C.A. Talk Radio

I know ev'ry mile will be worth my while--

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 16:26:29 GMT

I just got accepted into the Yale School of Drama's Stage Management MFA program.

Goddamn, I want to be drinking right now.

They will cheer every word, every letter--

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 03:19:07 GMT

This isn't new to some of you, but for my 1776-loving friends who have not yet seen this: It's Too Late...

And one of the reasons I haven't posted in so long is because I've been working on this meme, originally from actualize.

Leave a comment saying, "READ HARD" and I will give you five things I associate with you. Then post about what they mean to you, along with this, at your journal.

From actualize...

stage

I have always been ham. This is something that has always had a chance of coming as a surprise to anyone who has met me from middle school onward, as I give off a quieter impression than I did as a kid and can be rather reserved. But I have always been a ham, as long as I feel the situation to be appropriate. That, plus my love of the arts in general, combines to make me a person who love theatre and theatre people. And because I'm a Pretentious Intellectual, I also enjoy thinking about the more theoretical aspects of performance and performance space. This has its more practical applications, such as when I wonder at some audience members who are completely comfortable with WALKING ON THE FUCKING STAGE at intermission and such.

KOREA!!!!!!1

I WAS BORN THERE. SOMEWHERE. I have a very bro-tastic approach to my Korean heritage now, where Korea is to me what other people's favorite sports teams or college alma mater are to them. It's, like, KOREA YEAH and some things are cool and some things suck but you're still all FUCK YEAH because it's your team or school... but at the same time, it is just one aspect. I've had issues with my personal national identity since I was young and learned that I actually couldn't be president of the United States someday. (My parents, by the way, were excellent about educating me about that aspect of my heritage without shoving it down my throat.) I'm not big on the hyphenates. Hell yes, I am a Korean American, but I'm also a short American and a New Yorker American etc.. So, yeah, it's kind of like, "I love you man... no homo." There's definitely a defensive edge to it, though it's lessened greatly throughout the years.

music

I've been doing music for longer and more thoroughly than I've been doing theatre. I was one of those kids who was always singing. I was in some choir or another from when I was 10 to when I started college. I start piano when I was 7, and later picked up pipe organ when I was in college. I did a moderate amount of music theory and music arrangement study when I was in college. I never babysat or worked retail (out of practicality, really -- I lived in the middle of nowhere and didn't have a car/license) -- pretty much all of the work I did during high school was freelance piano and organ work. So even though the theatre thing has been far more visible, it's music that has been most of my life, in a very practical sense.

It's also limited, though, when referring to music in the sense of songs and contemporary pop culture -- I had no awareness of contemporary pop music until late middle school, when my mom would play the soft rock station in the car on the way to dance lessons etc. (Celine Dion was cutting edge to me at that point of my life). I didn't hit actual rock music or the like until late high school and only began broadening my contemporary pop horizons beyond that when I was a bit into college. (I had never heard Bon Jovi's Livin' On A Prayer until a party I attended halfway through my freshman year of college.) And most of what I have since learned has been from what has been shared by friends, so it's been shaped by the tastes of my friends. I am, for instance, greatly lacking in terms of my hip-hop/r&b/rap knowledge.

But in the general sense, my life is structured musically. It's how I think, how I move, how I hear things. I sometimes regret not having been a music major, but it;'s probably for the best, because working in music makes me even angrier and drunker than working in theatre does.

politics

When I was young, I considered politics to be a likely career path, as I viewed it as a way to make positive institutional change for the cause of social justice. Then I got disgusted and jaded by all of the bullshit. Also, I took a Introduction to Political Theory as a college freshman and absolutely hated it (even with a wonderful professor).

I continue, however, to place a high value on civic/social engagement and consciousness. AS ANY WHO FOLLOW MY TWITTER WOULD KNOW I am pretty sickeningly earnest when it comes to this. And while I think that nothing replaces taking action for justice and compassion, there is great power even in just knowing. I think that change will happen when it has to -- when a person can't continue as things are. knowing what they know, and still be true to their soul. To get to that point, whatever it may be, you have to know. It is very true that no one can or should be everything to everyone, but I have not a lot of time for truth apathy.

cfud

For those of you not in the know, CFUD is an LJ-based, online pan-fandom, comment-spam style roleplay. I began following it in the fall of 2005, having seen it mentioned by mistressrenet (whom I first discovered via her Yami fan fic), and it was great for when I was starting to feel down and needed a quick, humorous read. (Foreshadowing, perhaps). I told myself that I would not app because I clearly didn't have the time to actually participate in such an activity. It was tempting, though... in no small party because people kept on saying what a difficult app process it was...

So I finally gave in a couple hours into the December 2005 app window, grabbing the library's copy of Les Mis and throwing together an app for Enjolras, since I figured that I could RP any Les Mis character in my sleep. The app didn't get in! In hindsight, the material was good, but I was just new to CFUD apping and didn't have the hang of it yet (wouldn't get the hang of it, really, until two years later). But having started, I couldn't stop, so I re-apped in January, with my app going up to vote while I was in a gay dance club in London.

Since then, I've apped 5 more characters and, as the dates do indicate, gotten my B.A. in CFUD. CFUD was only my second LJ RP (the first being a short-lived YnM RP that fell apart shortly after I joined, largely thanks to drama where I still have no idea what exactly happened), and it's the longest single RP in which I've participated in any form. My playing has changed a lot as my life has changed over those 4+ years, and I'm definitely a casual player now. But as a game, it's a great fit for me. It's free-form enough that I can be a casual player, but there's still a focus on being IC and building character relationships. Things can be played dramatically or comedically. I can be a total troll (in the non-dramallama sense), and there's meta galore.

Tune in to alioth's words for more of this story!

From alioth...

theatre

IT'S WHAT I DO. And I do it because I can't do anything else. I tried, I failed. I strongly believe in its transformative power and how it can be used to do good, whether by empowering individuals or communities -- both the ones on the stage and in the audience -- or just by making people happy. Given the other things I've talked about and will talk about, it's probably not surprising that my two favorite types of theatre in general are documentary theatre (things like The Exonerated and Laramie Project) and musical theatre. Theatre for education and social justice (Shakespeare Behind Bars and such) also makes me all verklempt.

Not gonna lie, I also like eating rich people's leftover food. It's going to be difficult when I move up in the ranks and can no longer be a shameless bottom-feeder.

music

...huh, what can I say that I didn't say earlier.

It's very rare for me to tear up due to reading things; I think that I've only done so once in my life. Generally, there needs to be some soundtrack music for something to really get to me. Not gonna lie, I got all verklempt during The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers when they lit the signal beacons and had those dramatic distance shots with the MUSIC OF ROHAN'S SPIRIT playing.

Also, for something random about music, the people who were in the IRC channel with me for watching the Grammys this year got to hear (read) my strong opinions on Lady Antebellum. I have a very irrational hate-on for Lady Antebellum. If they were just a regular soft rock band with a different name, I would have no objection to them, but I feel like a band by the name of "Lady Antebellum" needs to be some awesome psychobilly or gothabilly group. Sort of like the Charlie Daniels Band by way of Emilie Autumn. It just all fills me with such disproportionate rage. I remember a radio bit when I was listening to some countdown program, and there was an anecdote about how the band came up with their name, where one of the guys suggested it and the female member was all, "...what does that word mean, guys?" and they ended up going with it because it sounded cool. Just... no. That's not a "cute" story.

Taylor Swift, on the other hand, I definitely hold a flame for because she is just too cute. I just wish that presenters would get her live performances under control. Girl's no singer -- and hell, she's far from the first songwriter/performer who isn't a great singer. But I remember the first time I ever saw her on television, years back, and how I thought, "...who the hell's this chick with a sparkly guitar who can't sing?" She has grown on me so much, though, and I would fight for her honor.

drag

I had latent issues with gender for quite a while. As a very young child, I was all into the glitz and glitter. But as I got older -- and, in hindsight, was more exposed to the ways of the world -- I began shunning girly things because they felt "wrong" and "weak." Growing older, with things becoming less "girly" and more "womanly," I got better with things, though as fun as being a pretty princess could be, it still felt (feels) transgressive. The difference now, I think, is that "transgressive" doesn't feel "bad" to me anymore. Also, I have come to view gender as being performative, which has made me much more comfortable with acting however the spirit moves me, so to speak, in that regard.

It rather follows that I'm drawn to drag, the explicit (and often theatrical) performance of gender. I've always loved performing as male, whether in plays or as a Halloween costume or cosplay, and I enjoy "being" male while doing so (i.e. not "tee-hee! I'm a girl wearing boy clothes! I'm so cute!" ...not that there aren't those who can pull that and really be very cute). It's been a while since I've dressed in a more gender-bending way in "normal life," since, as a smaller woman, it's much easier for me to do so in casual clothing than professional clothing.

...though I did really confuse the skate rental guy the other week regarding my shoe size because I was wearing men's shoes.

gay old men (by which i actually mean cfud)

So I gave my basic CFUD history earlier. Now is when I go all sentimental about how a fictional zombie summer camp on the internet changed my life.

With the exception of my college roommate, pretty much all of my closest friends are people I have met through CFUD. I think the fact that CFUD was big enough to have groups of people in a large variety of locations and tended toward the age range of late high school through recent college grads contributed to this phenomenon, as it meant that people were independent enough (both from their parents/whatever and from any dependents of their own) to make trips to meet up with others with minimal fuss. There was also the development of the huge IRC chan and its related smaller, more specific chans, where people just hang out and shoot the shit -- usually about things other than the game. So CFUD has evolved to be as much of a more general social network as an RP game.

The first CFUDer I ever met was anatari -- who is pretty much the person who made the NYC CFUD scene what it is. I only had two characters at that point, and at the point at which I went to my first group meet-up, and they both were basically the only ones from their respective canons in the game. (I didn't fully use IRC, which hadn't yet developed into what it is today, at that point, either.) So it was all fun! But I really began to get to know people by the point in my CFUD history that I apped my third character: Tatsumi Seiichirou from Yami no Matsuei, which is a manga about supernatural detectives from the afterlife (hence, old men) that has a shitload of homoerotic subtext, some of which remains at the level of subtext only through some really unconvincing denial (hence, gay).

All of this really came to mean a lot for me during my senior year of college, when I was struck down by something that, in hindsight, appears to have been like a very bad bout of fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome. For someone who had hit bottom -- after a rapidly accelerating downward slide from being one of those obnoxiously busy, overachieving super-students to having getting out of bed being a daily battle that I didn't always win -- having a group of people who was literally there 24/7 and whom I could reach by just picking up my keyboard (my wireless keyboard got a lot of use during that time, since I wasn't always able to sit up) was invaluable. poor_choices even showed up at my doorstep with candy or video games a couple of times. I somehow managed to graduate, and I give a good amount of credit for that to CFUD people for just being there.

living in relative isolation

I grew up in a town with the following stats, as of the 2000 census: population of 5808, population density of 81.5 people per square mile and 97.66% white racial makeup. (To give some scale of comparison, the city of Albany, NY has a population density of 5488.1 people per square mile.) There is no public water or sewer system. My house is in an area where there is no cable access; we only got non-dial-up internet access (via satellite) about a year ago. It's not in the middle of nowhere -- the city of Schenectady is about a 20 minutes drive away, the capital of Albany about 30 minutes away -- but it itself has a very "in the middle of the woods, no one can hear you scream" feel. College was pretty comparable -- in the middle of the woods in the mountains, though, as a college town, it had more features within the town itself (most people who got to Williams were all "Oh my god, it's so small, how will I survive?" -- whereas for me, the student body and staff alone was probably half the size of my hometown's entire population) and more actually in the middle of nowhere.

So that's my background! The regular theatre season last year and this year are the only times that I've lived in a city, save for a short period when I was very young and we temporarily lived in a more suburb-y area of Albany when our house was being rebuilt after the fire.

THIS MAKES SOME THINGS VERY NOVEL FOR ME. Riding public transportation, for instance! I'm quite used to the NY metro system, but things like buses still strange and foreign to me. I have gotten pretty sturdy about things like making sure that I have the blinds down when I'm getting undressed or whatever, but that was a habit I needed to learn my senior year of college, when I had a first-floor room that had some people traffic by it.

It also affects how I've gotten used to interacting with people. As a kid, getting together with a friend or friends was always a very planned and major thing for me, since transportation arrangements always had to be made. (There was nobody who lived within walking distance.) So it took me a while through college to really wrap my mind around the whole "spontaneously just hanging out with people" thing, since I had never been able to be spontaneous about it and, when it needed to be such an arranged thing, you always wanted to be doing something to take advantage of the time you had together.

It does sort of carry over to my time isolation, so to speak, and I think that it's helped me be able to handle having non-standard work hours (and a lot of them). Well, as far as planning my social life, that is. The wearing-clothes thing still is... yeah.

This is not the Post With Content you are looking for.

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 04:26:18 GMT

I am on the look-out for one or two Dreamwidth codes so that I can join an RP.

:|

ETA: THANK YOU, alioth!

LiveJournal fails spectacularly

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 04:32:59 GMT

From http://inkstone.dreamwidth.org/66626.html:

Hey, do you all remember a while back when LJ said they were going remove the ~~"Other"~~ "Unspecified" option from the gender field in the profile? And then they backtracked when people rightly pointed out this was a shitty thing to do?

Well, there has been a change in the gender field. One's options are now "male," "female" and "It's personal." Since apparently the only ways one would want to declare one's gender are male, female or an express desire to not declare it.

More and updated info is available in the aforelinked Dreamwidth post. They at least seem to be paying attention to this one.

It's also discussed in the news post here.

I personally find it rather distasteful that anything other than male or female is given the lovely option of being labeled not fit for public consumption.

ATTN STUDENTS: WRITE FOR MONEY

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:14:43 GMT

KaiserEDU.org announces its Fourth Annual Student Essay Contest. Submit an original essay on the topic below for a chance to win $1,000. Deadline for submission is March 8, 2010.

ESSAY TOPIC
It is January 2015. What do you see as the major health policy challenges still facing the United States? Please identify the top two priorities and discuss how they should be addressed.

CONTEST DETAILS

Eligibility - Submissions will be accepted from undergraduate and graduate-level students enrolled in a university-based, degree-granting program at the time of submission.

Essay length - Essays must not exceed 1,000 words in length and must be original work, prepared by one author only.

Essay submission - Entries must be submitted online only. No emails will be accepted.

Deadline - All essays must be submitted by March 8, 2010, 5 p.m. ET.

Judging - Entries will be judged by a panel of professionals with experience in health policy and politics from inside and outside the Kaiser Family Foundation. Winners will be notified by May 1, 2010.

Prizes - Undergraduate and graduate students will be judged separately and first-place winners will be awarded $1,000; second-place winners will receive $500.

For more information and complete rules and requirements, visit kaiseredu.org/essaycontest2010.

No, you just have to wait--

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 20:42:01 GMT

the romance me meme ღ

Despite my lack of appreciation for OkCupid's "birthday greetings" that I received this past fall ("Happy Birthday, [username]! Still single?"), I ended up keeping my account there. It was out of sheer laziness, mainly. I'm the type of person who rarely deletes accounts, whether they be for e-mail, forums, websites -- even when they have old, embarrassing fan fiction connected to them. Deletion just feels so final to me. I enjoy the concept of leaving my virtual tracks around the internet.

That digresses, however, from the point that multiple neutral-positive mentions of OkCupid on my F-list lately inspired me to actually update my profile. Since then, I've gotten a couple of messages, which, in what I'm sure would amuse a number of you, have caused me to freak the fuck out. poor_choices, in particular, has every right to laugh at me for putting myself through this after all of the times I've told her how much even contemplating the subject drives me to drink.

I just wish that there were a more clear way to indicate a status of "While I would, in theory, not be opposed to a relationship of the 'dating' kind and, in fact, do have an interest in reaching that stage at some point in my life, it is not something that I am actively seeking and attempting such a thing with me is, now that I think about it, actually a foolish venture all around" without seeming like too much of a downer. Because really, I don't mean to be. I just always feel like there's this implication that one is either looking to be in a relationship or not interested at all. While I have my romantic flights of fancy and occasional bouts of "No one will ever love me and I will die alone, surrounded by many bottles of alcohol because I'm not a cat person," I really am a very content single person.

The thing is, I have my doubts. As a child, my mental romantic model was: girl is awesome, girl meets boy, girl and boy become best friends, girl and boy have lots of magical adventures and fight a few dragons, girl and boy fall in love, girl and boy set up house in the castle but still have really rad horses. Obviously, I read a lot of fantasy literature as a child. But while there have been some alterations to the details as I've grown up, the basic gist has stayed the same -- you meet someone, you become friends and love blooms on the battlefield of life.

My life, and the life I'm choosing, isn't really conducive to a lot of normal life things, though. I'm married to my job, who is a very demanding and high-maintenance spouse. I also follow wherever that job goes, which leaves me without a "local" scene with any sense of permanence. My boss has even remarked (not relating to me) that she has "seen too many stage managers" look around years later and "have nobody." Now, I've seen crazily-busy professionals whom I highly respect maintain their personal lives, but they only manage with a lot of planning and deliberate action. That's the way that I've managed to make the rest of my life -- health, friends, family -- work around what I'm doing. With something like the prospect of romance, however, there's a number of fine lines between being open to things happening and being proactive and being desperate. As much as I would like to trust in the first option, I have, as I said, my doubts.

Part of that might be how I feel as though I must give off this vibe of a person who would sooner bite off another's vitals than contemplate a relationship of that sort or anything even related to that aspect of social life. Granted, there are certain situations where I would bite off another's vitals, but not being considered a stereotypical sexless librarian-type is not one of them. (Not that I intend to give the impression of demeaning librarian-types who might be less desiring of the romantic facets of life, but I simply feel it to be inaccurate in regard to myself.) It always both amuses and frustrates me how whenever I dress particularly nicely and throw in a touch of sass, people react with such absolute shock and wonder. While I don't normally dress in a fancy or girly manner, I'm hardly a sloppy dresser. It's normal for me to be wearing make-up. I'm just bemused by my own Clark Kent/Superman image abilities, I suppose.

Though that all just brings me back to how OkCupid induces bouts of not being able to deal with the consequences of feeling that I have to advertise the fact that I theoretically might be potentially interested in possibly dating or else the world will assume that I crush roses beneath my boots and discard chocolates into active volcanoes. Perhaps I'll eventually grow more comfortable with this. Or perhaps I will end up marking this down as yet another Great Life Decision that helped to further develop the relationship between me and my bottle of Jose Cuervo.

But they collided in the air--

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 20:55:43 GMT

Or, In Which We Judge The Coherency of Realtek Installation Messages Versus That of nightangelca's Subconscious

So last night, I dreamed that I was having to keep chasing after my grandmother, who refused to be careful about wearing her headscarf when going on gambling trips. This made my life difficult, as I then had to make sure that she wasn't caught by the religious authorities, as women weren't supposed to gamble. There was much stealing through the streets of an area that looked an awful lot like the 39th Avenue metro station in Long Island City, as I had to make sure that she wasn't caught thanks to her cavalier attitude.

That somehow segued into hanging out with President Obama in McDonald's, where he was eating all of their new products and tracking their nutritional value -- with his meal adding up to 6000+ calories.

Such a thing was clearly too super-sized for me, as I next found myself on the swingset in the yard of my home. When suddenly: rainbows began falling from the sky! Thus, I declared: "Rainbows are falling from the sky!" I was proved silly shortly thereafter, as the apparent rainbows turned out to be Power Rangers and Kamen Riders with parachutes. I went inside with a couple of the Power Rangers, who were conducting a poll for MoveOn.org to choose a middle name for the Yellow Ranger.

On that note, it ended.

There is the possibility that I have been a little immersed in current events lately. With the way that my job has relaxed, I have actually had time to read the contents of my inbox. I am still a little disconcerted by the fact that, as of the past weekend, I now have zero unread messages in it on a regular basis. (There are currently 16 unread, but that's only because I'm saving some to read at work.) Please understand that the number of unread messages is usually more around 150 -- see how unfamiliar this must be for me!

This is related to the subject of current events as part of the reason that my inbox is so huge is that I receive a lot of e-mails of the non-personal sort. Off the top of my head, there's the New York Times, the Economist, various Kaiser Health News collections, the Inter Press Service News Agency weekly, MoveOn.org, the Courage Campaign, the M-W Word of the Day, the Dictionary.com Spanish Word of the Day, all of those ad circulars, notifications from LiveJournal and DreamWidth... and oh, yes, e-mails from actual individual people, too. All non-personal e-mails get deleted/archived after a week, but still, it builds up.

Tell me about your inboxes and let me know how much of a freak I am for having an 800+ (formerly 1200+ until I did some major organizing) e-mail inbox. (The "All Mail" number being 8000+, if any are curious.)

Also, happy birthday to misspeacock and happy belated birthdays to yzak, sleepfighter and sapphire_hime!

Why, you might be selling flowers, too--

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 19:28:13 GMT

...IS THIS ENGLISH.

This is supposedly good for my computer, but I really just can't bring myself to click "yes."

ETA: And then the Windows Update manager automatically installed a more up-to-date driver for me instead. HP Health Check is behind the times, man.

It's a little easier to breathe--

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 21:40:40 GMT

mysoundtrackmeme ♫
♪ my thread

So this past weekend, I turned over a new leaf. I'm not exactly the more adventurous sort, so it's always something of a minor event whenever I try something new. But I did it -- and I liked it.

Yes, for the first time in my life, I wore eyeliner in a color other than black.

Metallic gold, to be specific. I'd seen it in the make-up aisle of the grocery store when I was picking up some other items that I actually did need (tangentially, it was a revelation to get new mascara and remember that mascara is actually supposed to do something), and I was unable to resist either the shininess or the gold-ness (which, while being a color that I shun in jewelry, I love in cosmetics). And I have to say, I'm pleased with the purchase. While I do need to be a little less supportive of the United States economy in the future, my impulse buys in these past couple weeks have all had positive results.

That was not my only streak of adventurousness this weekend, though. I also cold-talked a celebrity (well, a celebrity in my world, at least) when I saw Michael Cerveris (for whose surname I always have to check my spelling) at the opening night reception for Fetch Clay, Make Man. Figuring that I probably should say something other than "I know who you are and think that you're really cool," I told him how I'd seen him at the reading of Execution of Justice in the fall and thought that he was excellent.

That reading of Execution of Justice in early November was the start of the tidal wave of excitement that finally vomited me up on the shore this past weekend. It truly was a fantasy day. I took the train up to New York that morning and wandered up to 42nd Street in a leisurely fashion, stopping here and there along the way -- including in the Sephora in 42nd, where one of the floor staff asked me if I needed help and, upon my looking up, complimented me on my eye make-up, which put a little bounce in my step for the rest of the day.

The reading itself was splendid. The play is an examination of the trial of Dan White, the man who killed Harvey Milk, presented ensemble style a la Laramie Project. Cerveris read as the defense lawyer and, stepping in last-minute, Bill Irwin read as the prosecutor. I feel terrible for not being able to list more names as they relate to roles, as the entire sizeable cast was superb. It was a fascinating, thought-provoking experience. Though Dan White was a character in a play about his trial, the play avoided prosecuting this man who was portrayed as being unable to handle his feelings of being trapped and instead turned its focus on our judgment of him -- how it became a trial of not whether or not Dan White killed Harvey Milk in an act of premeditated homicide but a trial of how we felt about Dan White. Cerveris and Irwin were both spell-binding. Irwin, especially, in the less-flashy role, absolutely bowled me over. For most of the play, he seemed strangely quiet and understated -- but then, in his final argument, all of that was shattered to pieces as his character exploded with frustration at being able to do nothing more than present the facts and have that not be enough when, by all rights and reasons, it should be.

It was only late afternoon when the reading let out, so I set out to wander back downtown in a leisurely manner similar to how I'd wandered up, when I discovered that the shops at Bryant Park had just opened. I love Bryant Park during the winter holidays, when they set up the ice skating rink and vendors open up shop all around the park, so this pleased me to no end. I found the absolutely perfect birthday gift for my mother, and I met up with synergic as a window shopping partner in crime. (Though before she showed up, I was not without companionship, as one of the park workers decided to befriend me and was determined to get me to take advantage of the free samples offered at the kettlecorn booth.) And I had a real hot chocolate for the first time and have no idea how I didn't go into a diabetic coma. We also ate crepes of questionable content.

That was the last time I managed to make it to New York while in good health. I was able to attend anatari's Thanksgiving celebration, which was, unsurprisingly, splendid. (anatari, for those of you not lucky enough to live nearby or make it to the area on a visit, is truly a hostess with the mostest.) Delicious food, great company -- synergic, hitode, yzak (whom I hadn't seen in AGES), ysadrel, actualize and upper_flowers were all there. (Did I forget anyone? I'm getting mixed up with New Year's now.) I came down with a head cold the day before Thanksgiving, but it was worth it sticking it out.

It was also worth going "I am in New York on Thanksgiving, I am going to attend the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade!" and getting up in the morning to do so. It was a beautiful day, which meant that a lot of other people had the same idea that I did, but I could still see the giant balloons over the crowd. And isn't that what you go to the Macy's parade for anyways? Getting back to anatari's afterward was a little exciting, what with all of the roadblocks, but I made it.

And after that: the flood.

Rehearsals for Christmas Carol has actually started before Thanksgiving, but regular rehearsals had not been so bad. Life was busy, but not extraordinarily so. After Thanksgiving, though, we had a few days and then went into tech -- and then rehearsals for Fetch Clay, which meant that any time that I was not working on Carol previews or shows, I was helping with Fetch Clay. Which, with the two productions having their days off on different days of the week, meant that I had no days off.

Though I did end up not going into work on Monday December 14, as I was still sporting a nice fever that had started on Saturday night. That was the only day I'd have that month until Christmas, though the sickness turned into bronchitis that I wouldn't shake until a bit after New Year's. Christmas, by the by, was a beautiful day that I used to go to the ER. It truly was glorious. Not having to look after anyone else -- nay, having people looking after me -- and departing with drugs in hand? Hallelujah!

(For all of my health woes, it was a blast. And synergic and hitode were able to make it down to see the show -- and deliver anatari's delicious Christmas cookies to me. As well as SubtleTea. Because they love me. Really.)

As to the source of the sickness, I don't doubt that was one of my young Christmas Carol charges. Though I'm part of the stage management staff, for Christmas Carol, the person in my position serves as Young Ensemble Supervisor -- which entails being responsible for 14 actors between the ages of 5 and 13. After having a five-year old hacking directly into my face for a week, I had pretty much resigned myself to getting sick, though I was chagrined at how long it lasted. At the very least, it was an effective weight-loss program. I actually lost a couple of pounds during the holiday season while eating and drinking my fill, simply due to running myself ragged. Who knew that hacking up a lung burned so many calories?

(I've since gained the weight back, with a week-long eating spree when I found myself devouring anything that wasn't nailed down to a table. While I wouldn't mind getting rid of those errant couple of pounds at some point, I think that my body was demanding to be something a little more substantial for the winter. I have to admit, it was a little disturbing when I would find myself gnawing on chicken carcasses at one in the morning, and certainly not for lack of three square meals -- to say nothing of one second dinner and 12-hours' worth of constant snacking.)

Still, I was well enough to make it back to New York for New Year's, joining zehuti the night before New Year's Eve, only to find her already hungover in her hotel room. Tsk, tsk. (I kid -- I would have been drunk then if I could have been.) We had a New Year's Eve brunch at Max Brenner's, which was delicious -- though we were too maxed out by just the hot chocolate and omelettes to even attempt dessert. The afternoon was spent at the Museum of Natural History (which was the setting of the elegant picture of myself that I posted here a bit back), which had an awesome planetarium show for which I wished that I'd been more well-rested and, thus, not fighting the reflexive urge to fall asleep when seated leaning back in a dark room.

After that, New Year's preparations already had the city pretty snarled up, so we went to actualize and hitode's place, where we had AJ's curry chicken soup for dinner because we are fortunate people. We hung out there for a while, until I reminded them that we should possibly be social, so we went over to anatari's for a Very Kentity New Year. alioth, brittyone, ysadrel, xen0glossy, upper_flowers and -- bringing our XY count to an all-time high -- scootermcgaffin were all already there.

I'm not sure that scootermcgaffin knew what he was getting himself into.

(But seriously, if anyone in the picture wants me to take it down, I will.)

We all rang in the New Year in a friendly, if quiet, manner, then eventually parted ways. A bunch of us then got together for Korean BBQ the next day, where actualize and I demolished a huge amount of food because we're Korean. (I think that the staff thought that our group, as a whole, was suspiciously white or something, though, because they cooked our meat for us at the table, rather than just leaving it there and leaving us to our own devices. It wasn't unwelcome, but it was surprising.)

Since then, everything has been leading up to Fetch Clay, Make Man for me. circlesinwater, Umber and xen0glossy came to see a preview last week (sadly, it was our shakiest preview, acting-wise), when we were papering the house. As we were still in previews, I wasn't able to do much in the way of socializing before or afterward as a normal person, though xen0glossy being a local meant that she was able to wait around, so we chilled for a bit at my place afterward. (And, with me still being in that week-long eating spree, I ate chicken at one in the morning.) It was good times: we mostly talked about how zombies actually freak us out a lot and were pretentious English majors about horror films.

And then, that whole opening of a world premiere business.

Which, for me, mainly means that I have a life again for the first time in two months.

That's enough chronicling duty for today, I feel. For I have more important things to do today.

Like play video games.

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, world.

Motherfucking comfort and joy

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 04:13:25 GMT

Contrary to what the evidence might suggest, I am not, in fact, dead.

So I was being eaten alive by our holiday show -- and then started doing double-duty, working rehearsals for the next show (for which I am incredibly excited) whenever I'm not running said holiday show. I've also been pretty sick for about a week now. So while I love both shows and also love the holiday season, I am about as good-spirited as any sick person who will have had one day off in the span of December 1 through 24 can be.

(Which, to be honest, is pretty good-spirited. Being bitter about it helps, though, in a contradictory sort of way.)

Basically, I'm just postponing my Christmas cheer until New Year's. You will all be receiving tidings of goodwill and merriment then.

Also, my left knee and the left side of my ass are really hurting me from last night, when I was sitting on the bed and went to stand up but managed to miss the floor, and said knee and side of ass got all of the forward momentum that had been intended to carry me toward my desk. Well, it still did carry my toward my desk but not in the intended way. Overall, it was extraordinarily skillful.

I have over a month's-worth of questions to answer and events to recount, but hell if I am doing any of that now.

Have I made myself appealing enough yet?

ANON CRUSH MEME

Is it always "or"--

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 05:12:52 GMT

"Gender will be a mandatory field at account creation. ... LiveJournal is removing the Unspecified option for the gender field."

Polite feedback (as it is to people who aren't the people who are actually making these decisions) can be left here.

Too tired and needing to go to bed in order to get to work tomorrow to provide editorial comment. Not that it needs much for the choir to which I'm preaching. But, as they say: signal boost.

"New York State Senate Votes Down Gay Marriage Bill"

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:33:26 GMT

Fuck that noise.

I'm going into tech.

The bluest skies you've ever seen are in Seattle--

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 04:39:30 GMT

I've been meaning to mention this but keep forgetting.

This applies to anyone who lives in, lives near or is visiting Seattle, WA and has an interest in contemporary experimental theatre. If you haven't heard of them, there's a company called The Satori Group that moved to Seattle in 2008. They produced their first Seattle show this year, and they currently have Artifacts of Consequence running (through November 22).

I went to college with a number of the founding members, and they are very hip, smart, exciting people. If contemporary theatre is your thing -- or if you don't know and are willing to find out if it's your thing -- go check them out!

Ate a slice of wonderbread and went right back to bed--

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:50:40 GMT

Dear Body,

You know, you are discouraging this whole "exercise" and "fitness" thing when it takes me about five minutes to find the strength to pick myself up off of the floor there after collapsing after four half-push-ups when even my normal state of non-fitness can accomplish four times that much. Really, five-pound dumbbells and some moderate DDR are suddenly looking to be impossible tasks right now.

I'll add "Muscle weakness" to my symptoms for today, and then let's give this one more try. If it still doesn't work out, I'll give you today. But seeing how much I wouldn't mind getting those exercise-induced happy brain drugs, let's try really hard, okay?

-Me

ETA: So lifting a bag of clothes is difficult enough today. Lifting myself or weights is not going to be happening. Let's give the jumping around a try.

ETA2: Some physical activity and a hot shower work wonders. Not miracles, but still, wonders.

I've no intention of confessing today--

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 09:32:55 GMT

Look at things from a more philosophical perspective, dear Virgo, instead of seeing everything from such an intensely emotional perspective. You may have this constant fear that everyone is out to get you. More than likely, you are letting small instances get blown out of proportion in your own mind. Use your friends as a backboard that you can reflect your thoughts off of. More than likely, you will rise to a higher level of understanding of the situation by introducing this fresh perspective.

I really have no idea how I had been planning to start this entry, but I happened to stumble upon this random website that told me my daily horoscope -- which did that eerie thing where it's actually accurate. It is, after all, what I know intellectually, but it is annoying when my normal mental processes get exacerbated into such negative things as that (due to what I suspect might have been hormonal happenings). What made things worse the other day was that this particular period of vulnerability, with which I can usually deal just fine, happened to coincide with a Talk with the boss -- nothing bad, just a "checking up on how things are going for you" sort of deal.

Sadly, I'm extraordinarily bad as dealing with other people's concern for my non-physical well-being, since this tends to involve my emotions in some way. Now, I prefer to hold my deeper emotions at somewhat of an arm's length, given their tendency to be composed primarily of incoherent paranoia, despair and general violence. I've learned how to deal with those things for myself pretty well. It's different when they get dredged up by other people, though. Since things are how I've described them, it can create a somewhat awkward, difficult-to-explain situation, where attempts to explain only dig myself deeper into a hole and really don't explain anything at all. Attempting to communicate how I'm actually feeling in a direct manner is really much, much more trouble than it's worth -- but given the mistakes that I've made in the past when I haven't communicated anything at all (i.e. being overly stoic and determined to carry all of my burdens in silence), I instead made the new mistake of being honest.

Well, you know what they say about mistakes. (Something about making them being a good thing and learning stuff.) I do feel that going too far in the direction of openness has been a genuinely good thing, given my lifetime of swinging to the opposite extreme, but I think I have a better sense of that middle ground now and am eager to go there. I'll just pretend that I possess mind-powers that allow me to erase people's memories of past dealings in order to allow myself to move on as The New Me Who Knows That Most People Who Say That They Want To Understand What's Going On My Head Actually Have No Idea What They're Getting Into. While "I'm fine" might be a little too far from the truth, I need to come up with a general response that communicates the sense of my situation (there's a general set of such situations that I usually find myself dealing with) without bogging others down with too much accuracy.

In any case, with all of that occurring against the backdrop of the aforementioned biologically-induced emotional vulnerability, the past couple of days ended up being the low point of what has been a number of awesome weeks -- and even yesterday evening was highlighted by an opportunity to grab a comp ticket to the Yamato taiko show, which was wonderful.

Earlier this week, I was also able to snag a comp to Roger Rees' What You Will, which was an absolute delight -- a one-man show that's sure to be entertaining to anyone who enjoys things along the lines of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged). And rounding out the end of this week, I'll be heading up to New York on Monday for a reading of Execution of Justice, a play by Emily Mann about the trial of Dan White.

I was in New York just last week, actually, meeting up with anatari, synergic and teleute12 after I had caught wind that there was a karaoke party going down. It was my first time singing at one of those "real" karaoke places (i.e. not in the beer pavilion at the county fair), and it was a blast, even though my voice was suffering from lack of use and pretty much shot within an hour. We went for shabu-shabu for dinner afterward, which was delicious, and popped in on hitode at work. Looking back, it's able to be a wonderful trip in hindsight as I forget about the huge amount of grief that the NYC public transportation system gave me getting there. (The combination of it being the weekend, it being the day of the NY marathon and my having not planned on stopping for this side-trip between home and Princeton, and thus not being packed for dragging all of my stuff around the city, proved to be a little deadly. At least it gave me the opportunity to work off some of the absolutely enormous amount of food that I consumed during that week that I was at home.)

I've been stumbling upon a lot of things by chance lately, really. A GoogleAd at the top of my Gmail happened to link me to Patients Like Me, which, for the fibro/CFE section, has a pretty awesome symptom tracking tool. While I wish that there were a feature for adding notes to days for noting possibly related circumstances (e.g. "rainy weather today" or "drank red wine at dinner" on a day when you had a headache), this really might finally make me be a good patient and track my symptoms, to better prepare me should things again take a turn for the worse. And hey, it makes colorful graphs.

I also made my first woot.com purchase today (well, yesterday) when I checked the site on a lark and found they were offering something I'd been looking into, on and off, for the past eight years or so.

I wonder that I have experienced all of this spontaneity and not yet exploded! Miraculous!

So let's start drinking before we start thinking--

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:00:59 GMT

Hopefully, I'll have time to resume posting some actual substance this week. The past few weeks have had too highly concentrated awesome content to wrestle into journal entries. But the boss has me on vacation for the week, so I'm back on the homestead -- hopefully to be productive in a relaxed, vacation-y sort of way.

Really, this is all just the calm before the storm that is known as "holiday season."

Did you know but forget the method and moment in time--

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 05:59:21 GMT

So I went to the local reading of The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later. It wasn't a finished project by any means -- they were still receiving script changes this morning, this cast hadn't rehearsed until this afternoon. What today was, however, was an event: the same theatre project at hundreds of theaters worldwide on the anniversary of Matthew Shepard's murder.

It was a moving, informative experience for me. (Though not for everyone. During the short talk-back after the reading, one woman flatly stated that she did not consider what she had just seen to be art or theatre and that she was completely disappointed. Needless to say, while I consider her experience to be valid, I found her manner of expressing it to be quite rude and very possibly demonstrative of a lack of understanding of what she had just seen. But I digress.) One of the most intellectually interesting parts for me was the section with the university folklorist, where they discussed how we make our own stories, our control and lack thereof, the life of rumor. Just on a gut level, though, the words of the convicted murderers were heavy, so heavy, each of them for completely different reasons.

Father Roger said that Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney must be our teachers. I'm thinking that the first lesson might be humility.

Here at the crossroads of time--

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 20:58:48 GMT

At 150 theaters in all 50 states and 8 other countries: The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later on October 12, 2009.

The free reading will be at 8 PM on Monday night in Princeton. Anyone interested in coming to see it with me? Or search out a theatre near you, and we'll just see it together in spirit.

RIP Bruce Bowes (1961-2009)

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 17:59:17 GMT

I was going to make some artsy and youthful post about my life today, but then I found out that a sound designer with whom I worked last year passed away this past weekend.

It rather discomforts me that if I hadn't checked another person's Facebook page in order to e-mail them -- I'm one of those "as-needed" Facebook users, not a daily user -- I would never have known.

He was an awesome guy, y'all.

I'll be there someday--

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 04:02:52 GMT

Officially older than Treize Khushrenada.

Have not yet taken over the world.

...mada mada dane.

ETA: From my e-mail...

Happy Birthday, [username]! Still single?

So remember that period of time when you were required to create an OK!Cupid profile in order to do their quizzes? And you know how I've been too lazy to delete my profile? MAYBE IT'S TIME TO DO SO.

The best thing about New York City is--

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 04:22:03 GMT

I managed to have synergic and hitode over for about 24 hours, which was quite lovely. But now, I'm heading into tech week for Having Our Say -- about to hop into bed, and once my head hits the pillow, I will pretty much be at work all of the time until September 18.

...I don't particularly know where I was going with that, except to establish a legitimate reason for not talking to anyone or contributing to the world outside of work in any way for the next week and a half.

Shoulder to shoulder into the fray--

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 04:45:51 GMT

On this day in 1920, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was declared to be in effect -- granting American women the right to vote.

Fewer than 100 years, ladies -- for fewer than 100 years, we have had the right to vote in this country. Within the span of a century.

Voting means a lot of different things to different people -- to some people, I know that it means nothing -- but it's always been something very dear to me. I want to be able to cast a well-informed vote, so what with my life of an over-stressed and over-burdened vagrant for most of my voting years, I've only voted in the major national elections, where information and analysis was more easily accessible. But mercy, it means a lot to me.

I've never felt completely secure in my American-ness. While it's the only country I've ever known, I wasn't born here -- it's not something I can (or should) take for granted. Hell, I've encountered those individuals before who have taken a look at me and not taken it for granted for me (yes, ma'am, the place that this Asian-looking individual is "from" is actually here). I know that there are fellow citizens who would rather not share full ownership of the country with me due to any combination of my liberal-leaning social values, active non-religiousness, queerness or any other of my personal traits. We can disagree on many things, and that is just fine, my friend, because that is what life among people is, but the fact that I am here -- the fact that I am here -- is not up for dispute.

So to me, my vote is a huge "America, FUCK YEAH -- oh, and to the haters, FUCK YOU." It may just be me sticking my tiny foot into the huge, and sometimes horrible, machinery that runs this country, to little effect. But I'll be damned if I'm going to let anyone think that they can run it pass me without me at least tossing an egg at it.

American history and American time have been on my mind a lot lately, what with working on Having Our Say. It's a wonderful piece of dramatic storytelling, with Sadie and Bessie Delany inviting us into their home and telling us about their lives -- which just happen to cover over one hundred years of life in America.

I was only a child at the current point in time at which the play takes place, so it's been fascinating for me to be able to hear the history being discussed. My college studies unfortunately didn't include any history courses, so all I have is high school history -- which, as far as twentieth century American history is concerned, basically consisted of "WWI happened, Prohibition happened, speakesies, stock market crashed and the Depression happened, FDR and New Deal, WWII, something something Vietnam War, Nixon resigned and so-and-so is president now -- time for the AP exam!" But there's just something incredible about sitting in a room with people talking about 1968 and the fear and anxiety that filled that year, and things like that.

But even when talking about things from before I was born, the immediacy of it all is just mind-boggling to think about. There's women's right to vote, like I mentioned earlier. But also how interracial marriage was illegal in Virginia -- until 1967. Intellectually, I knew about that. But 1967 didn't really hit home for me until now. Interracial marriage has been universally legal in the United States for fewer than fifty years. I don't think of my parents' generation as being So Very Old, but had my father lived in Virginia and fallen in love with a non-white woman when he was my age? He couldn't have married her. By law.

American time.

During rehearsal the other day, we watched Dr. Cornel West's commencement speech for Spelmen College. It sure did bring me back to all of the reasons that I've always loved ministry. (Save for the whole "religious faith" bit, it really would be one of my ideal life paths.) Because that man wasn't giving a speech -- he was preaching, and I mean that in the best sense of the word, the kind of preaching that is meant to build up that fire inside of you until it just comes exploding out, where you can hardly contain your shout of "Yes, sir!"

"Don't be an echo -- be a voice."

And even so, mundane business must eventually be addressed. I am, believe it or not, still working on that meme. valancystar and misspeacock, I will be getting to your responses -- hopefully sooner than later, but who can say. Days at work have been long lately, about 10 hours without a meal break, and I am just dead at the end of them. Well, that's a lie -- actually, I'm starving at the end of them, but by the time I make dinner and clean up, I'm well dead.

It's strange to think of a U.S. Congress without Ted Kennedy.

Sometimes it just hits me right between the eyes, how glad I am to be alive.

It's been a long, been a long day--

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 02:12:49 GMT

So I've had my first week in my new city, on my new job -- another stage management internship. It's been awesome so far: my housemates are great, my housing is incredible, the theatre season is exciting and my boss is terrifyingly competant. And it's really just now hitting me how great of an opportunity I've been given. Quite frankly, I'm a little intimidated -- it's been mentioned to me multiple times, by various people, how my position in particulay is a career-maker -- but I figure that all I have to do is not worry about living up to the person who was presented to them by my application (they accepted me, after all) and concentrate on showing them how much more awesome than that I actually am.

(Tangentially, I'll be heading to New York tomorrow through Monday to assist with a reading at the Manhattan Theatre Club, so I won't be around for the next couple of days. Cell phone will be the choice method of contact!)

Keeping this short and sweet, as I'm in the middle of making onigiri right now, what with not being around to do any cooking for the next few days. Also, I am rather tired. The hot and humid summer weather plus sitting at a desk for ten hours a day (plus a mattress, which, while I appreciate its full size, isn't particularly the best) is doing a number on my back -- my shoulders are like a pair of rocks right now. Painful rocks. So back to puttering around barefoot in the kitchen I go.

And while I know that I have an outstanding meme or two from before my move, here's that "Characters' ~Love Lives~" meme, ganked from Various Folks:

1. comment with a character of mine. (defined as a character I play/played in journal format or an original character)
2. receive three bits of headcanon about their sexuality: practices, preferences, experiences, fantasies, kinks, etc.
3. receive information about their current love life and/or sex life if applicable and I feel like rambling at you. (signs point to yes.)
4. receive three bits of headcanon about their life outside of sexuality and romance.

Character List
Enjolras (Les Miserables)
Maladict (Monstrous Regiment)
Tatsumi Seiichirou (Yami no Matsuei)
Takeuchi Sora (Air Gear)
Van Grants (Tales of the Abyss)
Rorschach (Watchmen)
Damien Sheares (original)
Zachary Campbell (original)

Just so you know, I will cry at you if you pick Rorschach. Tears of blood.

So I've got a black eye and my arm's in a cast--

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:38:22 GMT

This is too much fuckery to fit on my Twitter account.

U.S. News & World report -- U.S. News & World Report -- recently published an article that has suggestions for how women can help their men in these trying economic times (as summarized by Jezebel):

That's why Lyons, working with couples therapist John Jacobs, has compiled a list of 5 ways women can help a man through this tough time. Jacobs recommends:

* Be his cheerleader, because men need to be rooted for.
* Don't push him to do anything, like talk about the feelings fueling his bad behavior (or how he needs to get off his ass and send out a resume or two.)
* Sit quietly, in case he decides to say something important to you.
* Make sure you don't stop sleeping with him. Men need sex.
* Don't place any blame on him for the state of your relationship.

This, despite the fact that Jacobs acknowledges explicitly that a man may well take his unemployment out on his partner and the relationship! In fact, if a guy's behavior changes, well, it's the woman's job to figure out how to deal with that... in addition to the increased financial responsibilities.

Though, I mean, if you are the strange type who thinks too much about these sorts of things and, thus, wonders if there might be any women who are being impacted by economic strife (aside from the heads of their households losing their jobs, that is), there are links within the original article so that you can "Read about the recession's impact on women's health — and how your anxieties might be affecting the kids." [Emphasis mine.] Oh, don't worry -- there aren't any silly suggestions that those poor menfolk should burden themselves by doing anything to help those recession-addled women.

That entire article is just so insulting to both men and women that I don't even know.

(Tip from shelightsupwell.)

ETA: The article is an online one, so you can post comments directly to it, if you so wish.

Posted solely for the amusement of those with whom I RP; all others can move along.

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:26:36 GMT

Your result for Roleplayer Test!...

The Soap Opera Star

Plotful, Character-Oriented, Sexual

You're the Soap Opera Star, the center of a massive web of characters -- and more importantly, character relationships. You roleplay mainly for character dynamics, and romantic character dynamics at that: if you didn't start playing with a ship in mind, you're definitely shipping now that you're playing. But it's not random relationships that appeal to you. You like your plots! It's just that most or all of them are personal in nature and revolve around either getting characters together or developing relationships once they've formed. But if given a plot like that, you're a determined, reliable RP partner. However, of all roleplayers, you're likely to be the ones most emotionally attached to your character and to fall in RP-love with the players of your ships.

You scored 6 on Plotful, higher than 59% of your peers.
You scored -4 on Action-Oriented, higher than 43% of your peers.
You scored -3 on Platonic, higher than 18% of your peers.

Take Roleplayer Test! at HelloQuizzy

I WOULD LIKE TO TAKE A MOMENT TO NOTE THAT NOT ONE OF THE CHARACTERS THAT I RP IS ACTUALLY IN A RELATIONSHIP-WITH-A-CAPITAL-R.

AND ALSO THAT

I JUST

...how can it be so accurate and yet so not at the same time.