Everything is beautiful at the ballet.

"A Chorus Line" was pretty cheesy.

I'm in the Sheraton New York hotel lobby because that's where I can get free Wi-Fi. It's also ripe with some excellent people-watching.

I recently went through and read all of my old posts on this blog. Some of them were happy. Many of them were sad. All of them were true.

It seems like I'm a better writer when I'm upset or angry. Everything that I've written in a state of anguish or hysteria has been painfully honest and real-two attributes that I greatly admire in the world's best writers.

Do you have to be tortured to be a genius?

I don't consider myself particularly articulate or intelligent-just someone able to describe the truth. My ability to impress people lies solely in the intrigue that the truth holds. People don't want to hear about satisfaction. Human beings are fascinated with pain, obsessed with it. Obsessed with seeing how much of it we can take. How much of it we can inflict. And most pertinently to this discussion, how well we can envision and imagine it without having to experience it for ourselves.

Why do you think the gorenography genre has exploded? We don't care about getting scared, because these movies don't scare us. There is no inherent psychological presence in these films. And yet, we watch them under the guise of watching horror movies because pain captivates us. There is so much of it to see, to hear. So many different ways to inflict it. The questions we all ask ourselves are "How far is it going to go? How many more needles can she possibly drive underneath his fingernails before he passes out from the pain? How much longer until the flames reach his flesh? When is it going to end?" Not because we want to see the end...because we want to keep watching. There is no pity here. Only fascination and an oft unexpressed desire, a NEED to witness more. Pain is the cause and effect of so many things. There are very few things that are universal.

Pain is one of them. Everyone understands the language of tears and anguished screams.

Yet so few of us are willing to admit this fascination. Really. I can't be the only one with a little bloodlust of her own.

So now the question is how much pain do we need to endure in order to become the geniuses that we all want to be? More importantly, how much pain are we WILLING to endure?