22/03/2002 - 1:20 a.m.

The enemy of Avenue A will stay.

Well, entry 200. I have written 100 entries since December 9th. Er, yes. Not that I have no life or anything, yes.

I'm sort of scared. My mother started in on paying for college, which means loans, which means paying them back, which means getting a job after college. This doesn't fit. I was going on the world tour after college. I was going to travel and write and visit all my friends and then sell whatever I wrote while I was travelling to pay for that. OH YEAH!? Well... you're right, it is crazy.

That's the one problem with being creative, no one necessarily has to pay you for it. I think it's funny, if you can hold a mop and wiggle it around, they'll pay you to do that, but if you can "bring forth men's souls with sheeps bladders" (to paraphrase Shakespeare, look it up yourself) then you only get payed if you're lucky.

At Roosevelt, Sarah and her husband Kevin are our "technical design" people. Kevin paints sets (he's a fantastic artist) and Sarah helps with costuming (of course, she'd get paid way more to do it at a real theatre, so we're really lucky to have her, both of them). I believe she refers to their home decorating style as the "Pottery Barn knock-off slash college dorm look". Then there's T.... It's scary to do a job that requires any type of subjective talent (writing, dancing, painting, acting, singing, creating, performing, etc.) because there's no, well, I hesitate to say job security, but that's about it. You can't know when or where or whether you can find jobs. You can apply for grants for some things, but if you don't get the grant, what do you do then? You wait tables, or work in the store, or economise some more.

There's this play, Dinner with Friends, one of the women is an artist, she's married to a lawyer. Is that the only way to do it? Hope that you end up with somebody who can make things work out? That's not what I'd want. I know I'm going to college for Theatre, and that takes talent and other people knowing about your talent. I don't have anything to fall back on if this doesn't work. A lot of other people look at Communications or Journalism majors- they're practical majors. I mean, I said a long time ago (October 14 of last year) that Seriously, I don't know what I'm going to do if I don't marry a writer. (Well, yes I do, I'll probably die old and lonely and dead, but that's beside the point.) I can at least understand people who write. and that's something I still hold on to. Except for that nagging fear of money.

At the same time, I don't think it should matter. I'm not so attached to possessions as other people, I know that. A nice house and car aren't important to me. I've often reflected that I probably don't need a space much bigger than ten feet square in which to live, and I'm easily made happy. So I guess, there's nothing to worry about. It seems scary only when my mother goes on about it because she worries. But, as long as I end up poor and happy, I don't see any problems.

I don't know whether you can quote me on that one or not.