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She/her queer disabled Latinx geek. Reader/writer/gamer/crafter, veritable font of semi-useful knowledge, #HopePunk advocate. Married with kitties.

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All the World's a Stage

All the World's a Stage There's something about the theater that's been a big part of my life since I was in high school, and I can't quite put my finger on what it is that draws me in. I remember listening to my first cast recordings when we lived in Spain, so when I was about 12 or so, because my brother had gotten interested in theater. I don't remember what the first show I heard was, but I know Phantom of the Opera and Les Mis were among the first - being a girl child of the '80s and '90s meant Phantom and Les Mis were required obsessions. I know the first shows I ever saw were put on by the base's community theater, followed by the school theater, and that my brother had gotten involved in the tech side of things. Naturally, if it was something my big brother was doing, then I needed to do it, too, and so I started out on stage and doing stage makeup. I ended up studying theater in college, even knowing that I would never make a living at it, because as much as I enjoyed it, I wasn't particularly good at it. This is all coming up because I've been incredibly fortunate to have extremely generous in-laws with season tickets to the touring theater productions that come to Seattle. Last month they had extra tickets to Les Mis and asked if my husband and I would be interested in going. My husband is also a fan of musicals, particularly the more established, traditional musicals like Rodgers and Hammerstein's works and Andrew Lloyd Webber, so we were happy to take them up on their offer. It's been a little bit since I've seen live theater, and it's been even longer since I've seen one of the two core musicals of my teenage years. That went well, so when they had extra tickets to Phantom this month, they invited us and we happily went with them. I'm happy to say that both Les Mis and Phantom have held up remarkably well over the years. I find myself watching the side characters more than the leads these days, and watching the ways in which an actor can take a part with few lines and turn it into a whole, three-dimensional person on stage. It's not easy (she says from her days in the background) - frequently, Spear Carrier #3 is meant to be human furniture and that's it. But when someone is given the room to make a character their own, that's when you can see magic on a stage. Les Mis had some fantastic actors in some of the "smaller" roles that really helped the show be more than just a series of solos with a bit of plot in between. As for Phantom? One of the things I've come to realize as I've gotten older is that the Phantom himself is a little over the top. The man is a bit extra, you could say. This production leaned into this beautifully. The fact that the Phantom had an entire writing robe and hat that he wore when he was working on Don Juan Triumphant? Beautiful. He played the character like the undersocialized, immature man-child that he can be, and it makes him that much more sympathetic. The best stories make you feel something for all of the characters and keep them from being two-dimensional caricatures, which this production did wonderfully. If I could go back and tell 16-year-old me that I would be able to see these shows I obsessed over, live in a theater, multiple times and with a partner who loved them, too, I don't think she'd believe me. I'm very happy that I can surprise young me like this - it's nice to have some good news for her now and then. Go see live theater if you can! It's an experience well worth having at least once. via Blogger https://ift.tt/kdc7E9b 2026-05-25T11:14:19-07:00

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Day 14 of #storyadaymay (and day 81 of #the100dayproject) - the Protagonist Game from the Writer's Toolbox. Stories at http://insertscenehere.blogspot.com/

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Story a Day May challenge

http://insertscenehere.blogspot.com/

So, since the beginning of May I've been writing a story a day on my blog, and filming videos showing how I use the various story prompt devices that I've collected over the years to, well, prompt a story. I realized I haven't posted here in a minute, and it might be a good place for the stories to live, too.

So come! See the ramblings and the extremely rough drafts! It'll be fun!

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Hope Is A Four-Letter Word

I've been bouncing around with this for the last few weeks, ever since I read a couple of quotes from the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. The book overall had some interesting ideas about reframing the idea of trying to get everything done. Even though there were a couple of things that made it clear the author was not approaching things with an eye toward neurodivergence (his discussion of distraction, for example, only talks about the "choice" to be distracted, and not how some people's brains simply don't focus the same way others' do), I was feeling generally positively toward the book until I got to the last chapter, and read this:

"Hope is supposed to be 'our beacon in the dark,' [environmentalist Derrick] Jensen notes. But in reality, it's a curse. To hope for a given outcome is to place your faith in something outside yourself, and outside the current moment - the government, for example, or God, or the next generation of activists, or just 'the future' - to make things all right in the end...[It] means disavowing your own capacity to change things..." (Four Thousand Weeks, p.230-231)

This, in my mind, is beyond untrue - it's actively harmful. Hope isn't some passive idea of "maybe things will get better" - it's a force. It's an active verb - a person hopes for things, putting energy into the world by that action.

Hope is a tool. Sometimes you have to destroy the obstacles in front of you in order to build something better, and hope is what you use to do both.

There's a reason why some of the worst situations are referred to as "hopeless" - the idea of being without hope, being beyond hope, having no hope left, is terrifying. It's where despair lives, and despair is a power all of its own, with an agenda of destruction. Hope is what keeps it at bay.

Telling people to give up hope is telling people to give in to despair. In the book, Derrick Jensen is quoted again as saying "When we stop hoping that the awful situation we're in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free - truly free - to honestly start working to resolve it." (Four Thousand Weeks, p.231) Why can't we do both? Why can't we both hope that the situation will not get worse, AND work to resolve it?

I understand that Jensen and Burkeman are pushing people to do more than sit back and wish for things to get better without acting on that desire, and that is something that can be frustrating when the world is on fire. Telling people to give up hope, however, isn't telling them to stop being passively optimistic - it's telling them to stop being optimistic at all. If there's no hope, then why bother trying to make things better?

Now is not the time to give up on hope. Hope powers revolutions.

(x-posted from my blog Insert Scene Here)

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hope is a skill

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hope is a weapon you are trained to wield

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Hope is a tool. Sometimes you need to destroy the obstacles before you can create a better world, and hope is how you do both.

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Hope punk

Playing off of an idea from here about a potential genre called hope punk. The idea being that having hope and demanding a better world is a subversive idea. I had just started working on a new story, and I realized it wouldn’t take much to amp up the hope.

Every good story has some kind of conflict, whether it’s external or internal (ideally both), and the more I thought about things, the more I realized that the true enemy of hope isn’t fear or anger - it’s apathy.

How many of you have heard “Well, I’m sure someone will do something about this”? Or “You need to go through the proper channels if you want to make a change”? Or even “The election’s over, what’s the point in protesting?” (I’ve gotten that last one from my mother directly.)

This is the attitude that we need to fight. It’s not just about pushing against the obvious threats, as most people* can agree that racism, anti-semitism, and hatred of all kinds is bad for humanity as a whole. The problem comes in deciding how to handle it. To quote Terry Pratchett, “the phrase ‘Someone ought to do something’ was not, by itself, a helpful one. People who used it never added the rider ‘and that someone is me’.”

Well? That someone is us, my friends. I may not be able to fight on the front lines, and my platform may be small, but this is the language I have to make a difference, and it’s time I started using it.

Keep the faith. We can make change happen. We don’t have to take this lying down.

*I realize this is a somewhat naive belief, but as much as I may dislike people in general, I still have faith in them.

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Realizing this might be useful these days, because in spite of everything, I still believe it.

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