The Independent Activity

I've been really unhappy with myself lately in acting class. All of my activities seem to suck. My teacher (or "Acting Guru" as a friend likes to say) doesn't like them, says "they're not well crafted." Ug. And I don't know what's worse: that there is no end to the activities in sight (one fellow had the gall to ask in class last week--and incurred Guru's wrath) or that, as Guru puts it, "this is the foundation for your character work next year. If you can't craft a good activity, you can't craft a character." Shit. This is not good, considering I've had all of 3 activities that worked well (note that all of these are imaginary circumstances):

--My mother had cancer. I was learning to play her favorite song on the guitar to play at visiting hours. Of course, I cried in class.
--My bestest, most amazing friend from high school was moving to NY. I was throwing her a "This is Your New Life" party (all activities should have a theme of some sort). I was so happy and excited. It was great.
--My best activity was (I think) when my niece had died and I was making a video photo collage to play at her funeral. That one made me and my scene partner cry, it was so sad.

I've had a lot of crappy activities too. Most of them are not terrible but "don't bring me to a full emotional life" as Guru would say. They included:
--Some guy had tricked me into sleeping with him (I actually used this blog post as inspiration). I was going to paper his work area with flyers and wear a sandwich board. Right idea, Guru said, wrong activity. I should have picked something more fulfilling--dressing up as something, doing something worse than just posters/flyers. And making a poster doesn't really bring you to a full emotional life...
--My Mom and step-dad couldn't go to Hawaii for their wedding anniversary because my step-dad had a stroke(!) so I was creating Hawaii for them in my apartment. I was trying to be happy, but my activity was actually quite sad. So my emotions got all confused and locked up. Crap.
--One of my friend's boyfriends had done something crappy to her. I had a whole convoluted story for what he did, and as a result she was mad at me, and yada yada. I was going to disguise myself and fool them both. But since my story was way too complicated, I couldn't act it. Ug!
--One of my friends had betrayed me, so I was dressing up as Mata Hari to embarrass her publicly. Good theme, but it turns out I didn't really care too much--her betrayal wasn't that big a deal, I guess, in the end.
--I had forgotten to go to my parent's wedding anniversary, because I'm an idiot. Shit! So I was trying to learn a song to sing to make it up to them. Not a great song, and I wasn't really connected to the activity.

Well I guess all this reflection paid off, since today wasn't so bad--I gave my dad Alzheimers and was recording memories for him. I cried. But my "contact" work with my scene partner wasn't so good. But he's so darn cute it's hard for me to yell at him! *sigh*