“The sound you are hearing is not a technical problem. It is not a musical cue. It is not a joke. It is the sound of one man’s mounting anxiety. I… am that man.” -tick…tick…boom!
I remember a 60 year old woman who sat in our poetry class back in college. The woman – for the life of me, I forgot her name – spent most of her life abroad as a nurse.
After her retirement, she decided to go back to painting and literature, passions she put on hold when she pursued nursing and raised a family. She sat in different lit classes around Ateneo, soaking up everything from lit theory to poetry to creative wrting.
“You will always have time,” she once told me when I divulged anxiety about not having the time to achieve everything I wanted. ” look at me, I’m doing all this and I’m already 60!”
In time, I remind myself as I go through my schedule and tick off my to-do list.
In time. I have to think as I grit my teeth and tackle the drudgery that comes with a job.
In time, I sigh, as I struggle to put together the rhythm and lines I once weaved with ease. It will come, I tell myself, to shoo away little mental vampires that cackled in glee at the scrawls on my paper. Emily Dickinson’s poems were valued more after her death.
I remember Johnathan Larson’s “tick…tick…boom!”. Over time, it has spoken more to me than “Rent”. My sister criticized “Rent” for embellishing a life of deliberate poverty, of featuring spoiled “hipsters” who thought honest living was much too mainstream. tick…tick…boom! was more honest, I believed, having had the chance to see both shows. In tick…tick…boom! lay the moral lesson of making the most out of our talent, and the choices we make around them. Even if it takes us away from them.
“the tick tick booms are softer now. I can barely hear them, and I think if I play loud enough I can drown them out completely.”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHBMxhxMYIg]
You can read more about it at the show’s wikipedia page.