Dazed and Confused

August 21st - Sikandar. I am Jedi Mind Tricking you into seeing my movie. You cannot resist!!!

These days I seem to be sleeping a couple of hours more than I usually do. Normally, after years of boarding school upbringing and my own hyperactive nature, five hours of sleep is all that my body requires. I feel sluggish, lethargic and not at all like myself if I get more than that. These days I sleep too much. I wake up hating myself for wasting so many hours of daylight. Hours I could spend writing, or sketching, or reading, or just enjoying the sound and the smell of the rain against the palm trees in front of my window.

I know why my sleep cycle is skewed. It’s because of all the uncertainty in my life these days. Sure, my first film “Sikandar” is due for release soon and that makes me excited as hell. Sure, my life in Bombay seems to be approaching something resembling what I lost when I left New York City. But the heart of my life, the actor in me, is left wondering whether the work he was looking forward to doing this year will ever happen. Every week, sometimes every day, I hear a different version from the production houses I’m supposed to be working with. One week they say a film’s definitely on, and soon, and they sound excited and frantic to get my dates and block rehearsal times, and other days I hear people tell me that the film is shelved or abandoned or plain cast aside. And everyday my heart does a little twist. And the other film (there are two I was supposed to be doing this year)…I won’t even begin to talk about the other film, whose languishing has become so self-indulgent I don’t think it ever wants to be made.

And I know that this is the nature of the business. I don’t work in a nine to five with a boss, an oversight, a steady paycheck, a company parking spot, boring co-workers, broken coffee machine, and stringently doled out vacation time. The nature of my work and the life I lead is a chaotic fractal in a whirlpool. I know all of it. And I am as patient as I need to be to retain my sanity. It’s just some days I wake up and I feel - blue.

Schroedinger’s Heart - that’s the condition I’m suffering from. No wonder I can’t wake up in the mornings. But I vow from tomorrow morning, I shall greet the dawn. I shall pull out my notebook and write for hours, or at least try. I shall sketch, I shall watch the Tom & Jerry show and laugh like I used to before I became an adult. Because otherwise, this waiting, and this wondering will mangle all that was good and talented and centered about me. I will not let that happen. I cannot let that happen.

So, dazed and confused, and reeling - but not ready to sit down just yet.