Dancing Torture

An Incredible Hulk is a drink of Hennessey and Hypnotiq.

The bartender granted my wish last night as she made it good and strong. This was, perhaps, one of the highlights of the marking of the death of 2003.

So the bloody holidays are over and we can all get back to our lives. I will try to start going to sleep by midnight -- maybe 1. My schedule is going to be very full, and I imagine I will be driven by the fear that is beginning to set in at the prospect of writing my thesis. I want to do an amazing job, but perhaps that's too much pressure to put on myself. So, yes, I'm scared.

My friend Anna came over tonight to watch Hedwig. It turns out she has a colleague who knows John Cameron Mitchell. He can never know I'm writing a thesis on his movie. Anyway, watching the film for the millionth time got me thinking about questions I'm going to address. This weekend, I'm going to take Cornelia's suggestion and do what she calls protocols, which is writing about each scene. We'll see what happens. I'm going to that for both films -- Orlando being the other one -- before school starts again.

After having done this, I will begin addressing what my point actually is. I'm not going to try to articulate it now, because trying to interrogate our gender system right now will probably give me strange dreams. Derrida, Lacan, Butler, and Foucault will be on my mind every day for the next six months. I'm excited about being able to immerse myself in this theory and try to come up with something of my own. But right now I feel like I'm in the middle of the Atlantic in a wooden boat with no oars. And it's frightening.

At some point I will have no choice but to have confidence in my ability to think, which is something all of my regular readers know I've been struggling with since I moved here. But I know there's something here and it's up to me, Hedwig, and Orlando to get to the bottom of it.

I just got another grade back. Another A-. It's in my writing class. I worked my ass off in this class, and I'm actually happy with the A-. It forced me to recognize the power that writing has over me. And this too frightened me. One of the good things about it is that up until grad school, I had never put much thought into writing. I took it for granted as being something that just happened. You mean I have to work to make it sound good?

So yeah, I've got a lot of work ahead of me. And I know this now. Somehow, this stuff is going to get out. I don't know in what form, though. Part of me wants it to just happen. And that's what's been my writing downfall. It won't just happen. I have to sit down with pen and paper in hand and go. Who knows what I'll turn up.  Speaking of bad writing, I am not producing anything of note right now. This doesn't help the creative drive that I feel is dying in me. So I'm going to stop now. Maybe I'll sleep. Or maybe I'll try to produce something. I'm at the front of something different now. It's been brewing for a long time. The coincidence of the start of a new year only supports this. I will try to be honest in here as I move through it.