Introversion and Extroversion might be looked at through the lens of a need to perform. If we have to be "on stage" -- acting in certain ways in order to conform to expectations or needs -- that is probably a social energy sink. Conversely if there are people around whom we do not need to perform in any particular way, that is, be at rest or just "being ourselves", that time would probably be energy recharging.

One can be on-stage and still be alone or with just one or two people reading a book or being quiet. If being alone and quiet isn't your natural state you have to perform it at some level of consciousness.

I know this isn't particularly original. However, I came at this thought by the angle of thinking about how there are people with whom I need to perform "Sean": people I need to pay attention to; and people with whom I don't: I don't have to be conscious of their presense -- with whom I can be comfortable just being present in my own skin.

But then it gets all muddled up with habit and performative ruts and "who the hell am I, and who the hell do I want to be?" and my belief that the sense of self isn't much more than the story we keep retelling to ourself (consciously and subconsciously) about how we react to the things around us.

Deep thoughts for a Tuesday. I really should reserve a car and go buy hardboard panels.

I'm certainly losing fat but also certainly gaining muscle. So the weight is kind of hovering. Have been doing some core, upper body & arm exercises with large elastic bands. I like them but I really need to sink a couple of anchors in the wall or ceiling.

Have been moving some junk around in the house. I get freaked out doing this because I see a huge pile of stuff and panic and have to leave the room. I know the right approach is one thing at a time. But it is nevertheless often just overwhelming. And ridiculous; there are empty cabinets all that stuff could go into. But I just took it out of there to sort it.

I am theoretically trying out for Royal City Musical Productions' _Into the Woods_.  Because it's a musical, I have to sing. No problem. But because it's Sondheim, I have to sing Sondheim. I mean, yeah, duh. But Sondheim is just so depressing. His plays are always a box of chocolates where the flavours are all Yiddish deprecations. (Not unlike real life, but magnified. Depressing!) But the director seems very strong. And it would be Something To Do in the Winter. 

However right now I just want to crawl in a blanket fort and play video games for four months. But that would probably not be great. I guess? Seriously if I replayed the Mass Effect and Dragon Age games over again that would probably get me to March at least. And I still have to finish Bloodborne, and the occasional fucking around with TESO. Could get me to the equinox!

On the other hand D is also trying out for it. And if she gets a part I wouldn't mind so much if I got a part because it would be something we could do together. If she didn't get one but I got one that would probably not be great IMO. Because driving to Guelph 2x a week when we don't have a car just for my benefit would suck.

On the camera app front, I'm trying to get into beta test mode. There's a few small features to add but overall it's solid and ready for other hands than mine. I've been hampered this week by a compiler optimization error that caused the test version to fail for Apple's beta review team, but not me. Not fun to get reports of freezes or crashes on app startup when I haven't seen those in months. But I could reproduce it by debugging in release mode, which allowed me to at least see the Swift library code path triggering it; and it was something I could work around. 

I keep looking at real-estate in tiny little towns. Like, oh, I could buy a run down century home for $70K. But my neighbours would be Conservatives. At least small town Ontario's like that. Probably small town everywhere. I'd probably be bored out of my gourd. And there's not so many great jobs for technical managers in small towns. 

I've put in an application for a three month artist residency next summer in Newfoundland. I hope I get it. It would provide a much needed reboot of my artistic chops. And a nice reboot of my personal interaction dynamic. My habits are too ossified, I feel like I just can't break free of them. A change of scenery would help.

That's it for now!

I missed a couple week's posts. Felt poorly about gaining a few pounds. Which I figure was due to starting some mild strength training. And having more dried fruit rather than (out of season) fresh fruit. Fucking winter. Fucking, fucking winter.

Still working on the camera app. Very, very close now. Just minor polishing. I need most importantly now to get the documentation written so I can put it in the hands of testers. It's that moment of uneasiness in a big project where one wonders, is anything important missing? Is it as good as I think it is? I know the work has been worth the months of effort because I love the resulting app, but it would be very nice to make some money from it too, and I don't know if that's just a pipe dream.

In other news, I'm applying for an arts residency in Newfoundland. If I get it, I will be away from home for up to 3 months ( hopefully in the summer) focusing on my photography. Yes, being apart from my beloved and my cats and my home and my habits for months will suck. It will also be exciting, wonderful and enlivening. It will be an adventure. I really hope I get it. 

Lear's done. It was a tough week with not much sleep. House was very disappointing; maybe 24 the first night and at most fifty the second. Contributing factors I suspect the choice of venue (hidden in a University campus where parking isn't free), lacklustre marketing, it being a "staged reading" (though we did fully stage it with movement), and it being Lear (which is not a happy evening). Still, it was a good show and it would have been nice for more people to have seen it.  

Good people to work with. Didn't really connect with them much, which is kind of disappointing. The rehearsal cycle was too short to really bond with people, and we're all from such disparate groups it will probably take a serious expenditure of energy to see them again. Maybe I'm wrong. It did feel a lot more like "bye" than "later" after the last show though.

Still tweaking the toning algorithms in the camera app. I am wanting to break down and put an editor in for the toner, rather than just present a couple hundred procedurally generated options. It would be better to not do that, however, and make it something for an upgrade to the app for later. And yet because the app's for me, why shouldn't I make it do what I want?

"Winter" is settling into my mood and it's not a good thing. Social activity is more important now than ever and yet I'm feeling pretty cut off. There's an audition for another staged reading this week, which I'll go to, but a couple days doesn't stave off four months of dark.

That's about it.​

Lactase pills seem to mitigate my cheese "problem". Thanks Costco for having cheap lactase pills. And cheap cheese. I guess. Well, anyway, more protein sources is good. I just need to not eat all the cheese.

Breakfast this morning was dried cranberries, dried grapes, dried cherries, peanuts, and Sesame Snaps. No fresh fruit. Winter is here. 

Have had a couple bad mental health days in the past week. Anxiety, feeling trapped, feeling on edge. Walking helps. As does talking with friends. There are probably pills to help with this too.

Making great progress on the camera app this past week. Even working on it today. I've added coloured lens filters and paper tones. Need to clean up the toning a little still but I found the bug that was bothering me.

Lear performances this week. I'm finding the rehearsals somewhat confusing but that's good I guess. I'm learning things. Or at least getting direction. Either is good for the performance. 

Later today meeting with Shannon Dea, director of woman's studies at UW, about a short theatre piece I'm working on. Hope to get some good ideas and feedback.

It is annoying to be about the same weight I was two months ago. I haven't been getting enough activity as the colder weather is settling in. Something must be done. I have some exercise bands on order, and I should probably go ahead and join a gym. Or find some actual reason to get out of the house every day for a long, long walk. If only I had to chop wood for heating. That would be awesome.

My daughter got married in North Carolina this weekend. I wasn't there because obviously I would have had to go to the US. And I won't do that for any reason that I can presently imagine. Also, even if I didn't have an attitude problem about crossing that border, driving a thousand miles to be socially awkward with a bunch of Republican gun nuts for a few hours while my daughter is rightfully focused on her new husband doesn't strike me as a good use of my time. I would, however, be very happy to have them come up for a nice chill visit where we can really catch up on the past few years. You may think I'm a monster for not going. I just think of it as weighing costs and benefits. 

It's a beautiful fall weekend, and Thanksgiving in Canada. We don't have any plans for the day. We might have chicken soup. Maybe some potatoes. Certainly a nice long walk, and d is going to vote in the advance polls. (I'm going to wait for the day.) Some video gaming. Maybe another episode of the Korean soap opera. 

La.​

Grr. Well, this past few days has been mostly occupied by recovering from an annoying head cold.  So I dunno what my weight is doing. Fortunately the cold was only coming on Wednesday, my last rehearsal, and it's mostly faded now and should be gone Monday, my next rehearsal.

Well, the last two "rehearsals" haven't so much been rehearsals as workshops; basically excerpts from Kristin Linklater's Freeing Shakespeare's Voice book. 

Monday, we started with a warmup exercise, starting below the diaphragm and exercising resonances and sound production from there up to the top of the head, and back down again. The same sort of stuff one would learn from a good voice coach, but focused more on clear & emotive speech production.

Then he gave us words to think about, like "stone" or "sea", and then asked us to feel the sounds that made up the words and then speak them aloud at our own pace. Then asked questions, like "what does it feel like?" or "what colour is it?" and had us use our answers to those questions to modify how we said them. Exploring emotion and thought and how they modify sound production. 

Then he gave us nouns and verbs excerpted from a sonnet, and asked us to say each word by itself, and after that, to start stringing them together and seeing how their proximity modified each other, but still allowing each word to be its own sound.

Wednesday he gave us a monologue and had us start by reciting it silently, but moving our lips in a very exaggerated way. Then we had to whisper it. Then we had to recite only the vowel sounds -- no consonants, exploring the emotion and feelings. Then again just the consonants, exploring the meaning and intellect of the words. (It took much longer to do the consonants.) Then to put everything together a word at a time, then a line at a time.

Then we went into iambic pentameter, and how it should be thought of only as a heartbeat, not a rule. And we worked on some new monologues, taking turns reciting each phrase, and sometimes more than one person at a time, and that was really cool. And that was about all we had time for.

Tomorrow we do our first read through of the play itself, and the two other professional actors will be there also. (The cast mixes three seasoned pro actors [one of whom is also our director] with us community and student players.) It should be very, very interesting. I'm learning a lot.

I've had the new iPhone for a week, a 6S+. It's very, very good. I'm working on my photography app, which I believe I've mentioned in this space before, and hope to get it out before the end of the year. I was also chosen to receive one of the new Apple TV developer kits. I'm not sure what I'll do with it, but I have some ideas.

I had some cheese last night, just a little, and by itself. Well, with some wine. But I also had some lactase. And I don't feel gross this morning.  Although it wasn't much cheese, it's not a contraindication, and possibly good news. Because I like the taste of cheese. And it's good food.

Past couple of days I was doing more motorcycle training, culminating in a test for my full M license. I've been riding on an M2, which is a long-term learner's permit. You have to hold an M2 for about two years before you can test up to an M, but if you don't pass the test within five years, you lose your M2. I suspect the province figures most people will quit riding a bike after a short time and doesn't want people licensed to ride permanently if they're not riding actively.

The M2 exit is a road test, so they give you a radio and an earphone and send you out on your bike and follow you around in a car and tell you what to do, and they grade how safely you did it. There are 418 points you can accrue for fucking up. If you get 26 or more points (or if you break any law, have an avoidable collision with anything, or drop your bike), you fail the test. Perhaps half of the points are variations on "looking at things" like mirrors, over your shoulder, at driveways, at cross streets, at busy businesses like Tim Hortons, over parked cars. (The rest of the points are safety things like which tire track to ride in, when to use your signals and brake lights, not driving on painted lines, etc.) 

The training is optional; one can go to Ontario Drive Test and pay $30 and they will give you an M2 exit test to anyone walking in off the street. And I understand that most people fail. Because they don't know what the tester is really looking for. You could go to the test and obey every law and regulation and fail it miserably because you weren't checking your blind spot during a turn or lane change. So the training, which is $400, is about six hours of riding a motorcycle and being coached on exactly what the test will look for. It's drilling, endless drilling, stop signs, turns, lane changes. 

Check your mirrors. Turn on your signal. Check your blind spot. Change lanes into the correct tire track. Turn off your signal. Check your mirrors. Put on your turn signal. Make sure your brake light is on. Come to a stop. Keep the brake light on. Keep the bike ready to move. Look behind you. Check cross traffic. Check your blind spot. Accelerate briskly but not hastily, turning left into the right tire track of the left lane without driving over any painted lane markings. Turn off your signal. Check your mirrors. Turn on your turn signal. Check your blind spot. Change to the left tire track of the right lane. Turn off your turn signal. Check your mirrors. --- Hours of it.

I passed the test with one point marked off; I didn't switch into the right lane of a two lane road fast enough after a turn. And I felt it wasn't exactly fair, but fair isn't really what was being tested. They emphasized that you should drive safely no matter what the tester told you to do. It's not that the tester told me to do something dumb, it's just that they didn't tell me to move over after having given me a long series of instructions immediately prior. Kind of sucks, but whatever. 

I now have a piece of paper that I can take to the bureaucracy that will get me a permanent M designation on my Ontario driving license. And that's a good thing. 

I have news about the audition for King Lear but I'm not supposed to share it yet.

Nine pounds to go. Probably won't get to 190 until the end of the year. And that's okay. I was 220 in April. A pound a week is good steady sustainable progress. Had to take in the drawstring on my fuzzy pjs this morning. I am also looking forward to introducing some very light physical conditioning once the exercise bands I ordered show up. And I should be doing more bike rides while the weather holds. But I've been so busy during the day with all my projects. 

I finished the seventh revision to my stage adaptation of House at Pooh Corner. It's just 132 pages now. Mostly because I removed every bit of non-essential stage direction. People will figure things out. And if they figure out something different than what I had originally put in, that doesn't mean they're wrong. It just means they found a different truth out of Milne's words. 

I auditioned for a staged reading of King Lear yesterday. The production intentionally mixes experienced professional actors (they already cast three roles, including Lear) with community shmoes like me. It went okay, and what was nice is that I didn't recognize anyone else auditioning. But it's a longer rehearsal process for a reading than I'm familiar with (like 8 rehearsals), and it includes some Shakespearean dialogue workshops which I'm eager to participate in. I don't have an answer yet. I hope I get cast!

Moving in the past week or two seemed to switch from something we hope do to someday to something we will do when we are able. It's best for both of our careers. While it makes sense that there are many more opportunities for strategic IT management work in Toronto, it is even more the case that if I ever hope to make money from my art -- any kind of art -- that I have to go to a city where people actually care about art. Because, I'll be frank, Waterloo Region is a hole when it comes to any kind of creative endeavour. No, I stand by this statement. I could rant on it for hours. 

I have a slightly swollen lower eyelid the past day or two. It's tender in one spot. I'm figuring it's a nascent stye, and I'm hoping it doesn't develop much further. Styes are no fun.