That's Fringe, Baby

A classic frantic, semi-sensical Journal

Writing in a hurry. Forgot to spell check or put the banners at the top. Maybe like a two minute read. No recs at the end, so listen to this Jennifer Lewis interview. It is so good.

Hello Sternal Journalists,

Fringe ended last night. What a blast. I have at least one request for a day-by-day breakdown of everything I did which I do not think I can actually do because I did a far smaller amount of note-taking than I normally do.

Normally, my note-taking about the goings-on of life takes the form of morning pages, the obnoxious and cult-ish daily ritual espoused by Julia Cameron of The Artist’s Way. It generally helps me work out feelings about things I don’t know I’m annoyed or worried about and is a great creative outlet.

It also ironically often becomes a source of worry for me as you’re supposed to do them in the morning and once noon rolls around and I haven’t done them, I start to feel the tug of anxiety about falling off a ritual I know to be good for me.

But the really nice thing about this past month is that I haven’t really required my mood-stabilizing habits—morning pages, meditation, running and other exercise, keeping my drinking in check. They’ve just become things that I know I enjoy, so I can do them when I want to.

That being said, I know this is a temporary situation and that there will be times when it’s very important to focus on these habits even if I don’t want to (especially that last one. Fringe is basically an adult freshman year and I cannot and will not take my consumption and sleep schedule back into the real world. It was pretty cool though).

But this, for the first time in a long time if not my entire adult life, was a time that reminded me that sometimes, some people sometimes just wake up every day and, even though there may be stresses or obstacles to overcome, they start with a baseline of generally having a nice time. They don’t need to start with a to-do list of four or five things that take time and are easy to put off in order to get a chance at a nice time.

And life’s not fair, so everybody gets a different breakdown of days where that’s easy and days where that’s hard. But, even if one tends to be on the shit side of that breakdown, it’s great to be reminded that there is an alternative to waking up every day with a mission to frantically zen yourself into a nice time.

I did, by the way, absolutely ugly cry while trying to explain this at the end of our show last night. Which means that a group of people saw me perform Poop Train and saw me ugly cry in the same 10-minute period. All while somebody was literally setting up a ladder to take down our stage the second we got off it.

But that’s Fringe, baby.

Here is a picture of me in a ballpit bar called Ballie Ballerson that is not vitally important to my experience here, but fairly representative of it:

Much love!

Julian