Random IV

1. Two not-so-nice realizations about myself:
One. That every once in a while, I suffer from these sudden, brief and pretty uncalled for bursts of jealousy.
Two. I forgot. damn. :)

2. About the performing arts:
That most of the good stuff you pick up, you pick up on your own. You may read treatises on the subject, get the best possible instructors, but you learn the important stuff by observation. You see others performing, you see something you like and you try to incorporate it. And this would be aping, only its not, because in an art, you can never ape. You can try to, but you can only try. When you try incorporating something you see, you do it in your own way, in your own style, and that makes everything you learn, everything you do, immensely personalized, immensely stylized.
In an art, especially so in a performing one, you are performing for a hypothetical audience. But the best performance comes only when you forget them, when you are lost in your own world. And I suspect that you can absorb everything, you can exhibit everything you've got only when you cut off the external connections one by one. And when you voluntarily become blind, the puppet suddenly opens its eyes.
About the learning curve. There isn't one. I'm not even sure how you learn. If you try making an analogy between picking up stuff from a text book and learning a new dance step, I don't think you'll get anywhere. You see, you copy and you practice enough till it comes. Then you practice some more, till it comes smoothly. Then you start adding the eye movements, the facial expressions, the grace, and you keep innovating. It's really hard to break it up into a cut and dried process. And in this learning process, you rely so much on intuition. There is this part of your brain, which controls stuff 'consciously'. And you simply have to deny control to this active part. Someone else takes over, and you aren't even sure who it is. And this is so different from classroom learning. Where you know who is in control and you know how you're learning.
And last, it's not easy. But oh, so much fun. :)