Dream

What can I say?* There just hasn't been too much going on.

I mean, there has, but nothing really blogworthy.

Well, I did have an unusually realistic dream last night. I was visiting my high school.

I took note of the surprising fact that this vision was, indeed, a locale resembling my high school. You see, much of my dreams are of the sort where I wander flooded highways searching for my pink aardvark and thinking to myself, "gee, isn't Disney World nice?"

This was one of the first dreams I've had where I see my school and actually recognize that it IS my school. And vice versa.

So, anyway, I magically appeared right outside the door of the blackbox theatre. I was smoking a ciggy. Apparently I also thought it would be amusing to blow the toxic fumes into the faces of my disgruntled peers. Then I decided to put it out, so I dropped it, fully lit, into my pocket.

But it didn't catch fire, of course. Because dreams just aren't that logical. My jacket's chances of catching on fire would've increased tenfold had I not been smoking.

And that's a fact. But, anyway, I arrived in the middle of a performance. Everyone was in costume, and one of my friends from a nearby high school had arrived for an acting class with my director, who could apparently be in two places at once.

Everyone looked just like they do in real life. And I called them all by their proper names. This is a rare phenomenon in my dreams. Generally, not only do I misname my friends, but I also turn into them at some point during the course of the conversation. IDENTITY CRISIS!!!

So, anyway, I see all my old friends and then I go into the empty theatre (because this is in the middle of a performance, of course it's empty).

That's it.

*I used to look at people's yearbooks when I was a freshman in high school, and I saw this one that said "Dear Jack, What can I say?" It continued, but those four words struck me with their profundity.

Then I realized that everyone signed their yearbooks that way.

The Ultimate Christmas Fake Book

With a label proclaiming its status of "Newly Revised Newly", The Ultimate Christmas Fake Book enables hopefuls to con and hoodwink their way through any professional Christmas engagement. The deceptively simple anthology features old favorites, such as "Angels We Have Heard on High", "It Came Upon The Midnight Clear", and "Joy to the World". Tucked between these comfort foods rest the eclectic, the overstimulated, and the just plain twisted. Old favorites? Not quite. Fairly early on we are presented with a song title representative of the question posed by any busybody nasal toned housewife while looking into her heathen neighbor's living room: "Do They Know it's Christmas?" This is followed by more meat-and-potatoes carols, but it isn't long before we come across "Neighbor, What Has You So Excited?" You can tell it's trying too hard; it's desperation for news borders on the obscene. I Hope it doesn't have a heart attack. This song title works best in conversation if recited at the speaker's breaking point, so as to create a prepubescent air of chemical imbalance and self-conscious testosterone. And, to round out our Overeager Category, we have "What Month Was Jesus Born In?" Another prepubescent display of awkwardness sure to turn heads, ludicrously emphasized by the uncomfortable placement of the preposition at the end of the sentence.

Speaking of strange wording, what about "Deck the Hall with Boughs of Holly"? I always thought there was more than one hall. Is that just me? Did the people in this song have to downsize, or something?

On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have the great epic titles, like "Ring Out, Ye Wild and Merry Bells!" What terror, what fervor! King Lear couldn't have put it better. Again, note the hints of obsession. Whoever this guy is, he needs to stop hyper-focusing. He really likes those bells. I mean, really, really likes them. Hmmm.

And lastly we have the exhausted, stuttering"Still, Still, Still".

Enough said. Buy this book.

The Boring Manifesto

I have found many, many ways to combat the post-first semester freshman year existential crisis, none of them being remotely effective in any way. Right now, my eyes are just kind of slicking over the surfaces of the room. I wish I could say that my head was whipping wildly about, or that my eyes were darting, or any of that nonsense, but unfortunately I'm just too sedentary by nature. I killed about fifteen minutes slicking over a green wrought iron gate that stands between the fireplace and me. I contemplate it from different angles. It looks like a bearded flower, with a mouth like a teardrop.

I watched another movie today, went shopping, and curled my hair as a defense mechanism against hard water. I don't mean that in a metaphorical sense; our water softener has been insolently refusing to remove calcium deposits for quite some time now. Hard water seems to encourage and rehabilitate oil, frizz, and dryness so that after a shower my hair resembles, in many ways, a dehydrated squirrel preserved in a bottle of extra-virgin olive oil.

This is not to say that I look back at the past week with fondness and nostalgia; I just managed to kill all my work, and kill it good. Um. Before it killed me. And it almost did. Last week, I read that story about the British teacher arrested in the Middle East for naming a Teddy Bear Mohammed. When reporters asked about her plans for the rest of the season, she expressed her wishes to take a break from teaching until the New Year so she could spend time with her family and recover from her time in jail.

Damn, I wanted to be her. Spend time with my family, even if I had to go to jail.

And here I am, spending time with my family and waiting for the remainder of my friends to get the hell home from college, and all I can think about is a bearded flower and an oily squirrel.

No, I haven't abandoned you

The tyrant is home.

It was a nice trip. And yes, nice is the only word flowing down my bloodstream through my fingers. This is what happens after finals week. Within 48 hours, I wrote a one act play and a 15 page paper and studied for an exam. So you can't really blame me for losing my facility with language, albeit temporarily.

Then again, my parents are in the living room, too, arguing about the validity and reliability of the weather forecast. Makes concentration something I only wish to aspire to.

Remember my blog idea file? On Microsoft Word on my laptop rests a file entitled "BlogIDEAS!.docx". Guess I thought I'd be extra emotive and just shout it out. OMG! Like blog IDEAS! Not words, not phrases, IDEAS!!! Incredible.

I found something on that list which once tickled my fancy. After waking up at 3:15 AM to finish a project, a thought came to mind and I obligingly opened my BlogIDEAS! file to write it down, chuckling like...I don't know, just chuckling idiotically. When I opened that file this morning, this is what I found.

"what if stage directions were written with emoticons? So instead of '(sadly) I'll miss you.' you'd have :( I'll miss you.' That would be hilarious! Hahahahah!!!"

Yes, I actually wrote "hahahaha!!!". Keep in mind that this was written at 3:15 AM, ironically at the same time as my roommate, Lauren, was finishing up a costume design project for Hamlet and nearly substituted "Opela" for "Ophelia" on her design board.

But seriously. EMOTICONS? Why did I find that funny? Perhaps I was retrieving a seed from my corpus callosum, a seed of sharp satire and political lampoon, a message on the horrors of consumerism and puberty in this country. Perhaps I wanted to show to the world that there was something more to this symbol, this colon and parenthesi, this primitive expression. Or maybe it was my goal to point the beacon of the theater in a direction unforeseen and completely uncalled for. A theatrical revolution that would encompass the powers of the written word and the technological era.

More likely, I was just fucking tired.

Now my parents are talking about Linda McCartney, and whether or not she was the heiress to the Eastman fortune. And something about Kodak. And people sitting next to each other in a restaurant.

You know I've been home for 24 hours and I've already watched 4 movies?

Now that's what I call productive.

Lurgh Lurgh!!!

So, like, I was looking at facebook at 5 AM this morning, and all of a sudden, I realized:

Oh

My

Godly

Cream

Cheese

I have a blog?!?!?!?!?






Ooops. So I just thought I'd apologize for my lack of upkeep this past week. In my defense, it's the week before finals, and I've been studying. Er, and playing pool. I'm not so good at what you call "pool", but I'm pretty good at just air-hocky-ing my way around the table. Haven't killed anyone yet.

So, again, sorry, and I promise I'll update more frequently after December 15. And I have plenty to share, because I keep a blog file on Microsoft Word where I list my countless amazing ideas!

I'm not nerdy at all.