Art and Numbers

I’m hungry so I eat success. It tastes like strawberries and my face is red with raspberries, bleeding fruit as I go after the viney kill. I lick my fingers and dream of home. All my homes are in my dreams, which I count like I cannot count the stars.

I have the most frustrating time counting and lose track easily. When I volunteer for Boise Contemporary Theater and work behind the bar, I enjoy every part except making change from bills. There are no calculators. When I am handed a twenty dollar bill from the patron who just ordered a hot chocolate, beer and a candy, I get a sharp pang of panic in my shoulders. Hot chocolate, one dollar. Beer, four dollars. Candy, fifty cents. That means five dollars plus fifty, which means that twenty minus five is fifteen, minus fifty cents is fourteen fifty.

It isn’t so bad when I figure it out at my own pace, but at that rate, calculating those numbers in my head is slow going. Then, when a group of people is standing with steady, patient smirks waiting to order behind the customer with his twenty-dollar bill who has been waiting for his change, their staring faces stop my brain. The pressure churns the numbers into glue, which circles around up there until mashing to JELLO, then into soup and then into blood. Then I can’t see in front of my face anymore. That’s a long time to wait for change and chocolate.

Counting is much easier in my dreams. I don’t use numbers there. I just know and that means complete success.

When I think of success without my brain but use my stomach instead, I know I am already there. I feel it like butterflies tickling my bellybutton. Knowing that lets me breathe a little deeper and exhale a little softer, so then I can inhale hugely, charging my insides to run faster and faster toward that invisible goal.

Listen to my body. It says, “Pace yourself. Be patient. You can’t have it all. Killing yourself on productivity won’t get you where you need to go.”

I was thinking about that nearly a year ago in the basement of the Esther Simplot Performing Arts Center, where I work on props for Opera Idaho. Where I was painting a ladder to match another ladder for Our Town, both of which needed to be dark umber like faded raw wood. The one I borrowed from the Boise State Theatre Arts Scene Shop was white and splattered with yellow paint.

After spending an hour reproducing the brown ladder’s color with the opera company’s leftover paint—years old and rotting—the first coat didn’t match the other ladder exactly, but it was close. Next I spray painted the steel joints, hinges and bolts, creating a rusted steel color. Then I mixed dark brown with chocolaty red to dry brush the sides for a slight grain effect. As I pulled that effect over the first coat, I thought about process.

Often when I work, I’m thinking of where I want to be later on. I think about graduate school, the next play, the next theater company. The locations and circumstances are always a little vague when I visualize them, but it is important to work toward something.

It is also important to enjoy the process of the moment. I am doing what I love right now. Writing on this page is an enriching experience in itself. Too often, I get caught up in what’s next, as if what I am doing now only serves as preparation for that.

“Okay, enough of that. Hurry up. What is the next big thing?”

That way, I jump from project to project. It is a jumpy mind frame. I get dissatisfied with the present moment, which reveals everything I’m not doing. As it highlights all those growing bullet points on my to-do list, I get frantic. Then I start reading an old notebook and think of two scripts I need to write, six stories to revise, manuscripts of poetry to compile and memorize, props to make and office work to organize for the artists and musicians I manage.

If I’m always looking toward “what’s next,” I will overlook that when I get there, too. So when I receive a PhD and Pulitzer Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship, am working with prestigious theaters and immersed in projects I’d never imagine at this time, I will not even enjoy that and will never be satisfied. It is motivating to always have a hunger for “what’s next”, but it is essential to taste what I am biting into right now. Otherwise, it makes no difference that I work in a field I love, not at all. I’d rather let art and love make a difference. I’d rather success come from process.