RHPS

I have really nice legs.
The show was absolutely fantastic. I was going to put up a few pictures, but Jess Amir's makeup job was so horrendous that I don't know if I even want to... Okay, just one.

Things I'm Enjoying

StumbleUpon

If, like me, you ever find yourself saying "boy I wish I had an interesting website to look at right now," this is a pretty beefy tool. Just click on a button and - bam! - new random website. Sometimes crappy. Sometimes not.

Like Better

Click on photos! Computer tells you about yourself! Fun. Kind of. Mindless, but hey, that's how it works.

Songbird

Like iTunes, but more capabilities. Still can't figure how to randomise, though...

Things My Mother Sent Me For My Birthday

My mother always sends me the strangest packages for my birthday so this year it's being documented.

Some strange wobble-headed thingy. It has a metal staple stuck in its nose. I believe this is my mother's commentary on how much she dislikes my own nose piercing.







A package of salted peanuts. I'm not upset about this. Peanuts are, in fact, absolutely and ridiculously delicious.






Those thingies where you scratch off black stuff and there's rainbow colors underneath.

A birthday card with a nice greeting inside and a plea for more phone calls.

Cookies! In a nice tupperware container. I already ate some and they're delicious.

A festive bag.

A change thingie without about two dollars in quarters inside. Since there are no arcades nearby...

I'll consider a contribution to the tattoo fund!

Thanks, mom, I love ya!

What does it mean...

When you have a dream that's a movie starring Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt?

I think it means I have to write a play.

That Damn Marijuana.

Happy Birthday to Me

A few days late, but still...

Last night I had my first legal drink. A double jack on the rocks. With Dr. Maurice Kenny, goblessim. A man that has had such a deep influence on my writing commemorated with that sort of landmark?

Appropriate.

Glass House

The current project I'm working on for playwriting is a long, experimental piece which is, on a plot level, about a relationship that's on the rocks. Of course, it's deeply metaphorical and, like any writing piece, the majority of the characters are operating on pretenses that mirror my own faults and whatnot. I have an interesting direction to take the plot, I think, and it won't require reworking much more of the current play than the final scene, which is faulted anyways.

I realised, while working on it, that the plot is basically a prediction about where I'll be in a few years. This made me think about turning it into a full three-act play. As it stands the idea is:

Glass House: Summer 2008, following the rocky relationship of Stan and Margaret and their interactions with the people they surround themselves with.

Cold House: Winter 2005-2006, a difficult winter break for Stan, following his conflicts with his family, who he's living with, and the difficulty of his deep-seated apathy.

Burning House: 1983-2003, chronicalling the failure of Stan's parents' marriage, from the destruction of their first house to the drawn-out divorce.

Being at Home

Late-ish Thursday night, my brothers and Joel showed up to pick me up. We grabbed my bag and left; I don't think anyone knew I was going, but that's okay. The drive home was suprisingly entertaining - I always expect car rides with my brothers to be somewhat worse than they are. As we're driving south, it gets progressively colder until we get home, where the windows might as well be frosted. If it had been precipitating, I'm sure it would have been snow.

So we go inside and - suprise! surprise! - it's just as cold in there as it is everywhere else in the Adirondacks. I called Kaye and she came over while my brothers and father are getting ready for bed. We were huddling under a blanket trying not to be cold.

She went home after a while and I went to bed. I didn't have blankets or sheets so I had to go onto the porch and grab a sleeping bag. Of course I grab Sara D.'s, which for some reason has a pair of underwear in it, but at that point I was too tired and cold to do anything but put the underwear elsewhere and go to bed trying to ignore that fact that the window next to me had a broken pane of glass covered by nothing but a cardboard box

The next day I got up and, again, was freezing cold. It frosted outside. So I started a fire, which was unfortunately too hot, but that was fine with me at the time. Kaye came over again between classes and I made her breakfast and then she left and then I watched movies for the rest of the day and that was Friday.

So on Saturday we were going to go hang out with Jane. Kaye came around, we went and picked up Christina, and then got fantastically lost trying to find I90. We looped around the next major city and came around and found it. Eventually. We got to the apple orchard and found out, to my surprise, that we weren't just apple picking. There was an apple festival going on. My hopes immediately soared - kettle corn? It turned out there wasn't any. Awful thing. Any event that includes the words "Festival," "Fair," "Carnival," or such should have a place that you can buy huge amounts of kettle corn. It should be a law.

Goin' Home

I'm going home tonight, woot woot. Should be a fun trip - going to see Jane, Kaye, Sara D., hopefully Ryan, definately Sara G., maybe even Spencer, the little bastard. Phone number there's 1(518)251-2047 if anyone wants to get in touch.

That is all.

A Collection of Utter Nonsense: UNEXPECTED EVENT!

A Collection of Utter Nonsense: UNEXPECTED EVENT!

This is hideously disturbing to me. I don't know who fabricated this utter lie but I assure anyone who cares that my foreskin is as intact as the day I was born! I remain all man! Anyone who says anything to the contrary is a filthy, worthless liar and should burn in hell.

CDs to Review (September 29)

CDs I've had for over a month:

Various - Alberta: Wild Roses Northern Lights
Various - Classic Canadian Songs from Smithsonian Folkways

New CDs:

Gran Bel Fisher - Full Moon Cigarette
Painted Saints - Company Town
Moses Mayfield - The Inside
Bright Light Fever - The Evening Owl
Justin Beckler - Oh! My Troubled Mind
Dragonfly - Blind

As soon as I review them I'll tell you which are worth listening to.

Harry Nilsson (September 28)

This is very important.

VERY important.

If you don't have any Harry Nilsson music on your computer, please for the love of god go download some right now. I'd say buy his albums but goodness, he's dead, he can't get your money now anyways and that's the only reason to buy a record.

Specifically "Pandemonium Shadow Show" and "Aerial Ballet" are worth looking into, though you'd have a hard time finding a bad Nilsson album.

Jackass 2 (September 28)

Alright, so I watched it... legally, of course. Some people are really offended by this stuff, but I propose that Jackass is the exact same kind of entertainment as Mythbusters, only more accurate because they don't use dummies! Or myths. But still, gluing pubic hair all over someone's face is worth something.

Facebook (September 27)

Pretty much everyone, I'm sure, has noticed the recent changes in facebook; the newsfeed, the refined privacy settings, the addition of notes, the opening of the network to people outside of academia. Some people are very pissed off about this; some people are cool with it; some people just don't care.

The important thing to do in this situation is to examine the original purpose of Facebook and then examine each of the recent changes from that point of view.

"When I made Facebook two years ago my goal was to help people understand what was going on in their world a little better. I wanted to create an environment where people could share whatever information they wanted, but also have control over whom they shared that information with. I think a lot of the success we've seen is because of these basic principles." - Mark Zuckerburg (http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2208562130)

His stated purpose is to help people understand what is going on in the world. Unless you're very, very closed to things like family, old friends, graduated friends, or the outside world as a whole, "the world" consists of more than the colleges that have been added to the Facebook network. Examine the recent changes individually:

A) Notes - Allow a person to explain the otherwise inexplicable changes that they've made to their profiles. Sure, my cousin went from "In a Relationship" to "It's Complicated" to "Single" to "It's Complicated" again. If he wanted to let me or the other people watching his tumultuous love life know exactly why that happened, he would be able to if he put a note up. (Kerrigan, put a note up! You're confusin' me here, bud.)

B) Newsfeed - It ain't for stalking. It doesn't give you any information you didn't have access to before. It just makes it a little more convenient to get access to that information - if anything less stalkerish, since you don't have to go through your friends profiles seeking minute differences when they're listed as having made recent changes! And, thanks to

C) New Privacy Settings - you don't have to worry about information you don't want getting splashed all over Facebook being displayed. You can decide exactly what information you want to share, and with who, which is especially important now that

D) Facebook is Open to Everyone - After all, you don't want your parents looking at those pictures of you doing bong rips at the naked frat party you went to last weekend, do you? And you might not want your significant other seeing those flirtatious wall posts you're throwing around like confetti. Or employers seeing that your first listed interest is "Beer Funnels (Antique)".

Basically, it seems to me that Facebook is progressing is a logical manner where prior changes acknowledge the problems of forthcoming ones. Facebook is doing its perceived job, which is to provide a classier, more refined networking tool than MySpace or the various other middle-school clogged websites on the internet. Just because it "creeps you out" doesn't mean it's a bad feature.

CDs I Reviewed Today (September 24)

All from Putumayo:

Folk Playground
Blues Around the World
Acoustic Africa
Music From the Winelands

Blues Around the World was by far the best, but Winelands is good too.

Angels in America Part 2: Perestroika (September 22)

I just got out of the play. It was... okay. The characters were good. The plot was interesting and wonderfully irreverant. But it seemed to lack a certain element of truth. I've always visualised the tearing away of curtains to be painful and violent act, and Angels in America lacked a certain brutality that I've come to associate with any kind of destruction of the ego. I want theatre to change me. I want it to reveal new depths to the world around me. The power of it is in the momentary nature, the fact that what's happening on that stage is completely singular. Nowhere else is the same thing happening, and it can't happen exactly the same way ever again. There's a lot of potential there to really blow people away, and I don't think Angels did that. Not every play can.

So, basically, it was acceptable but not sublime.

Imperial Orgy (September 20)

The Imperial Orgy

A really interesting website. I've only just begun the cobra level of it, but it kind of demands input and really there's no reason not to go through it.

I found one part especially interesting, namely a section that described exactly the reason that I stopped using marijuana. I wasn't aware that other people had the same problem. This is probably what made me keep going and start taking it seriously.

Camilia (September 20)

Right now I'm taking a break from writing a greek-style drama, complete with chorus and high language and long monologues, based on the law going into effect too soon that requires a passport to cross the Canadian border. I'll note here that I originally proposed it as a joke, sort of a "wouldn't it be ridiculous" suggestion, but the small group I'm working with loved the idea so now, instead of presenting our issue in a straight and boring way we're going to put on a play. This is probably the ideal situation in this case.

I'm finding writing it particularly enjoyable since it's not serious. I can play with the language a little bit in a way I wouldn't want to in a more serious drama. I'm sure I'll end up posting it to my deviantART site so if you want to read it, it will be there.

Little Miss Sunshine (September 19)

Probably the best comedy I've seen this year. Seriously. Any movie that includes cocaine usage, gay porn, and body smuggling in conjunction with a seven year old can't be bad. Not in my book.

Masks (September 19)

Today, almost every class I was in was talking about masks. Small groups communication was talking about masks in terms of different group roles; monsters was talking about masks in terms of whether or not playing a role that's not yourself is inherrantly monstrous; and of course, Theatre History was about Greek theatre and that's just masks all over the place.

It's a good thing I believe in coincidence, otherwise I might think someone was trying to tell me something.

The Difficulty of Communication

I have tried, on several occasions, to establish a public journal for the dual purposes of communicating with people I don't necessarily talk to as often as I ought and in order to better arrange my thoughts on a daily basis. Unfortunately, nearly every time, the exercise disintegrates into either pointed in jokes towards a specific person or, more often, an update schedule that resembles bimonthly more than journalistic.

So, I'm going to try again. Hopefully this time people will actually know what's going on with me.

Today I did very little. This may be a pattern.

I did see Dr. Henry read from his new book, though, and it was pretty amazing. The book is listed below. If you have any interest in the contemporary novella it's worth checking out.