Tension

"If you're going to be a diva, you better be good. If you're going to be a bitch, you better be right."

-- anonymous

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The air is rife with it. I smell it when we break for lunch, I hear it when we load into libraries. It is an elephant in the room, a squid in the soup, a bee in the ear: Tension, a strained connection between two human beings, haunts me. Onstage, it is glorious and powerful; off the stage, it is agonizing.

Tension invades with the stealth of a ninja, creeping in the silence--the awkward silence. And once it makes its presence known, it is hell. Like a bowstring pulled taut, the slightest pluck annoys me, threatens to sever the thread, turning possible melodies to atonal twangs.

Yet, as the old song goes, "What causes that?" Why is there so much tension in my life right now? It could be that I am pulled away, my coil cranked too tightly around a knob. Could be, I am pulling away, withdrawing, and pushing others farther away in the process. Which in a small theatre company, is social suicide. Asides of ire. The cyanide of silence. But who cranks the knob? Am I the cranker, the cranked, or just cranky? Perhaps, in this metaphor, I am not the string, nor the knob, but the musician, adjusting too much, picking nits in every note, listening with a troubled ear for an impossible tone. That must be it. I am doing this to myself.

And the other musicians play on, confused, alienated, offended. They scoot their chairs away, leaving me in a misconstrued solo.

--

All that goes to say, I'm alienating other actors. I need to stop.

--

I am in a different library, killing time before the performance in the conference room. We got here too early, set up too quickly, and while the rest of the cast naps, I am blogging. (Another example of my withdrawn humor.) I have picked up five movies, three of which I have never watched. I don't know when I'll watch them.

The librarian here looks like a girl I worked with in Scotland, a girl I grew to loathe, a person with as much negative energy around her as the person with whom I feel so much tension today. They are the kind of people who suggest too often, who interrupt you to say things which are absolutely false and argue them as true, who will call you by a stupid nickname long after the initial joke of it has staled and spoiled, who are addicted to caffeine and cigarettes but would fess up to neither problem, who are obsessed with the most popular of popular culture and pass this off as being cultured, who love everything that is new even if it is inane, who act like they know you well before they even know you poorly, who mistake sophistry for wisdom, who assume leadership roles that do not exist, who are politely wrong and rudely right.

In short, they simply do not know how they come across, because it is not worth the trouble to tell them as much. Best to ignore, ignore, ignore, with as much tact and fake absentmindedness as possible. After all, these are the folks who come and go in our lives with the speed of Chinese food through a digestive system. They do not last.

When it's time for them to go, it is equally satisfying, for them and for you. It is one of the hardest things for anyone to do, to work with people who don't like you. Which is why, all faults in focus, it is best to bite tongues and unshoulder chips.