Hello World!

I like that coding sample. I don’t know much about coding but I know that, and I like it. This entry is mainly to test out the word editor. (And it’s already crashed on me once, inauspicious, WordPress, inauspicious.)  So behind the cut, I think goes more detail about me.  But I won’t toggle to full screen.  I’ve learned my lesson. I’ve been writing online in one fashion or another since 2001, but it’s always been haphazard, whatever is on my mind from navel gazing to a laundry list of the day’s chores (which often included doing the laundry because I hate doing it enough to tell the whole world).  But it’s time to separate the bigger thoughts from the chicken scratches that can go in my own little diary elsewhere.

Snap your own self, WordPress, blockquoting crashed the page again!  Right then, no blockquoting either.  How bout indenting then?

“We’re actors! We’re the opposite of people!” –“player” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, by Tom Stoppard

Works for me.  Anyway, let’s try some bullet points. There’s probably a lot of my background that might help to know, or at least it’s part and parcel of what I want to share.

• I think a lot. Maybe way too much, maybe about the wrong things. I think about thinking. I think about my thoughts and what they mean. It’s probably what I do best; or at least it’s what I do most.
• Theatre. It’s what I am, what I do and how I see the world.  I’m just about always contemplating how something plays; I have for as long as I can remember. I’ve spent the last decade assuming my calling was offstage as a dramaturg, stage manager and director.  Before that I earned my BA in Theatre from USC (’99). Irritating circumstances have kept me from a Master’s degree (time, then money), but the idea still floats around in my periphery with attached feelings of “man, wouldn’t that just rock!”
• I spent a lot of time thinking acting wasn’t quite what I ought to do when it came to the stage. But I’ve been reassessing that idea over the past year.  I’ve gotten into voice acting and through it I’ve rediscovered the unadulterated joy of the art that got me into theatre in the first place.  That’s the upside. The downside (I guess?) is that I have to market this love so people will pay me so I can keep doing it.  I’m a terrible salesperson.
• Linguistics. I’m bilingual and working on becoming trilingual. I’ve found the differences in approaches to communication just fascinating and I’m always curious to see how people’s points of view inform their speech patterns and vice versa.  I thought the play in meaning coverage between Spanish and English was fun…but then I started studying Japanese.  Sugoi!
• Communication. Now here is where the topics start to get blurred, because to me all of these are similar, just a different discipline for looking at the same thing.  Communication of course covers linguistics, but stagecraft must also be a part of it.  To me though, stagecraft is communication.  It relies on inherent signals in society to inform and share, and cultural semiotics are most quickly identified in every instance of theatre.  But I get ahead of myself.  I love investigating how ideas are shared and the opposite, or maybe the inversion, how the same experience can be had and result in two completely different ideas.  Neuroscience falls under this investigation, though my appreciation is utterly that of a dilettante.
• Faith and good works.  Honestly, this just thickens the web between theatre and communication, but I can’t find a quick way to explain it.  I express my faith best when I serve others, when I work for peace and justice, and when I do my damndest uh, level best to improve this world, even if the difference is only that of a drop of water in an ocean.  I’m a Catholic and there are Fransiscans in the family, if that makes any difference.  But that’s not it for me as far as religion goes.  In any case, the writing here, I expect, will stick to abstractions rather than hard theology.  And I’m not particularly interested in arguing religion.
• Philosophy-ish. Bringing it all back ’round, the thinking-too-much has been around since I was little, however when was much further along in my formative years I encountered a certain Immanuel Kant and shit hasn’t been the same ever since.  Reading up on philosophy continues, albeit slowly.  As it does expect there to be entries here on my analysis.  Also, expect me to suddenly bust out some Hume-tastic navel gazing and the occasional Socratic discourse.  It’s just what I do.
• I also drink.

So, now that that’s out of the way I can rest easy that I have a shiney new blog, have exposed my soft underbelly to the entire world and thoroughly bored anyone who might have harbored any interest in me.  My job here is done.