Return

Today I returned from here:
To here:

The Pacific Northwest is a beautiful place, but it feels good to be home with the sirens and garbage trucks and cats. I think I'm turning into a city girl.

A Big Step

I got to my parents' house this week and learned that my baby brother just got engaged. I'm feeling a little conflicted because he's only twenty and hasn't even declared a major in college yet, but they seem very happy and whatnot, so I guess I'm on board. He and his girlfriend, excuse me, fiance, have been together for several years. As long as me and my mister were before we got hitched, actually, they just started earlier.

So I've been thinking about pearls of wisdom that I can pass on to my betrothed brother that will help them navigate the beginning of their marriage (since that's the only phase of marriage I really know anything about).

1) DON'T GET AN EFFING CREDIT CARD UNTIL YOU HAVE A SAVINGS ACCOUNT THAT YOU ACTUALLY PUT MONEY INTO. Obviously the most important key to any successful relationship.

2)Don't try to keep an equitable division of labor in the household. It doesn't work. Doing the dishes does not equal feeding the pets, and you will sound silly if you try to claim that it does. Keeping track of who does what is ridiculous because it does not matter what chores you do, they will always seem more tiresome than whatever the other person did. You will always feel like you are the one taking on the greater burden.

3) Don't keep track of who is bringing in the money, either. Yeah, I worked my butt off as a barista for three years to put beans on the table, but as soon as he was out of school he surpassed my life-time earnings in about three weeks. Nothing comes from keeping track.

4) Have open lines of communication with the in-laws. If your partner wants to know something from your mother, have them call her instead of being the go-between, and you do the same with your mother-in-law. Too much is lost in translation.

5) Don't try to be a new person when you get married. Don't expect your partner to be a new person.

6) Continue to compliment one another. I just realized as I typed that last sentence that it could mean two different things, and I guess I mean both of them.

7) Don't join in with your girlfriends/guy friends when they start in with the "well, you know how the men can be..." and complain about their partners. Your partner is a full human being, not a gender stereotype. Don't say anything about your partner to a friend that you wouldn't say to their face.

8) Go out on dates. Do fun things together.

9) Have traditions that are all yours, like Waffle Time. I strongly suggest composing a song and dance to go with your special times.

10) Don't judge your relationship by anyone else's standards. Let it be as unique as the two of you are.

Does anyone else have any tidbits on relationships that I can pass on to my wee little brother?

Peace on Earth

Today I'm celebrating the arrival of Christ in this world who came "to give light to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death and to guide our feet into the way of peace."

If we are serious about peace, then we must work for it as ardently, seriously, continuously, carefully, and bravely as we have ever prepared for war.
- Wendell Berry

Today is a day of peace, but we do not live in a world of peace. We live in a world where greed and vanity and impatience and pride is valued over peace. I can find too many places in my own life where I take the easy path instead of the path that leads to peace, and I'm challenging myself to be less complacent.

So, this year let's work for peace. Let's work for the people in our world and our cities who are marginalized by systems of power and oppression. Let's try to recognize when we are a part of those systems. Let's work to take better care of the planet that was given to us- at least not to destroy it as quickly as we are. Let's work to call injustice injustice when we see it. Let's work to judge others less quickly and listen as much as we talk. Let's support the people around the world that are working for peace and not just trying to spread their own lifestyle. Let's celebrate joy and beauty when we find it and work to add these things into the world.

The world is large and will always be broken, but I believe more and more each day that when we do small thing to bring peace and passion to the corners of the world that we live in, we each make the small steps that are necessary for large change. Do it, people.

Unfortunate

We went out the other night in B-ham to meet up with some of Z's old friends. One of his friends greeted me excitedly. "Wow! This is so exciting!!! I didn't even know!! Congratulations!" I was confused at first and then realized that he thought I was pregnant. Ouch. Time to go back to the gym.

Later that night, tiptoing back into the house, I managed to track dog shit all over my mother-in-law's white carpet and then, while attempting to clean it up, slip down the wooden staircase and completely bruise up my left side. Not my finest night.

Leaving on a Jet Plane

I am out of here, folks. I wish I had time to tell you all about the magical marionettes we saw yesterday (including one naked, obese, accordion-playing marionette) and the conversation about how "nice guys finish last" I had with the drunk girls in the bathroom at Loki, and all the rest. However, I'm zipping up my bags and heading to JFK where some nice people in an enormous steel machine will magically fly me over the country while I watch the Cartoon Network and CNN (more of one than the other, but I'll let you guess which) and then wake up in Oregon.


I'll try to keep posting over the next ten days, but if I don't you should rest assured its because I'm drinking chocolaty drinks and jiggling giggly babies and getting some much needed distance from this wonderful city of unattainable brownstones and hauntingly pungent urine smells.


Much Love, All.

Done and Done.

Just finished all my work.

All of it.

Finals, thesis proposal, human subjects research app., all out of my hair and gone. Now, as of twenty minutes ago, the Review of Lit, which topped out at 27 pages, is finished and has all 40 of its works correctly cited.

I rock.

And I plan on celebrating heartily this weekend before heading out on my Great Northwest Adventure on Monday.


Hmm...that picture turned out a little more sexual than I had intended....

And The "Playing Is Hard Work" Award Goes To...

We went to the circus last night. Not just any circus. Circus Oz.



Circus Oz is half-circus, half-burlesque awsomeness with tongue-in-cheek social commentary flying along with the trapeezers and contortionists. I know that it can be considered uncool for staff of my theatre to be thoroughly enthusiastic about our productions, but I loved it.



I really just love circus, and I loved the Chinese acrobats that performed last year, but compared to the Aussies, last year's show was a bunch of spandex-clad robots. Circus Oz might not be as technically perfect, but they made up for it with spunk. On the couple occasions that someone missed a trick, they laughed, asked the audience if they could try it again, and got back up on the horse. Or the BMX handlebars. There was one incident where a spinning bike almost flew into the audience and knocked over a footlight before stopping inches from the face of a young audience member in the front row, but they seemed to take it all in stride. They were working their asses off, and made it look like the best possible job in the world.


I'm going to run away and join the circus.

I Wouldn't Joke About This

I swear, I just recieved an e-greeting christmas card from an arts organization who shall remain nameless titled "tis the season" and followed by THIS:

WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?!!?!?!?

I miss the stress

The semester must really be winding down because I have stopped getting emails. I still check my account every five minutes or so, but it is as though there are tumbleweeds blowing down the center of mainstreet and all that can be heard are the shutters on abandoned buildings flapping in the wind.

I could always count on Face to Face to get me some good email. David would send out a grammatical question about a draft of a publication to the full committee and it would get ten responses, all sent to the full committee, usually just consisting of "sounds good," "okay," or "thanks." They clogged up my inbox, but at least I was a part of something!

During the theatrix festival I would get irritating announcements from the board with erroneous information about our show or apologies from cast members who would be late showing up to rehearsals. No longer, though.

Even the endless job postings and event announcements from the listserve at school have slowed to a trickle.

Now I got nothing. Nothing nothing nothing.

This always happens to me. I get stressed out and burned out by all the insanity of the semester and, buried under it, I want nothing more than to be free for a few days. But now that I'm free, I'm a little bored and restless. I need some adrenaline and anxiety to function properly. That can't be healthy. What am I going to do next semester when I have no classes, only a couple rehearsals a week and whatever workshops I get hired for? It seems at the moment like I won't have enough to fill my time, but I should know better than to be thinking like that. Something always comes up.

I hope so, because I am immensely unproductive when I actually have time to do what I need to do. I only get things done when I'm under a crunch. Like right now. I still have one more paper to finish by tomorrow, but here I am, typing this instead of that. Its getting close to crunch time, though, so I think I'll pick up the pace pretty soon. I certainly don't have any emails to distract me.

Slander

ZACH: I don't trust you. You're not trustworthy. You're also not seaworthy.

Holidays

It is getting hard to find a good Christmas card in this town. I know not everyone celebrates Christmas, but I do, and most of people I send cards to do, and I wouldn't mind if the cards I sent mentioned the reason I'm sending them, rather than the generic "Seasons Greetings" or "Holiday Wishes" with snowmen and holly-berries and cheerful birds.



You can always find a nativity scene card or three wise men card down on the bottom shelf, buried under some reindeer, but for some reason they always are the most terribly designed. Mary and Joseph look pale and sickly, and the angels are bored out of their minds.



Why does being Christian automatically relegate us to bad art?

Surprise!!!

Nicole turned 30 on Friday and her sister decided to throw her a huge surprise party on Saturday at one of the local bars. Dozens of invites were sent out and Nicole was clueless. We had to keep her from getting suspicious by going out on Friday, though. We thought about ditching her just so she'd be good and depressed by Saturday, but she went to a bar that was two blocks away, so we couldn't get out of it. Having made the effort to go out, we made the most of it and got good and rowdy and didn't slink home until well after 2.

Unfortunately, at 8:15 on Saturday when we were huddled around cupcakes and balloons in the downstairs lounge at Bar Reis, waiting for Nicole to show up, we realized that the five of us huddled were the five of us who had been out with her the night before. None of the other dozens of surprisers had shown up yet! Definitely a lame surprise.

The other guests eventually showed up, Nicole was indeed surprised despite our lameness, and the cupcakes were delicious, so Nicole's Birthday Part II was ultimately as successful as Part I.

A Night In the City

Two things happened to me on Friday night as I was hanging around Washington Square. I am in Washington Square a lot for school, but somehow the atmosphere changes from weekdays to weekend nights.

The first occurred when I turned the corner from West 4th onto Broadway and bumped into a man standing close to the Gallatin building. I turned to apologize, but stopped myself mid-breath when I noticed that he was actually urinating on the corner of the building. If you choose to huddle against the corner of a building at a busy intersection to urinate, getting bumped is a risk that you have to assume.

After the peeing incident I met Zach at a cute little Italian cafe that I occasionally go to for lunch or coffee. I tried to upgrade to dinner, and it was a failure. After forgetting our menus, silverware, bread, and the drinks we ordered, the waitress finally brought out our salads. We finished them and were waiting for the pasta, and when the waitress came to clear the plates she said "I'll bring your next meal right out." Meal!!?!? It was pasta and salad!!!! She still succeeded in making us feel like gluttonous fools.

Not an auspicious beginning to the weekend...

Being Beautiful is Hard Work

Check out this video from Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty.

">REAL BEAUTY

I'm not sure that I totally buy into the Campaign. Dove is, after all, a beauty-product company. I'm going to do some research into their workshops for girls. I respect that someone out there is uncovering the myths beauty in advertising, I just wish it wasn't someone trying to sell me their products. On the other hand, because they've been complicit in spreading the myths, they can speak against them with some authority...

I don't know. Anyway, check out the video. Its 40 seconds long and very eye-opening (and eye-enlarging).

Finally, And Yet Tragically A Year Too Late, Lauren Learns The Secret of Graduate School Success

I just spent 12 minutes skimming the 536 page book that my advisor recommended I read, just so that I could find a quote to include in my thesis proposal.

I could have read a lot more books this year if I hadn't, you know, read the books.

Going on a Guilt Trip...

My professor tried to guilt-trip me last night. I'm sure everyone who knows me is aware of how susceptible I am to guilt-trips from those in authority. But I'm holding my ground on this one. I might have to choose between enrolling for the second semester of a year-long class and scheduling enough time for the after-school program that IS my thesis project. Not much of a choice, is it? But when I told her I might not be able to continue the class, she got all huffy and upset. I thought that because she was a research methodology professor, she might understand how long it took me to set up this particular research site and why it wasn't really flexible, but apparently not.

Why is it so easy for people to make me feel so bad?

The problem with guilt is that it spreads. She gives me a start, and then I start feeling guilty about possibly saying something inappropriate to a classmate after class, and that I cut someone off on the subway platform, and that I've been remiss in keeping up on my homework and that I have some phone calls that I should have made yesterday but didn't. I have to staunch the flow or else the guilt spreads to other areas of my life.

I'm working hard on this one, though. I'm not going to let it get to me. Because when it comes down to a choice between a research site I've been negotiating with since July for my thesis and a three-credit class that I like but don't even need to graduate, I don't think I'm being unreasonable in letting her down.

Pop Quiz

1.

2 third grade classrooms
+ 30 juggling scarves
______________________

a) chaos including, but not limited to, jabbing elbows, stomping feet, and hyperventilation.
b) real pedagological questions about the importance about integrating circus arts into the curriculum
c) a little bit of magic

2.

14 weeks in the semester
- 2 weeks left of work
______________________

a) a fresh determination, a second wind
b) denial that school is still in session
c) a new-found appreciation for the option of 'incomplete' in grading

3.

2 strings of Christmas lights
2 boxes of Christmas bulbs
+ 1 fake Christmas tree
__________________________

a) festiveness
b) an unforgivable level of temptation for cats
c) all of the above

Make Your Own Pollock Painting!!!!

Click here and go to town.