Less Twitter abuse Now, I pride myself on coming up with clever tweets and choosing which quotes are funny enough to copy down, but certainly not every single tweet I tweet makes good use of the site.  I am one of the first to complain about someone “over-tweeting” and filling up my Twitter feed–but I’m also one of the first to do just that.  So I am going to limit myself.  No more than three per day, unless I am attending a particularly amusing event or embarking on a particularly tweet-worthy adventure.

Blog More Just that.  I need to get back in the habit of using full sentences and fleshing out ideas.  It’s good for the thought muscles, especially since I won’t be in school for a little while now, and I need to exercise my brain.  Once a week.

Be less apologetic I tend to apologize for all the silly things I do, and even apologize for apologizing.  It doesn’t do anybody any good to simply tell them you are sorry and that you are going to change your ways.  Instead, I am going to make an effort to actually make those changes, rather than repeating over and over again that I should make them.

Get back into the yoga habit This summer, I got myself into an almost-daily yoga routine.  It was really nice.  I felt really good physically and emotionally, and it was just good to have a routine to start my day with.  But then I fell out of the habit when I moved and my life went to shit.  Having moved back a couple weeks ago, I would simply like to start up this routine once more.  Nothing too strenuous, I don’t have any silly weight loss goals, or any dietary plans, just a little daily dose of spirituality, meditation, and stretching.

Early to bed, early to rise Along with the above, this summer, I also got myself in the habit of getting to sleep at a humane hour and waking up by, at least, eight in the morning.  I always feel much better about the day when I start it early, so I am going to make the effort to get back into the swing of this.

Learn to properly balance my checkbook and keep up with it That is pretty straight-forward.  And a pretty big deal.  I cannot have my account overdrawn one more time.  Along with that, I would like a paying job, a new place to live, and a car that doesn’t require regular trips to the shop–but those will come in time.

Happy New Year, universe!

Recycling the method that worked so well for him in Chicago, Marshall sets his musical numbers in the imagination of his main character, but rather than the stage of a young woman’s Vaudevillian fantasies, Nine‘s interior stage is concerned with the subconscious conflicts of the struggling genius, Guido Contini, at work.  His imagined performances are a reconfiguring of his real life into something he can better manage–and direct.  Perhaps I should not have downloaded the soundtrack and put it on repeat in my car CD player, while making long commutes into and out of Boston, but at least the first fourth of the film drags as if the plot and dialogue are merely devices to move the story from one song to the next.  As the beginning of the film quickly reveals the protagonist’s dilemma,–that he has yet to write the script for the film that is about to go into production–we wait, almost impatiently, through a few minutes of strained characterization, for the moments between, when we are transported to a beautifully lit stage filled with music, vibrant costumes, and the Rome and women of Guido’s imagination.  We wait, almost as he waits, living his real life through the lens of his theatrical fantasies.  The film is quite smart in this way, but the shift from reality to fantasy lacks the smoothness and fluidity so deftly handled by Marshall in Chicago, until we get used to being tossed back and forth between the worlds in this way.

I think it comes as no great surprise that the moment we are finally aligned to the flow of the film comes with what can almost be considered the title song, “Be Italian.”  Those of us familiar with the Broadway productions will want for the rest of the song’s original title, “Ti Voglio,” if only because the added verses would lengthen the number.  Fergie gives a surprisingly strong performance, and while her one short scene does not give her any room at all to prove her acting skills, her vocal prowess is the turning point of the entire movie in terms of cinematic impact.  Is it any wonder that this scene, the scene that finally draws us into an previously disappointing film, is the most reminiscent of Chicago?  Marshall has a formula, and so long as he doesn’t try to stray too far, it really works for him.  The imagined realm of song and dance, the legions of fishnetted women stomping rhythmically across a vast stage, banging tambourines against their breasts, and belting atop wooden chairs–all familiar to Marshall’s work, and all truly masterful musical filmmaking.  The drop of a curtain of red lighting and red costumes on the words “it is in your blood” is the first moment that gave me chills, and, thankfully, it was not the last.  ”Be Italian” finally ushers in the Nine we eagerly paid our eight dollars to see.  It is evocative of the sexuality of the creative process of the genius, the conflict of what it means to be Guido Contini, what it means to truly “be Italian,” and the very dark and vibrant roots of a story called Italia.

After Fergie’s brief yet powerful performance, the film finally begins to tell the story it has been alluding to for the first quarter, and while the world outside of Guido’s imagination is still unnecessarily bland in comparison, and while just the volume might enhance the quality of the songs themselves, the film gains in several respects from this point on.  Not the least of these gains is the eventual appearance of Guido’s wife, Louisa.  Marion Cotillard offers the film the depth it so sorely lacks until this point.  While we are meant to sympathize with our struggling genius, it is difficult to do so as he shies fitfully away from the paparazzi, chainsmokes alone in his grand hotel suite, and catches his breath in bed with his mistress, and it is not until this personal conflict surfaces that the film ensnares us.  But ensnare us, Cotillard does.  While a vocally weak follow-up to Fergie, her rendition of “My Husband Makes Movies” is heartbreakingly poignant, and with tears in her eyes, she can’t help but make us fall in love with her.  In fact, one of the film’s most striking moments is the beginning of the new song, “Take It All,” as a silky glove punches through a beaded curtain to the introductory clash of a drumset.  The glove is followed by boa-laden Cotillard, who performs a striptease that somehow manages to be simultaneously sultry, violently angry, and heartwrenchingly tragic.

I do not mean, however, to shortchange the rest of the cast in saying that the first quarter of the film is lackluster.  Penelope Cruz gives an especially stirring performance of “A Call From the Vatican,” not only telling but dancing “all the things” she is planning for her lover, and–my, my, my–very convincingly.  Dame Judi Dench is a delight, as always, in the role of Guido’s costume designer and confidante.  While her “Folies Bergère” is overtly silly, she wears her top hat and drags her twenty-foot feather boa with all the class she has always exuded.  In the vein of Fergie’s spectacular and all-too-short appearance, Kate Hudson, as the alluring American fashion columnist, give a knock-out performance of “Cinema Italiano.”  It is not wonder Marshall chose her exceptionally fun number to leave his audience with, as it plays over the curtain-call-like closing credits.  Sophia Loren is angelic as Mamma, and while she lacks any maternal warmth in her scenes with Young Guido (seeming more like an aloof grandmother), she plays the perfect Italian matriarch in her moments with adult Guido.  Nicole Kidman, as Contini’s star muse, plays the part of the jaded diva notably well, but unfortunately not well enough to outshine her dull vocals.  I will forgive her in this, however, as her one song, “In a Very Unusual Way,” is sports a poorly constructed bridge and a rather flat ending, which she does handle as well as she is able.  Her tears are real, as Kidman’s usually are, and she is fitting in the role of the lithe, golden muse upon a pedestal.  Daniel Day-Lewis’ opening monologue on how we kill our films in the process of making them, as he chews subtly over something mysterious, and sings while scaling the empty set of his imagined stage, is entrancing enough.  He almost succeeds in making Guido a more likable character, but though he would “like to be Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, and not have to believe in God,” we do not get down on our knees and feel any sympathy for this character until nearly the very end of the film.  However, Guido’s final number, his hunched silhouette in front of the projector screen, as the film rolls out, asks us to sympathize.  Indeed, it is hard do otherwise when Day-Lewis tears the sheet from the theater wall (seemingly from the very wall of the theater in which we sit), and the black and white faces continue to flicker over his broken form.

The vagueness with which film ends may leave some viewers dissatisfied, as is the danger of open-ended conclusions, but Marshall orchestrates a satisfying finale, using the final moments to eventually bridge the imagined and the real in order to portray the creative process of the artist in full.  The real-life women put on their makeup, are paraded out onto the set, which is now behind Guido, as he realizes his fantasies on the “real” stage, with actors, before his camera.  He never succeeds in telling the story of Italia, but that story, the story of the whole of cultural and personal identity, is impossible to tell without killing the reality that the film is based upon.  Suddenly, Guido’s tale comes full-circle.  He is back in his director’s chair, and as his nine-year-old self sits there in the middle with him, his muses at his back, entangled in the fishnets of his imagination, and his story is created before him, Louisa stands in the shadows in the between world with him.  He cannot see her, and he never will, but she smiles, as the final word of the film leaves Guido’s lips: “Action.”

First off, Simmons is a wonderful little community.  The people I’ve met are lovely, intelligent, fun.  The professors are challenging, caring, everything I loved about the professors at Chatham.  My grades, while not stellar, are falling into the B+ to A- range, which is hardly a thing to complain about.  And for not having put an ounce of effort into anything (that is to say, without even reading most of the material), I think I’m doing rather well, if I do say so myself.  I only wish my grades reflected my feelings, or that the environment didn’t work in tandem with my personality.  On the contrary, according to all the elements in play, things should be making perfect sense.  But they aren’t.  I can’t help but succumb to this overwhelming feeling of “This is not what I want to be doing right now, or where I want to be.”  I’m homesick, it’s true.  I have never been outside of South-Western PA for this long ever.  And with not certainty whether I’ll ever get back anytime soon, even for Christmas, I’m feeling low on top of things not fitting together in the ways I imagined they would.  I’ve always portrayed myself as a huge advocate for travel and Striking it Out on Your Own, but now I wonder why and if that’s really what I want to be doing.

But then of course it is.

But then I find that less and less do I know what I want to be doing.

At this point I have several options: 1) stick it out, it’s only another year and a half; things might change, I might find myself with an awesome employment opportunity, I might make a life out of this situation yet; 2) take a break, but stay here; 3) take a break and go home and work and think about things and explore options; 4) jump into another graduate program somewhere else.  Today–and every day I will tell you a different story–option 3 tastes the sweetest.  First off, I am feeling more creative than analytical at the moment, and I want to milk this moment for all it’s worth before it disappears again.  So taking time off, which I honestly believe I should have done in the first place, seems like a fair plan.  I also enjoy the idea of being able to relax and consider things from a more constructed place.  If I head home, I would have the support I need.  I could work, and potentially find a place of my own in the city, and then explore graduate options in six months or a year.  I might even return to Boston, if that’s where things lead, but I don’t have to.

Of course,–and here’s the kicker–unless I stick it out, no matter what I do, I’ll have to swallow my pride, and that, my friends, is the most painful part of this whole scenario.

So I bought this audiobook today, The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield.  I bought it because it looked decent, it was read by Lynn Redgrave and Ruthie Henshall, and it was only fifteen dollars.  But somehow this book, which I don’t think I would find nearly as engrossing on paper, captivated me for my entire hour and a half drive into Boston.  Sure, I zoned once or twice, I turned my attention away to traverse the rainy, bleak Massachusetts highway now and then, but as a whole, I was totally and completely in Setterfield’s world.  I even chuckled at funny moments.  Almost never to do find things in the written word funny enough to laugh out loud.  There’s something about reading to me that distances me so much from the story that it seems nearly impossible to “See” the action before.  I would wager this is due to my being a product of the modern age of television and movies (though I don’t watch a lot of television, and I can turn off a movie just as easily as I can close a book), but I think there is also something totally gripping for me to hear the words spoken aloud, emoted, even acted out to a certain degree.

Then I remembered, as I was sitting through a class discussion on Victorian fairytales, I didn’t read as a child.  In fact, I didn’t start buying books and trying to get through them until I was well into high school.  My parents didn’t even read to me very much.  Oh, sure, my grandmothers had a few books at their houses that they read to me when I came to visit and plopped myself in their laps (Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Toads and Diamonds, being notable favorites), but what I had more of than books were books on tape.  You know those children’s books (often Disney) that came with a cassette?  It was those things I grew up on.  I had stacks of them.  I don’t remember the books at all, but the tapes I knew by heart.  There are countless videos of me at age three or four reciting Sleeping Beauty (which was my favorite, if you haven’t caught on) and stories of Sesame Street characters by heart.  I listened, I memorized, and I performed what I had heard.  So, really, storytelling for me, has always been auditory, performative, and these books I now love to spend money on and hold in my hands and lean over with a steaming cup of tea or extra sweet coffee, these texts I love to stare at while I’m thinking about the coffee or the day or the homework I’m not doing or the paper I could be writing–I have not been fitted for these things.

Now, I’m not sure what the point of this discovery is.  It’s not that I have an inherent hate for the written word, and that I think books should be done away with.  On the contrary, I still love stories and the way good words sound when put together with talent and a proper ear, but that’s just it!  I love the sound.  This explains not only my difficulty in reading silently, but my interest in theater, and my earliest poetry: all sound and no sense.  When I heard The Thirteenth Tale during my drive today, I was totally engrossed.  I laughed at funny moments in plot, I even smiled serenely when I heard a beautiful line of imagery (because it is a nice book), but I don’t think this would have been possible if I had been reading it in my room over a cup of coffee.  It’s not so devastatingly beautiful a work of writing that it would transcend my natural (anatural?) tendencies to disconnect from written words.

Ultimately (and I’ll just stop, because I don’t really know where I’m going with this), I think I need to start a collection of audiobooks.  And that that is, is.

Lately, I’ve been grappling with the idea of “internet personae” and internet friends.  For instance: can we accurately portray ourselves via an online medium (but do we ever accurately portray ourselves, for that matter?)?  Can we establish meaningful relationships with people we have known only via this medium?  Can we offer real life, long-distance relationships adequate attention via this medium?  A year ago I would have said, “No,” to all of these.  I do not feel like I can accurately portray myself without physically being present (although, I confess, I have had a long-time battle with the idea of identity and perceived identities as it is).  So often we say of photographs, “Oh, it doesn’t do you justice!”  I like to believe this is because there is something extra to a human being (or plant, or animal, or even inanimate object), which cannot be captured by a photograph.  This is a discussion for another time, but my point is that it seems, to me, to be more than a little difficult to be actively present on the internet.  This is not to say I think the internet is inherently bad.  In fact, I am rather fond of the internet.  It’s a wonderful tool for networking and researching, a good source of fast news, a handy way to keep in touch with people (quite a bit more convenient than the Pony Express, I’m sure), and a nice little distraction for idle times (and times of procrastination), but not anything of value in so far as personal growth and relationships are concerned.

Until recently, that is, I pretty firmly believed this.  But lately, I find myself more and more “present” on the internet.  That is, I am doing more with blogs and Twitter and Facebook and journals and what have you.  I find, though, that making myself “present” in the sense that I mean here is nothing short of a struggle.  Maybe this is because in person, I am the girl who nods and smiles and laughs.  This persona is difficult, if not impossible, to carry into the realm of the internet.  Therefore, I find that it’s a constant uphill climb to make myself “seen” and “heard” and to establish an identity.  Here, I find that my identity becomes reliant entirely upon recognition.  Because, in the same way that it is impossible to be the girl who smiles and nods, on the internet, it becomes nearly impossible to be reassured of your existence unless someone goes out of their way to let you know that they hear you.  And people do not do this unless your most recent “tweet” is particularly noteworthy, or they happen to catch your Facebook status at precisely the right moment–which is, of course, a fair practice; we can’t expect everyone we know to recognize every internet squeak we make.  If that were the case, we would overwhelm the internet with a constant wave of snaps, props, pokes, and @backs.

And this is what sparks this entry.  I’ve come to realize (or hypothesize?) that one of the major ways in which the internet works (specifically networking sites) revolves around methods of ego-fluffing and masturbatory tricks of clever wordplay and well-timed squawking.  And maybe this is just how the world works on a larger scale, but I think with the internet, it becomes less avoidable.  And maybe this is all because I already have a major invisibility complex as it is, and the internet only serves to make me hyper-aware of the attention I do or do not get.  Yes, I am aware of the irony of posting a blog entry about this very subject.  A first entry in a new blog, no less!  Will I fret over whether anyone ever reads this blog?  Probably.  Will I feel unvalidated when no one comments on this entry?  Most likely.  Will I lose too much sleep over it all?  Doubtful.

While all of this is going on, my opinions on internet personae and internet communication have not changed all that much.  There is something to that heavily cliched importance placed upon real-life interactions, and I still feel like it is lacking when one communicates solely through letters and fonts and emoticons.  What is the important difference then?  And can important friendships be forged over the internet?  I’ve heard that it happens, and if it’s possible, I would certainly not turn my nose up at it.  I suppose the impetus to these thoughts is that I have spent the last four or five months far away from almost all of my friends, and have taken to building up new relationships with people I know only in very specific contexts online.  Part of me has projected my need for socializing onto such folks, and I have begun to think of these relationships as very important to me.  But the other part of me remains tremendously lonely, and has been subjected to a feeling of deep disconnect with these same folks, as their existence to me is entirely contingent on internet mediums.

I imagine a rainy, cold day is a poor choice for opening a blog.  When you spend the afternoon listening to listless pianos while watching the rain outside your window, you might want to consider taking in thoughts rather than putting them out for all the world to see.  But if you do see this post, oh, little gnomes and fairy folk who lurk about these fanciful and humble corners of the internet, tell me: what do you think about the Internet?  Friendships built or sustained through the medium?  The need for validation as an integral part of internet usage?