Theatrical Neuroses

I’m not sure anyone understands my neuroses.

I’m not sure I understand my neuroses.

I’ve been wandering myself past “first works” err.. “first published works.” Wil Wheaton‘s books, Shane Caruth’s movie, Jenni’s novel. (okay Jenni’s novel goes in the former, not the latter for now.) So many of these things are a tour-de-force of determination and will.

The problem is I don’t want to get stuck where I’m at. Don’t get me wrong I enjoy most of my work in transportation but I know there is only so much variety in managing trucking transportation. I’m horrified that in five years I’ll still be in transportation. Sure, I could make some nice money, but for me, theatre is where its at.

Another part of the problem is I’m a peon. But, I like building systems. (ask for a tour of my website some day, that HTML that you get in your browser isn’t what is sitting on the disk on the webserver.) I’m annoyed that right now we’re building a bunch of important systems and I have nothing to do with any of them. (Remember this is about my neuroses.) I’m also willing to bet that at least one of these will be really screwed up upon actual delivery and will likely require debugging and more time on the phone debugging attempting to figure out why stuff doesn’t work.

I’m not being some self aggrandizing prick here, I more or less have just finished debugging a interface between two of the major systems at work. These two were set up to work together over two years ago, so yours truly, the co-op, who has worked for the company for six months has to take it upon himself to get the dang things working correctly and understand how the systems work and ferret out where things are failing. I feel comfortable in saying that just about two weeks ago we got them working reasonably well together.

I want more. I want to fix and develop systems. I believe theatre productions, excluding artistic considerations, are just large one off systems. One of those things about theatre is you can walk into a production about a week before it is ready to premier and pieces aren’t fitting and things are going to hell. You’ve got that week, and that week alone to get the whole system debugged and working together.

I’m not sure the people around me understand my theatre bug. Its been suggested to me that I find a community theatre and work on a production there. The problem is a matter of balance. I don’t want just to settle with theatre being an add on.

I need to develop a plan to get back to working in theatre, and somehow do it without having to mortgage my non-existant house.