This is my very first journal entry. I don't really know what to put here, but it feels like I ought to get the ball rolling somehow. First off, I don't have a digital camera, so until I can track one down or borrow the use of one from a friend, I'm using Oolong as a placeholder avatar. I hope he's not copyrighted or anything.
Second, I feel extremely awkward writing this, for some confusing reasons. I used to be an extraordinarily creative writer. I didn't generate a whole lot of material, but almost everything I did was original and strange. Between that and my stage acting, I didn't have to try very hard to meet people. They came to me, so I could afford to be antisocial and reclusive. But over the last couple of years, my internal strangeness (or my unique point of view, or my creative spark, or whatever) has begun to lift like fog, and I am left flailing. I've become extraordinarily anxious about acting, so I'm not doing that any more, and my writing always comes out prosaic and flat now. That leads to
Three, which is that I am writing a screenplay. Actually, two screenplays. A rather nice fellow I've known for about five years has kept in touch with me, and he remembers all the old short stories and plays I wrote. Poor deluded fool that he is, he thinks I can still write. So we have embarked on a rather large enterprise together, with deadlines every week, where we exchange ten to twenty pages of material and discuss.
I am scared to death about it.
Meanwhile, I have begun to delve into my own feature-length screenplay, with this same nice fellow's encouragement and faith. I am only in the outline stages of this one, but I oscillate between thinking it's the most truthful, genuine, personal piece of film about a psychic guy and a potential serial killer I've ever seen, and how it's the most hackneyed, overdone piece of shit anyone's ever written. Then I start thinking about my teeth, and how nobody will ever love me because of the little gap between the front ones, not to mention my inability to play pool or even sometimes leave the house. And then I get sort of sleepy, as a defense mechanism against my own brain, and six hours later wake up to a blank Word document and another day wasted.
Four, and this is the only thing that has anything to do with me joining this site or starting a journal, I'm very lonely these days. I'm really rather terrified of real life people my age. I never learned how to make small talk, so even when my one friend manages to drag me out to a bar or club or whatever, each conversation I get into reaches the awkward pause phase very very quickly. My friend, of course, makes a ton of new acquaintances every time we do this. The most common thing she hears from them, about me, is, "Your friend didn't seem to be having a very good time." Not "Your friend is really awkward," or "Your friend is catastrophically ugly," or "Friend? You brought a friend?" So I know I'm not having the typical shrinking violet problem. They just think I don't like them. They're wrong. I like them. I don't know how to talk to them. I need lessons.
Holy cow, I think that's enough for today. Tune in tomorrow, all zero of you reading this, for the further adventures of anxiety boy. In the future, this journal will hatch into a baby ostrich.
-Tobin
Second, I feel extremely awkward writing this, for some confusing reasons. I used to be an extraordinarily creative writer. I didn't generate a whole lot of material, but almost everything I did was original and strange. Between that and my stage acting, I didn't have to try very hard to meet people. They came to me, so I could afford to be antisocial and reclusive. But over the last couple of years, my internal strangeness (or my unique point of view, or my creative spark, or whatever) has begun to lift like fog, and I am left flailing. I've become extraordinarily anxious about acting, so I'm not doing that any more, and my writing always comes out prosaic and flat now. That leads to
Three, which is that I am writing a screenplay. Actually, two screenplays. A rather nice fellow I've known for about five years has kept in touch with me, and he remembers all the old short stories and plays I wrote. Poor deluded fool that he is, he thinks I can still write. So we have embarked on a rather large enterprise together, with deadlines every week, where we exchange ten to twenty pages of material and discuss.
I am scared to death about it.
Meanwhile, I have begun to delve into my own feature-length screenplay, with this same nice fellow's encouragement and faith. I am only in the outline stages of this one, but I oscillate between thinking it's the most truthful, genuine, personal piece of film about a psychic guy and a potential serial killer I've ever seen, and how it's the most hackneyed, overdone piece of shit anyone's ever written. Then I start thinking about my teeth, and how nobody will ever love me because of the little gap between the front ones, not to mention my inability to play pool or even sometimes leave the house. And then I get sort of sleepy, as a defense mechanism against my own brain, and six hours later wake up to a blank Word document and another day wasted.
Four, and this is the only thing that has anything to do with me joining this site or starting a journal, I'm very lonely these days. I'm really rather terrified of real life people my age. I never learned how to make small talk, so even when my one friend manages to drag me out to a bar or club or whatever, each conversation I get into reaches the awkward pause phase very very quickly. My friend, of course, makes a ton of new acquaintances every time we do this. The most common thing she hears from them, about me, is, "Your friend didn't seem to be having a very good time." Not "Your friend is really awkward," or "Your friend is catastrophically ugly," or "Friend? You brought a friend?" So I know I'm not having the typical shrinking violet problem. They just think I don't like them. They're wrong. I like them. I don't know how to talk to them. I need lessons.
Holy cow, I think that's enough for today. Tune in tomorrow, all zero of you reading this, for the further adventures of anxiety boy. In the future, this journal will hatch into a baby ostrich.
-Tobin