December 1 – Day 75

I heard a great line tonight. Stephanie was crying on my bed after a few too many drinks about the stressful run-through we had had this afternoon. Things hadn’t gone the way she wanted and I was trying my best to aid her through her intoxicated artistic crisis. She moaned through tears and a little snot, that the problem was her Emo and her Ego. The ego part is clear. We are bull-headed artists who have lots of stubborn insecurity issues to deal with but it was the Emo part that intrigued me. We are the Emo generation, waxing and wailing about our emotional sufferings and if there was any place in the world that epitomized the manifestations of Emo it would be Russia, a people that pride themselves on their pain. This conversation stopped me cold in part because of the other crazy conversations I had had throughout the day. There are moments when I look my reflection in other people’s eyes and I look so clear and yet so different from the person I was before that it is hard to believe that it is real. First, I was talking to Galina, my cinematography teacher about distribution rights and international access of Russian films and I felt myself get all flush with excitement. I knew I must sound utterly ridiculous to the rest of my classmates who loathe the business of the industry but I didn’t care. I love this stuff, unapologetically, and I don’t think it makes me any less of an artist. Everyone always wants you choose one path or the other but why can’t you have both. The world seems so much larger when the concept of impossibility removed from the equation. Then, after that rather tense run-through, I set out on my date with Sammie. Sammie is one of the few people on this trip that I hadn’t gotten to know that well but always really liked and tonight I finally pin-pointed why. I asked her out to Gogol Café for margaritas and talked about our experiences here versus back at home and I realized that she is a living, breathing Beatles song. Till the day I die, when I think of Sammie Granburg, I will think of Let It Be. She is that person, the one who has found the way to exist in this crazy theatre world without all the drama. She is never a bitch. She is never rude. And she is never weak. She gets that certain things are with invoking your passions and certain things aren’t, and never before in my life has such a way of existence seemed so appealing. I somewhat begrudgingly look back conversations I had over the last year and think, damn they were right! Why couldn’t I see? And now I do. So tonight when Steph sat there crying about not getting her way, I could see myself, my former self, in her arguments and shared some advice a guy once gave me about thinking it through and figuring out if it really, really matters. Not every issue has to be a battle. Some things just aren’t worth the drama. It is actually quite possible to set aside all the emotion and ego and just let it be.