i was in boston this past week. it was pretty awesome. we performed at the MOST beautiful theatre i've ever been in. seriously, it was gorgeous.

http://abostonvignette.blogspot.com/2007/10/theater-district-majestic.html

http://dcist.com/2008/03/05/boltbus_offers.php

cheap ny-dc bus trips. with free wifi.

http://www.overheardintheoffice.com/archives/005819.html


hehe.

"memento vivere" (remember that you also have to live your life)

In heaven all the interesting people are missing.
  - Friedrich Nietzsche

"men really need sea monsters in their personal oceans.

for the ocean, deep and black in the depths, is like the low dark levels of our minds in which the dream symbols incubate and sometimes rise up to sight like the Old Man of the Sea."

-j. steinback


i'm reading fluke, by christopher moore. it's good.

the laptop is back in action! i had to get a new hard drive, and spend a long time on the phone with IT people, and buy a new windows cd, but everything is worth it, because my baby is back. i didn't know how much i depended on it til it was gone. thanks to greg, julio, jason, matt and all of my other computer people who helped.

in other news, my show is (finally) open. snow days, 2 lost dress rehearsals, food poisoning, canceled opening night, and many other factors contributed to this being a Very Very Long week, but last night went really well.

and, it has finally stopped fucking snowing. thank god. i slipped on ice and broke my arm a year ago this week, so i've been in uberparanoid mode, but maybe spring will come in february and i can relax. cross your fingers for me.


i succumbed and resubscribed to netflix, and am being pulled in by the sway of the documentary. there were a bunch of movies that i wanted to see at silverdocs last year and didn't get to, so i'm seizing the opportunity. i just watched jesus camp, which was a little terrifying although not as interesting as i had hoped. and i want to see the 7 UP  series. and an inconvenient truth. plus i want to see bridge to terebithia which i loved when i was little and they filmed up the street from the bookstore i used to work at. 

off to work-

highlight of my morning:

walked to the diner in the brisk brisk cold and flurries to drink coffee and eat breakfast and read the paper.

the only other people there were middle aged engineer-type guys. one of them points out loudly to another the humor in a dilbert cartoon. they chuckle. then the first one loudly summarizes an article in the paper about a prison inmate getting drunk on purell hand sanitizer.

i think you had to be there, but it was pretty great.



good morning.

i think i've been sleepwalking.


for the last two days, i've woken up in the morning and noticed a lamp in my room that was on. it's definitely off when i go to bed, but i wake up and it's on and i don't know how.

i used to sleepwalk a little in college. not much, but my roommate from freshman year would tell me about it. mostly really banal stuff, like getting up at 4am and getting dressed and trying to leave. and at least one boyfriend teased me about talking in my sleep- he woke me up once because i was calling a show. but it's been a long time and maybe i've done it all along but since i don't live in such close proximity to other people i don't notice it.

this lamp is freaking me out though.

i am thankful that i don't work at the timonium target.

that i didn't drop out of community college.

that i have my health, and three living grandparents.

that i am not like my extended family, and that i only see them a few times a year.

that i don't live for tv.

that i can run a mile.

that i can cook thanksgiving dinner.

and that it's my birthday.

happy belated thanksgiving.

the sky is red. i'm not quite sure why. it's a bit odd considering it's like 2 am. i don't know what to make of this.

the show closes tomorrow. i'm not doing too much for a while, just the opera cabaret, so it's going to be a low key month or two. may be going to visit noelle.

i had a lovely night at the quarry house with gwendolen. lots of music, mistaken identities, spilled beer, forgetful waiter. excellent. i need to go out more, i think. where are all my silver spring people?


i bought some pointe shoes. it's an experiment. i've never had them before.


....

i'm low on thoughts, so instead, dessert sushi: http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/DessertSushi

gold mine at the library today! i found "the art of maurice sendak", by tony kushner. what??? it's insane. fully illustrated, shows some stuff from his books and TONS of stuff from his set and costume designs, mostly for opera and ballet. if you love me, buy my this book for my birthday. i'm in love.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?node=cityguide/profile&id=1122180&categories=Performing%20Arts&venueid=794232

Owen Meany's up and running.

i rode the bus home from work yesterday, around midnight. after the second stop, there was this sound, a loud, piercing bird whistle. every fifteen seconds or so, it would whistle again,a nd everyone would look around, trying to figure out where it could be coming from. i watched a man, looking around, then slyly whistling, teasing all the other riders,a nd looking around again for the source of the whistle. it was loud, way too loud for an actual bird, and eventual people started to get annoyed. after a few minutes he looked at me, and i looked back at him and said 'cut it out'. a girl sitting near him had head down, her hands clamped around her ears. he kept whistling, laughing and pleased. the guy sitting next to me saw i was going to say something again and told me i shouldn't give him the satisfaction. he was right, so i went back to reading my book.

about 10 minutes later, the whole front of the bus was laughing. he was still whistling, and now everyone could see it was him. he was really very good at it, the birdcalls were so realistic. he was joking around with the girls at the front, whistling 'who let the dogs out' and cracking himself up. all of the sudden. the bus driver slams on the brakes, stops the bus, and throws him off. screams at him, calls him stupid, and yells at everyone who was laughing at him, calling them stupid too. sits down, keeps driving.

the front of the bus revolted against him. even the people who had wanted him to stop felt bad, and they all rose up against the bus driver.

'you can't talk to people like that! what gives you the right?'

"Design" by Billy Collins
I pour a coating of salt on the table
and make a circle in it with my finger.
This is the cycle of life
I say to no one.
This is the wheel of fortune
the Arctic Circle.

This is the ring of Kerry
and the white rose of Tralee
I say to the ghosts of my family,
the dead fathers,
the aunt who drowned,
my unborn brothers and sisters,
my unborn children.
This is the sun with its glittering spokes
and the bitter moon.
This is the absolute circle of geometry
I say to the crack in the wall,
to the birds who cross the window.
This is the wheel I just invented
to roll through the rest of my life
I say
touching my finger to my tongue.

quick, eat these words

i felt like a bitch at work all day. it was like this week sucked all of my personality out of me, and i walked around like a zombie. i did my work, i wasn't mean, i guess, but i wasn't myself and i don't know why. we had the theatre gala today, and i spent a large portion of the evening standing against a wall and trying not to look at anything or anyone.

i ended up being an electrician earlier this week, because we were short staffed. it's been so long since i've done any of that. i have to say, i don't really like it that much. but it's done now. and i went to delaware. the trip was actaully good, and i'm looking forward to having hte show move down here.

i have a car now. 97 buick lesabre. (try not to be jealous). it's got really low mileage and it's in great shape, so i'm quite happy about it. drove it this morning.

g'night, you princes of maine, you kings of new england.

well, it's been a while. my arm is no longer broken, which is nice. midwives is over, the high schoolers crucible is over. retreat from moscow has been great. i'm calling hte last 3 shows, so this weekend will be fun. i haven't called anything since last summer, i'm actaully pretty excited.

i spent a lot of time recently looking for summer work. i almost ended up going to north carolina, but it didn't work schedule-wise. i'm going to work for round house instead, which actually works out a lot better. so, hoo-rah for being employed. i suppose the whole freelance thing is going to be like this, all the time, so i might as well get used to it.

my parents are helping me buy a car! i don't know what kind yet, but anything with wheels will do at this point. and yes, i am aware of logistical problems involving, you know, being liscensed, but i'm working on it. once i have a car, it will be easier.

i'm reading the cider house rules. john irving is amazing.

and my favorite newspaper article this week:

Songbirds May Be Able to Learn Grammar

WASHINGTON -- The simplest grammar, long thought to be one of the skills that separate man from beast, can be taught to a common songbird, new research suggests.

Starlings learned to differentiate between a regular birdsong "sentence" and one containing a clause or another sentence of warbling, according to a study in Thursday's journal Nature. It took University of California at San Diego psychology researcher Tim Gentner a month and about 15,000 training attempts, with food as a reward, to get the birds to recognize the most basic of grammar in their own bird language.
Yet what they learned may shake up the field of linguistics.

While many animals can roar, sing, grunt or otherwise make noise, linguists have contended for years that the key to distinguishing language skills goes back to our elementary school teachers and basic grammar. Sentences that contain an explanatory clause are something that humans can recognize, but not animals, researchers figured.

Two years ago, a top research team tried to get tamarin monkeys to recognize such phrasing, but they failed. The results were seen as upholding famed linguist Noam Chomsky's theory that "recursive grammar" is uniquely human and key to the facility to acquire language.

But after training, nine out of Gentner's 11 songbirds picked out the bird song with inserted warbling or rattling bird phrases about 90 percent of the time. Two continued to flunk grammar.