Validate Your Life

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I liked the days before all the massive spam bulk forwarding email freak fests…When an email was as rare as a letter from a friend or a postcard from a traveler…sigh.

In any case, I realized I’m very much like a kid. When I was a lot younger I never really dreamt of being a Superman or a super hero or a fireman or things that kids typically dream of an envision themselves as. So I realized in my young adulthood I’ve still acted as a dreamer but dreaming and pretending to be as epic as Paul Newman or as talented as Collin Farrel, Brad Pitt, or Tom Cruise or Gabriel Byrne or maybe as wise as Emerson or as clever as Einstein or as peaceful as the Dalai Lama. More recently have dreamt “play-pretending” of being as talented as the actors or comedians as witty as Jim Carrey or as fearless Robin Williams. But it’s still the same as dreaming of being a superhero at age 4.

Being a constant lifelong learner, I always have to have something to study and with which to connect my mind. As of late (the past few months and years), I’ve been studying Neurolinguistic Programming (useful for communications, for general conversations with people, to giving performances such as comedy on stage, NLP is essential), some Jungian Psychology (for creativity and peace in aiming to understand the complex areas of life), rudimentary math (for clarity), as well as audition and standup comedy books to keep me aligned and focused on career.

“All that time, under the gorgeousness was this major actor waiting to get out….He was getting on, and, an actor has a choice about how much of himself he’s going to reveal” (p.28).
This one made a LOT of sense. Because after all…some times actors play roles, characters VASTLY different from their core personality (take Michael Richards for example, a very philosophical personality in person, but plays a quite a contrary character). In many ways I feel I do that as well. It’s difficult to distinguish what parts of me are character versus just “me” at times. Even when trying to recreationally entertain I approach it with a seriousness, so it can even be difficult for me to make a distinguishing characteristic!

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Tom Cruise Notes

“I eat life” LOL such a great quote.

“Every actor has their own voice and what turns them on and what they like. It’s not analytical; it’s instinctual. It is their own voice…[and that is what is needed to make movies]“. AWESOME quote because

“What I want in a performance is I want it to be spontaneous; I want it to be now. Not you know happening in the past. We try to work towards getting rid of the mechanics, the technique. Let’s find the spontaneity. With the power of my own imagination or my own ability to believe or my own creative idea of what I’ve created here it just happens, it just happens; it just goes. And I don’t judge it. And there’s times where as an actor where I’m working and I feel nothing and I don’t panic and go “oh my god I feel nothing!” I always take from the point of view of “okay well that’s interesting. I don’t invalidate. I don’t fight what’s going to happen. I din’t try to create. I’ve done my work. It gets inside of you see that it’s just there. And when youre there you just want to fly and play jazz.”

What I would say for the pearly gates questions: She would say (god is a definitely a babe, possibly androgenyous, but at the very least a babe), So SHE would say, “Wow, you rock! I could say that in a way that would take 10 years of detailed explanation, but I’ll be concise, you rock!” Because I know that she’d know all the details of my life and I’d remember most of them so having this long drawn-out explanation of what my life meant or what I did or didnt do would be redundant, so I’d be overjoyed if I got the rolling waves of heaven and She (god) jsut says “you rocked life, you rock!”

Surmised, I think that may mean, you do your work, your preparation like mad — THAT is your work, so then when it’s game time and you actually have a contract, salary, and acting Job, you can relax and know whatever you feel (or dont’ feel) is fully 150% totally valid! .

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In other words, the best actors dont’ “act” or put on emotional masks at all. They remove those masks and simply put themselves in situations that would cause any person not concealing their emotiosn to react with a display.

If there’s machine gun fire in the background or buildings are exploding or loved ones die or victories are own, the greatest actors just react the way a normal, non-facade-wearing human would react. Because actors are actually “real” and not acting, they remind the many of us who get caught up in politics — deceit of guises, gimmicks, and tricks — and forget what it’s like to be human, of our right and capacity to be human. Acting recollects the human spirit, in that sense.