The Present is Cancelled
The current state of my life…
I’ve had a lot of ideas lately, but, when searching for some kinetic energy to implement them, I somehow come up empty.
Lazy is a dirty word. At least, it is in my vocabulary. How about yours? While we are all doing our patriotic duties and staying home while this virus runs its course, I find myself overwhelmed to the point of standstill. But while my eyes refuse to open before 12pm, my legs refuse to do their (very needed) daily stretches, and my arms, fingers, hands refuse to put in the work of doing my hair, putting on makeup, or shaving those hairy legs, my mind still runs at the speed of light. Take this text I sent to a friend the other night:
Time too is weird. The whole world is in limbo. It’s like I’m literally straddled between my past and my future and presence doesn’t exist unless it’s a virtual presence. And even then, the virtual isn’t entirely present. So then I’m grasping for some sort of presence.
Forgive my grammar and my improper use of the word literally. It was coming up on 2am, and I’m still 22 years-old. Even though I may have been completely delirious, I thought to myself, am I actually onto something here? Our lives, for now, are operating entirely in the virtual sphere. We don’t need to be psychological experts to know that this is no good for mental health. Usually, the most detrimental side effect to sharing our lives online is FOMO. But now, FOMO is on pause. There’s nothing to be missed. There’s nothing happening. But something is brewing, percolating, in progress. I’m reluctant to share anything that is a “final product” at the moment, but I’m more than willing to show progress and progression. In our heavily-filtered Instagram posts, our insanely curated (seriously, why?) TikToks, and our braggadocious live announcements on Facebook, we demonstrate how afraid we are of showing our process.
Thus, I have created this blog! Welcome. Thank you so much for reading if you’ve made it this far. In later posts, I plan to discuss and review particular aspects of art and culture. Some of these may be reflections of current productions (I anticipate mostly theatrical), but some of these also may be about things I have just been thinking about for a long time. Whatever is percolating. I’m going to bring us out of limbo here one step at a time. I’m going to encourage us to talk, to have dialogue, to confront what has been bugging us for a long time, but what we haven’t been able to get to because our lives have simply been too “in the way” up until now.
Some of these posts may be polished and academic sounding, others may be entirely free form and abstract. Some might even be full on rants. Let’s see what happens.
