22/04/2002 - 6:04 p.m.

The plays the thing.

I sometimes wonder if I ought to go add one of those silly little "listening to" things to my diary, and then I go- no, half the time you're not listening to anything, and the other half of the time it would be really silly- She's Got Freckles or Theme for Aragorn and Arwen. Yeah, got the CD on Saturday, I've listened to practically nothing else. Ran through the Moulin Rouge CD and that nifty frog noises CD (actually, it's pretty cool, it's recorded so that you actually believe you're sitting in the middle of a swamp listening to birds and frogs and what-not), but I've run out almost two sets of batteries on LOTR. It doesn't help that it's somewhere in the region of 70 minutes long either.

Obsessive? Moi? Never!

Quite a long time ago I sent in two plays. One to a Stephen Sondheim Festival that I was sort of indifferent to, and on to International Thespian Festival. I wouldn't be so indifferent about the Sondheim one (because, hell, that's New York, so so different from Linclon Nebraska), except that I don't think I can get the time off from camp to go to the festival. Anyway, this week I heard back from both of them. The Thespian Festival people don't want me- wankers, this is the second year! But the Stephen Sondheim people want me to know that I am in the semi-finals.

They sent me a review of sorts. I'm a little wary at it because most of it involves expansion, and I don't really want to get into it. Rem suggested the same sorts of things in Wisconsin, and yes, maybe, but it's slighty more personal that I might want to let on. Playing with it only causes me to look at my own strange existance (which is now rather different from the one I was living in when I first wrote the thing three years ago- can it really have been three years ago?) and I don't know that that's what I want to do.

People who don't know me and my deep deep despising for therapists (I can't stand them, I've talked to a few in my time and they only want to twist my words around and find fault with things that aren't a problem- psychobabble) don't understand Lily. (This guy didn't, most of the grown-ups from Wisconsin didn't either.) But I think that's part of the problem- in this day and age, people don't want to understand that. They go happily to their therapist every week believing that they're getting something for the exorbitant amount of money they pay. Maybe they are, but I prefer to find cheaper ways of working out my problems. When it's writing, I can get money for my problems.

So I guess that, in a way, I'm talking to everybody else out there who understands Lily. Hey, it's OK, I'm a freak just like you are. A lot of people have told me about watching Rat Trap and wanting to laugh, but instantly feeling that it's not the right thing to be doing. Trust me- it's OK to laugh. It's funny. And when you catch yourself, you're not doing it because anything's in bad taste, it's because "ohh, it's true, but it all seems so ridiculous." I'm not an absurdist, by any standards, but I do have a tendancy to make people laugh until they realise that ohhh, that's something they're going to have to think about.

The funny thing is, I can't explain why.