Thursday, November 16, 2006

My girlfriend left me a very encouraging message on my phone earlier. She seems to think that I need to stop thinking of myself as an artist creating art, and more as a student learning artistry. This could be part of the issue. I don't approach my assignments as learning opportunities but rather as another chance to show up my classmates and teachers--show them that the tens of thousands of hours I've spent watching movies, the essays, the lectures, the books, the DVD hyper-extended features...that I "know" what I'm doing. And I think I'm taking the competition thing way too seriously. My sensibilities are vastly different from the rest of the class, as many of them are from each other. And yet, I endlessly compare my shit to theirs...goddamn comparative literature. My first instinct isn't to work my heart out and push it to mental, emotional, psychological failure, but to find a measuring stick against which to measure myself, and then strive to measure up. And I'm a talker, so if the work itself doesn't actually measure up, I can at least talk part of the way up the stick.

This is not good.

1 comment:

Marie said...

You've come so far, Erik.