Listening:
Random tracks from All Ages, Bad Religion

Lately at work I've taken longer and longer to finish my work and have averaged in the last month or two one day a week when I don't finish my work. Today I was assigned an abnormally high load and I finished it nearly two hours ago. I grabbed some more work and finished it too. Starting more now would be silly...so now I'm bored.

I've been wracking my brains for something interesting to write here. I haven't come up with much of any Import. I'm growing numb to the news (which is sad, really), work is still work and barely worth the effort it takes to complain about it and my friends are mostly in a holding pattern, managing not to draw (much) drama their way (or else they're just not telling me, which is actually fairly smart of them). But I don't figure I'd want to write about my friends cause they might read this and get mad that I talked about them publically. Or that I revealed some inner thought or feeling about them here and not to them in person.

*shrug* My journal is space for me to say and think what I want and any reader that isn't me is merely a guest. Bitching about what I write here is like complaining about how I've chosen to decorate my bathroom. It only carries weight if I have chosen to write libelous material, broken with a legal contract or written something that might incite others to commit crime. And that goes the other way too. If I read about myself in someone else's journal I have a *really* strong urge (usually) to write to that person and set some part of the record straight...or something.... But really, something that journaling has taught me is that opinions and points of view are incredibly valuable in figuring people out. They write about themselves and the world and how it all looks from behind their eyes and it's all just hopelessly interesting.

But. I have this journal see. And I want to say something insightful about me and my view of the world. So I don't really know what posses me to write about what I did yesterday or what I'm planning to do this weekend. How does that enlighten you? And yet I feel the deep-seated need to tell you that I'm going to a vampire game tonight (I don't really know why), I'm going to my parents house tomorrow to clear out some of my books from the bookcase so my sister can move in baby stuff, I'll likely do some laundry and take out my sister at some point and have that "sisterly" chat we've never (EVER) had, and finally have dinner with the family. Then that night I'm hoping to make it out to the Dungeon and dance and drink until I can't do either anymore. Sunday there's a Garou game.

What part of that did you need to know?

Well, "need" is a strong word of course. You don't "need" to read this journal. You just keep coming back for more, you sicko.

It's the very basis of absurdism, I suppose. We know there's no point. There is only so far that communication through language will take us before we start to come up empty. We can only rationalize what we do for so long until just give up and say "I like it cause I like it."

On a fluke I studied absurdism during my junior year in high school for a theatre class project and to get a better handle on it (cause it actually doesn't have a strong presence in theatre) I backed up and studied more of the basis of modern theatre and read up on Stanislavsky and Peter Brook. A) Stansilavsky is *WAY* outdated in this day and age, but who knows where we would be in this day and age without Stanislavsky (and of course Elizabeth Hapgood *snickers*) and B) Peter Brook is a fucking genious, though, of course, he knows that, thank you.

But I found that a lot of absurdism went the distance like abstract art and surrealism and in a lot of ways was more "true" than straight up drama. Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett were in some ways more honest about human interaction than Sam Shephard and Tennesee Williams. Before you begin the stoning of your faithful writer, I need to point out that it is not easy to see the "truth" in the works of the absurdist. Anyone who has tried to slug their way through some Ionescu has probably wondered if he made his stuff hard to read and unreasonably weird because life is just like that or if he was trying to add to our misery and laughing at us behind it all. Or heck, just try to read the first five pages of "Waiting for Godot." I'll give you a dollar for every page you can successfully explain to me.

But that's why the absurdists were more true and harder to decipher. If they came out and explained themselves in a clear language they would be falling into the trap that modernist are stalled by and end up talking about the interaction between people rather than addressing the circumstances that gave rise to people's interactions.

The trouble with this thesis of course, is that I can't present it in anything other than language in this journal format. I like theatre because it can transend language while still being formally based in it.

Anyway, I'd go on but it's finally time to leave.