Hey, the website was down for a while there. Everything’s back up and running now, hopefully better than before.
Look for new posts in the near future.
Back in Action…
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Dietary Announcement: Wheat
Been struggling with my health amid a busy season lately, but I finally found the reason: I have a gluten intolerance.
Basically, I can’t eat grain products anymore. It’s a genetic condition called (among other things) celiac disease. My sister was diagnosed with this a few years ago, so I’ve been on a semi-cautious lookout since then. Gluten is a protein found in grains that has basically gotten way out of hand since farmers invented cross-breeding to increase harvest yields. Over the past couple hundred years the gluten content of grains has gone nuts. We’re talking multipliers in the hundreds. The human digestive system isn’t designed to handle that much gluten, so an autoimmune disorder has arisen that basically destroys your small intestine – making you unable to absorb nutrients and and generally turning you into a sickly person.
A few days ago I was attempting to go to sleep after a rough day when the thought occurred to me that I was exhibiting a lot of the symptoms for celiac. In the morning I cut the grain products out of my diet and almost immediately noticed a difference.
I hadn’t realized how bad I had been feeling until today. When I woke up, feeling great, I thought to myself “Gee, I like feeling this good. Sure beats being sickly.” Then I ate a protein bar I thought was gluten-free. I was incorrect. Within a few minutes I started feeling the ‘sickly’ symptoms coming back and double-checked the label. Yup, trace amounts of wheat involved in the manufacturing process.
So now I’m embarking on the new diet. It’s a big lifestyle change, especially for a bachelor “starving” artist. The hope is that by switching over, I’ll regain a lot of the energy that I haven’t had for a few months now. Even in the few days I’ve been testing the gluten-free diet I’ve felt more alert and energetic. The improved mental state is awesome. We’ll just have to wait and see what sort of long-term effects the change has in store as well.
In conclusion: Big life change, but don’t bake me a cake to celebrate 
So… sleeping is good
Wierd, I just realized that the last few posts that I thought I put up didn’t go up. Oh well…
So, one of the many reasons I haven’t put up anything here in a while is, of course, the fact that holidays take me out of commission for a while. However, holiday recovery has been accomplished for a while now and I still haven’t put anything up.
The reason has more to do with the fact that I haven’t been able to sleep well for months. I have actually no idea why this wave of insomnia has hit, I didn’t significantly change anything about my life when this started, strangely suddenly, in September. (Just woke up in the middle of one night without any trouble going to sleep before)
September was not a good month for insomnia to start, although possibly appropriate since we were rehearsing Dracula at the time. I though it might have something to do with that project, but the insomnia has continued well after the vampires went to sleep. Since then, it’s been varying in intensity for a while. I don’t have the problem where I can’t sleep at all, I do sleep. It’s more along the lines of waking up repeatedly in the night and a general degradation of the quality and type of sleep occurring.
You can imagine that this has had a detrimental effect on concentration and energy levels. Depending on how things were going on a given week, I was not a necessarily safe person to have around the studio for a while. People got bruises to prove it. The problem eventually drove me to try medicating myself (sleeping pills) which had mixed success. For those of you who know my aversion to consuming medication, that tells you how extreme the problem got.
Sleeping pills only shut your body down, which was apparently not my problem. I also apparently don’t like shutting myself down artificially because the first few nights I took sleeping aids, I fought them off and woke myself up, which was super-creepy. I also had trouble waking up because the pills keep you down for a certain amount of time, whether your body wants to be down or not.
So, on the advice of a neuro-biologist friend of mine (cool friend to have, I say), a few days ago I switched to using melatonin, which is the chemical your brain uses to tell itself to go to sleep.
Which brings me to why I’m writing today – I have energy! A couple days of going to bed because my brain tells me to is great. It’s still hard to get out of bed in the morning, but that is starting to fade as I get further from pill-induced habit.
Yay for modern science! Now I can see if the melatonin will get me into some good sleeping habits and I can go to sleep completely drug-free. Also, now that I have energy maybe I can try to figure out why I started having this trouble in the first place.
We’ll see.
Dracula… (cue eerie music)
It all began one sunny afternoon at the gym. I was being very manly and pushing heavy weights up and down and back and forth. All of a sudden, I realize that Darren was in the gym! I smoothly set my current weight down and sauntered over to say hi. We chatted for a bit, mostly making fun of meeting in the gym, when Darren got this too large grin on his face and said, “I’ve got this great idea: Dracula!”
And now, over a year later, we’re in the final rehearsal stage for PUSH’s re-telling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Our version of Dracula departs from the original novel for mostly practical reasons. We don’t have the numbers to fill out Stokers’ main cast, much less all the supporting roles. We also don’t have a good way of staging a weeks-long cross-European chase with trains and boats. At least, no way that wouldn’t leave the audience catatonic from intense boredom.
The central liberty we’ve taken with the story is to tell it from the perspective of the madman Renfield. In Stoker’s novel, Renfield is a sort of motion sensor for Dracula, his actions parallel Dracula’s movement and desires. Renfield also serves a crucial plot point by becoming the weak link in the defense of the asylum he is housed inside. A local writer/actor and friend of ours, Danny Hoskins, wrote and speaks Renfield’s part on stage with us as we alternately become his nightmares, fantasies and actual characters.
(YouTube doesn’t seem to be working with me today. Video’s are here.)
On the spiritual side of things, Dracula is an interesting story to tell. There have been a lot of sidelong glances from many church friends who ask “Why Dracula? Isn’t it all about EVIL?” The short answer is: yes it is. Our ‘Dracula’ is a story about absolute evil. In a society where morality is more of an opinion than a standard, we felt this would be a particularly compelling idea. It breaks the social norm and makes our vampire story a bit different what pop culture is producing. It’s a conversation point, which is what we always hope will occur when people watch PUSH perform.
We’re pretty excited about Dracula, if you couldn’t tell. This is by far the biggest project we’ve ever worked on – the show is almost an hour long. It’s also a chance for us to merge the many worlds PUSH draws our art form from. The narrative of Dracula draws out our classical story-telling mime background. The horror element allows us to indulge the more extreme movement training. There’s even a moment where I get to bring out some of my old circus training and hang from the ceiling.
We’ve got more videos and pictures up on our Facebook page if you want to take a look (which I’m sure you do). We’re using social networking pretty heavily for this show, so there will be plenty of updates before the show goes up.
New Hobby
This summer I started doing something… well that’s not strictly true, I’ve been jumping over/under/on things for a very long time. Maybe a better phrase is, “This summer I found a means to do something in a socially acceptable context.” Unfortunately, this is a long and cumbersome phrase, so I won’t use it.
Let’s try this: I joined a local Rochester community of traceur’s this summer. “What’s a traceur?” That’s the word French-speakers use to describe a person who practices parkour (also a French word – I guess the French get to name things that Frenchmen invent.) Parkour is a bit more difficult to define than traceur (and I kinda cheated with that one, anyway). You can check out the group here: Rochester Parkour
There are several ways to define parkour. First off, it’s a non-competitive sport. It’s all about community; pushing yourself and encouraging others to increase their ability. There are flashier spin-off sports like free-running that aim for more spectacular movements, but parkour focuses on efficiency and economy of motion. Parkour is also described as training the ‘flight’ portion of our ‘fight or flight’ response. Martial arts will train you to confront someone, parkour will train you to get away, unless you’re being chased by James Bond. In which case, your best course of action is to become an iconic arch-villain and hope to be resurrected in a future movie. (See the Casino Royale opening for a traceur who did not apply the appropriate response).
Aside from escaping super-agents, parkour has been a great addition to my life. I still love to perform and move with PUSH, don’t get me wrong. There’s just something about the lack of pressure with parkour that is very freeing. Freedom is the key word, actually. I’m free to have fun with it,the movement itself is meant to provide freedom in an environment and leaping up and off a 10-ft wall is probably the next best thing to flying.
And even though that last stunt may sound kinda dangerous, the guys at group (and girls, too) are very good at controlling the safety factor. You never do anything that you aren’t comfortable with, and there’s always someone around to watch you or help you achieve a new skill.
Oh yeah, the people are pretty fascinating, too. Most of the traceurs are local college students, which probably isn’t a great surprise, but there are also a lot of locals who spend their weekends and free time training. All ages,too. It’s a pretty cool thing.
I do end up with a higher number of scrapes and bruises than I would have otherwise, but I have yet to see or hear of anyone in our group picking up any injury worse than a sprained ankle. Plus, the scrapes are just added manly/cool factor: “How’d you get that nasty scrape?” “Jumping up a 10-ft wall and then Kong-vaulting over a 5 -ft long concrete block.”
Totally worth the 3″ scratch on my arm.
All photos are courtesy of Graham Musler. They were taken this summer during one of our training sessions at Manhattan Square Park.