Some of My Favorites, 2011

It has been a strange year for entertainment: huge amounts of movies (my boyfriend has netflix), a loaded but desultory reading list that dropped from novels over tea at 7:00AM into criticism and theory at 2AM halfway through the year. Some great concerts and plays, though I would have loved more of those nights. Without further ado:

Books
the tastiest of the classics:
The Beautiful and the Damned- F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Moveable Feast- Ernest Hemingway
Wise Blood- Flannery O'Connor
Howards End- EM Forster
The Voyage Out- Virginia Woolf

and a few sundries:
The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction- Nicholas Dames
The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects- Charles Altieri
Why Do We Care About Literary Characters?- Blakey Vermeule
That Used to Be Us- Tom Friedman (inflammatory, and I disagree, but in a healthy way)

Concerts
Joe Pug at the Grey Eagle
Mount Moriah and Mandolin Orange at LAB
Bon Iver at Raleigh Amphitheater
Gillian Welch at the Orange Peel

Films
Blue Valentine
La Fille Sur le Pont
The Tree of Life
The Debt
Incendies
Beginners
Melancholia

Performances
Ruth (Magnetic)
Songs of Robert (Magnetic)
Middletown (Manbites)
Glass (LGP)
Henry V on Trapeze (Delta Boys)
Endgame (The Gate Theater at Historical Playmakers)
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Playmakers)

Frontiers

I love art. I love literature.
Sometimes, though, I get so saddened by the spaces in between them. The brushed-over program note of a dramaturg. The embarrasment of a sloppy adaptation. The limitations. The ennui.
In my life I have so many radiant examples to fuel each love: a family that has been, for almost a century, nourished by a feast of fiction. We share the delights of a juicy poem like secret fruits. I have sat in beautiful places all over the world and wept at the last page of a book. I crave French literature like I have some palpable, sickening deficiency because I can't read it fluently. I admire deeply those who read well, often, and to the point of taxation. It is one of the most enduring parts of my center. It is a home.
The other home, of course, is theater. At one point when I was about 16, I had been benched for the umpteenth time in JV basketball. I came to my mother, wrecked, self-disparaging. She finally said outloud what I had wanted to hear: stop doing what you're bad at, and do-- do fully, and dutifully--what you love. I had a home, and, it turned out, a future and an adulthood in the theater. I let it happen. I am endlessly proud of my peers in the theater, endlessly admiring of my mentors, endlessly aspirational myself. I see the structures and shape underneath the future of American theater and I am excited about it.
This duality is strange and stark. My family doesn't know or understand those shapes and structures underneath drama, or what it would really mean to have a career as an artist. My friends--the luminaries!--maybe see books in an analogous way: a hobby, a private world. Separate. Distinct.
Let me return, briefly, to the spaces in between:
Several times in my life I have tried to understand the bridges. Find out what they are, fantasize about becoming an influential architect of one of them. I try to understand the transgressive innovations of Modernism, the instinct to overhaul, and the ingredients of the success. 1910!
I think there is a frontier out there; it would mark an end to this division, and represent something new about the human imagination, power of expression, and consciousness. I don't know what it is. I don't know how to begin to excavate it. But, perhaps more profoundly than I am called to understand anything else about humanity, I feel compelled to understand it and move something forward.

Beggin' Strips

Doesn't this just totally look like plastic toy bacon?

WELL IT'S NOT. I have avoided this stuff for years, and I finally decided to try it. Let it be known that all three of my meals today have been soy-bacon'd, including the last, which was two strips of this stuff and a bunch of spinach and cookies.
More like soy BEACON OF LIGHT AND GOODNESS, am I right?

Lance-a-lot

The foregone fate of the recent English grad has come to pass: today, I signed my first freelance contract.

Season of Giving!

This holiday season, I have decided to donate my savings to those who need it most, to the worthiest charity of all: Educational Testing Services! All I ask for in return is the simple electronic transmission of my GRE scores to the appropriate parties. I love you, ETS. Merry Christmas. I hope you enjoy ALL OF MY MONEY.

Without Fail

Doing Shakespeare always leaves me covered in cuts, bruises, and/or broken bones.
Additional findings: it is impossible to capture bruised hip bones, bruised knees, bruised elbows, and modesty all in one picture.

THAT SAID, the scene I am working on right now from The Tempest is incredibly fun. Good to have some simplicity and levity amidst end-of-semester chaos.

Too Late and Just In Time

My two most intense reactions my most recent birthday:

1. "Oh my gosh, I'm too old to apply for the Rhodes"
2. "Oh my gosh, I'd better start wearing lots of gold lamé"

Mercy Be

Well, this week is one of the biggest of my life. That seems dramatic, but it is true! I am scared and excited. The only really analogous feeling I know is stage fright, which I get very rarely, and usually when I HAVE put in the work. I think I am a master of minimizing the stakes when I have not put in the work.

Perhaps skiing works as an analogy, too. I have only been skiing a few times in my life. I can't really remember if I'm good at it or not, but I will pretend to evaluate it as though I remember it:

I fall down a good amount at the beginning, enjoy the lift, am scared to fall getting off the lift. From getting off the lift to the bottom of a run, I am literally completely terrified of myself. Constantly. I experience no other feelings than sheer terror. I think I'm going to lose control of my body and break both of my femurs or somehow jab my skis into and gouge out my eyes at 50mph and end up in a pool of my own blood and no one will ever help me. I of course make it down, and sometimes do a kind of successful hockey stop or else fall down at the very end. I sort of reflect on the experience as thrilling and do a few more runs until my legs are tired and it gets too scary to be fun.

I am taking some risks right now that sort of feel like I'm halfway down a ski run. Everything is happening so fast. I am so fast. I am not failing, or dead, or broken in a pool of my own blood on the white snow. I probably look just like the other skiiers. I do not run into anybody. But what I am feeling is absolute paralysis by fear while my body is successfully skiing. So we'll see how this all goes. And I have to trust that this is fun and I will get out of it with either a cool hockey stop or a wobbly fall in front of the snowboarders. Either way is okay.

I must remember.

The REAL ME

Comrades,
Can you beLIEVe it? My hair color is now my hair color. BACKSTORY, in 7th grade, I begged my mother for highlights in order to avoid looking like an adult and not a cherub. I received $100 in a Winnie-the-Pooh card and became a blonde. Twelve years and approximately The Cost of Supporting a Family of 4 later, I have decided this is maybe a silly way to define myself.
This is who I really am!

 

Oh, whoops. That's Taylor Swift looking richly dark blonde. My bad!

That's me, in my mouse glory. Sometimes I even wear a bathrobe.
Now just you wait while I grow out all my body hair and transition to Fur Poncho Only.

Crazy New Diet Plan

I promise this won't be that blog that turned into a stupid food blog, but I really must lay forth my Crazy Diet Plan!

• Don't really buy a lot of groceries. Face it, you're pretty Low Income, as they say. Buy a can of beans and a box of rice; you don't like those foods. Work with it!
• Step 2: Okay, buy some food. Guacamole and spinach makes a tasty fake salad. You don't know how to make that block of tofu go from tasting like cat food to tasting like people food, so don't worry about it!
• Go running until you destroy your left foot, but definitely take care to not complain about that, except to a four year old when he asks why you're limping.
• Go to the fair. Meet Santa Claus, and also have a funnel cake while watching the fireworks!

Guaranteed results after two weeks!

Google is Seriously Ugly

Get your aesthetics together, Google.
The singleonly reason I don't use google reader is because there is no good way to make it as pretty as looking at blogs/newssources themselves. One could argue that, in the case of design blogs, layout is as integral a part of the reading experience as the content itself, and Google reader swiftly inserts its sabot into the machinery of a pretty reading experience.

Keep making your design better, Google, and maybe stop asking me if I like it all the time. That's sort of like if I went up to strangers and asked, "Hey, do you like my lipstick? I will keep wearing it if you do. Hey, do you like my pants? I made them for you to enjoy!" Super douchey, right?

Undedicated

Yeah, the results are in: food definitely needs cheese to be good. Got to like day 5 and ate some pizza. Tried again and ate a queso-dilla. WHATEVER, yum, moldy, cultured cow breastmilk.

But you know what? No Sugar No Vember is coming up pretty soon, I hear in like 2 weeks, so I can be "dedicated" to my "cause" and "feel better about my diet" then.

Does Food Need Cheese?

Though I have been a happy vegetarian for many years*, I am pretty sure food needs cheese to be good. A while back I did a 5-month experiment with veganism that left me angry, often unsatiated, and about ten pounds lesser than prior. I must remind myself of two things:
1) For two of those months I was at a summer program living in a dorm with not much to call a kitchen, and
2) That was before I knew that greek yogurt existed.
While I don't plan on veganism, I would like to make a short foray into cheeselessness, because come on, bacterialized cow breast milk? Yuck.

So here goes! The cheeseless fortnight. I christen thee with a meatless, cheeseless, creamless burrito.

*Except for one time in 2007 when I found a chunk of chicken at the bottom of a "vegetarian" cup of vegetable soup. Thanks, Milltown!

Hilarious Game

Hilarious game: Pretending to be my headshot when I'm gabbing about actorly things to Patrick via gchat.

Welcome to Your Own Heart

A thousand things to do, and I choose to paint instead. First time in almost a year. I have a feeling that the new apartment is going to be a wonderful place to create. Such an amazing feeling-- this should have been on the top of the to do list all along.

The Alarm Clock

I consider it a small point of peace and happiness when I can drop off to sleep with both dots lit up beside the time on my alarm clock: the PM light (it's still today) and the "alarm is set" light (I've got something worth waking up for tomorrow morning). No rush, a full night's sleep and dreams planned, vocation and purpose tomorrow, even if it's just a day's worth.

Scrapbook/ They Mean So Much

I am probably one of the sappiest people I know. I spend a lot of time doing things like weepily thanking my friends for being so beautiful and talented. It probably gets old. One of the ways in which this phenom presents itself is saving pictures and looking through them way too often. For no reason, I present a small but important selection:

New Year's Eve, 2003. I had just transferred to Chapel Hill High and spent a few months pretty friendless and lost and miserable. Then I found these folks. They ended up being some of my best friends in life. I love looking at these early New Year's photos; they remind me of feeling, for the first time in my adolescence, truly at home and very happy. The tradition of New Year's together continues, adding each year new closest friends. One of my favorite parts of my life.

UNC, October 2005. I really didn't want to go to UNC. I had a rough time accepting the concept of being there at all. I found, though, the other half of my friend-core in the first year there. Smart, nice North Carolinians who are currently impressing me daily, accomplishing mind-blowing stuff, and traveling widely. I think this is one of the first times I hung out with Jaki, who is now doing crazy stuff in Malaysia on a Fulbright and sending me precious emails and (thank god) stopping in NC for a little while before she moves on to other amazing whatevers.


Cymbeline production photo, July 2006. I got a little lost that summer, had to drop out of summer school, had a crappy housing situation. But Lucius put together an extremely innovative summer of theater for our friend group, and I had two roles I loved playing and still cherish. It was probably the most powerful acting experience I've ever had, and has shaped me as an artist. Lucius continues to make amazing theater all the time.

Fast forward-- October 2009. As I mentioned, UNC unexpectedly gifted me with incredible friends and a really rewarding academic experience which pleasantly peaked my senior year. These girls threw me my favorite ever/ sillest ever birthday. I respect them so much and think they're absolutely hilarious (see? sappy!).

Another serendipitous bout of grace (December 2010). My first 9 months post-graduation were even more confusing than expected, and life felt disappointing after the bliss of senior year. Our family was going through a lot of stressful changes for the first time in many years. I quit my unsatisfying job last winter and, sometime around then, realized that my family (along with my current boyfriend) would comfort and support me when I didn't know the way. I had a unique, quiet, slightly sad but very peaceful Christmas with nearly 2 feet of snow. On Christmas day, my dad and I took a hours-long walk through our neighborhood, silent, in awe. I took a lot of pictures, but I don't think I'd ever forget it anyway.

Voila! Sap-book! Maybe I'll do this again. Even though I seem to always think the best is behind me, it never takes too long for the best thing ever to reveal itself. More peace, more maturity, lifelong friends, feeling at home (you know, little stuff like that).

I move back to Chapel Hill in a few weeks, and am, as per usual, nervous and pessimistic (well, just a little) about this phase of my life--this leap--being as good and valuable as previous phases. Looking over these photos, I see the pattern of great luck--totally undeserved wonder and mountains of love--that seem to crash into me at just the right time.

True/False

This would make everything more peaceful/ easier?
(If boarding passes looked like this, not if you were Tyler Thompson)

Gilligan

God, I was just trying so hard (it's late at night; really late) to remember the theme song for Sesame Street, but all I was coming up with was the Gilligan's Island theme.

Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale,
A tale of a fateful trip
That started from this tropic port
Aboard this tiny ship.

The mate was a mighty sailing man,
The skipper brave and sure.
Five passengers set sail that day
For a three hour tour, a three hour tour.

The weather started getting rough,
The tiny ship was tossed,
If not for the courage of the fearless crew
The minnow would be lost, the minnow would be lost.

The ship set ground on the shore of this uncharted desert isle
With Gilligan
The Skipper too,
The millionaire and his wife,
The movie star
The professor and Mary Ann,
Here on Gilligan's Isle.

So this is the tale of the castaways,
They're here for a long, long time,
They'll have to make the best of things,
It's an uphill climb.

The first mate and the Skipper too,
Will do their very best,
To make the others comfortable,
In the tropic island nest.

No phone, no lights no motor cars,
Not a single luxury,
Like Robinson Crusoe,
As primitive as can be.

So join us here each week, my friends,
You're sure to get a smile,
From seven stranded castaways,
Here on "Gilligan's Isle."

On this show there was usually a brief, slapstick cold open, transitioning into a truncated version of this theme. But every so glorious often, they would start with the full theme. I remember sitting in the den at my grandmother's house, planning out what I'd watch with the TV Guide, and the frisson/ joy of getting the full theme. It almost obviated the desire to watch the rest of the episode. I sang along loudly.

Which reminds me:
Even as a child, I was extremely cynical about the idea of God, and the hypocrisy between some of my parents actions (actions I now know are uniformly virtuous) and their faith. But I was really into some elements of churchgoing:
1. Donuts, and going to my parents' sunday school class instead of the one for kids, and feeling precocious.
2. "Popcorn prayer," where everyone stood in a circle and talked candidly about what they want and need to feel comfort in life. I would like to do this with my friends today.
3. Hymns.
I remember walking around in the woods at my grandmother's and singing elegant mash-ups of hymns and the Gilligan's Island theme. Sitting on mounds of moss or dropping beads of bittersweet into a stream on one side of a culvert, running to the other side to see if they made it out, proudly singing and thinking about the Skipper and God.

Note to Self

This photo has been edited for dramatization purposes.
This face has also been edited for dramatization purposes.

Just because
- You were super tan a month ago
- You feel fearless
- It's just an hour!

Don't
- Go review vocab by the pool
- With no sunscreen
- In mid-July
- For an hour

Because
- You will get burned as hell!
- You've been inside! For a month! Studying vocab!
- You fool!*

*Extra foolish: now there's a picture of me pulling my shirt down on the internet.**

**Like that's a first.***

*** No but seriously, I'm pretty sure that's a first.

$128.00

Oh my lord, Urban Outfitters is laughing so hard at all of us right now.

Emoticons

I was going to make a post about taking the GRE, but instead, I think I'm going to start a new feature on this blog (I accidentally just typed "fetus on this blog." Let's see what google analytics has to say about THAT!) where I attempt to make emoticons with my face.
...and maybe call it EMOTE? I CAN!s ?????*

D:

*Currently accepting suggestions for alternate names.

To Have Bookshelves Like This...

...is to be happy forever.

FOLKS.

THIS IS A DUCK WITH TEVAS ON.

Check it out! I got Chacos, friends!

I am so into this.
I also think this might be my boyfriend in a past or future life.

Sparknotes

Hello, Sparklife. Yes, I am ready for Cute Guys.

So lately I've been reading SparkNotes alongside whatever novel I have going on. I did this in highschool because we always had plot quizzes and I have abominable reading comprehension. Even though the evil Ms. Thompson, who once accused classmate Alyssa and me of cheating on a vocab quiz, is no longer giving me reading quizzes, I still have no brains when it comes to knowing what's going on. I'll read a hearty novel--you know, spend a week or two on it, roll around in it, carefully connect its message to my Major Thoughts of that month*-- and will remember the color of the protagonist's jacket when he's at so-and-so's house, but who's so-and-so? What did they talk about? I don't know, man. Hard question.

This all fills me with such JOY and HOPE for a perfect score on my GRE verbal section! I'M AN ADULT! PLOTS! LITERATURE!

*This maybe implies that I have Major Thoughts of the Month. Not so, but I'd like to think I have at least Thoughts Each Month.

Oh, Ma! Ha!

My mom is awesome.

Praise Be

Coffee! It works!
Also Praise Be:

Photo, I presume, by Jana.

Bert and Jancho Villa are
1) super duper engaged and
2) back from 7 weeks in Europe.
LET ME PLAN YOUR WEDDING!

Isle of Nerd

In these grad school planning days, I've been talking with my thesis advisor to discern the best plan of action. Her advice has been go for the programs with the active, innovative 20th-century Brit lit gurus, then find a school you like from there. Well, I'm not actually sure that was her plan, but it is my plan now. She pointed me to IVWS, which despite my research last year, I hadn't joined. But then I did, and plans have rapidly come together to go to this year's annual conference in June.

In Glasgow.

It'll be a big, expensive thing, but I can't think of a better way to, in my preparations, get the net back up in the air (or spend my savings). In the best case scenario, I could have some great conversations, find a mentor, and get wonderful new research ideas. In the worst case scenario, I still get to go to Glasgow and the Isle of Skye. I am almost painfully excited.
In all of my research last year I avoided looking up pictures of the setting of To the Lighthouse because I wanted to see it as Woolf paints it. I had my own vision of her hills, shores, water, the house that lives and breathes and ages with its sometimes-residents. But last night, hanging out with my parents and talking about my trip, they showed me their pictures from their tour of Scotland last September.
I had avoided looking at these pictures or even talking to them about their trip because I was so overwrought with jealousy then. I was fresh off a year very, very hard at work on To the Lighthouse writing and research, and a heavy dose of writing about and acting in a great production of Macbeth as Lady M. (set, to those who don't know, in and around the east coast Highlands)
As soon as I saw the pictures (my dad, a little ant walking around the shore as my mom snapped the vista from the winding road; the view from Dunvegan castle where my mom sat and drank tea and felt like Mrs. R) I just involuntarily burst out crying. I was so happy to see how much it looks like I hoped it would, except stupid-beautiful and grander and more enchanting and colorful. I am just totally dumbfounded and blinded by it, and really looking forward to the next month of research before I go.
Ahh! I hope this all works out! So stoked.

Netting

Things I am thinking about:
1) Going to grad school
I have now, as of today (!) been out of school for exactly one year. The 9-5 world has not been unrewarding in that it has delivered so much perspective, in particular that I love school and have been deeply self-conscious this year about not reading enough, writing enough, collaborating enough, and synthesizing enough. I described it to my mom yesterday that in school I felt like there was this netting over me-- sort of a well-lit, translucent, glittery web of ideas-- and more ideas and information and pieces of culture were alternately cast into and drawn from that web. Outside of academia, I feel like that net has, like, been cut down (to switch to a different metaphor) somewhat triumphantly (like the quasi-glory of an under-underdog beating Duke or something), and is just a trophy of some middling accomplishment, and not actively in use, and (to switch to a different metaphor), putting stuff in that net at my feet is like some kid shoving a dead fish into a net when his dad's not looking to pretend like he caught it. Slimy and wrong. My aim to put in some applications this fall would, at best, get me into grad school, and would at worst get the net back up in the air, to glitter and catch ideas (or to catch a nasty shot from downtown, or to catch some non-slimy fish). OMG this train of thought is making me crack up. Other kinds of nets to consider: fishnet stockings, butterfly, profit/loss, internet.
2) Switching to wordpress (?)(!).
I get a little embarrassed now and then about this blog title, which I came up with sometime in the early-middle part of college when it was ~super e-hip~ to have usernames/ blog titles with two simple, delicate nouns... gag. BUT! Whatever. It might be nice to blog again, and take some pictures of my life, and keep in touch with my now far-flung friends, but I should do that in a place where I'm not self-conscious about dumb archives.
3) Oh GOD, can I go to the beach yet?
I can go about 3 months without being in sea water before I get really anxious and feel like I'm being deprived of some essential joy. It is time.

Well, This is Exciting!

I am pretty sure I am going to start blogging again.