Text: (on TV): “TOMORROW: -30º”
“Oh Wow!!”
“Its so cold this week! That means a snow day!!”
“…”
“kinda cold today, huh guys?”
I personally can’t relate to this comic strip at all! Not even one bit!! But seriously though, I hope everyone is warm and bundled up right now. I think we’ve gotten through the worst of it, but still, please stay warm. Not all of us have fur!
I’ve reached a newfound love for sunrises. I’m now starting my days in the darkness of 7am, and in these too early mornings I find myself witness to the magic of the sun warming the world as it rises the horizons. Yes, I love sunsets as much as the next person, but there’s something about the sun rising and waking tired eyes that feels like a hug after a night spent too alone.
As a professional workaholic, I spend my sunrises and sunsets in the Stamps print studio most days. My lifelong growing love for printmaking has only grown tenfold this past year during my printmaking classes, and in its wake my love for the print studio has blossomed as well. Although I come home bruised, stained with ink, and the sorest I’ve ever been every time after working in the print studio, I’ve never been happier. The print studio has become some what of long lost home in my time here in Ann Arbor. It’s where you go to find someone willing to laugh with you and gossip after a long day working. You’re able to find secrets tucked away in the donated artwork pinned across the walls, lasting memories of those who came before. There’s a peace that exists in the studio when no one is there, and you can feel it right before you walk it. The air is stagnant with the smell of ink and linseed oil, and the metal of the presses sit still and cold until you will them awake for the next step of work. The dust of litho stones are settled into corners never touched by brooms and the crinkle of newsprint stay silent until a breeze shakes them to life. There’s a certain special kind of life breathed into the studio when you step in and see an assortment of people you never would’ve met if it wasn’t for this shared love and you start to create alongside them. There’s a special connection made through printmaking and I find it to be most tangible in the life of the studio. From late nights to early mornings, from spilt ink to perfectly polished plates, the print studio exists as a world entirely its own and it’s something that can never be replaced.
To take into our next week:
Ins: Pomegranate tea, hosting movie nights, reading before bed, sunrises, the color mauve, hummus, thermoses full of coffee.
Outs: Sleeping after 11pm, broken appliances, wind tunnels, dry knuckles, static electricity, grease.
I always believe time is well spent no matter what you’re doing as long as you’re in a space you love. I hope everyone is able to enjoy the places that bring peace, happiness, or even just respite from the chaotic world in the coming days.
They say it is highly unlikely that lightning will strike the same place twice. Sadly, no one ever made a flood version of the saying so here we are.
While packing my belongings to return back after break, I decided to check our dorm group chat to let the memories of my Michigan home flood (absolutely no pun intended it’s far too sensitive of a topic) my brief nostalgia. When I saw this message, I mentally slow clapped at this building’s ability to structurally dissolve at any moment.
This column may transform into a flood report issue. Once is a mistake, twice is a coincidence, three times is just more content.
From a possible future Ann Atlantis,
Captain Singh
“I’m sorry there was some…emotion there.”
Sentences like this one have been said to me in a variety of situations in recent years, usually in the context of some minor moment of tension. And in many cases, this response almost rubbed me the wrong way moreso than the original conflict.
Why are you apologizing for emotions? We can apologize for our behavior or the way we respond to things, but that’s not the same thing. Plus, why is expressing big emotions somehow offensive, or even more troublingly, some universal sign of mental instability? Why does feeling and showing the urgency, immediacy, and importance of something warrant our friends diagnosing us with various ailments and commenting on how “dysregulated” we are? While therapy and emotional intelligence can be beneficial and healing under the right circumstances, they aren’t meant to be weapons pointed at anything that’s mildly uncomfortable.
Emotional intelligence isn’t the same as emotional absence. We have them for a reason, and using them smartly and compassionately doesn’t necessarily mean using them less.
I was an Angry Kid, or at least that’s what I was constantly told. My emotions were simply too big and implied that, at best, there was something a bit wrong with me mentally or, at worst, I was just a bad, angry person. As an AFAB, femme-presenting person, you could argue that this was mostly just misogyny. Since I’ve spent most of my life with a visible deformity, and since deformity is often equated with villainy in media and the arts, you could argue it was ableism. But whatever the underlying reason, it was a form of hatred. It was exclusion, meant to reinforce the notion that my emotions made me bad and that I needed to be punished into controlling them, cutting off their sharp edges, in order to be worthy of love. I needed to fit in the box and follow the rules, and if I couldn’t do that, I was Bad.
I’ve struggled for years to articulate what drew me to theatre in those early days, but one thing I remember vividly is how freeing it felt to be able to fly up to a 10 on the emotional scale and be praised for it. Onstage, the 10 is encouraged, a necessary use of energy to draw the audience into energetic proximity. Though they know we’re just telling a story, heightened emotion shows immediacy, need, scale, stakes – it shows that the events taking place, real or imagined, are worth drawing up our vital force and setting it loose, pushing it beyond us. And if it’s worth it to us, maybe it should be worth it to them.
This is why live performance has so much power. It’s a sharing of life force in proximity and a declaration that there is something out there worth physically putting ourselves out there for.
Theatre has its problems, at least as it exists in a late-stage capitalist, colonized society. But it makes space for big personalities and big emotions. More than that, it cultivates them, training them into us because of the power that they have to move a room, to cause someone’s breath to catch, to break skin out in goose bumps, focus soul power through glaring eyes, and zing urgent, world altering energy into fingertips, twitching them into action.
And sometimes we need the 10 even in life. Big emotions are there for a reason. Sometimes that reason is change.
What is worth your 10? Where will you lend your vital life force? Which story will you let breathe fully into your living body in the years to come? When is it worth exhausting yourself and getting angry if it leads to change?
We can’t live every moment of our lives at a 10, but sometimes we are called to it, and we have to be ready to draw upon ourselves in fullness when that call comes. Villainizing our heightened, most powerful selves will only serve to keep us quiet when it counts the most.
Is a flower still a flower if it can’t bloom? If you are that seed sown with doubt & feel that you don’t belong, perhaps you’re a rose in a tulip garden. & if you can’t bloom as they bud with frustration, know that when the tulips wither, you alone will stand tall. - Sappy
It’s a lot to process, I guess…
