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Hi! I’m doing a talk at 6pm Central tonight about the ways theatrical history is crammed into the video game Pathologic. It will be on the Twitch channel edgecasecollective.

Here’s the bibliography!

Continue reading “Bibliography for that Pathologic 2 Dramaturgy talk”

This is the first in a series of drafts about the stuff I’m watching, listening to, playing. I did these now and then when I was keeping my journal online, and what better time to bring this habit back than when all my friends are bored? (And I need to start with this topic because I’m embarrassed at how pretentious my last blog post was.)

One of my guilty pleasures out of the last five years is a synth-rock comedy band called Ninja Sex Party. Their original songs are…not clean. (“Heart Boner” though, is beautiful and probably their cleanest song despite the title. It’s that joke I love called “songs that are absolutely filthy yet technically wholesome”.)

Where I really got hooked on NSP, though, was their (family-safe!) album of cover songs “Under the Covers” in 2016.

This is one of my top ten albums ever, and it’s a cover album by a comedy band. Seems like a joke answer, but, okay, what other band is out there covering the theme song from “The Last Unicorn” and absolutely slamming it out of the park?

(Note: I have just discovered that the answer is “Kenny Loggins”. Of course it is.)

In December, I was at a wedding. The reception had an amazing live band, and over dinner they performed a cover of “We Belong” with Pat Benatar. My winter depression was gone for three beautiful minutes as several tables of English teachers and summer camp counselors serenaded each other, dramatic arms in the air. 

I decided I needed an entire playlist of songs that made me feel like this, and maybe you need it too?

This playlist has brought me so much joy while cleaning up, while exercising, while trying to distract myself from doomsurfing on social media.

To bring this disjointed entry together: this spirit is exactly what I love about the NSP cover albums. Danny is half of the on-air talent for the comedy gaming channel Game Grumps (like NSP, it is not work safe, and absolutely not to everyone’s taste), and in some of their longer runs he tells stories about being a little kid who loved singing, even if people thought he was annoying, and I can really connect with that. It’s about the fact that he loves the music, he loves making it, and he makes something beautiful out of harmonizing with himself. That’s rad.

Anyway, in this time of isolation, please enjoy “Orgy for One”. Maybe not with kids in the room, though.

me, former gifted kid: my therapist says I’m good at quarantine

therapist: I don’t really think that’s the main takeaway from our sess-

me: that’s right, I get an A+ at quarantine

— Carrie Lynn (@ProfClarySage) April 8, 2020

Junior year of high school was Brit Lit, one of my favorite classes in all of high school, and I adored my teacher, who was basically what you’d get if Oscar Wilde had come out of 1950s Bridgeport. He had an annual assignment for the Chaucer unit: each of us was to write an intro for a new character who was also on that trip to Canterbury. It could be anachronistic, it could be silly, it just had to be 24 lines of heroic couplets. He had a gallery of his favorites over the years that he read aloud to the class, delighted he had so many clever students’ poems to share with us.

I wanted to be in that gallery so badly. There was one problem: I couldn’t think of anything funny. Not just “I thought of a joke but it sucked,” but, at the time, I was in a dark place and couldn’t think of anything at all other than sadness and futility. I ended up writing lines about a woman with a sinful past who was going to Canterbury to find absolution, and it got me a good grade, but certainly it wasn’t a gallery hit. It was a bummer to write, a bummer to read, and I was really down on myself about it. It was a total failure of the person I wanted to be: Carrie the comedienne who could write something funny for any occasion. It was baffling to me that I just stone cold couldn’t do what I’ve done before with a bit of hard work any time it was necessary. It was like a light in my brain had turned off entirely.

Well…it probably had. As we’d later learn, when you’re depressed or going through trauma, the electrical activity in your brain changes. I wasn’t well for most of my teens, and when in junior year I lost my ability to even joke about what was going on around me, I didn’t honestly know what to do with myself or if there was any hope for me going forward. It was a cruel lesson that one of the only things about myself that I liked could just…not show up for me when I needed it.

The long road of learning to like myself, as someone who grew up only valuing grades and spiritual purity, has meant cultivating a heart that’s kind. It gives me something that I can appreciate even when my skills aren’t the best, or I’ve done things wrong that have hurt people. That’s a lot of words for saying “stop trying to prove you know it all, and just get better at being a decent human being already” but I’m assured this later statement is still a bit judgy for how I need to be speaking to myself.

So! Present day. Last week I’m trying to figure out why I’m having such a hostile internal response to seeing people making parody songs about life in quarantine. I’m just not finding any of it funny, or clever, or witty, and I don’t know why I’m being such an unsporting ass about it all. It wasn’t until I saw a headline that it all fell into focus for me:

And my internal voice is going “if you were really a writer worth anything, that could have been you. After all, you quit your job to be a writer, and you’ve had nothing but time, so where’s your writing already? You could be out there providing hope to people and all you can do is shitpost on Twitter.”

Yes! I’ve had more time these days! But these days are traumatic, and as we’ve established: trauma changes the patterns in your brain. (Believe me I’m STOKED to have something new inhibiting my prefrontal cortex immediately after I just had the damn thing fixed.)

I am also grieving a delay to being able to start that shiny new life I wanted to create for myself. Grief, too, does a number on your entire body, not just your brain. With all that going on physically and mentally, it truly is understandable if anyone can’t create, or get dressed every day, or follow a schedule to prove you still are a valuable worker, so you’re spared when the capitalistic death cult that is the current US executive branch decides if your pitiful contribution to the labor pool is going to be worth hooking you up to a precious ventilator.

(Rage also messes with your cognitive ability, by the way. But please never stop being mad when people are suffering and those in power are proving they do not care to help in any meaningful way.)

What’s important now? For me it’s important to be kind wherever I can be kind, and that means I have to be nice to myself too. Heaven knows I’m spending more time with myself than anybody else these days! I have to respect the truth of my own situation, that it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Yesterday I set the table for writing, turned on my keyboard and tablet, and managed to crank out the three-line joke at the top of this blog post here. It’s not much but it’s what I could do yesterday, and it helps to cut to the core of an attitude that keeps me stuck. I’ll take it.

We’re surviving. We’re getting through this, and this too shall pass. No matter what may be “wrong” with us, we are worthy of dignity and safety and love. If I help somebody feel that in a given day, maybe that’s all that’s in my control right now.

One thing at a time, one day at a time, we keep going. ✌️💖

I’m wrapping up at Slack this week. I’ve been with these folks for 6 years, plus the 9 weeks I worked on Glitch the Video Game. I love the people there, and I’d recommend it as a place to work if you’re in tech and live in one of the cities Slack is located.

I’ve been in tech for 15 years now. Yet, since I was in college, I have wanted to work in dramaturgy, or as a lit manager for a theater. I couldn’t find work out of college though, and we were broke at the time, so I spent the next 20 years trying to grow up and have a “real job.” Focus on making money, because that’s the responsible thing to do when you have a kid. While I finally did land at a place that pays customer service what customer service is worth…I still really miss the creative path I’d hoped I’d be on by now.

The last year has blessed us with a little financial wiggle room for a bit. Along with that, it’s looking like the TMS therapy I did last winter has brought me into remission from depression, and I have a much better handle on my OCD/anxiety than I’ve ever had. So I’m going to try growing as a writer and theatre person again.

It is work that scares me a little. I mean, nobody wants to fail horribly when doing something artsy. I’m also afraid because I wasn’t able to find writing work the last time I looked for it, and of course I’ve done the very irresponsible “quit before you have another job lined up.” (believe me, my therapist has scolded me soundly for this, so you don’t have to.) 😘

I want to make promises, to hint at what you’ll see next from me, so you know you don’t need to worry that I’ll be a success. But what I really hope I can deliver on isn’t a project or a sold play, it’s that I’m focusing on my own growth again. I’ve been stuck for decades in mindsets that range from “poor fit for me” to “actively destructive to my spirit and self-esteem”, and now that I know what self-confidence feels like, I absolutely need to take it out for a test run.

(If you’re doing theatre in the NW Chicago suburbs and you’re looking for dramaturgy from a reference librarian, come find me!) 💖

I let Amie make a Tumblr account. (In 2018. This is a recycled post.) Though, as somebody who has worked in social media, you better believe we had a serious talk first. You can’t prevent the next generation from making the same mistakes you did (and in many ways they’re way better at navigating this digital landscape than we’ve been!) but some pitfalls are the same now as they ever were. This is what we talked about…

1. Make sure you’re connecting with the people who are important to you, both the ones in-person and online. If you’re not getting to everybody, you’re doing too much social media and you need to trim your follow lists. High numbers don’t matter if you’re not able to get any quality time with people. (Example: I keep Facebook active because I must, for boring technical reasons. But reading it makes me feel terrible unless I just filter it to close family members and good friends. I also have a Twitter reading mode that’s just friends I know well, for when news cycles are awful and I need to get personal connection without being overwhelmed.) Your eyes can only read so much in a day, you can only type so much in return, and your time is valuable.

2. Some people out there are very skilled at sliding into your online life and manipulating you. You’ll make some good friends and I don’t want to scare you but you need to know: something feels wrong about the connection someone’s trying to make with you, if it’s always okay to say no. In fact, please do that. Once, because of low self-esteem, I didn’t say no to a creepy person until I found out he was also being creepy at a mutual friend. I should have cut out that creeper right at the beginning! What I’m saying is: don’t put up with creepy. Creepy doesn’t get better, and you deserve better.

3. Make sure the news story is true before you repeat it. Especially during breaking events, exciting and upsetting updates can be wrong. (We talked about this with my experience on 9-11, when I was working at a school in the city of Chicago that was in Midway Airport’s flight path. Someone had heard someone say there was a missing plane in the Midwest and everyone was terrified. But it wasn’t true.) It’s okay to turn off the news for a bit, do something else for awhile, and get the whole story later.

Related: if there’s a crowd of people storming up a call-out, be wary. It can be an incredible high to ride along with something like this, but in many cases people prioritize that high of moral superiority rather than actually making change for the better. Too often the target isn’t actually someone with power, but just another human who (might have) made a mistake. Be wary any time people try and convince you anyone is less than human.

4. Be authentic, but you don’t owe the internet every piece of your story and your self. Having an online profile – for everyone! – means presenting a curated, edited version of yourself. Don’t be afraid to be real, but always remember that what you put online can be permanent. When I’m really hurting, I have to force myself to stop and think: Would I feel better instead if I called somebody and went out for coffee and vented? Would I get the same satisfaction of getting this out of my system if I wrote this on paper instead? These can be way healthier alternatives to posting something online and then waiting for the trickle of interactions you’re hoping to have. And you don’t want to carve words in stone over feelings that will pass.

5. If you’re tagging in somebody’s username, think about the notification the site will make for them. Perhaps tagging that actor would make your post look more complete, but if you’re an actor would you want to read “I can’t believe how bad @thisactor is in this movie” when you look at your notifications? Even for folks who aren’t celebrities: is tagging them in a group going to remind them of bad times or get the attention of people who have hurt them in the past? Are you going to tag in somebody who doesn’t want to be a part of the conversation or receive notifications about this? Finally, if you’re replying to Alice’s tweet about Bob but she didn’t tag him in? She probably had reasons. Don’t tag him in for her.

6. When you’re picking new artists to follow, give priority to any folks who are systematically disadvantaged in a way that you’re not. Understanding intersectionality is crucial to understanding how oppression affects everyone differently, and since your school is a little lacking in diversity you should absolutely curate a diverse reading list. Follow people of color (especially Black women), people who are disabled, neurodivergent people, people who are broke, religious minorities, members of LGBTQIA+ who might feel unwelcome in queer spaces. (You know the letters some say don’t belong there.) Listen when they speak about their lives, and believe their experiences. Don’t make demands of their time, speak for them, talk over them, or expect to be mutuals, because that’s all super rude. Just witness, learn, and signal-boost their work when you can. (And focus on their work if you ever do initiate conversation. You can imagine it’s frustrating as hell to just want to be out there creating, but everybody just wants to focus instead on the things that make you different.)

7. Place kindness into the world. If you like someone’s art, tell them. Tell a friend. Lift each other up.

And be kind to your own work as well. You’re not trash and neither is your art. I know that’s a meme but it’s not true, and reading that over and over absolutely has a psychological effect. Just…be kind. The world needs that more than anything right now.

(originally posted semi-privately on Dreamwidth in 2018.)