"Try reading books instead of burning them!"

Indiana Jones teaches undergrads. I teach undergrads. Ergo... why isn't my life in academia more like Indiana Jones'? (This comes after reading a 300-page book of theory in a day, with another to go by tomorrow night. Plus grading. Eeesh. Can I go search for the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail now please? Or do I have to wait for tenure?)

Like Indy, this is what I do on a daily basis, and I probably look just as confused while doing it.

But this is so much sexier and more confident.

And so much more exciting!

I wanna go on daring expeditions to fulfill my academic dreams! Can't I go questing around London in search of some obscure theatre artifact, that might then lead me to Cairo or somewhere else similarly awesome where I could fight off bad guys with aplomb? It's the perfect mix of geeking out about history and having amazing adventures! Why isn't all of academia more like an Indiana Jones movie?

(Photos found here, here, here, here, and here)

With a Thankful Heart

Happy (belated) Thanksgiving, everyone! I had a great day here in Seattle! My parents flew out to see me, and we made a traditional turkey feast right here in my apartment in my ridiculously tiny kitchen. Turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, sweet potato casserole, corn, rolls, cranberry sauce. One of the best Thanksgiving dinners in recent memory. We watched the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV, and then after dinner watched This is Spinal Tap (because my parents had never seen it, and it's a classic). Plus, now I have enough leftovers to keep me well fed for at least a week. Hooray!

This year I am thankful for: my great family; my wonderful Zan; my absolutely fantastic friends (near and far and those I've never met); health; enough food on the table and ability to buy food whenever I'm hungry; a warm beautiful apartment to come home to whenever I come inside from a cold, rainy Seattle day; the ability to be doing something I love (even if at times I question my sanity for going back to school).

It's really amazing all of the things that we take for granted. I read something once that said, "What if you woke up tomorrow with only the things you thanked God for today?" and I realized that with all we take for granted, it might be very little. Even when I'm stressed out or frustrated or feeling like a failure in grad school, I still am surrounded by so many blessings. So, with a truly thankful heart, Happy Thanksgiving to you and your families and friends!

(Photo found here)

The Great White Way

Yesterday in section I taught-- The Broadway Musical! I don't know what my students thought, but I personally have never had so much fun in a class. On Monday, the guest lecturer set the scene with one of the most engaging lectures I've ever attended; Monday night, I spent several hours compiling a playlist of songs from musicals from South Pacific through the 2011 Best Musical Tony Award Winner Book of Mormon. Tuesday, we listened (and I sort of... danced along). I started with "Some Enchanted Evening," then we worked our way up to Hair, and into Jesus Christ Superstar and through the opening of Sweeney Todd and up to Les Miserables and Phantom of the Opera, got in a little Rent and some Wicked and Avenue Q and then "Hello" from Book of Mormon, just to name a few of the musical snippets I played for them. To think, that's not even a fraction of the one's that I wanted them to hear! That they could have heard! And only such small song snippets!


In other news, my entire two sections now know I'm a huge nerd (as do all of you).

(Photo found here)

Laughing Awake

I've had a very busy "four-day" weekend-- from teaching section on Thursday to researching/writing a paper on Friday and Saturday, I haven't had much time to relax. Nor have I felt particularly lighthearted, despite the fact that now my cable works so during my meal breaks I get to watch NCIS and see holiday commercials (I love holiday commercials!).

But this morning something happened that has never happened before: I woke up laughing. I laughed so hard I literally woke myself up. I remember the dream, too-- I was at McDonald's with a few of my best friends to get an apple pie. For some reason, I sat at a table near theirs instead of with them, but facing so I could talk to them. Suddenly my phone popped up with a message: "Look behind you!" I warily turned around, but nothing was there. Then we realized that my phone had gotten a signal from my friend's phone and based on the table placement thought she was "behind" me and was letting me know that I had friends nearby. We got a case of the giggles. Then one of my other friends opened her fortune cookie (yes, I know we were at McDonald's, but this is a dream so anything can happen), and it said, "Have fun at your Bar Mitzvah!" which combined with the phone thing set us off into even more giggles.

Then I woke up laughing!!! It felt nice. I wish more days started with laughter. :) And I wish I could see my friends more often than in my dreams.

(Me with all of the friends from my dream, waaaaaay back in the day)

A Song of a Wintry Fairyland

In a month and a day I will be here:

With him.

!!!!!

(Photos of Cinderella's Castle and Mickey's Very Merry Christmas Parade found here)

A thought I think from my little white couch

(Photo found here)

A Short Week

I've made it through Monday, and thus I have made it through one-third of my week! How lovely! There's a big theatre conference this weekend that as a first-year I'm not attending, so while everyone else frolics off to Montreal, I have four lovely days to write a paper, catch up/get ahead on reading, take a long, leisurely trip to Trader Joe's to stock up for Thanksgiving, and buy Christmas decorations to put up the second Thanksgiving ends. I've already purchased some hot cocoa and am waiting on some Christmas DVDs to arrive. Exciting!

In the meantime, my struggles with my cable box continue and I need to write an abstract for one of my seminar papers. And I need to cram a bit more knowledge about Epic Theatre into my brain for tomorrow. But I'm so close to the end of the first quarter I can taste it. Just gotta write three more papers, see one more play, read, and do some grading...

Immersed

Thank goodness for the three-day weekend. I've managed so far to immerse myself completely in things that I need to do and things that I hope will further my progress in this program. Thursday after seminar I felt completely beat, but nevertheless I managed to rouse myself enough to go to Pies and Pints with Katie, Dan, and a few of their friends, then came home and read Waiting for Godot, since I'd only ever read Beckett's Endgame before, and Godot is a pretty canonical text. I remembered bits of it from who-knows-where, so that made me feel better.

Friday, my day off, I spent grading acting assignments. Liz came over and we made a lovely lunch of penne a la vodka, watched an episode of Frasier, then got down to grading. Five hours later we were still at it, so we ordered a pizza, watched another episode of Frasier, then continued the grading. This was my first real thing to grade-- I've graded a few quizzes here and there, but nothing substantial-- and it took forever. Amazingly, yesterday the weather in Seattle went crazy and it hailed, thundered, and lighteninged! True, the thunder only clapped once, but it has been so long since I've heard any thunder at all that I absolutely relished it.

This morning I finished reading Isadora: My Life, the autobiography of Isadora Duncan. Isadora basically invented modern dance during the first quarter of the twentieth century. She lived to great heights and to terrible tragedy. Her book made me keenly aware of my body and my soul, and sometimes when I read books like these, I can feel my soul pressing against my heart-- a real, physical feeling-- and I want to see magnificent sights, I want to live to the fullest of passion and beauty and Art and just to feel. I wonder if I could dance her dance. I wonder who I might be or become, given wings. Given courage. For bravery is a great part of it and I do think fear of the unknown holds most of us back.

(Isadora Duncan, photo found here)

A November World

How have we been living in a November world for well over a week now? How can time possibly fly so fast? I feel as if I just started this month, yet the calendar reads the ninth and in just a few short days we will be saying mid-November, then late. Then December.

Although, Target would have you believe it's already December. Friday afternoon I went to pick up a prescription, get some dishwasher soap, toothpaste, and other odds and ends, and what should greet me but a big banner proclaiming, "MERRY CHRISTMAS!" Now, I appreciate that it didn't just give me the generic "HAPPY HOLIDAYS" of most places, but Christmas? Already? They had snowmen and penguins and reindeer and Santas everywhere, and a whole section devoted to wrapping paper and Christmas CDs. I will enjoy this once I am able to say it is late-November. Right now? Too soon.

November so far has meant lots of cups of tea and sitting on my couch reading. I decided to study Charlotte Charke, an eighteenth-century actress, for one of my seminars, but I decided so last minute (after trying out first Cleopatra, then the Wyfe of Bath from The Canterbury Tales) that I only left myself about four good days to complete all of my research before my presentation (which was on Monday). Or at least, enough research to make a nine page outline to send out by Sunday afternoon. Thus, I have been living and breathing Charlotte Charke since the second of the month. Luckily, I had a bit of familiarity with her from my thesis, but certainly nowhere near enough to present on her; I did have the leg up, though, by already knowing the period and knowing the titles of a few books that I could run to for information. So my entire weekend was consumed by The Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke, Introducing Charlotte Charke, Charlotte: Being a True Account of an Actress in Eighteenth-Century London's Wild and Wicked Theatrical World, and many more.

The thing is, before working on this project, I really thought Charlotte Charke was, well, a bitch. And while I still don't think she and I would necessarily have been great friends, after spending so much intense time with her, I appreciate where she's coming from. It's very different to approach a historical figure that you're not pre-enamored with; I think I managed to give a more nuanced account of her-- to really take in her humanity, rather than her myth-- than I would have been able to do with, say, Georgiana, The Duchess of Devonshire. I started to see the complexity of her in completely new and fascinating ways. But my time with Charlotte doesn't end here! I have a twenty page paper to write about her by mid-December!

But I had to have a bit of a break here and there, so without leaving the couch, I turned on Netflix instant and watched all of Sense and Sensibility in break-length increments!!! I love that movie so much! What a great way to relax. I've also started watching the new ABC show Once Upon a Time. The pilot was a bit hard to get through, but the second episode was wonderful. The parts in the fairytale world are a bit cheesy, but the 'real world' stuff is fantastic. A nice diversion.

Hope everyone else is enjoying their November thus far!

Feels like snow in the air

So after a terrible start, I've decided to make November amazing. Thanks everyone for your encouraging comments-- I really appreciate them. I'm thinking I might start a count-down calendar for real :). Here's a cute picture of a piglet to thank you and to cheer you all up after the depressingness of my last post.

(Piglets are the best!)

So how did I spruce up the rest of the week? Well, on Wednesday I wore a new non-neon lime green sweater. I felt so pretty and warm and happy. Turns out it was a good thing I wore a sweater-- the air grew incredibly cold and had that nip in it that felt like snow. It didn't snow, of course (it rarely does in Seattle), but I loved having that little hint of winter coming just as the world begins to prepare for the holidays. Call me crazy, but I'm already excited for the Christmas season. Less than a month until Thanksgiving and then I can start decorating and listening to Christmas music! Plus, Thanksgiving itself promises to be wonderful!

Then yesterday in my sections I got to continue teaching Hamlet, and I think I saw my students start to appreciate some of the really cool parts of it-- like how Hamlet might purposefully switch swords with Laertes in the final fight, how Gertrude might have killed Ophelia, and how there's basically no wrong way to interpret the play. I think it's so liberating to realize that none of your answers can be wrong-- well, some of them can-- but if you can support a claim with the text, you can interpret the action in nearly any way. They also began their acting scenes, and I saw seven wonderfully acted scenes. I have some pretty great students, overall.

After classes, Kris and I went to see a newly devised play, and it was an incredibly fun and entertaining night, perhaps not in the way the actors intended, but I quite enjoyed myself. I'll never forget it, that's for certain :). I feel about it a bit how Laura Elizabeth tends to feel about many of her Blu-Ray Tuesday movies.

And today it's Friday! I'm going to go to the grocery store, finish reading about Charlotte Charke, and do my best to have at least a little time to take it easy!


(Not sure where the photo is from, I've had it on my computer for awhile)

you're gonna bring yourself down

So far, November sucks. Nothing major, just an awful day. A lot of factors combined to make this particular November 1st particularly sucky. First of all, I'm not a fan of November in general. Then, this morning's schedule got thrown off. Instead of my usual routine of tea, blogs, some reading and prepping section, I had to get to campus early for a PhD meeting, which meant I had to get up earlier than normal, and while it wasn't early, it was still dark outside which just makes everything gloomy right off. Also, I was a bit tireder than normal. Plus, of course, we've hit the middle of the quarter when everyone feels tired all the time, and I have more work to do than I can possibly get done. I feel like I'm already in finals mode, staying up all night to complete readings. Additionally, I keep feeling like I'm completely unsuited to being here. I know that's just in my head, but I feel like there are a million billion things that I don't know that everyone else does, and some seminal texts that I'm not familiar with because I come from SUCH a different academic background than everyone else. I feel like I'm so far behind everyone. I know that I just know different things from them, but it makes me feel like an idiot pretty much all of the time. Plus being younger than everyone doesn't help.

Then, I've been incredibly homesick for the past few days, more than I had been. I think it has something to do with it having been October-- the most beautiful month in Williamsburg, but not a very nice month in Seattle. I long for DoG Street, and I miss Zan and my cat, and going to Aroma's and having places that I love. I have no where here yet that I love. No Blair Hall with a million memories, no Wren Chapel to collect my thoughts, no little patch of wildflowers behind the House of Burgesses, no Cheese Shop. And, mostly, I just want all of my friends together again in more or less one place. I feel so lost without them. Just in general a very frail emotional state.

So one little thing that was said to me this morning due to a, to put it nicely, misunderstanding between me and one of my cohort just ruined the whole day. Normally I would have stood up for myself against her comment, or explained to her that she mistook my meaning, but instead I let her say her piece and walk away. Then I literally kept breaking into tears and once had to go to the bathroom to cry. How crazy is that? Ugh ugh ugh. I know I just have to push through this quarter, and then I'll start to feel more like I'm home, and Zan will be here, and Sphinx, but right now the next month and half looks simultaneously too short to complete everything I need to do and too long until I get to go home.