There is nothing in my head to write at the moment. I've just woken up from a long nap which I didn't mean to take. It's nearing midnight. Similar situation as yesterday, but unlike yesterday I'm lacking the inspiration to create any interesting prose. Trust me when I say how hard it is to come up with an interesting story at the drop of a hat, especially at 12 am in a groggy stupor.
So I'll do the most forbidden task, which is simply to tell you about an event of my day. And one that wasn't too interesting either, I'm afraid to say.
Due to the loveliness of some family friends, my dad and I had the chance to go see The Addams Family musical which, despite my initial cautiousness, was actually a pretty cute and fully-formed stage play. When I hear about musicals based off of gimmicks, I always hesitate to embrace them for the fear of having them commodify my favorite artistic industry.
It's so easy to make musicals seem cheap and frivolous, so I'm constantly on the defense about the topic. It's something I've had to field questions about before. Why is Broadway so plastic? Why is musical theater so concocted and unrealistic?
I admit that these aren't atypical issues. But for someone who really loves the theater, it becomes an easy task to overlook the over-the-top to get to the heart of the story and to embrace that story.
If I'm going to prove this point, I guess I'd better take into account The Addams Family, which was admittedly a cutesy farcical musical and therefore perhaps within the category of the sillier, more frivolous style that many people love to hate on Broadway.
The story of this musical isn't just like a typical episode in The Addams Family television show or films. It asks the question of how parents Morticia and Gomez Adams would deal with the idea of their daughter, Wednesday, getting married.
Turmoil springs up right and left as Wednesday confides in Gomez that she has been secretly engaged, a secret she wants to keep from her mother until after an announcement during a dinner party with her fiancé's parents at the Addams family mansion.
There are issues brought up that, however exaggerated, represent real life concerns for people in relationships. Issues like honesty and compassion, devotion and passion. Even in a story about a group of kitschy goth-people, it is possible to address some highly realistic issues.
On a night like this, it's hard to find any value in anything other than sleep. I've spent about an hour in bed half-awake listening to BookTV on my television (thanks to my dad, by the way, for leaving it on). During that time, the broadcast kept convincing me that I had finished writing my blog and that in the process I had constructed some coherent discussion of the life of George Washington (which was the narrative being discussed on the episode airing in the background as I slept).
In my head I came up with marvelous analyses of life based off of the relationships between Washington and his parents, Washington and his wife, Washington and his adopted children. In reality I did not.
And more than the ideas of what makes for a good familial or romantic relationship (which, it seems, are common themes of pursued knowledge throughout my life), I feel that in recent times I've learned to embrace the concept of constant creativity.
Even when I wake up at 12 am after falling asleep at 9, it becomes my responsibility to create some sort of plot and let it run through my head until it becomes coherent and meaningful. I am forced to put it online so that everyone may bear witness to either its genius or its stupidity.
Most of the time, I try to ensure it has some depth.
Now I have discovered that even in my sleep, I try to make these connections. I try to take what isn't really significant in life and formulate a scenario in which it is significant, even if that scenario is the very act of writing it down.
So where other people might watch BookTV and yawn and move on - and yes, I'm one of those people as well - and where others might watch The Addams Family musical on stage and laugh a bit then forget all the subtext and morals of the story, I'm trying day by day to make life make sense through every little piece of experience I attain.
I don't know if I have my blog to thank or just my general demeanor, but it's been a nice journey these past few months, of that I'm sure. Because without this incessant need to wake up when I'm half asleep, I doubt I would spend half as much time really considering life within its smaller contexts. And to really understand my existence, it is important to place the tiny building blocks of understanding together to come to conclusions about broader issues.
Is a scene from The Addams Family something I'll draw on in the future when I'm dealing with an actual crisis? Maybe not. But who knows, maybe it'll be that one piece in the puzzle of my life the clarifies everything. Only time will tell.
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