Tablesaw!

Missed a few days for a few different reasons, but it's been busy. Just today: Work project is under stressed, but still moving smoothly. Managed to find my suit too late to realize I kinda need a new one, but in time to get it dry cleaned before the wedding. Made Spaghetti and meatballs. Groupchat watched the Game Changer finale.

Trying to keep a tighter lid on my journaling time at night, and part of that has to be not letting work grab my attention before bed. I had to put in some extra hours over the past weekend to make deadlines before taking time off, but an end to that, and being more conscientious about using journaling time for journaling and not just procrastinating sleep.

Had a moment of spiraling today, not fully recovered, of uncertain origin. I suspect it's a combination of overscheduling (planning for multiple trips in the near future) and a drop of sociality. I'm definitely starting to feel the lack of theater rehearsal/performances, compounded with seeing a bunch of familiar faces of years past. I need to get out of the stasis of longing for those connections and do some work to maintain them, but the time! The time! Where does it go!?

Maybe I should have taken more time tonight to reestablish those connections, but at least I got one thank you letter out to one of the reunion organizers, and I'll try to get more this week. But some of the priorities of the evening also felt good. I didn't let my emotions dissuade me from cooking dinner, and it turned out okay. The only mistake was not preparing some pasta with what I thought was a dish that could stand on its own. And it kind of did, but would have been better with some farfalle. I also took a long shower and watched a great episode of Crowd Control.

Listened to an episode of Pseudopod while walking the dog, and though I'd hoped for a real banger to mark my return to the series, #1046(!) "Annie's Heart Is a Haunted House" (by Todd Keisling) didn't really do it for me. I don't think it was a great choice of narrator, and the story felt like it traded a bit too much in cliches. Still, I might spend more time getting back into the podcast during "Spooky Season."

Generally the only podcast mainstay has been Shelved by Genre, whose "Lord of the Year" project has reached The Silmarillion. I've chosen not to read along, even though I'd never read it before, and I feel like this might be a good choice. It's fun to try to get by with only knowledge of Catholocism.

We have our Covid/flu boosters, and we planned for a quiet day. Psyche got hit with a bonus nap (after getting a TDAP I didn't have to deal with), but I seem to have mostly escaped. The rest of the day was mostly household computer maintenance: transferring Bandcamp purchases into my music library, continuing to set up non-Google calendars and emails.

I have to say that routing email addresses through aliases using SimpleLogin is a lot of fun for me, and I hope Psyche enjoys it too.

100 in Santa Maria, and higher in a lot of other areas. It's bad. Very, very glad for the portable AC, and for the fact that it doesn't need to be a permanent feature.

Beyond Fest schedule dropped today, and it's very interesting. I'm skipping the Shyamalan retrospective because I just did my own following Media Club Plus, and I'm missing most of the beginning due to family events. Still, tomorrow morning, I'm scrambling for tickets for the last weekend. The plan of attack:

• Devils @ Egyptian (with Aero as backup)
• Wicker
• Victorian Psycho
• Grand Guignol silent shorts
• Rumble in the Bronx
• Bruce Dern marathon

We're thinking about going down for some extra days, but we may just do the free screenings if we do, because those look uniformly interesting.

Drove to LA. Was Rear-ended. Traded cars. Drank alcohol.

Final show went well, nobody too hungover, and the set stayed up until it was time to take it down. Despite a simpler set than last time, we had a third of the cast, so it was kind of rough. There was also a request to dismantle flats completely, which was harder than it sounded. Those flats have been around for a while and many of the screws were covered by many layers of paint. We managed a few, but had to leave three for the future. Not sure if they'll go back into storage or take another round of disassembly. Before strike was over, I knew I was tapped out: overheated, underhydrated, and without even a protein bar to aid me. I took a break, finished off, then treated myself to a glass of wine before I left, relaxing on the couch in the driveway.

It's been fifty-six days since the first read-through, and I think I'm only starting to realize that all those people are going to be out of my life for a while. The previous show, with a big cast and long production time, felt more like ending camp or a school year. Big emotions after a journey of friendship. This feels more like getting transferred from one team or office to another. It seems like no big deal, but, hey, I liked those people, and I liked hanging around all the time. (I've grown accustomed to their et cetera.)

I didn't do cast gifts this time, mostly because I felt too rushed, but I may need to follow up with something after (or while) I'm on vacation.

It was a rough day. I woke up late, having miscounted my snoozes. It was a second day of heat, clouds, and humidity, and the light started to wear on me. A little emotionally hungover from intense conversations the night before, and looking down the barrel of work needed by the end of the week. Maybe should've time-shifted, taken an early nap and committed to some time finishing up the work over the weekend, but I got to the theater late, with meals out of sync, rushing to prepare for the show, which I managed just in time.

Maybe related (as all things interrelate), but recently, I've been thinking about how sad it is that cramerica didn't get to see me on stage. I think he would have enjoyed it. I certainly enjoyed going to his band performances. I haven't really felt to regretful about my time away from theatre, but that's something I regret now.

It was a good house, with a substantial number of at-the-door tickets sold, which did more than enough to counteract the minor hiccups onstage. After the show, a late dinner with Psyche at the only late-night diner around: Denny's. Oh, how we miss Norm's.

Watched the most recent IASIP, and I laughed so hard. All three episodes this season have been great, and I really do appreciate the simplicity and relentless pace of the show that still shaves down their episodes to a TV friendly twenty-three minutes.

Tomorrow, I finally get to see Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

Worked late tonight as part of a production rotation for deployment emergencies. There was one, but I addressed it early, then spent most of the night waiting for other teams to deal with things.

Spent some time reading Peter Brook's The Empty Space. I thought I'd read it before, but I think I'd only read the chapter "The Holy Theatre" as an excerpt before. I'm trying to season the polemics with the appropriate salt, but it's still fun to read about "The Deadly Theatre." I find it amusing, over half a century later to apply the descriptions of Deadly Theatre to cinema in the age of the dying blockbuster: "There are occasional new movements, good new writers and so on, but as a whole, the theatre not only fails to elevate or instruct, it hardly even entertains." That certainly addresses how I feel about the Marvel output. But at the same time, the wide applicability counts against the argument. The Deadly is not theatrical, but aesthetically universal.

Haven't gotten deep into "The Immediate Theatre," but already I have taken a hit.

The actor who believes he may one day play Hamlet has endless energy: the one who sees that the outside world is not convinced he will ever play a lead is already tying himself into painful knots of introspection with a consequent need for self-assertion.

The set finally fell apart, but it wasn't my fault. Talkback with the playwright was fine.

Finished Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen today and really enjoyed it. It's a Gothic Horror in structure, but not in tone, which kept things fresh and moving forward. A show that I thought was just going to be vibes turned out to have a surprising amount of well-structured parallelism and episode focus.

Put out a fire at work quickly and definitively, which felt good.