As you may or may not have heard by now, we had a little ambulance-requiring incident at my house yesterday. Despite Kat's claim, our poor punctured housemate was really much calmer than I was, despite having spattered at least three different rooms of our house with his blood. Which Kat and I promptly cleaned up as soon as he was gone with the medics.

When he decided that he'd rather have an ambulance get him and take him to the hospital, than have me drive him, which by the way was fine with me, I dialed 9-1-1 from my cell phone. It was a new experience. I'd only ever called 9-1-1 once before and it was from a house phone so it was easy to trace, but I suppose they must be used to this cell phone business by now. At any rate, I was immediately connected to the Philadelphia police, which is interesting to me only because my cell phone has a New Jersey area code and I have no idea how this whole satellite thing works. I explained to the man who picked up that my housemate had accidentally cut himself and would like an ambulance to take him to the hospital please. He said he'd connect me to an ambulance and he transferred my call.

A woman picked up "Philadelphia fire department." Imagine my confusion. The man said he'd connect me to an ambulance, I told her. She made some response that must have been words but which I can neither recollect nor could I understand them as an explanation, at the time. But she jumped right in, not noticing my bewilderment, I suppose, and proceeded to ask me questions. First she got the address. Then, was he conscious, was he talking, what happened. Yes, Yes, and he was cut by a knife. Did he cut himself, she asked, or was he cut by someone else? I was brought up short by this, "What?" After all, the choices she seemed to have given me were attempted suicide or assault, neither of which was the case. She repeated the question. "Oh no," I laughed, nervously, "it was an accident." She gave instructions on first aid which I relayed to Kat but didn't seem to have any impact at all on what was being done. Got my phone number, said to call right back if he got any worse at all. I said, still confused, "We are going to get an ambulance, right?" She said something reassuring, I suppose, and after a few very quiet, still, tense minutes, we heard sirens approaching.

I went out on the porch and flagged the emergency vehicle which had stopped somewhere up the block to check house numbers. Two rather short female medics hopped out and walked up to our front door, and it took all of my willpower not to smile, say 'Do please come in," and gesture them into the house. Why, I don't know. Maybe it was because they didn't seem to be in much of a hurry.

They asked him a few questions, what had happened, was he cut by the knife or was he stabbed by the knife, had he in fact been squirting blood. To which he calmly replied that no, while he definitely hadn't been squirting, it had definitely been gushing. "So," one of the ladies said, "it was a fast trickle?" He considered this, standing in a bloodied t-shirt with reddened paper towels wrapped around his still-elevated arm in our front hall. "Yes," he said, "I suppose it would have been a fast trickle."

We made sure he had his keys, his cell phone, a clean shirt and a jacket, and he'd easily made it up and down our staircase at least twice before he left in the ambulance with the agreement that he would call my cell phone for me to come get him from the hospital when he was ready to come back.

And that was the excitement that was my early Saturday evening. After an hour and a half of waiting for the housemate to call, I was invited to dinner at Peter's where I sat with my cell phone in my hand for roughly an hour before calling to Kat back at the house. "Is he back yet?" I said to her. "Ah...yes...I thought he might have called you to tell you, and I thought to call, but then I forgot." Ok...fine.

And then we made up a drinking game for Clue the movie.

Isn't it the worst thing in the world when you make a sick joke about something stupid and dangerous happening and then it happens?

Most of the time, I'm so comfortable and confident in my own life, despite the uncertainty, that I feel unassailable. Nothing can go wrong, really, I have almost everything all planned out. Like, forever. I'm all set here, thanks. I have some very basic framework that is absolutely permanent and then there's room for change in the spaces between.

But then there are other times when I'm more in touch with reality. When all of my plans realize that they are useless and they run off screaming. All the pieces of my life are in a big heap on the floor and it's the best I can do just to sort them out, never mind putting them back together. There is no great scheme, then, just me. Just me standing on the edge of some great dark hole stepping forward because I have no choice at all.

So on Saturday night, we opened for PennSix at their spring concert. As evident from their site, they're a comedy group, but their written humor far surpasses their sketch comedy in terms of being....well...funny. And despite the fact that their alumni seem to strike terror into the hearts of innocents wherever they go, the guys themselves rock quite a bit. By the way, we were thoroughly warned months before the show that their audience tends to be quite drunk. So anyway, we were there, at the show warming up running through our set while the guys ran through the hallways in grass skirts and other paraphenalia; we were closed into a tiny dressing room that was about eight thousand degrees warmer than the hallway, but that's ok. So we ran through half of our set, Respect, Sweet Dreams, and Like a Prayer, when there's a knock at the door. We open, there stands one of PennSix. Hey, he says, you guys sound great. Did you know that we also perform Like a Prayer? We all go oh no! do you want us to cut it from our set? No, he says, but we would like it if you would perform it with us for the encore. You can pick something else to sing during your set.

Needless to say, we were thrilled and agreed, we ran through it with their Like a Prayer soloist (amazing) and then refilled the empty spot in our set. So we get out on stage and it's nothing from the crowd but 'Take off your shirts!' and 'I like the girl in the middle.' Well, as I said, we'd been warned and we really warmed up to all the objectifying and sexual harassment. :) As a matter of fact, we totally fed off of it, especially after someone put a twenty on the stage to get us to take off some clothes. Oh, and when someone drunkenly tossed a ball of paper up onto the stage, our President threw it back into the audience. It rocked. They loved us.

Ever since then, I've been saying that we should hire some of the PennSix audience to come to our shows and be rude to us. ;) The encore went famously, and we invited their Like a Prayer soloist to come sing with Meg at our spring show. Man, did y'all ever miss out.

At Kat's prompting:

When I was born, I was five weeks overdue. Yes....five weeks. My poor mother carried me around for more than an extra month. Needless to say, I was a big baby and quite developed. Not only did I have fingernails and an extensive vocabulary, I also had a bit of hair.

My mom's hair was always long. Down well past her waist, she used to tuck it into her pants by accident. I never had my hair cut professionally. I had little bangs in my straight-as-a-pin, almost-black hair and when it started to look really ratty around the ends, my mother would trim it. In the fifth or sixth grade I started to grow out my bangs and they were really and truly gone after a few years. My hair used to get caught in the crack of the seat on the school bus.

When my brother was born, my mom cut her hair up to her shoulders. One summer I wanted to cut all my hair off and my sister argued strongly against it. Her hair was as long as mine and I think she was offended at the very thought of anyone cutting off their hair. She ended up cutting hers short years before I ever did.

Senior year of high school, I decided it was time for a change. I'd been dying my hair subtly redder for three or four years by then, but this time I was fascinated with the idea of blue streaks. I really wanted bright blue streaks in my hair. So I went into the salon that my mother and sister frequented and told them what I wanted. Well, they could give me blue streaks, the hairdresser said, but blue is a very tough color to maintain. It needs to be touched up and made to look blue again every few weeks and couldn't she just give me some nice bright red streaks instead. Well, no, I wasn't into the Scream 2 Courtney Cox racing stripes, but I still wanted something dramatic. So I asked them to dye my hair black but to put white streaks in it. Oh, and I had about eighteen inches cut off of it.

Three months later I went back and had them dye my hair all to black, mostly because the theater show was going up and they didn't do blond streaks in the 40s but also because I was sick of looking like a zebra.

Last year, as anyone who is familiar with this page will know, I took to cutting my own hair. I'd gone back to dying it reddish and I learned how to cut layers into it myself. It became a new hobby, almost. And then last spring I dyed my hair black. Well, turns out that DIY hairdye sticks a lot more insistently than salon color, for better or for worse, and I've been trying to get rid of the black ever since. All this time, my hair was between just below my shoulders to the middle of my back depending on how long it'd been since I took the scissors to it.

So out of the blue and for honestly no reason other than feeling like a change, I decided to go daring and cut my hair short. This was not a move that I was prepared to attempt myself, and so we decided to go down to a local hair cuttery that is reputedly very funky and cheap. I scoured magazines and ended up buying a special hairstyle magazine to get a picture of something I figured would look good on me. There was a lot of conference between Peter and myself and we did eventually decide on one. We got to the salon, I showed her the picture, asked if I could do it without a blow dryer, cause damned if I was buying a blow dryer at this point in my life...and found out...Alright, this stylist doesn't speak very much english. Panic ensues on my part as I don't want to offend the poor woman, but I really felt the need for easy communication. But I seemed to have been able to get my points across to her with only a few different gestures and repititions, so with some calming gazes from Peter, I sat still and didn't sniffle.

So, now my hair comes barely to my chin, I need to wash it a lot more often and I don't love the way it looks without styling, but with a little gel it's fantastic. It hangs in my eyes if I don't pin it back, and the color is fabulous. See, the cut incidentally left nothing but an inch or so of my old DIY black color on the longest layers. Everything underneath is short enough that the black had grown out, so it looks like I just have some fabulous black tips on a pretty solidly dark red color.

One of the best things is that I feel like all kinds of great body parts are a lot more obvious now. My chin, my neck, my shoulders, and I feel very hip, and I feel very bold. It's sexy, it's kind of wild, and I love shaking my head around until my hair is all fluffy. Now *there's* something that never worked with long hair. Turns out that my hair even has a little character to it, besides being straight like a stick.

Maybe next time I'll go even shorter.

On a lighter note (cause what wouldn't be lighter, really?), I just had no dsl for two weeks. And no real easy access to anyone else's internet-capable computer, so you know how it goes. I guess I should make a list of everything I might have blogged about while I had no opportunity and then slowly catch us all up on what's been going on.

I think I've decided that I have premenstrual disphoric disorder but on a seasonal cycle. What this means is that I get really really depressed and irritable about a week before my period, but only during the fall and winter. So that's about 12 days a year, but man, are they wicked. Just ask Peter. :)

We just had a great big TrebleMakers altercation this week which I was largely left out of, as I had little or no internet access. Needless to say, it was a huge todo which resulted in our president and music director both resigning independently and then both recinding their resignations. And might I add that I am shocked and amazed, in a good way, at the diplomatic abilities posessed by the TMs president. I don't know exactly how she managed to diffuse the situation at rehearsal last night, but we all went in really uncomfortable with each other and we all left totally not hating each other, with one possible exception of mutual venom. And we all learned from it.

So, my dishes won't wash themselves, contrary to popular belief, so tune in next time for a discussion about what short hair does to your attitude and about sharing a dwelling with five other life-forms.

What can I have to say about anything. I get disquiet and TroubleMakers and the 48 hours run out. There has to be a better way.

The sound of snow falling. The cry of a gull, always the cry of a gull. The scratch of toast against my gums. Too-sweet tea.
These remind me of the things I've lost.

I've lost poetry.

So it's been one of those weeks, it seems. I did actually go an cut off all of my hair, and I totally love it. We had the big Acappella Fest, and it was really rather a resounding success with the possible exception of relations with the boys. The other groups were absolutely amazing, that's the Ransom Notes from University of Texas, I don't have their web addy handy, and the Haverford Humtones. The RNs were spectacular in terms of complexity of arrangement and vocal quality while the Humtones had shocking stage presence and great comedic sense. Their arrangements were possibly simpler than the ones that we use, but they definitely know how to make the most of them. Our boys, on the other hand...well, all we can do is hope that they had the grace to be taken down a notch, cause damn were they ever shown up. And for that matter, our guest groups really blew us out of the water, but at least we weren't surprised. :) No, we know that we are just little fish in a very big pond, and we're only a couple of years old, as a group. But anyway. There's currently no internet access at all in my house, so my online time is very limited. I've mostly been catching up on the new TMs page. Check us out, sign up to be notified of our upcoming events, and soon we may even have pics and audio clips up there.

Term is almost over, but that means that I have final projects/papers to be doing and have even less time to be dashing off to use other peoples' internet connections. *mwah*

I don't know how many of y'all are in the Philadelphia area, but for those of you who are:

Come to Acappella Fest! See the Drexel Treblemakers, Drexel 8 to the Bar, Texas U Ransom Notes, and the Haverford Humtones on Saturday March 8th at 6:30pm. The performance will be in Stein Auditorium, Nesbitt Hall, Drexel University Main Campus. Show is FREE. Come out and support collegiate acappella! Hosted by the Drexel Treblemakers. We will also be raffling off gift certificates to Philadelphia resturaunts: raffle tickets $1.

It's been busy around here. Kind of. Not necessarily interesting, but busy. Um...there was the show. I sang and played guitar and had 4 whole non-sung lines. Very exciting. Boyfriend still cute and loveable. Kissed two girls on Friday at the cast party. No tongue. :) Finished the show (thank whatever divine powers may be). Talked a lot of acappella with business manager and girl in theater who is starting a new group here at Drexel. Decided to cut all my hair off. Totally perfectly finished transcribing an old TMs song precisely as it is now sung.

And happy belated one-year birthday to Thinking Out Loud.