DREAM: I dreamt I needed to write an editor and a meta-editor

I dreamt last night that I needed to write an editor for my life. Instead of manipulating my life directly, as I have been doing, I need a development environment; an editor.

Rookies write games. Pros write tools to make writing games easier.

The dream went on to show that I also needed to write an editor for my editor. A meta-editor. This editor was more of an optimizer. It optimized for two axes: shimmer and fix. When I woke up, I realized that shimmer meant, "Improve what is already working until it shines," and fix meant, "Fix what is not working."

DREAM - I dreamt I worked for Google

I dreamt last night that I worked for Google. I was surprised to find myself there. They had high ceilings and tall windows. It was not the current Google, but a larger cleaner one. I set off to find out what my job was.

DREAM: I dreamt I invented two levers

Last night, I dreamt I invented two levers.

• One answers questions.
• The other asks them.

You only got to pick one lever, per topic, and only got to pull it once.

I spent the rest of the night dreaming something, then bringing that portion of the dream -- which looked like an aerial view of greenlands, with lakes and streams and roads as seen from above at dusk, all midnight-blue, purply, dotted with yellow lights, with the irregular contours of a county -- to the levers, picking Answer or Question, and receiving the result.

It was surprising how useful a question was.

It was surprising how hard it was to choose. Because, of course, I ALWAYS wanted the answer. It was like Door A and Door Who Knows What The Hell Is Behind This One. And, these were real answers.

I was busy for two hours. I resolved lots of big stuff, and woke up peaceful.

Just before waking, my conscious mind started inserting questions. These clogged up the machinery. They were flat, and not dimensional or whole. The machine was built for whole things.

The last day of 2011

What a glorious unexpected crazy huge fucking year.

Change in a chaotic system begins imperceptibly, in tiny motes, at the edges. 

In the first year of theatre, I did not know it was the first year of theatre, either. The whole time, I thought I was going back to Microsoft in six weeks. I did not know that I would do nothing but theatre for four years, and stay in thrall to theatre for three more years, even after returning to work. Or that I would spend a year in Europe studying it, and become an ensemble theatre director with a sure hand for Chekhov and devising physical theatre. I did not know any of that.

2011 has been that kind of year.

   one day you're eating

   mulberries, then -- you're on a 
   strange road with strangers

This was a year of rending. Things I had held true of myself, I could no longer hold true. Things I had thought and believed, I no longer thought or believed. New, more coherent, more explored pieces of systems of ideas had appeared.

I can point at all the things that happened this year, and yet, I cannot see the pattern. Only points of light.

Points and points and points of light.

When you inject energy into a closed system, there WILL be changes. You cannot predict where or what the changes will be. But you can, with absolute certainty, predict that there will be changes. 
-- Benjamin Ellinger 

I got sick Christmas day with a high fever, and for six days lay in bed, drinking only water, sleeping 20 to 24 hours a day. I was processing, and moulting, burning, fitful, restless, consumed. Solve the puzzle, I kept thinking, as I rolled in fiery slumber. Solve it. But after days, I realized it was not solvable. Trying to, even from the depths, just spiked my fever higher. Finally I let it go until I could think again.

I have leveled up. I have left the level of Do It Alone and entered the level of Do It With Others. Few of my reflexes or habits work, and almost all of them are anti-patterns. It is the shift to working as a system, not a node. 

This was my desktop background all year:

A tsunami isn't a tidal wave but a series of waves—or wave train—in which the first isn't necessarily the most dangerous. Seen from on shore, a tsunami may be more like a rapidly rising tide than a series of giant breaking waves.

When you start to play together and evolve, the first thing that happens is that all your old habits break. It is destruction of a precise and remorseless magnitude.

If I had to name 2011, I would say it was The Year Of Entering The Discrete State Change.

Auditions

I attended the Theatre Puget Sound General Auditions this year. I was a yearly auditor from 1999 - 2001; this is the first time I have attended since then.

This was TPS's first year of "going digital." Auditors received all the actors' headshots and resumes printed out, on regular non-photo paper in a binder, along with a CD of the same. The headshots were numbered, in audition order.

What I noticed is, I have shifted.

I have "leveled up," as gamers say; I have grown. I am committed. My commitment level at DigiPen is intense, as is the commitment level of the students I am working with. They have committed four years of their life, and eighty thousand dollars to this work. I have been here three years, and it has gone by like a spring week. What I notice is that most of the non-equity actors do not register on the same scale of commitment (although many of them likely are); they do not have that solid day-in, day-out feel to them. Interestingly, the Jet City Improv company actors do; they look at home on a stage, real, connected, alive; they look like equity actors, like company actors from other countries. But overall -- only the equity actors feel right to me.

I have gone pro. In all respects.

I felt matter-of-fact about looking into how to hire and pay them. I talked with Rik Deskin, our Equity contact, and said I would be sending him an email. If this is something I can afford, he will work it out with Los Angeles, who handles all the Seattle equity contracts.

DREAM: Black and gold octopus statue in the square / TPS actors

I dreamed that I was in an old stone, thick-walled Polish building -- as if in the Krakow main plaza, overlooking the square. I was looking out through a quiet window (although there was no window; just open air).

The square was covered by the statue of a giant octopus, with its head over 8 feet tall in the center, and the tentacles raying crookedly out to 8 corners of the square. The gold had been burnished in places, by years of children sitting on the tentacles. The head was also gold, with a black patch or leather cap covering about 1/3 of the head. The cap was made of leather (most likely), or possibly obsidian.

The octopus statue had two eyes, which gazed my direction. As I watched, the octopus blinked its eyes, and winced its head slightly, softening; then it straightened back up.

I was horrified to realize that it was alive. I felt like we were torturing it. It seemed calm and peaceful, though, and did not seem to be in pain. I ran down to the sea, and brought back a container of water, which I poured on its leg. I could not remember if octopi could live out of water or not; I thought not, although in the dream they clearly could, as this octopus had been there for years.

I realized that the octopus was almost entirely made of gold. Over 85% of it was solid gold, like the Tibetan buddha statues. If I could turn the rest of it to gold, it would come back to life, and return to the sea. Almost all of it was healed (gold), except the third of its head which was covered in, and made of, black leather or obsidian. (From my window, it looked like obsidian from my window, but close-up, it looked like supple well-used black leather.)

--------------

INTERPRETATION

The octopus is me.

I have almost completely healed. But something -- a third of my head? -- still needs to be healed. I am not in pain, but am not alive either; and am not in my element. I am respected, loved, a fixture, a thing of formal power and beauty; a central part of the town square. I am almost entirely immobile. I am big.

I think the missing third is theatre; or body; or love; or the three, melted into one. The other two thirds, software/games and Core Protocols, are rich and fully developed. The other two thirds also refers to Ben and Chris, my DigiPen partners, who seem more fully realized to me.

I decided to hire actors from the Theatre Puget Sound regional auditions, to develop my next piece with and on, at least to the staged reading level.

You can never enter the river the same way, twice.

This is different, all right.

One semester into Goddard's MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts

I have completed my first semester. It was a rough, but illuminating ride.

I had not planned well for how to add a fulltime graduate program to my already over-full life; so in the middle of my first semester, I fell blazingly sick, until I figured out how to interweave the two.

The Goddard MFA is pretty consistently a 5-semester practice of increasing clarification. What people come out with is always related to what they come in wanting -- but it is distilled, purified, shifted in some way.

I entered my MFA with a focus on high-performant ensembles and the Core Protocols; but found in the first semester that my connection to theatre had deepened while dormant. I have shifted.

My current two areas of focus are Theatre Directing/Devising and Writing; the high-performant team work is a topic of much of the writing.

All of this sits, like a jewel in a rich and glorious setting, in the ever-fertile, ever-changing software laboratory of my dreams, which is the DigiPen Institute of Technology, and the software programmers and game teams I teach.

There is a line, in the Brad Pitt movie, "Legends of the Fall," after all the drama of the first couple acts is done, and before the drama of the final climax has begun -- which goes: Then Tristan entered into the sweet heart of his life.

That is how I feel. I am in the sweet heart of my life. If I were to stay here for 30 or 40 years, it would feel like an extremely short time. The rounds of the DigiPen year are as deep and orderly as at a monastery, and the personal practice is as intense; it feels like the Odin; it feels like me. I find that the longer I work here, the deeper I blossom.

I have found that most rare of things, a true rich creative home.

MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College

This is the campus where I will be getting my MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts. It is the old Fort Warden grounds, in Port Townsend, Washington, which Goddard College rents for their Intensive Residency programs.

I love this place. I attended a week-long Jazz Composition and Arranging workshop there as a junior in high school. They hired a U.S. Marines band to play our compositions.

I have twice before applied to MFA programs. In 1994, I was accepted into the University of Oregon's MFA in Printmaking program. In 2004, I was a finalist at Yale's MFA in Theatre Directing program and had completed the interview before I withdrew. In both cases, I decided not to go.

I think what stopped me, in the end, is that neither one felt like software; neither the students and teachers were software developers. I am a hybrid. I am both a traditional artist and a software creator, to a professional level; and it has been my life's work to figure out how to create a life with these in it.

If I am creating anything, I want to be creating it with software developers. This is true even if the thing I am creating is a choir, or a theatre troupe, or a symphony, or a company. It is just as true, however, that if I am creating art, I want to be creating it to absolutely the highest standards of that art.

GODDARD'S MFA PROGRAM

The best fit I have found so far is a meta-program, Goddard College's MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts. This is a rigorously structured design-your-own-degree graduate program. It is perfect for someone who knows what they want, and wants to pursue it intensively.

Goddard was a traditional college for decades, before they decided to close their traditional programs and focus only on Intensive Residency programs. They had been the first to invent and pioneer the Intensive Residency model, with their legendary Creative Writing MFA. This spawned more than 40 similar programs in schools across the US and Europe. Thirty years later, Goddard decided to close their traditional programs and focus solely on Intensive Residency offerings. Their goal is to become the best Intensive Residency college in the world. "You are lucky you had such an immaculate record as a traditional college all those decades," said their accreditation board, "Or we would never let you do something like this."

This means I can stay in my house, in my life, working at my beloved DigiPen, and still get my degree. Every three weeks I submit a packet of work over the internet. Twice a year, all the faculty and students fly in for 8-day Intensive Residencies, during which we have showings, seminars, 1-on-1 meetings, semester reviews, and design the next semester's work. It is a two-and-a-half year program, three years with permission.

Goddard's focus and discipline is on whether you is following your own authentic artistic path. They do not care what medium you work in, or whether you move from one medium to another; they encourage your work to have a social component, as all art is connected to the world. They care strongly that you do the work; that you have intentional practices; that you do your work at a professional level; that you contextualize and articulate your work; that your work is authentic; and that you are establishing practices which will carry you as an artist for the rest of your life. Three years is not long in the life of an artist.

THE MFA IS A TERMINAL DEGREE

The MFA, Master of Fine Arts, is the terminal degree of the creative and performing arts. A PhD means you are an expert scholar of the field; an MFA means you are a virtuoso performer of the field. Concert pianists, painters, dancers, and writers get MFAs. In the academic world, scholars teach scholars, and performers teach performers. With a PhD in theatre, you teach theatre history. With an MFA in theatre, you teach acting or directing. An MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts is a good fit for the work I currently do, which is teaching game creators, in year-long project classes, how to make games.

I have noticed that people who truly long for an MFA or who truly long for a PhD, are always correct about their choice of degree. The PhD students profoundly love knowledge, research, scholarship. The MFA students profoundly love creating, in ever more skillful fashion. I don't think it matters which one you get, as long as you choose the one you love.

THE FOCUS OF MY MFA

This brings us to today, July 5, 2010. I have gotten the financial work done. I qualify for loans. I am half-way through my application. And I am walking around thinking deliciously about, "If I could do an MFA in anything, what would I do it in?"

I am definitely a creative artist. I have spent 40 years in these fields:
Music - 15 years
Dance/Choreography - 10 years + 8 years of sports
Art - 14 years
Writing - all my life
Theatre/Directing - 12 years formally, but grew up with it; wrote my first plays at age 8
Videogames/software - 30 years
High-performant ensemble creation - 13 years

I walk around thinking about this all the time:

What do I want from my MFA?
How shall I structure my MFA?
How can I involve DigiPen students in this?
What would be even better than that?