Tegan,
Are you bored? We’ve both been asked that question a few times this week by people working on the set of our TV show High School. It's a reasonable assumption, especially since we're mostly here to bear witness — sit on our butts and watch everyone else make a TV show about our lives. The days are long, and there is a lot of waiting as lighting is adjusted and technical decisions are considered. When there is nothing to view on the monitors, I check email on my phone, eavesdrop, people watch, or daydream. Yesterday, I read a few dozen pages of a book I'd stuffed in my backpack. The novelty of this experience will surely wear off, but in these early days, I'm the opposite of bored.
Would boredom make me more of an insider here? Is my enthusiasm pulling focus away, or distracting from the task at hand? When our family, friends, and colleagues join us on tour, their presence exaggerates the mundane in-between moments that make up most of our life on the road.
I am self-conscious about the endless sitting, waiting, eating, and scrolling that we do backstage. I am not a tourist, not on vacation, or even curious to explore the city or empty venue. I prefer the cocoon of our tour bus, or the windowless, endless night, of a dressing room backstage.
Visitors inject energy into the group, we show off, we drink more, we go to karaoke or a museum before soundcheck. But an outsider can also burn battery life when I need to recharge. Establishing a routine on tour is a way to calibrate a life constantly in motion. It also helps vanquish homesickness and I briefly forget that my real life is elsewhere.
What made the reality of adulthood daunting as a young person was the idea that being grown-up meant wishing away time at a job. TGIF, weekend warrior, two weeks paid vacation. It was privileged, wishful thinking to believe I could escape that fate. Adults rolled their eyes or scoffed when I told them that I didn't want to live a normal life. I wanted to make music, see the world, set my own schedule, and escape the rules and expectations that were suffocating me at 17. After establishing ourselves as professional musicians I realized that we hadn't escaped having a job at all. It wasn't a normal life, but building (and eventually maintaining) a career required us to do things every day that were boring, difficult, and on a schedule that was not our own.
What I didn't understand about adults living for the weekend or for a shift to end, was that passing (sometimes wishing) away the hours of a day, meant disappearing weeks, months, and even years of unpleasant memories. The innumerable miles we’ve driven on tour, the countless claustrophobic flights in coach, insomnia and the narcoleptic mania of jet lag, and opening sets so bad my brain had no choice but to immediately file them into my subconscious. But the black hole takes the good stuff too. The thrill of a crowd roaring as the stage lights are extinguished is a sound so familiar I've come to only notice it in its absence. My threshold for surprise, joy — even fear — has been raised impossibly high.
At the center of every experience there I am.
My point of view is crowded and eventually overwhelmed by what remains on record. The vast archive we’ve amassed means that recalling any event of my life, makes me the viewer, the director, the camera. So how will I remember this time? Without a stage, or a microphone, I am in the background, watching someone else play me on the screen.
For now, I’m relishing the view.
Sara
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