offer what you have

It asks that we maintain a healthy standard of living plus devote many hours to music, practicing scales, and to art, drawing from life, working with color and meditating to keep the demons from revolt, and to writing nonsense that must be written, reading in search of wisdom or God, thinking, thinking, thinking -- and sometimes to more and stranger things: sleeping a lot to find peace, going on retreat, flirting with madness. It is our responsibility to ourselves and to the world to do these things, to find ways to take care of ourselves, not to become a burden but to offer what we have.... don't drift along in life, waiting until you feel like the time is right -- it's never right -- it's always NOW when you're supposed to be doing this work.

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day in the life of an art director

fling myself out of the van as it stops in the alley behind my office, somewhere around 7 a.m.; stumble upstairs, enter my ID code into the little black time clock thingy so that the vast bureaucracy knows i showed up, even though i'm salaried and could be punching in at 1 a.m., for all they care.... think about just giving up and dreading all my hair, then realize my boss would never let that fly -- i'm pushing it already here with two visible tattoos and multiple ear piercings.... check a third email box to see if anyone here has decided to add a new router and thus, new wireless service somewhere on campus.

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truth in comedy

"The Art of Play: The New Genre of Interactive Theatre" (Gary Izzo) is great theory -- fantastic theory -- but if you're anything like me, when you first hit the streets of faire, hoping to inflict yourself upon a hapless customer, theory tends to flee right out of my head.... close, although he tends to go on and on about the "Harold," a game which isn't particularly applicable to the improv out at faire, gives some great examples and advice to remember when you're on the streets.... It's much better for an improviser to assume he knows the same amount of information as the other actors, and use the opportunity to contribute his own share of information to the scene.

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