Day 22 of Detox-- Looking more "present" than ever

What defines "strength" in a person? There's the physically strong, the emotionally strong, the ethically strong, etc. But how can you say a person is "strong?

I know that's a weird place to start, kinda outta left field. But not having the distraction of Facebook has certainly forced me to be a bit more "present" than I was in the past few months. Finally sent out that audition email for the 2014 NJ Ren Faire, been getting back to the gym and can consisently do at least a mile now. Might start looking into what it takes to be a Zumba instructor and saving up for that. Looked into the firearm safety classes out on Ft. Dix and came up with the hunting and fishing license class that I'll hopefully be taking in the coming weeks. Took the first step this week in cleaning out some things that I've been holding on to for various sentimental reasons. Will be starting teaching a Saturday morning drama class to the international students at the NJ United Christian Academy after I get back from Chicago. I also believe after Chicago, I'll be heading down to the Baltimore area each Sunday to have some fun with Lewis Shaw in his smallsword class. 

SO, getting a lot done and started. But even more so, (and at the risk of sounding like a "LiveJournal/Myspace" entry), I've been paying more attention to myself lately. It's not been a nice thing. But when is it ever nice to look at your faults? Been feeling more disconnected than usual lately. Been really REALLY tempted to jump back on FB, but luckly I've been checking in with a friend every time it's really bad.

People who are trying to quit an addiction usually have some kind of support system, or even just someone who helps them stay on track. Someone they can call or text whenever they have a urge to cheat. Adele Rylands has been a great help in this respect. I'll be really bumming and I'll shoot her a text or email and almost immediately she'll shoot back with a bit of encouragement. So big thanks to Adele!

But even with that, Philly and NYC have never really felt farther. Starting to look around the house and in moments here or there, this place is slowly feeling less like my home and more like a place I'm visiting or sleeping over at. And this is a good thing. It's telling me I'm personally really ready to step out and find that place that will feel like MY home instead of my parent's home.

I could go on for a while with the little realizations I've had here or there, musings, epiphanies, etc, but I wanna get back on track with where I started....Strength.

This time off FB has also given me a chance to look at the people around me. We judge people so quickly on their faults, especially since they are so easily seen as compared to our own. But it's that much harder to acknowledge their strengths and give them credit where credit is due.

I look at my brother, who is 20 years old and is High Functioning Autistic. I look at how much the things he does annoy or frustrate me. But then I look at the little things he says sometimes, and how clever and smart they are. How astutely aware of things he is. I look at the little ways he helps out.

I look at a coworker of mine who is 43 and still has some trouble understanding how to use parts of her computer and acts some days like she is still in high school. Some days she asks some of the craziest questions and says some of the most out there things. But then I remind myself she is one of the most generous people I know. If there is a service member who needs help, she would do anything in the world that she can to help them.

Another coworker who is SO overly apologetic that it boarders on frustrating, but has a zeal for life that it's refreshing. Another who is so pig headed and in your face, but is a no bullshit kind of woman and will call you on yours in a second. A fight friend/sister who seems a little flitty at first glance. Talk to her for more than 5 mins and you see this highly dedicated and motivated woman who has such confidence in herself and the people she chooses to associate with even if those people don't have the confidence in themselves. 

Looking at these other people have given me the chance to look at myself in the same way. I recently saw an interview with Tom Hiddleston and he mentioned a bit of advice he was given at one point: "Give yourself permission to succeed."

I know I've heard that from other people at one point or another in my life, but lately I've been internalizing advice like this a bit more readily. But it's so true. I've held myself back at times because I didn't want to step on anyone's toes or stir the pot in a bad way by stepping out. In this field though (performing arts), you have to or else you end up with the audience watching others move forward. Give yourself permission to succeed and take the jumps you need to despite what other may think. Been telling that to myself more often lately and it's gotten me to do a few things I might not have done otherwise. 

So those are my "deep" and intellectual musings for the time being. For now I'm going to focus on the things I need to get done. Working on putting together my new years resolution list and making sure they are things that I will actually make happen this year.

 Also, on a much less productive note, been kinda stuck on Zachary Levi a lot lately. REALLY want to see him in First Date on Broadway and have been catching up on the seasons of "Chuck" available on Netflix. I'll admit I kinda wish I was Agent Sarah Walker,...she's kinda bad ass. LOVE Adam Baldwin's character.  So for now, off to watch more Chuck while I fold laundry and enjoy a nice cup of hot chocolate. :-P

Day 5 of Detox--Beware of substitution

So I need to be careful because I'm can see myself starting to substitute other sites in for what I use to do with Facebook. Twitter is getting familiar. Google+ is even looking appealing. I've got points in the day where I can feel myself getting twitchy, wondering what's going on on my page. You know how they say when someone is trying to quit smoking, they have to relearn how to do everyday things again because they are so use to doing it with a cigarette? I kinda feel like that's me to a point right now. I've gotten into such habits with checking Facebook when I get up in the morning and before I go to bed. When I leave someplace, I'll check it on my phone. Need to rework those habits. Now that I recognize what I'm doing I can stop it before I start. CONSTANT VIGILANCE! :-P

Realizing this though made me recognize how much I distract myself with what others are doing. As they say in all of your acting classes..."stay in the moment"...and I haven't been. I've been letting all of these extraneous little things take my focus away from the tasks at hand.

I've gotten into the bad habit of watching others and taking my cues from them on how and when to do things. Have you ever had those moments where you feel like everyone else has had a class or read a handbook on how to be a grown up or how to make relationships work or how to get the job that you somehow missed? I feel like that has been me lately. But thinking back now, it might have been like that because I was so focused on what everyone else was doing instead of focusing on improving myself and moving myself forward.

Despite my twitchiness, I've actually gotten a few important things done this week. I finally paid Siobhan for the skirt I was hoping to get from her back in August. I'm almost done with some important paperwork I needed to send in to Fight Directors Canada for my apprenticeship. I finally got back to the gym last night. Little things eventually add up. Next stop, my 7 goals for this detox!

Day 1 of Detox! I PASSED ALL MY FIGHTS!

So today is the first day of my self imposed Facebook Detox. As of 10am this morning, I deleted facebook on my phone and haven't been on facebook since 12:09am. I may have sent some videos of fights from yesterday through dropbox in facebook messages, but have been trying to avoid facebook itself.

Speaking of fights....PASSED ALL OF MY FIGHTS YESTERDAY!

 The way the SAFD works is that you can fail, get a basic pass, or get a recommended pass. There are a bunch of various ways you can fail a fight test...actually hit your partner, sword point go across your partner's facial plain, weapon going across the line of death into the audience, those kinds of things.

To get a basic pass, you demonstrate you have learned and can perform a fight with that weapons style safely and accurately. There is room for improvement with the acting of the fight, but you've at least demonstrated you can handle that weapons style.

To get a recommended pass, you have demonstrated high proficiency with that weapons style as well as demonstrating you can "act" the fight. It's not just choreography, it's a fully developed scene. There were high acting stakes and a real sense of danger. As of the most recent rules, this is the highest "grade" you can get with one of these tests.

So with my fights yesterday, I got recommended pass with 5 fights and a high basic pass with 3 fights. The 5 I got recommended for were Unarmed, Singlesword, Knife, Smallsword, and Rapier & Dagger. The 3 I got the basic passes on were Longsword, Quarterstaff and Sword and Shield. If memory serves, Longsword was a borderline test between basic and recommended. If we had pushed the tempo and stakes up a little more I think we might have gotten the recommended. For sword and shield, the beginning was a bit under tempo and there were some things that didn't line up for the audience. With Quarterstaff, we both had some goofs on choreography so that didn't help us. So I know now some things I need to work on.  But I GREATLY want to thank all of my partners from yesterday. Jacqueline Holloway, Oliver Donahue, Lauren (Ren) Williams, Martin Boresma, and Kathryn Roper. And thank you SO SO SO much to Ian Rose for dealing with all of this craziness and giving us the guidance all along the way! 

Practice at this beginning of this week.

The Boys having some fun.

Night before tests

Last kill of the day!

Now, it's recovering from this week of craziness. Sore muscles treatments and bruise reduction is the name of the game now. My thing is that I bruise like a peach, so for the next two weeks you will not see my forearms. (Last thing I want to hear ever with my bruises from stage combat is "Do we need to call someone for you? You don't have to stay with him".) But in the coming days, you will see the videos of these fights on my Youtube channel: TJMPhilly.

For tonight, I wanted to reflect on what it's been like to not be on Facebook for the first 24 hours, but seeing as how I've slept most of the day, kinda not much to say. So for now, off to another hot soak, uploading videos and being with my family before going back to work tomorrow. Tomorrow night in class (yes, jumping right back into Monday night classes) we're doing some Rapier and companion weapons, so excited to use my new cloak for the first time...thank you Siobhan Richardson! I will have money for you soon for the skirt! Also have registered for the Winter Wonderland Workshop in Chicago and will be buying my plane ticket out there soon. Will also be traveling down to the Baltimore area next weekend to see the fight tests for Lewis Shaw's class, also being adjudicated by J. David Brimmer! So some good stuff coming up soon!!

Perspective is a Saucey Minx...

Perspective is an important part of all of our lives. It allows us to take in the world around us and can be influenced by SOOOO many factors. One event, experienced by two different people could seem ENTIRELY different to both people. There have been hundreds of treaties written about this kind of thing in almost every civilization, and yet for most of us this seems like a daily discovery.

We go about our lives every day. Our brains do what brains do and intake all of the sensory data coming in from our fingers and eyes and hears and such. But since each of our brains process this same data in different ways depending on how we were raised or even depending on what might have happened to us 5 minutes before this specific data was processed, the result could come out hundreds of different ways.

I recently met a coworker who had no sense of smell...she was telling me about an instance with her family on a car trip where she thought she was smelling cookies, but to the rest of the car, the smell was from a skunk. That one deficiency in sensory input drastically changed how she perceived her world.

One of the things that prevents us from colliding with each other on a constant basis from being stuck in our own little worlds would have to be empathy I think. The fact that we have the ability to make observations of each other at rapid speeds, we can tell by the simple change in vocal quality whether someone is sad or upset or happy. Being able to put ourselves in other people's shoes. I guess it could be like being able to see the woods from the trees. Being able to see the bigger picture rather than focusing only on ourselves.

So why am I talking about perspective? Because how we perceive the world changes the way we interact with it. Something we are scared of may only seem scary because we don't have all the data. A child may be scared to go into a dark basement because they think there are monsters or ghosts down there. But once they learn that there are no monsters or ghosts in the dark, the basement doesn't seem so scary. A personal experience may seem lonely because you don't see the other people going through the experience with you. But once you expand you perspective, things don't seem so lonely.

So for me I think something I'm gonna be working on in the next few months will be perspective. Breaking down the things that seem like insurmountable tasks into manageable pieces. Refocusing and realizing that the things I don't think I could do are actually easily doable. I think this is something I've actually realized with this round of fight tests.

I thought trying to do all 8 weapons in one day would be almost impossible and would be asking for failure. But in thinking that, I was discounting my own abilities and the people around me. Now I am down to 1 fight to learn choreography for and one script to fully memorize. Honestly a week before hand I should be just having to practice rather than learn new things, but where I'm at with my training I think I've got this. Plus I have some of the best in the area working with me on the same project and one of the best teachers in the business.

Just like Hamlet says..."for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so".

So with just 6 days left till my Facebook Detox begins, time to start refocusing and closing things out till March.

Monstrous Discrepancies