Improv me
Awkwardness is contagious, or maybe things just don't work right, temporarily, and you have to give up and muddle through. You all know the stages of learning, right - unconscious incompetence, conscious incomptence, conscious competence, unconscious compentence? There probably should be some intermediary stages in there for self-conscious incompetence and self-conscious compentence, right? Or maybe they can be defined away into one of the other categories. Also, unconscious incompetence is always defined so negatively, as if it's a pre-learning stage, but I think you can learn a lot from being unconsciously incomptent. It's an experimental, "play" state of being where there's no consequence to your actions - which is invaluable when learning. And that's pretty much where I felt I'd been for the first three classes - unsconsciously incompetent but with a keen eye for discovery.

I felt like I took a small step backwards last night in class, but then again, everyone was struggling this week (after we all thought we were so fucking awesome last week), and it is, in fact, only the 4th class, so there's no sense in beating myself up over it. Though the teacher did admonish us as a group to cool it over post-scene self-recriminations, which it seemed everyone was doing ("man, I should have done more with that mechanical dinosaur." or "When she took the gerbil out of the cage, I should have made her paint one out of the mural on the other side of the room." These were strange scene-paintings). I have no particular highlights to report - during my first scene I had set something up and my partner immediately changed it and confused me, because I had expected her to respond to what I was saying rather than establish a different scenario right away. I also never, ever want to have to pretend I am stoned "onstage" again. Embarrassing! There was a weird focus on childhood scenes and also animals; very kindergarten play-time. I did what I thought was some excellent object-work of lifting a very heavy shovel full of sand, but all in all, this was sort of a self-consciously incomptent night, as opposed to the playful unconscious-incompentence that I'd been feeling. We will roll over to a new plateau next week though, or maybe on a weekend practice session.

Anyway, if you'd like, help me construct some new stages of learning, based on personal experience, and with more of an emphasis on the cyclical nature of acquiring skills rather than the implied "result" of the standard 4 stage model. I am finding that I am short-circuiting myself with a lust after immediate results right now, and hey, that shit isn't going to work and is pretty much antithetical to any success I've had recently, so I need a new model.