden. They are under a lot of stress and personal anguish and dont seem to respond well to the people around them, there for they have no acting front when it comes to others. others playing in action roles often ham it up, screaming and whatnot or maybe haming it up in the other direction as most villians do, by playing it cool all the time, even when explosions are going off just over their sholder.

anyway i digress, even though theres actually no point in this whole post, and once again, no one reads this so i can say what i want. Well after watching mickey rourke on inside the actors studio which was pretty neat, i saw that there was a link to sylvestor stallone on inside the actors studio. I really liked rocky and thought rocky II was also pretty good and thought that he did a very good job of acting in it as rocky, and i was very influenced by rambo my senior year in college. I believe i watched rambo for the first time the summer before my senior year of college. I watched it at seans house. we made a list of movies we wanted to see and just started watching them. It doesnt seem like we were accomplishing much, but at the time it felt pretty good to get through the list. Most of them were horror films, like the friday the thirteenth films and what not. actually i think we had a few movies that had numerous sequals. thus both rocky and rambo were on the list. there were a few classics like dr strange love and the great escape and north by northwest. unfortunately north by northwest was unavailable to us that summer, but we still saw some good movies. i remember the striking thing about rambo being the way in which it was very different from what i thought and i believe most people think of rambo. hearing the name rambo brings to mind muscles and mindless explosions for the sake of money in the boxoffice. it might have been that way in the later films, but the first one was very different. i felt as though it were a work of art, or a piece of music. a great bulk of the film followed the character rambo through a mountainous wild montana or colorado terrain, with little dialouge and lots of chasing and hiding and later in the movie, shooting and the explosions expected from a rambo film. his acting wasnt horendous and the other actors at times played a very convinsing role. there was a scene where rambo runs through the woods being chased by a group of officers, who find that they are soon being stalked by rambo. he runs passed one of them and cuts him on the leg and it was a much more brutal and real scary situation than any of the other larger than life gun fights and car chases in the rest of the movie. the amount of restraint in the wound that rambo showed the man made it much more real of the kind of damage that could be done. this part just seemed to stand out at me. But the final coup d'etat in the film is of course the final scene where rambo breaks down. The whole of the movie was filled with action from this character who was going berzerk through the mountainous community, capable of killing everyone but still showing some bit of restraint, and remaining silent through all of it. then, he finally just exploded all of the things that had been kept in his head and on his mind for seven years, as he says in the movie i believe. it was much more interesting to see a man who breaks down and cries after seeing him destroying a town with little more than a bat of an eye. it made the movie so much more interesting and it felt to me like the very outstanding beautiful part in a piece of music, much like the way i think of racmaninovs adagio sustuneto or certain sports in paintings that stand out from the rest. it made me think of the relationship between and within singular works of art, like perhaps purposely making most of a guitar piece lack luster to make the dramatic climax that much more intriguing, or the same with a painting. leaving most of the canvas a dull mix of colors so that one specific spot stands out, to make the whole piece seem like it stands out as beautiful.

That scene from rambo was my final monolague for my acting class. I was the last to go and went on stage telling the class that i chose the final scene from rambo. almost everyone laughed when i said this, thinking, i can only imagine, that it would be a goofy hamming it up impression of a guy blazing guns shooting off bullets and one liners. when i had finished most of the class was crying. thats the extent of my acting career however. I might be interested in it and think about it more than i even know, but really that was the only time i acted on stage. I would still very much like to be an actor.

by the way i can remember watching a movie with marlon brando playing a captain of a ship when i was younger, thinking it was brilliant.