A challenge

I recently went to a cafe with , on the spur of the moment. I suggested that we engage in artistic/creative endeavors, since we were over at her apartment complaining that we don't get around to it much lately. So I said, "Come on, let's go now. Let's just do it."

I didn't have any of my writing with me, so I borrowed a notebook and tried to just do something on the spot. I felt a bit disjointed with none of my writing around, so I couldn't really get myself to write, but I did console myself with trying to write out some ideas about the personalities of these characters. I been realizing lately that I don't know my characters' everyday, mundane personalities - what they like to read, eat, how they react to stress, being challenged, etc.

So I sat and tried to do that. I ended up learning a lot about myself in the process. When I got to the part about his passions, I realized after a while that I was writing about me. Perhaps not surprising really, but it's funny how these kinds of moments can take you by surprise anyway.

I learned a lot about how my head works when it comes to creativity. As much ground as I've made in the last two-three years, I still have big fears of failure that sabotage me when it comes to taking creative risks. To avoid taking such risks, I tell myself that it's all too much work, too hard, that I don't know where to start.

Yeah, some of that is the ADD at work, but it runs more deeply emotional than that. I'm running from the prospect of falling flat on my face. No matter how many times I tell my students that mistakes are the best way to learn, I get very avoidant of the prospect of failure and tend to stop pursuing my passions when they become too important to me, too reflective of my general self-image, too likely to involve bumps in the road.

It's too frightening, too wrought with the prospect of feeling like a schmuck. Not that anyone would fault me for trying and failing, but I have a lot of angst about appearing to fail. Somewhere along the way of my childhood, I internalized a message that one must always appear to be succeeding or else not trying. I think it has something to do with my parents being very protective. I had to really fight to do a lot of things that I wanted to that involved taking risks --- taking the subway on my own, driving a car by myself, going to college away from home, doing an internship in New York. I also remember my well-meaning mom saving me from failure in other situations, whether that meant letting me stay home from school when I didn't get along with kids there or letting me get out of sticking with a musical instrument or hobby (guitar, piano, gymnastics) once the initial excitement of the learning curve ended and it required perserverance and challenging onself further. I'm not blaming them; I think they made the best decisions they could at the time, and who knows how things would have turned out if they insisted that I not avoid these challenges. I might have had other hangups, I suppose.

But nevertheless, I think these were object lessons for me that reinforced some ideas about taking risk, namely, that taking risk is dangerous and threatening and not fun, so why do it? It's been a comforting point of view for much of my life, but it's also given me a lot of frustration, anger and self-hatred. I want the freedom to fail, as bizarre as that sounds. I don't think I give myself that freedom very much. An inner voice tells me that if I fall flat on my face, I will not be allowed to try again. I will be told, "You see, it was useless to try. It only hurts. Let's try and do everything to make sure you don't have the opportunity to experiment with risk again, cause that'll hurt too much."

But no risk also means no passions, no joy of learning, no pleasure of curiosity.

I want to tap into that joy. Again, I want the freedom to fail.

Whither ho? (And no, I don't mean "Where's my prostitute?")

Regarding my previous post, where do I go from here? What do I do once I've realized the roots of this unresolved issue? How do I teach myself to overcome this fear of failure, this fear of passion?

I think I may have found the beginnings of a path:

A long time ago, I wrote a post about fixing my vacuum cleaner. At the time, I was proud of myself for having the courage to take apart this machine I would never previously have dared unscrew. I learned something that day about jumping in and trying something without being daunted by the fear of failure, but I have not remembered it well lately, until now.

I am realizing that this is the path towards following my passions without crippling fear: Keep taking risks. The more I take risks, the more I will become desensitized to the fear of failure. I will see that failure is not the end of the world, that it is actually a valuable object lesson.

And so I have given myself a challenge: I am going to figure out how to build a bookcase. I need one for my studio to hold my records, which have been for almost two years now in makeshift containers on the floor. I don't know the first thing about woodworking, but I have resolved not to care how this comes out or even if it comes out. I am simply going to learn some things about building a bookshelf through trial and error.

I already went to the hardware store today and got some supplies. Also, I got some helpful information from the staff there, who I think thought I was bit nutters to try and do this, but they steered me onto better paths than I was blazing nonetheless; and they saved me a bunch of money, for which I'm grateful. Foster Farrar rocks, incidentally.

Tomorrow, I'm going to Northampton Lumber to buy the wood with grinninfoole and his van. soulstorage is coming with me as well and she is going to help me. Then in the evening, we are going to do loads and loads of laundry. I think I will be ready for something so mundane and obvious after a day of challenging myself so.

I just need to keep telling myself that even though I've never built a bookcase before, it doesn't matter. I will learn from the experience more than I know now about woodworking. That is good. That is all that matters. Failure at this doesn't mean I'm a failure. I'm brave for taking this risk, in fact. The point of this exercise is not to succeed at the bookshelves (although that would be nice), it is to overcome my fear, and hopefully learn a bit about woodworking in the process.

The Merchant of Venice

All right, I admit it. Never read it. Went to see the movie tonight at Pleasant St not really knowing much of the story except the pound of flesh thing. Some reflections:

1. Wow. And to think that Shakespeare must have been a raving liberal in his time. The anti-Semitism was hard to take, especially when his daughter runs away and all he seems to really care about is his honor and his gold; but what really shocked and bothered me was the humiliation of Shylock towards the end of the trial. I was gratified to know I wasn't the only one. There were barely audible groans running through the little airplane theater audience during the parts where they really debase him. The way his daughter abandons him to become a Christian and gets rewarded at the end basically because she elected to no longer be Jewish also left a bad taste in my mouth. It felt like watching in silence as two people have a conversation about the dirty Mexicans or something.

2. Pacino did a fairly classy job making Shylock as believeable a character as I imagine was possible given the original play. The seething, almost unbearable anger that he carried with him throughout the whole movie as a badge of pride reminded me of a conversation I had once with one of my African-American students.

3. Having never read the play and not really knowing the intricacies of the plot, I could tell there was some subtleties that I was missing due to the archaic language. Somewhere during the movie, I realized that this is what it would be like for my students to see *any* Shakespeare. They probably would have very little idea what was going on.

4. I don't know if events in the play are set up in the same order as the movie, but the whole thing with the lost wedding rings seemed like a tacked-on epilogue to me, an attempt to inject some levity after the really traumatizing trial scenes. I suppose there was a thematic connection between Jessica being rumored to have given away her father's ring and the two rings that were indeed given away, but after that extended trial scene, this duplicitious power play game about the rings seemed utterly and annoyingly trivial. Is this how Shakespeare arranged scenes in the play?

5. Is there no explanation in the play about how on Earth the wives ended up intercepting the letter from Dr. Bellario that allows them to concoct their crossdressing impersonation scheme?