9:40 PM - Tues 4.18.23
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Sometimes I like to "bury the lede" in a given journal entry - It's fun.

But not this time, because I booked the TV thing I wrote about in my last entry (I was "pinned" for it yesterday, and the "pin" became an actual gig earlier today)!

The period of time between the "pin" and booking the gig was a little stressful, as you might imagine - have I mentioned lately how this was the fourth time I've been "pinned" this year and I hadn't booked the first three? - but it's a great relief to finally put a "win" in the books this year.

(I don't have a shoot date yet, but the "window" is sometime next week. The "offer" - where they tell my agent what they want to pay me and so forth - is supposed to happen in the next couple days.)

My "Creating With Clay" class at GenSpace today - only the second time I've attended -was a good distraction from worrying about whether the TV "pin" was going to actually "stick" or not.

For an hour-and-a-half, as I worked on the little clay guy I'd started weeks before (Interrupted by the film festival in West Virginia), I wasn't thinking about "pins" - Instead, I was struggling with my guy falling apart, trying to fix him, then turning him from a guy that looked vaguely like me (He was bald) to a little French artist.

It's interesting - This is the first time I've been in a room doing "art stuff" with a bunch of other people since junior high, which makes it about as "new" an experience as I've had in quite a while.

And I don't quite know how to write about it - overall, I enjoyed myself...but at the same time, I found it tiring, struggling some to deal with my frustration, my competitiveness, and my fading-but-still-present feeling of being an old man during "Art Therapy" time at the home.

Yesterday, I did the "Drawing" class for the first time (I'd missed it the first week I signed up).

And I think I was lulled into a false sense of security by "clay class", which really is just playing with clay - In the drawing class, we watched a YouTube video on Rubens, then were given handouts of a couple of Rubens figures (For an upside-down drawing exercise), and the "negative space" exercise of drawing a chair by drawing the space around the chair, and for the next hour we were drawing (Again, not something I typically do with other people around).

I think I misunderstood something the instructor said, and instead of doing either the upside-down drawing exercise or the "negative space" exercise, I tried to do both at the same time.

It was kind of a mess.

And I was a little embarrassed when we had to show them to the rest of the class - The Instructor complimented the "flow" of fabric in my drawing, but it was definitely one of the lesser efforts.

(Afterward, the confusion on my part confused me, since I'm familiar with both of the exercises mentioned from the book Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain, which I own. I just think I was a little too nervous to actually hear what was being said.)

I was glad I did both classes, and I plan to continue going to both of them...but that said, I did have to give myself something of a "talking-to" about "feeling competitive" or wanting to be "perfect", telling myself, "This is for fun, Jim, not for a showing at LACMA...!"

And as I've discussed with my therapist - our last session is tomorrow - the life I want is not one where all I'm doing is waiting around for auditions/gigs, but one where I get interrupted from my drawing or writing (Or hanging out with Josh or Jane or whomever) by a text about the latest audition/gig.

Where I'm "living my life" and not just "waiting for my life to start happening".

And I think I'll end it there.

Till next time...

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