wasted days

Student productions are next Friday. Are we ready? Of course we’re ready. Or, we will be.

I hope.

We are all bluster and unseasonably warm days until suddenly, Oh!, winter is upon us; I ignore my climate until I look outside and all is quiet, the unexpected house guest suddenly arrived and poised, a brief greeting and then stillness. And we don’t worry about what comes next, too engulfed in the memories of last year, and the year before, and, Oh!, what a strange thing deja vu is when it’s entirely expected and yet still enthrallingly alien. My smile is as broad and silent as the plains of snow.

Because what is life, really, but summations? The addition of a thousand little pieces and memories crammed together like puzzle pieces misaligned by some well-meaning child to form a tableau both unspeakably strange and yet strangely familiar. And we don’t worry about what comes next, busily examining this piece even while we are slightly suspicious of the fact that the last time we saw it it was abutted to some other memory. Familiar, and yet…

And so we witness things coming full circle (how many dimensions does your memory work in?), and I prefer squares, thank you, the interlocking bits that are context shaved off of my puzzle pieces to leave nothing but the soul of expression, unadulterated. So that we don’t have to worry about what comes next.

Sometimes I feel really overwhelmed, overworked, and like the things I spend my time doing are just ridiculous. But only sometimes. Because being busy is actually really nice a lot of the time. Sure, I wish I had more time to work on the Agora project or make movies or read or write more, but I get to do a lot of things that are tons of fun. Student Productions is going great. I’m a little concerned about time, but it’s still just far enough off so that I don’t have to panic yet. Next week, though, chaos begins.

And there’s more besides stud prod. I was freaking out about my calc test last night, but then just decided to not fret about it. I went to see Bang on a Can perform with Philip Glass at Krannert and just enjoyed it. It was quite nice, a little repetitive at times but such is the nature of that type of music. Some of the finales were just fantastic, the way they build such simple musical ideas into these roaring movements takes such skill and precision, and sounds great.

So that made my night. For now I’m off to eat, watch the West Wing, and find some time to do homework.

And here I am, back in the good, solid midwest. It was a nice trip to Portland. I’m not totally convinced about Reed, though. While I like the city a lot, and in many ways the type of school that Reed is appeals to me (small and liberal-artsy), I just didn’t get a really good vibe.

For one thing, whenever we asked people about what they didn’t like about Reed it would often be the atmosphere of stress - everyone likes to feel like they’re working too hard; one person described it as an academic pissing contest. For a school that doesn’t give grades (in the traditional sense), I was hoping that the focus would be on the learning, rather than simply the workload. I simply worry about my ability to thrive at a place like this, because I’m so used to being on top of things. I guess it’s probably a good idea to put myself in a position to be challenged, but this has never been a good way to challenge myself. It just makes me angry and depressed. Of course, I’ll probably have to learn how to deal with it sooner or later, but I’d rather not have that be the main focus of my college years.

That said, Reed does offer some nice things - a beautiful campus, a good and liberal city, a downplay on the importance of grades, etc. But it’s also got a strict core curriculum, which doesn’t really bother me so much but isn’t ideal (one the one hand I’d like to be able to do what I want, on the other hand this will expose me to more disciplines that I might not have considered otherwise).

Socially, I would really just need to find a like-minded peer group. Some of the people I talked to seemed cool, others not so much. There’s a huge tendency towards drinking and smoking, but that neither surprises nor bothers me (it’s going to be like that everywhere). We were talking to a couple of other prospective students from Texas who had stayed at Louis and Clark on Thursday night. They mentioned that one of the people they stayed with had a boyfriend at Reed (or something like that), who said there’s a big hard drug movement at Reed, too. Not sure what to make of that.

Overall, it’s someplace I could definitely see myself, but it’ll come down to whether or not I want to repeat the stringent academics of high school in college. At the moment, I’m holding out for a place that more successfully balances academics and social life and still gives me the most in terms of actually learning things I want to know. And maybe a place that’s a bit bigger, 1300 is tiny.

So student productions have started. And oh, God, am I excited. My cast is excellent, my play is better than I thought (once I finish the revisions I’ve started, at least), and I have discovered that I LOVE this position. Hearing my words come out of other peoples’ mouths at auditions made me jumpy, sent me into little giggling fits. And being in the position of the director, i.e. the position of power, i.e. people have to listen to me when I talk. It’s fantastic. People tend to listen anyway (miraculously) but now they do it all that much more attentively.

Oh, oh, it’s so exciting. And the possibilities for this show are great. But first, work must be done. Revisions must be made. Characters need to be developed. People need to be taught how to act. But I have the utmost confidence in my cast that they will be able to do this.

It’s gonna be great.

And now, off to Portland! Back in a few days.

gah!

Spent too much time today trying to make my stupid play halfway presentable and FAILING miserably. Mostly because I can’t bring myself to actually do anything more than stare at it, give up, and come back to it in half an hour to repeat the process. Still, at least now I’ve outlined a reasonable list of things that need to be changed, and I’ve decided that since really changing them is too hard I’ll just delete chunks of it and write them from scratch. It’s the only way to be halfway original about it. Yargh. But I really don’t want to be doing this, I want to be making a pretty new design for my blog and spraypainting t-shirts. But auditions are tomorrow, so I really need to get cracking.

SPEAKING OF WHICH

Come to Student Productions auditions. Everyone. Doesn’t matter if you can’t act, and you don’t need to prepare anything. Either come at lunch or after school from 4-6 pm tomorrow, November 9th. In the North Attic. Please please please please please

background noise: “Such Great Heights” The Postal Service (yea it’s still good)

…to our usual programming. Sorry for the brief down period, much change has happened. Most notably, I think my old host finally realized I hadn’t paid my hosting fees in a year and a half and suspended my account without notification. So I moved to a new host and upgraded to a different blogging system in the process. Unforunately, I discovered my backups were imperfect - although I had one from just last week, it was corrupted. The most recent good one I had only goes up until August, however. So there are a big chunk of posts missing, forever lost to the annals of cyberspace. What a loss.

Anyway, we had our last performance of The Crucible last night. It went pretty well. The show overall turned out surprisingly well, better than I had thought it would. I’m happy with it. We might take it to theaterfest. I’m pretty ambivalent about the idea. We’ll see what happens.

In the meantime, I’ve spent two hours putting everything back together, and I’m tired. Until next time.