Day 93.

Is posting college essays on here selling my soul?
Oh well.....

Essay for Brown: What is the best piece of advice you have received and why?

I got a lot of good advice during CSSSA-- the California State Summer School for the Arts, where, for a month, I lived on the Cal Arts campus and studied creative writing.
On the first day the director of all the programs told us, "This month is what you make of it." I resolved to write as much as and as well as I possibly could. I wrote a scene sprawled on the cold tile of my dorm's bathroom floor because I was keeping my visual artist roommates up with the light; I wrote a poem while crunched into a cave-like space under the big desk in the writer's lounge because my teacher told us to write in different places.
His advice made me approach that month like a dare, but I still managed to bring some of my old fears: I was nervously reading one of my pieces to the whole writing department, swaying a little, when Eva Marie, the theater coach, told me, "Don't be cute. Cute ain't comfortable." She had me stand in what I call a power stance and what she called normal, and start over. Now, months later, when I talk in front of an audience I always look down to double check that my feet are firmly planted David Bowie style.
But the last and best piece of advice I got at CSSSA was from Zay, a short man in hipster glasses."Do something while you're here that scares you," he told us. I doubt he was the first to say it, and he didn't pretend he was, but the strange glint in his eye seemed to expect great things from us. Merely squishing spiders would not satisfy this glint. Jumping off buildings would not satisfy this glint.
Only confronting our own personal boggart would satisfy this glint.
So on the last night of CSSSA, I sang (with my friend Veronica on guitar) a song called "Blue or Gray" in front of maybe a hundred people, and they clapped and waved and called my name even though I was magnificently off-key and I had brought the lyrics up with me because I knew I'd forget them. And then we danced, way too many of us, in a tiny room sweating with joy, and people I'd never met came up and high-fived me and bear-hugged me-- just because that's how it was there.
And then, the next morning, I carried all my bags out to my family's car, and I went home. The whole car ride, while I heard mismatched pieces of what I'd missed, I flashed through the people I'd just left, the places I'd loved. My dorm room, with its hoarded food and the Bijou theater, where Holly and I read our spoken word poem. What made CSSSA special was besting our fear, and letting things surprise us: whether the cafeteria food's edibility or the reaction of an audience.
When faced with my daily routines, it was difficult at first to find room for fear (and the conquering of.) But soon I couldn't stop seeing opportunities: the tricky passage I always faked my way through in the piece I was playing in orchestra, the physics teacher who spoke in an intimidating drawl and punctuated all his sentences with a forcefully capped marker and the phrase "Simple as that." Looking for fears has become a game with myself, and though I don't always win (in fact sometimes I don't even play) it's given me a lot of something Zay could tell you all about: material.