Thursday, February 17, 2005

Living in the present

A month ago, I decided to stop blogging about things that might happen and wait until they did, especially on the job front.

In the meantime, both plays are cooking. Several actors from my class are going to help with the Next Step play; if they work backstage on Doors, they'll be able to join the company, which puts them upstream for the next play.

My car, which I adore, has come to seem like a horse. I pay the same constant attention to its mutterings and murmurs that I used to, to my horse's gait and ears and moods. Being this intimate and faithful to my car makes me feel... responsible. Good. Like a farmer who knows his cows. These days, I always know my mileage, within 10 miles. I know how the CV joints are sounding, whether the brakes are making that pulling sound, how the steering wheel is doing, when it last got oil, where it is on gas. Routine stuff for many folks, but for me it's a connection at a deeper level.

A friend was talking about the tenacity of habits today; their power and force. I feel like I am building the habit of self-care, in the area of my car; it's muscular.

Just finished Michael Crichton's book, Prey, about a nanotech swam gone wrong. I liked it. It had the same general story-shape as Jurassic Park -- replace "impossibly intelligent, ferocious, man-hunting velociraptor dinosaur" for "impossibly intelligent, ferocious, man-hunting nanotech swarm", and you've got the story. I love all the mind-candy -- bacteria, viruses, evolution, flocking, distributed-data-networks, convergence. Although, he did get basically the whole scale of it wrong; there's no reason to have nanoparticles appear as a black swarm. At their scale, they could invisibly infiltrate practically anything. It's like us appearing as planets.

Rehearsal for Doors was fun tonight; a commedia scene, with commedia blocking. Those beautiful winds, blowing actors across the stage like skeedy-weedies.

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