Put down your suitcases

At my very terrific voice class on Friday we had a great conversation about recognizing tension.  One of the first things pointed out is that a beginning student may have trouble even knowing what tension is. When starting out, you need to develop a level of awareness about your own body.  Then, as your self-awareness develops, you can begin to understand where you are holding tensions that are new and different, and eventually you work your way towards the deeper tensions - the habitual ones that you've held so long they seem like the normal state.  We made an analogy between tension and luggage (emotional baggage anyone?).  You can think of different areas of tension as different pieces of luggage you carry around on yourself.  Learning to release tension is about learning to recognize when you can put down one of those pieces of luggage because you don't need to carry it anymore.  I think it's helpful to think of tension as luggage because of the resistance to letting go of the long held tensions - if you know you're just putting down a suitcase for a little while, you can always pick it back up if you miss it.  But it's also possible that you'll realize you can travel lighter.
I'm finding this suitcase analogy really useful for other things as well - I have so many compartments to my life these days - day jobs, side projects, auditions, etc.  And it doesn't help to try to carry all of those bags at the same time.  If I bring the day job bag into an audition, there goes the audition.  If I bring the audition to the side project, I'll end up saying the wrong lines!  And if I bring any or all of those home to the dinner table, I'm going to be less present for the important people in my life. 
To be even more specific, it's a great analogy for how to deal w/auditions after they're done.  Put the suitcase down.  Once you're done, you're done and it's up to someone else to make the decision. 

Resource of the week: weird actor day jobs

Substitute teacher, santa's elf, fake medical patient, dental office front desk - all of these are jobs I've held while pursuing work as an actor. 

And, I just found a cool new source for odd jobs that is pretty complimentary to actor hours - it's called TaskRabbit - it's a website where people post things that they need done, then designated TaskRabbit 'runners' bid on those tasks, and get paid when the task is completed.  A lot of the tasks are 'can you go get this thing and bring it from one place to another?' There's also moving help, housecleaning, and some things that are a little bit more odd.  The first thing I did on TaskRabbit was make a list of 10 pizza places in SF that were open until 10pm, had a table big enough for 15 people to sit together, and weren't too loud (the person who was posting the task had a group who wanted to meet regularly and practice their english conversational skills) - I thought about places I know and like, used yelp to flesh things out, and it took about an hour - I got $25 for it. 

At this point TaskRabbit is only in the SF Bay Area, and Boston, but I'm sure they'll be expanding soon to other cities. Check it out!

Resource of the Week: Feed Readers

My sister's in librarian schools, so she's teaching me how to manage my information streams.  I thought this was a pretty basic one, but after explaining it to three different people in one week, I realized that maybe it's not.

Are there websites that you visit regularly to see if they have new content (blogs, websites for newspapers, weekly columns on-line, etc)?  If so, streamline your time and subscribe to these websites using a feed reader such as Google Reader or FeedDemon.  Then, you just have to open your feed reader, and it'll show you all the new content that has been put up on that website.