I was showing my mom a resume that I may use for community service. She told me to include the album I made in 10th grade, but it made me very upset. This is partially because I was quite sleep-deprived, but also, thinking about that album just makes me unhappy in general. It's very strange. I wrote an entire music album with 9 songs in three months. It should be one of the biggest accomplishments in my life, and maybe it is, but I take little pride in it. I feel embarrassed by it, like I feel embarrassed about all the music that I've made. It makes me think of the times where I constantly forced myself past my comfort zone because I thought that's what I was supposed to do.
Later, when I freed myself from music, I found that I had a serious lack of direction. I no longer suppressed my feelings, but I also realized that I didn't feel strongly about anything in particular. I equated this with a fear of trying new projects, and to a certain extent it was. Additionally though, it was a happy complacency. Last year may have been a bummer for a lot of people, but for me it was a blast. I had a solid group of friends and we had a number of misadventures that still make us laugh.
Back to the album though. So I was thinking about how the biggest project I've ever done is something that I don't strongly like, and this made me sad. I thought, "what can I do to truly represent me and show that I am an incredible person that can do incredible things?" As I dwelled over this question, the thought occurred to me that perhaps the way to get past the bad feelings of past projects was to create a new project that was even better than The Enneagram. Perhaps I have to top myself.
This is easier said than done.
When I made the Enneagram, I was in an ideal set of circumstances. I had music training since I was 3, songwriting training for a year and a half, and parents who bought me most of the materials that I needed. I had two and a half hours a day to work in class for five days a week, and a mentor (Luke) who kept me on the right track. The songs were not difficult to write because I based them off The Enneagram. I did my research, but I didn't have to create profoundly new and original material. The pieces were set. All I needed was the will. So it was done.
What can I do now that also fits that ideal kind of situation? I thought some more about this. My main discipline in STAC has essentially become writing. I've been writing since they taught us in school, and I've been maintaining a weekly blog for three and a half years. My favorite elementary school teacher told me I was destined to be an author someday. People enjoy hearing my stories. From this I surmised that it may be time to tackle a book.
A book about what though? That was the next question. As I said before, I don't feel entirely passionate about any cause in particular. I don't think I have a heavy message to communicate about life. I don't know much about life outside of Long Island suburbia. Currently I'm not suffering from any deep emotional issues. This makes it difficult to create art. How do you make art when you're generally content?
I decided to talk to my dad about all of these things. He said something along these lines.
"The reason The Enneagram worked out so well for you is because it was structured. You knew what you wanted to write about for each song and you were able to get it done. Translated into book format, you could do a series of short stories. Maybe you could make a series of stories loosely based off teenage life in suburbia, because that's all you really know about."
This thought did run through my head, but the concern I have with writing teen stories is that they are often trite and predictable. Also, I wasn't sure if I had enough interesting stories of my own that people would want to hear.
"You think you don't have interesting stories? Come on Ellen, what about your two friends who went on such a bad date, they both turned gay? All you need to do is fictionalize the date to make it even worse than the reality, and you have a great story right there."
My dad recited a number of the amusing stories I had told him throughout the years.
"You should make the stories like real life. Occasionally bad things happen, but people generally figure it out."
My mom chimed into the conversation as well. Having grown up in the McCarthy and Vietnam era, she believes that right now, we live in one of the most egalitarian societies yet. She is profoundly impressed by how people of all genders and ethnicities unite together and thrive in a very menial kind of way. She appreciates how stereotypes are constantly subverted in our school, like the girls in hijab who are completely boy crazy, or the asians who sell weed in the alley, or the white kids that are horrendous at sports. She commented that before Garrison Keillor, Minnesotans didn't have much of a shared ethnic identity, and she thought it would be cool if I could form something like that for Long Islanders and teenagers.
This sounded actually sounded like a pretty good idea to me. Luke was asking me yesterday if there was something I strongly wanted to try. The first thing that popped into my head was standup comedy, because after watching Aziz Anzari, I felt inspired to share some my own humorous stories and make people laugh. See, I still get inspired sometimes! When I thought about it though, I realized I wasn't so keen to bring my comedy to a stage. I've actually done stand up comedy once before at sleepaway camp, and it was a decent experience. While I enjoyed speaking and sharing my stories though, I had trouble shaping the story in a way that could be easily understood in a short amount of time, and I felt awkward forcing myself to perform my stories instead of simply sharing them. Still, I love making people laugh. In addition to stand up, I've done a good amount of improv and sketch comedy, and it's had a profound impact on my life.
I had it in my mind to try some creative non-fiction. Last year we did a writing workshop with creative non-fiction. My piece was more serious, but after reading the book How to be Inappropriate, I had the desire to write some stories that were lighter in tone. I actually attempted to keep a blog (link here) to share some short creative non-fiction, but it quickly died. Also, last year I kept a record of everyday for 2013, so I probably have a lot I can take from. There are two issue with straight creative non-fiction though. First of all, I would have to find a lot of stories from my own life and make them coherent. Secondly, I may not be able to share all the stories I want to for fear of embarrassing the people that I know.
So, writing a comedic set of short stories loosely based on my high school experiences seems like it could fit. I love telling funny stories, especially about myself. As a second semester senior, this would absolutely be the time to write a book like that. If I put my mind to it, I really think that I could pull it off. And if I manage to write a full-fledge book (not necessarily in length but in coherency), that would definitely top The Enneagram.
Reading all this, I am starting to realize that The Enneagram is really not something to be ashamed of at all. The circumstances for the project were truly right. Each step I took felt like a natural progression. The first step was creating my studio. I will quote a blogpost I made at the time.
"During the songwriting workshop about 2 weeks ago and I asked Phil how he organized all of his instruments. He told me that he kept them all up on the wall. In my basement I have a series of 5 long shelves on the wall, which I realized were perfect. That's when I knew I had to clean out my basement.
This seemed almost impossible though. The corner not in use had basically been kept as a large garbage square ever since my parents moved into the house. Junk was piled so high you couldn't even walk into the area.
I couldn't give up because I knew that this was my rite of passage, I could feel it. This was the challenge I had to go through to continue on with my life and prosper."
And then The Enneagram.
"Yesterday when I was sitting in class, I started to brainstorm possible projects I could do with the plentiful time that I had. What could I do with music?
That's when the idea popped into my head. Make a concept album based off of the Enneagram. 9 personalities. 9 songs. Perfect."
Even when I decided to quit writing music in the end, that felt like a natural progression as well. A number of my previous blogposts talked about my doubts with music. I wrote one post where I put all of the hints together, but I believe I deleted it on account of seeming too emotionally provocative to share with the world wide web, especially while applying to colleges.
Right now, I am having that feeling once again. I feel like this idea for a project is either exactly what I want to do right now or quite close but not quite on the money. I don't have the details, but I get the gist. I've already been recording random amusing memories that I hope to implement in some way. I could talk about small moments, such as the time my friend complained to me about having an umbrella that could poke someone in the eye, while simultaneously shaking it around until he accidentally poked someone in the eye, which was quite an incredible feat considering that the kid who got poked had a very low epicanthal fold. I could talk about people, like my friends who got themselves into messes because they became promiscuous quite early, or my friends from South America who are quite the entity unto themselves. I could talk about things that happened to other people, like the time Caitlin and Alex were walking around the city on a STAC trip and someone tried to sell them "Weezer tickets," but it was actually just a metaphor for weed. Just throwing ideas around here.
Hopefully, things will soon become more clear on what plan of action I should take for this. Hopefully, I'm not completely on the wrong track making statements I will look back at later and think, "wow that was really silly."
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