Where has my Muse gone? Apparently whatever Muse I have is on summer vacation.
I did some background work for a new webseries-turned-TV-show called Girlhattan (formally known as The SkinNY) last weekend, which was pretty fun. However, I gained some interesting knowledge. Some people there were like me, doing this sort of thing every once and awhile for a bit of cash, the learning experience, and the networking possibilities. But there are a lot of people around who do this all the time, and not only that, but they seem think it makes them small time film and TV stars. Seriously, this one guy was talking about Will Smith like he knew him, just because of some background work on Men in Black III (yes, they are making that right now). And I don't know how many of you have experienced the coy actor trait of pretending to be ashamed or bashful when they brag so that you will think they don't want to tell you every credit they have, yet somehow all of a sudden you know everything they have done in NY, as well as all of their elementary school leads. To be fair, the majority of the people I met were not like this, but that type of person tends to stand out. And while background work is fun, it really is a lot of sitting around...I probably sat around for six hours and worked for two. It was a similar situation with the last project. Pantomiming and pretending to eat sushi, or pantomiming and watching the fake 2012 New Years ball drop in mid-town, all very exciting. But it's not acting. Well, it is, I guess. But I would not want to spend my days doing it. Yet sometimes I feel like...I don't know what I feel like. Success means different things to different people. I guess I'm not sure what my definition of success is right now.
Ann Brashares wrote a fifth "Sisterhood" book called Sisterhood Everlasting, and the four girls are now 29. I read it the other day, in one day, because I couldn't stop, and to be honest, I cried throughout the entire book. It's beautiful, and like I told my mom, there will be a point when the reader might want to stop reading the book, to put it down altogether and shield themselves from the difficulties. But if you do read it...keep going. Finish it. That woman knows how to write...she breaks your heart and feeds your soul.
I'm going to close with a quote from Siri Hustvedt's The Summer Without Men.
Time confounds us, doesn’t it? The physicists know how to play with it, but the rest of us must make due with a speeding present that becomes an uncertain past and, however jumbled the past may be in our heads, we are always moving inexorably toward an end. In our minds, however, while we are still alive and our brains can still make connections, we may leap from childhood to middle age and back again and loot from any time we choose, a savory tidbit here and a sour one there. It can never return as it was, only as a later incarnation. What once was the future is now the past, but the past comes back as a present memory, is here and now in the time of writing. Again, I am writing myself elsewhere. Nothing prevents that from happening, does it? (pp. 177-178)
I feel like other people can form words and thoughts for me better than I can these days.
[amanda]
[title quote: Bob Dylan]
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