Category Archives: personal

late night ramblings

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me and aaron kiefer, c. 2002

There was a time, not so long ago, when I enjoyed acting. I’d like to think that I know a bit about myself and the way that I work, and so when I say I enjoyed acting, I mean that there was a point in my life where me — the guy you would see every day — was honest and open about himself. Acting, then, became a great way to inhabit the minds of people I’d never think to inhabit, people who had wildly different thoughts than I did, people who weren’t as honest and open as me, who tried very hard to obfuscate and keep secrets. But me, Josh Belville, just a silly guy with broken glasses and a very general lack of fashion sense, I was here, and I was me. Acting became a way to fuel emotions that I might not necessarily have on a day-to-day basis, to explore some inner workings that I was familiar with, but didn’t spend my life exacerbating, simply because I didn’t have to. There’s a proverb that goes, “Happy is the man who has no story to tell.” That was me. There was no facade, no mask betraying inner feelings. There was just me.

But now, as I’m writing this, and as I spend time delving into the double life of Don Draper (yes I’m watching Mad Men, and yes I’m watching it quickly), it occurs to me that my life has changed. No longer am I the man who is happy to be honest and open about himself and his life. It’s affected my work. Now I wear a mask every day, which I don’t even remove when I’m therapy; most of my time there is spent talking about other people, rarely about myself. So when I get on stage to perform, the words are meaningless — they’re not real, and I’m not real. The two cancel each other out. There’s no need to wear a mask when you’re already wearing one.

I mean, people get in this business for a variety of reasons. Some do it because they just want to be seen, acknowledged, loved by scores of strangers in a dark room. Some people desire the disconnect from themselves, because their personal lives are tumultuous and require distance. And some people, people like me, do it because our regular lives are relatively empty, meaningless, and donning someone else’s persona for a couple of hours a night is just a lot of fun. An added bonus is that we share a human experience for a group of people in a dimly lit theater, who may find themselves transformed by the end of the performance, as much as we were transformed in the beginning.

Performance is about the simultaneous act of giving yourself up for a character, and giving yourself into a character. It is a transformation unseen in any other art form. When Anna Deavere Smith performed her play Fires in the Mirror, she brought that transformation to light, and some people didn’t like it. Say what you will about the play, her contribution to theatre is one of illumination of the act itself. She was herself being characters. The incomplete transformation, the ability to be yourself and be the character. No man is Hamlet, but every actor who has performed Hamlet was Hamlet.

My problem is: I can’t invest in being Hamlet because I’m too busy being somebody else. Someone who is not me. Someone who doesn’t find joy in the world like he used to.

I guess what I’m saying is: I’m unhappy. There. You’re welcome.

2011, an introspective retrospective

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Well, 2011 is almost over, and in the last month my world had been upended faster than anything that happened over the course of the rest of the year. I lost my job, the wonderful owners of the Greek deli by my (now old) work are retiring after over thirty years in their incredibly delicious business, and the yoga center by my house is closing after what I can only assume were financial hardships brought upon by Groupon. All of this happened in December. Much of my old routine no longer exists, and, in a strange twist, my new routine is very similar to my old old routine — I’m going to school and not working. The only difference is that I will be getting unemployment while not working this time around (and my financial aid is a lot more than it was when I was an undergrad).

It’s a funny thing, to take a relatively arbitrary means of establishing time and use it to figure out if you had a good or bad time during that time. I’ve been alive almost 29 years now and every year I try to think back and wonder if I had a good time or not. I think I’m kind of an accidental Buddhist. A lot of people are stuck in the past, or fantasize about the future, but I’m pretty okay being in the present. So when I try to think back on 2011, I can’t ultimately say if it was a good year or a shitty year. Am I happy? Not really. My current circumstances are lacking in something that I don’t quite understand yet. But happiness isn’t something you should try to maintain for such a long period of time. People who pursue happiness like that are doomed to never see happiness when it arrives. (On the other hand, people who pursue despair find it in abundance. Funny how that works.)

Am I content? Yeah. Of course! I have a roof over my head, clean water, food when I want it, a delightful woman who enjoys sharing her time with me, and, of course, the internet and enough money to furnish my new computer building hobby. I have no reason to be unhappy in a general sense. Specifically, yes, there are aspects of my life that I wish I could make better. I wish I had as much control over my impulses. Being caught in the present makes for awful choices sometimes. I wish I could save money. I want to lose weight. There are a lot of t-shirts in my closet that I just can’t wear anymore, and it’s getting to a point where I can either buy new shirts, or lose weight, and I’d like to do the latter.

I also feel creatively stagnant, so I’d like to work on that. I have to just create things, even if they suck. Part of the process is honing your skills so that you get better. You can’t get better if you don’t try. Be prepared to fail. I have to be prepared to fail and possibly be humiliated. It happens. Welcome to the world. You can’t spend your entire life not trying to be the best you can be. The best for you, I should add. You don’t have to be the best for anybody but you. Don’t spend your life trying to please others, just please yourself and that will please others.

Anyway, I’ve thought a lot about this blog recently, because I started it three years ago in response to having graduated college and not having a job. It became an outlet for ideas and thoughts that were stuck in my brain. Over the course of time I moved to Portland, found a job, and became entrenched in the “new old routine” of going to work full time every day for three years. My creativity waned to the point of near non-existence; every February my FAWM1 output has declined, and now I don’t even write or record music anymore. Obviously these blog posts have been more infrequent, not because I couldn’t write them — I had the time — but because I didn’t want to. I had no energy, no desire. No passion. I spent three years making money, and I came out of it with nothing but money. I’m not really depressed about the whole thing, just more in shock: what did I do with my life? Why did I allow myself to stagnate? Why did I not grasp the multiple opportunities around me, in this bigger city where no one knows who I am? I could’ve done just about anything, but instead I took the first job I got and ran with it for too long. Again, not depressed about it. I mean, it helped pay for rent and food and water and warmth, and even more on top of that. It allowed me to travel back to Boise and see my friends, to attend concerts and movies, and to buy parts for my new computer. My job didn’t buy me happiness, but it did allow me to purchase things that would bring happiness. And that was good enough. For a while.

But! Now I’m in graduate school, and I have no job, and I hope that the money that I have and the money I will get through unemployment insurance will be enough to sustain me until I graduate. But since I have a little more time on my hands I figured I would make one of those New Years Resolutions and state right here, right now, that I intend to write more in this blog. Every weekday, in fact. Monday through Friday. Maybe even Saturday or Sunday! Who knows! Every day will have a different topic, cleverly alliterated for your enjoyment: Music Monday, Tech Tuesday, Weigh in Wednesday, Theatre Thursday, and Fiction Friday. Monday I will post a song or two that I’ve been enjoying lately; Tuesday I will update the world on my computer builds, or some new thing I learned or was interested in, etc; Wednesday I will update my goal of losing weight and getting in shape over 2012 (obviously I will weigh myself every Wednesday, hence the title); Thursday I will review a play I saw or read; and Friday I will post a bit of fiction that I wrote, whether it be a play, short story, or ongoing serial. I might include a Special Topics Saturday or Sunday just because I like to talk about video games, but there is no day of the week that starts with V (not in English, at least).

Yes, I am doing this. Yes, I am starting this Monday. I may even do podcasts for Saturday. Yes, I will be doing this while attending graduate school, so if I slip every now and then, it’s because I’m writing essays about Plautus2. But hopefully I can buffer by writing posts on the weekend and queuing them up. Whatever! I’m going to do it.

My three main goals for 2012 are the following:

1. Return to my undergrad weight and toning: 215 lbs (at least. I’d like to go further than this).

2. Write the aforementioned blog posts. Be on time with them as much as I can.

3. Be more creative. Write music, write stories and plays and poems.

And all I ask of you is to read, enjoy, comment, and maybe give me a hundred dollars. Is that so much to ask?!

Hope you all have a fantastic New Year. Let’s have some fun before the Mayan calendar ends and we all die in the horribly fiery death maw of the World Eater, Xtloclixtli.

  1. February Album Writing Month ↩
  2. Got help me if I have to write essays about Plautus. ↩

theatre and distractions

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So I’m in grad school. Theatre. And like most first semesters (or quarters, for Portland State), I am in lit classes and not acting. Relearning about the classics, which, for me, means talking blandly about A Doll’s House, teeth clenched, waiting for the day we get to talk about The Cherry Orchard and Death of a Salesman. I am entrenched in a dying art form, people. I have spent a lot of money and a lot of time reading, discussing, and acting in an art form that most everyone pays no attention to. Our core audience is elderly, and those people are going to be replaced by a generation of old people who grew up on YouTube and Die Hard and The Hangover. Here I am, trying to explain why George Bernard Shaw is such an amazing playwright, and my responses are generally, “But his plays are so long!”

Well, they’re right about that. GBS writes really long plays. Dude likes to talk, what can I say.

But I’ve found that immediately after starting school and reducing my amount of work time, my spirits have brightened considerably. I find my mind is clearer, my body lighter, my faith in humanity restored a bit. School is fun. Learning is fun. Knowledge is amazing, wisdom even more amazing. Moving is good, too. The ability to go to a class, then walk to the bus, then walk to work, then take the bus home — the breaking up of monotony is what life is all about.

I didn’t realize how bored I was until I started doing things. And then I realized that Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc, they’re all distractions. They’re fun, and I love to use them, but I hardly do anymore, because I’m busy. Busy with LIFE. Which is a lot more fun.

So … consider that an explanation for why I’m not around as much anymore.

9-1-1

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Ten years ago yesterday I was eighteen years old, working at a gas station in Nampa, Idaho, making (luckily) more than minimum wage. I had graduated from high school three months prior, and was, as usual, lax about getting into college. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, and the prospect of a real, concrete job, even though it was at a gas station, was enticing. Little did I know that I would have to quit a month later because I was too young to sell beer.

I had worked the late shift the night before, and was planning on sleeping in to, oh, two, three PM, but instead was rudely awakened by my father at about ten-thirty in the morning, shouting downstairs toward my basement door, “Josher! Wake up! It’s World War III!”

The next minute or so is crystal clear in my mind: so many jumbled thoughts at once. Mydad wasn’t making light of the situation; hell, for all I know he really did think World War III was coming, or was here, or something. I’m sure a lot of people felt the same way. But to be awoken from a deep sleep by your father, a man you put a lot of trust and respect into, telling you that a war was happening, and that it was world wide, well, that will freak you out. And so I woke up half-asleep, in a stupor, scared shitless that they would reinstate the draft (which I, like every other eighteen year old male in this country, forcibly signed up for) and that I would be sent off to wherever the hell they were fighting with an M1 Garand and an Army helmet with a pack of Lucky Stripes strapped to it.

Hestitantly, I crawled up the stairs and walked over to the TV, and saw that my worries were not as bad as I had thought. Though what was happening was horrible.

Looking at my LiveJournal entries from that day, I saw that I wrote a lot of misinformation (I even wrote about a fake Nostradamus quote that “predicts” 9/11. At this point, is Nostradamus even real? It seems like every quote attributed to him is fake). Five thousand people dead? Three thousand? And then, the very next day, a post about buying CDs from Fred Meyer. So I guess that’s proof right there that terrorism doesn’t work. Especially on the other side of the country.

I had never seen the World Trade Center, though my brother Russ had, and got photos ontop of one of them. I had never even been to New York, or the east in general. I was sheltered, and seeing planes slam into buildings didn’t affect me as it did everyone over there. Still, patriotism ran rampant in the days following, as did, for some of us, the onslaught of national introspection.

Now, it’s ten years later, and the brave men and women who went through hell trying to save people in those towers can’t even get their health problems caused by the dust and smoke covered under their insurance. The number of innocent civilians killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past ten years is more than 1000% of the number on 9/11. The amount of money George W Bush spent on mindless war is so big, it’s impossible to understand, so we almost forget about it.

Talk about terrorism.

computer nostalgia

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For years, I have been terrified to building a computer, and skittish at best at upgrading one. Despite my knowledge of software and operating systems, I really knew very little about hardware, and even more about the new technology that was coming out. I grew up with old computers, 486, Pentium, Pentium II, etc. The idea of a “two core” processor was foreign to me. My last computer, the one I bought aaalll the way back in 2004, had a single core processor, and back then no one called them “single core” processors, it was just Intel or AMD. Back in that time, I purchased a 256MB thumbdrive for $45. Now that just seems ridiculous. But it also seems ridiculous when I think about my first time dealing with computers, playing Space Invaders on a sepia-toned monochromatic 386 computer with two 5.25 floppy drives and Windows 3.1.

As of 2009, I have owned a dual core processor machine, with 4GB of ram and a 500GB hard drive. It is called Magrageeves (I give my computers weird names) and at the time it was a godsend. My old single-core computer, Albatross, was getting very, very old, and had experienced a bad static electricty problem oh, nearly six years ago now, and thus would freeze up randomly, forcing me to restart frequently. The only reason I stayed with that computer is because I was too poor to buy a new one. It was college, what can you do. So the purchase of a brand new system was exciting to me, but also kind of nervewracking. I had to buy something relatively cheap, but something that could do what I wanted, namely play video games. So I opted for a dual core, because quad cores at that time were super expensive. Five hundred gigabytes, I thought, would last me forever. How do you fill up 500GB of space? The cost of Magrageeves was $470.

Later on I purchased a “bare-bones” computer kit for $200. An AMD Phenom quad core processor, 2GB of ram that I upgraded to 4GB, a 500GB hard drive, power supply, a shitty case, etc etc. I was supposed to put it together myself. I was nervous. See, Albatross had been sitting in the garage for months now, collecting dust, and at one point I decided to turn it on. I turned it on and experienced a series of beeps and no Windows loading. After some investigating, I quickly discovered that Albatross was Dead, a lifeless hunk of scrap metal. So I did something that I would do frequently with toys as a child: I took it apart. God damn it felt good. I hadn’t taken apart anything for a long time, because at some point it became apparent to my developing brain that while I was good at taking things apart and investigating them, I was horrible at putting them back together. I distinctly remember the piles of parts of Transformer toys I disassembled and then kind of half-heartedly reassembled, and how they looked nothing like they used to. I then said, Well, let’s stop doing this.

So I took apart Albatross and looked at what made it tick. Of course, what was in that box and what is in my newer computers is a little different. Better technology, more upgraded thingymajigs. I don’t know the name of everything, but I know generally what goes where, how to plug in things, etc. And I used that information along with basic instructions to build the bare-bones computer. It was painless! The only issue is that the hard drive light doesn’t light up, despite plugging the right connecting pin (or whatever that’s called). But I did it. I constructed something. It made me feel good. It was as close to working on a car as I’ll ever get.

Now my plan is to upgrade! I was going to upgrade my dual-core to a quad-core behemoth, but thankfully through some research I found that the motherboard on that computer can’t handle more than 4GB of ram. So the next idea is to upgrade the quad core and make it the main computer in my house (the other being a guest computer/recording computer). I can add a 1TB hard drive, a shiny new ATI Radeon graphics card, and two sticks of 4GB ram (this mobo can go up to 8GB) for under $200, though I’ll probably have to chip in and get a new computer fan, too.

Oh, and randomly, I discovered that Albatross’s 80GB hard drive still works, and so I put it in the quad-core machine. Honestly, I’ve never had a hard drive fail on me, ever. People must be pushing those things like mad to get them to burn out on them.

I know this goes against the general patois of this blog, but I’ve become quite proud of my ability to deal with computers like this, and I can’t wait to buy the parts to upgrade my quad core. There’s something about getting your hands dirty and putting stuff together yourself that makes you more invested in those things. For some it’s gardens, for others it’s cars, and for me it’s computers. So there! Deal with it! *sunglasses fall onto my face*