Wednesday, February 26, 2003

As always happens around show week, my life seems to be on hold. My classes are almost entirely unimportant, I'm refusing to do housework outside of my room, and all of my activities other than theater are pretty much ignored. Fortunately, my voice is almost all back, so I can practice my TMs music, and talking to the TMs business manager about contacting groups and planning next year's concert gives me my acappella social fix. The choir director is quite put out by all this theater business, and I'm going to be in some serious trouble in my ballet class for not having seen a live ballet performance.

It's a shame that time goes on without me.

Sunday, February 23, 2003

An outline of the next two weeks. This morning, singing with the Treblemakers at an Admissions event. Thursday, Friday, mainstage show in which I sing. Saturday morning, another Admissions event with the TMs. Saturday night, another mainstage performance, with the last mainstage show on Sunday afternoon. March 9th, choir concert.

Fabulous time for me to lose my voice, eh?

Thursday, February 20, 2003

Not that I've had any time or anything, I'm too busy irking all of my performance directors, but silly Blogger was broken when I wanted to post the other day, and I just hadn't had the heart to try again since. Fortunately, I'm over that, just for this moment, and am making myself late for class and skipping out on breakfast tea in order to write something that really isn't worth it. Cheers!

Tuesday, February 18, 2003

*considers applying finger puppets to keep fingers warm*

Monday, February 17, 2003

I slept a lot yesterday, and sat by the window in the corner. He has a little tiny window in the corner of his room that is almost against the floor. It's stuck behind the pile of laundry and the guitars, but I can get in there and sit. Outside of it is the top of a bay window, so there's a little platform for all of the snow to pile up on. I watched it all day. Outside the window sill, the tiny flakes of crystalline ice piled up. They were huge, some of them, and I could see all of their six little points when they glimmered in the light from inside. They were very very flat. Two-dimensional and transparent, not like the ones we had last year that were little eight-sided chunks of ice, like stacking a thousand identical snowflakes one on top of the other. Still, they had all their points discernable as well.

The ones that fell too close to the window seemed to fizzle and vanish before my eyes, and every so often a gust would throw a scouring blast of ice against the panes. The sound was like tiny chimes.

I don't know how I'm going to dig my car out of a foot and a half of snow, but right now, it just doesn't matter.

Thursday, February 13, 2003

So, I didn't know what to get. I'd never been taken out for 'coffee' before, which was probably because I don't drink coffee. But it had been freezing cold out so I was definitely up for something warm. "Do they have hot chocolate, do you think?" He thought so. I got a hot chocolate and he got a hot spiced cider.

When I had to go to rehearsal, I made some small gesture of affection. I don't remember what it was, but I'm sure he could tell you. I may have kissed him lightly or on the cheek or I might have hugged him or just squeezed his hand. What I do remember is the feeling I had when I watched him turn back to look at me with this huge smile on his face before he turned to the door and left. I had my hot chocolate in the band room, and I couldn't stop smiling and blushing, and I probably would have gone on that way for a couple days if I hadn't been thrown into a wonder of other situations.

I love you!

Tuesday, February 11, 2003

I've been remarkably future and past-minded these past few somethings. I don't even forget about the present, it all just goes on the back burner. The past is something that definitely bears consideration and that seems to sneak up on me at strange moments, and the future presses itself on my and I grab at it greedily.

I don't like living in this house with all of these people. It's too cluttered for me. There is probably just about no one in the world that I could peacably co-exist with. Definitely Kat. I know i can live with Kat. But anyone else inspires strong doubts in me. I'm looking for somplace to live next year. If Kat goes to Penn, we may get an apartment together somewhere between Drexel and Penn, and if she goes somewhere far away, I'll probably get a place by myself, hopefully very very close to Drexel. The farther from campus I situate myself, the less likely it is that I'll get to class. The relationship is direct.

I've also been thinking about jobs...both for co-op and for after I graduate. Right now, I think I want to be a summer camp arts and crafts counselor for the rest of my life. I could flit back and forth between any art form I can imagine without having to be particularly expert at any of them. And I could turn kids on to new things. I would spend my summers trying to find a passion for every single new camper. Painting, photography, drawing, ceramics, beadwork, cross-stitch, hell whatever. And I could direct the camp plays. I don't need to know anything to do that. But that might only work if I had a job for the rest of the year...and that would have to be some sort of teaching, probably. I'd like to teach, I think, but I don't really want to put in any kind of education training in order to do so.

Man, I really know how to just ramble on and on.

Sunday, February 09, 2003

We used to walk. This was back before I brought my car into the city. There were four of us, two boys and two girls. For a while, we all had boyfriends and girlfriends back home. I think she lost hers first, then I did, then one of the boys. The other of the boys is still with his high school girlfriend, I think, but I don't know because we don't talk any more.

At the time, we would walk. We would have some vague target in mind...South street, Old City, Rittenhouse Square, and sometimes we even made it there. We would always leave around dusk, walk east for maybe half an hour in what might or might not be a freezing chill, and lose time. Sonehow, it was possible for us to lose hours in this new city. It was new to all of us, two of us from New Jersey, one from California, and the only Pennsylvania one from an hour away. We wanted to taste the city.

From south street, we learned that Philadelphia is a city that sleeps, and even the weirdos pack it in early. From Old City, we learned that all but the very strangest artistes close up shop after dark, and if they like to party, we have no idea where they like to do it. But from Rittenhouse Square we got really the most representative experiences.

It's a park lined with upper middle class commercialism. High cost bookstores with cafes inside, so you don't even have to find your own, four dollar ice cream cones, hotels and the like. And we'd been there before, but sometime in December they light it up with these glowing balls of colors that seem to just hover thirty feet up in the tree branches turning the whole place into some sort of fairy ball. There are statues and hedges and lawns, and while the whole park only takes up about two city blocks, it was one of the most fantastic things I'd ever seen, and it still is. The four of us sat, not really talking so much as just being there and memorizing all of it. It was unseasonably warm for December, last year, so we weren't uncomfortable, despite it being almost one in the morning. Of course, we did see a giant rat in the park that night and we also talked loudly about the giant rat to be sure that the couple making out in the grass could hear us. And at 1am, a police cruiser did drive through the park to tell us all that it was closed.

But it was still magical.

Saturday, February 08, 2003

I had one of those stock experiences that everyone is supposed to have. Maybe 'Stock experiences,' as in 'stock character,' is a little bit harsh. I guess most people consider them 'rites of passage' or some such nonsense. The one I had was the 'getting trashed in the kitchen with your college roommate for no apparent reason' one. So, it was Friday night and I got sucked into this great web site, and started looking up all the drinks we could make with the ingredients we have. We ogled recipes for about an hour while Kat was theoretically supposed to be getting some work done or something. Eventually she says to me, 'alright, i'm making a drink and then getting to work. what should i make?' She talks all in lowercase like that. She decided to try making an Oxymoron, and I decided to try a Red Hurricane. So we went down and mixed our drinks. Kat played with hers for a while, ending up with a pretty unpalatable concoction of Bacardi Limon, lime juice, lemon juice and salt. No water or ice or anything, and she loved it, of course. I tossed my drink back, and then figured, well why bother with measuring...you know, why bother with the rum at all....tequila and cranberry juice sounds like a good plan. So I had two tequila and cranberries. And all of this took place in the span of about a half an hour. That's a lot of tequila in a half an hour, and I had stopped measuring after the first drink, so I can only guess that I had about 4-7 shots of alcohol altogether.

Made for an entertaining evening, to say the least.

Thursday, February 06, 2003

In the last 25 hours, I've come in contact with one not-so-common concept three totally separate times. By concept, I mean like a theme. Like the recurring motif of windows in Dubliners or red in The Scarlet Letter.

But my theme is a good bit creepier than windows or red. My theme is skeletons.

I've heard people say 'skeleton' three times. First was last night at Treblemakers rehearsal. Lindsay said, "We'll keep the general skeleton of the rehearsal schedule we worked out before, but with a few changes." Not so creepy at all. This morning in drawing, she said she'd let us decide what to draw today. I missed class on Tuesday, so I was entirely surprised when she offered us the options. "Mannequin or skeleton?" Needless to say, the single vote was for the skeleton, so she dragged two very detailed plastic skeletons out of the drawing storage room. We drew skeletons. Finally, dance class. Not such a peculiar place to be talking about things skeletal, but this particular instance was not a kineseology discussion. Lucinda is a very avid user of metaphor. She's obsessed with the way animals move and often tells us to spread our toes out on the floor like a duck. Well today she said, "Sit like a little skeleton in a closet." What the hell did she mean by that? Well I could show you, but it's hard to describe. She was trying to demonstrate bad form, but the closet part made me raise an eyebrow. The closet definitely has nothing to do with posture. But oh well.

As each of these events unfolded before me, I saw nothing strange, took no note of the apparent theme. It took seven or eight hours for the oddity of it all to occur to me, and why it struck me on the way home from digital photo, I'm really not sure. Maybe it's a bad omen. Maybe the universe is trying to communicate to me the urgency of making Peter say "Ske-le-ton" rather than "Skel-t'n." I have no idea. What do you think?
When life puts sheets-marks on your face, wear them proudly.

Wednesday, February 05, 2003

What do you suppose the footsteps of a three-inch cockroach sound like?

Tuesday, February 04, 2003

I saw someone the other day who looked like this guy Mike that I knew in high school. I couldn't remember his last name, at the time, but I remembered that I'd been friends with his older sister who played in the marching band with me and that he and I really didn't get along at all. I remembered that his grandfather was the person who designed the emblem of the Philadelphila Museum of Art or at least the griffin statue that it is based on. I even remembered the rest of his name, eventually. But I didn't stop to talk to him. It might not even have actually been him, after all.

I was thinking today about the pretty girl that we all loved, back home. She was sweet, effervescent, but she had an edge, real or imagined, from living in the ghettos of New Jersey. She wouldn't take any crap from anyone and she would really fight for her friends. Like, with her fists. Needless to say, the boys were crazy for her. I bet they still are.

There's a cute freckled girl with light straight hair and blue or green eyes that I had a class with last year, and I saw her on the street, today. She reminds me of the only friend from home that I've ever seen in Philadelphia, and the reason I've seen her is because she goes to Penn.

In November of 2001, the only boyfriend I ever had who was younger than I broke up with me. That's when I stopped being homesick.

Why do I start up again now?

Sunday, February 02, 2003

I could be making this up, but it seems as if about this time every year, I start to appreciate winter. Today was the day this year that winter started to warm up. Sure, it might go back to being cold, maybe for another entire month somewhere, but today was the first hint that winter will eventually end. It wasn't run-about-in-shorts weather, but it was warm enough to take a ten minute walk without a coat and without getting frost-bitten. At least it's a step up from where we've been the rest of the season.

In drawing class, she's been making us draw vases full of dried plants. At the beginning of class, I tend to shy away from their repetitive organic forms in favor of repetitive geometric forms which somehow seem less threatening. By the end, however, I've usually bent to the temptation of little circles and squiggles that no one can say are exactly wrong.

You can call it clinging to the familiar or savoring the present, but right now, I'm into this winter thing.

Saturday, February 01, 2003

I don't usually consider myself to have a short attention span, but when it comes to parties, it's another story. I can party with the best of them for at least three or four hours, but really, if you get past that, I just want to go home. One of the problems with having parties at my house is that I have a lot of trouble managing this. So while the more salwart of the boys and girls of Drexel's acappella scene ran screaming up and down the stairs of my house, I tried to quiet them. Why? Because three of our six housemates were totally uninvolved in this particular partying event, all three of them were home last night, and all three of them live on the 3rd floor...the floor closest to our "den" of an attic. True, it was very very early in the evening, but I know that if it had been me, I would have been less than pleased.

But anyway, I got tired of the party, especially since no one had gotten anything at all that I like to drink. So I'm wandering around sober, bored, and irate. Not the best combination, I should think. I repeatedly signaled to Peter that if he'd sneak upstairs with me I would put out, but for a while, he was too busy singing to comply.

Finally the party quieted down enough and he'd been worn down enough that we could just lock ourselves in my room and collapse into sleep.