ROB

Rob Goldman is a noted photographer who's been published internationally. He is also the author of the book
Shooting From the Heart: Creating Passion and Purpose in Your Life and Work. Many big magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Time have contained his work. Rob has organized personal development programs with a focus on the artist and the person as a whole. His workshops are typically conducted for the education, business, art, and yoga communities. In these programs, he explores the integration of the energies of the body, mind, and spirit. Rob also serves on the board of Photographic Imaging Program at Suffolk Community college and is co-founder of Oyster Bay Gallery Art That Matters.

Dancing...

I don't have any complaints about having to dance. It's not my favorite thing, of course, but it doesn't hurt to do something that throws me a little out of my comfort zone. It's also fun. I guess my only problem with it is that I can't contribute much to it other than doing it. It doesn't work my mind too hard, which is nice, but not so rewarding. I guess the real challenge will come when actually doing it in front of an audience and struggling through my own shame and insecurities.
As for Stac Live as a whole, I hope everyone realizes how amazing it will be if we get to do everything we want to. I'm incredibly determined to make it all happen. I think that even though it will be difficult, it will be small compared to how much credit we'll get from the school for pulling it off. Everyone has to do everything they can to make sure this works as well as it can.

Starting Over & Black Swan

Lately, everything is circling around the idea of starting over. Shosta-tree-tree and New Years and just having this break to get myself together. Normally, I'm a cynic and am very aware that resolutions are seldom carried through. Well I still am, but I don't see any reason that Stac can't start fresh and with a clean slate. If anyone can do it, Stac can do it because despite our opinions of each other, one thing we always have going for us is that we're on the same page about what's going on and what we want to happen.
But starting over doesn't interest me all that much. January is June is December and I could start my year on any day I want and the rest of the world won't listen anyway.
I saw Black Swan. Twice actually. It was pretty great. I was jealous of how well the dance scenes were filmed. I found it especially interesting when Nina would be off and on stage in the same shot. That was really cool and it went along with the idea of oneness and not being able to separate out the different parts of you, the good and the bad. It was also extremely Brecht. The push pull effect was clearly evident. The lowest tension moments would end with something bloody or horrifying and then it would cut to a scene in the studio. I was constantly moving from the edge of my seat to the back of it. I tried talking to my brother about the movie and he said it could have been better because you know exactly what's going to happen at the end, and I explained that it wasn't by accident. Especially seeing it twice, I was able to try and figure out why things were happening instead of what was going to happen next. I was very impressed. And it was just as good the second time.

Commercials

This week, Ashley and I story boarded our commercials about each other. Story boarding makes me really nervous because I worry that the actual shot won't look the way I anticipated it to. I guess that's okay, because nothing can look the way I imagine it in my head. With that attitude, I aim for practicality, and I guess it may limit my openness to ideas. I'm afraid to fail at them!
I'm also having a really hard time visualizing what the commercials are going to look like when I story board.. what's going to work and what won't. I guess I just don't have all that much experience with it. The unpredictable part really bothers me. I guess the best thing to do is to just go for it. The more mistakes I make now, the less mistakes I have to make later.

Titleworthy? Eh

I'm about to do one of those free write things that I've never been good at because it was a short week and there were only three days and I don't want to talk about the feast and what's really on my mind lately is that I can't write as well as I used to and I'm thinking that I know how and I just don't have time to do it like I want to and because I always write them in the same place on my bed at the same time right before I go to sleep and I used to write them on my roof in the summer but it's too cold outside now even though I did try the other night but it's not any warmer on the roof than it is on the ground but I've blogged a lot about not writing well lately so I don't want to talk about that anymore so I'll talk about how my brother was home this weekend and I realized that he's a really good person and also that even when I don't like him I have to love him and then I wonder if maybe everyone was my brother I could find away to forgive everyone and why should I forgive him if I can't forgive someone else.. just because he's my brother? That wasn't even in his control.. then again I guess everyone else can just be forgiven by their sisters but it's always harder for me not to forgive people anyway so I figure that if I could forgive someone if he was my family, I can forgive him even though he's not, and maybe I shouldn't forgive people all the time, but if I'm going to anyway (while I will) it's nice to have some justification and I don't know if this will come to anyone else as as much of a revelation as it did to me but it never really does for different people, especially not at the same time and I know I kind of broke all the grammar rules by making this one huge sentence but I thought it in one huge sentence so there it is.

Hopefully a Turning Point

I know that I could have done better this quarter. I didn't come out of it with anything I'm really proud of, so I must be doing something wrong. I think that the effort was mostly there, though, for everything except the portfolio. What angers me is that once I actually got to doing it, I had all these ideas but no time to sort them out or to do them justice. It was just the worst possible week for me. I still don't have an excuse considering we had more than a week, so I feel pretty much like a failure.
HOWEVER, coming out of this painfully long week feeling like utter crap, I was motivated to be super productive this weekend. That means not only homework and STAC stuff, but little things like my laundry and going for a decent run got done. I finally feel somewhat caught up with all of the stuff I've been putting off. If my closet is a mess, everything I do while my closet is a mess will have less quality than it would had my closet not been a mess. But my closet is clean, my laundry is done and put away, I posted about 40 poems yesterday and I still have 32 to go. I finally bought a new journal and transferred all the ones that I've been writing on scraps of paper for about a month into it because for a month I've just been too lazy to go buy a new journal. All of these things were just making me feel terrible. So here's me congratulating myself for being back on track, and here's me setting a goal to have this attitude as often as possible.

Maybe If I Write About Writer's Block It'll Go Away

So I'm still writing my daily poem. As soon as I'm not super busy with work, I'll post them. But I've been finding it increasingly difficult. At first I thought it's just because I do it so often, it's getting old. Or I'm running out of ideas. But today was a weird day. I cleaned out my closet and my grandparents mailed us some old home videos so I watched them and when I walked my dog I didn't see anyone on the street and the atmosphere felt like there was some perfect combination of the trees and the color of the sky and the time of day that it felt like it only happened once a year and somehow it looked like it had just rained and I didn't see anybody and no cars went by and the one thing that's been on my mind for months kind of went away so when I came home I wrote the first good poem I've written in a while. It's this one stupid little thing that I can't stop thinking about and it's the only thing I can write about and it sucks but I keep saying I have to write about what's on my mind because it's the only thing I'll be able to write about well. Now I'm thinking I just have to put my mind somewhere else. And I'm thinking of what I'll have to do in order to do that. I should be able to write no matter what time of day it is and no matter how the trees look against the sky. I just need more control over my thoughts. Or less. They mean pretty much the same thing to me. I need a change of atmosphere or a new notebook or to remove a person from my life or add another. I feel like my days used to always be like today. But I can't remember them all that well. I usually remember things as better than they actually were.