Sickness and Excitement

Well, life has been... interesting. Elephant Man has completely stolen my life, and I have been feeling like a trainwreck lately. I've had two states in the past week: sleeping and wishing I was sleeping. Beth has decided to put me on vitamins to see if it helps, and if not I am forcibly being carted to the doctor.

Interestingly enough, in the total of an hour when I had time and coherency in the past week, Kinsey attacked my hair. Yeah...

A Thousand Words

Currently at SUU the Braithwaite Gallery is a display of photographs from National Geographic, and it includes some absolutely breathtaking works. My creative writing professor, as part of our class, took us down to the gallery and told us to come up with a story to tell where one of the photographs was the climax of a story.

The story I would write would be based on the photograph that I considered to be the most striking: that of the Afghani girl.

I can see this photograph being the climax of a story about a girl who has lost everything and has been sold into slavery. She would struggle through the psychological difficulties of being without her family and friends, and she would also have to face the impending problem of becoming a piece of property. The moment of climax, which this picture would capture, would be when she is being sold and suddenly a bid of an unusually high nature is placed on her. She turns her head, and it is her brother who has just placed the bid.

It May Be the Death of a Salesman

Well, I managed to cut Death of a Salesman down to six minutes and thirty seconds. Peter Sham was impressed when he overheard the mention of that, and I bet he is wondering what all I left in. My group was really excited when they got the script, but I forgot something... We have a group of six instead of the five I originally thought.

Luckily, Professor Sham was perfectly willing to let me be director since I had done the cutting of the script myself. So the parts were given out to the other members of the group. Everything seemed to be fine right up until this morning's practice. I was ready to smack Scott. I really was.

You see, in Salesman there is one character the play can't function without: Willy. Scott's playing the Willy that is known as "sane Willy" (even though he is the one driven crazy by the other and commits suicide... yes, it's irony on my part). The problem? He is not memorized and has not yet displayed a willingness to act. No matter what we did, no matter what was asked of him, he did the same things over and over again. If he is not ready by Saturday night I get the fun job of telling him he is no longer in the production.

But wait! That would leave us without a Willy, right? Wrong. The group decided I should memorize Willy just in case. So much for no stress this weekend. I may just rip my hair out.

Death of a Salesman... In Seven Minutes

Yes, you read that right. No, I am not crazy. It just happens that for my dear Acting I class I get to do yet another abridged version of a play, and this time it's Death of a Salesman. Oh joy. I was tossed into a new group composed of myself and five others, and between now and next Monday we have to put together an entire seven-to-ten minute version of the play.

Now, I am not entirely afraid of this assignment because we have already done something similar with Hamlet, which I think is a harder show to cut. It also happens that my group for the Hamlet project got extreme props from the professor, and we all earned A's on the assignment.

My fear? Well, two of the people in my group did rather badly with the last assignment, and in a play if one person slacks off the entire production suffers. It's an unfortunate fact of the theatre. However, I have decided to go into this project thinking like a director. I actually had an idea about how to stage it, since we have six people and probably about five roles. I thought it would be interesting to have two people play Willy. I figured one person could do "sane Willy" and another could do the one that is trapped in the past. What that'd do is give everyone a role and create an interesting transition as "trapped Willy" takes over the play. Besides, we have very little to work with on staging, and that would help it out a bit.

I don't know what my group thinks yet, but it was a thought I'd had and figured I should write it down. Either way, at least I know my creative juices still exist.

They Say Inspiration Can Come From Anywhere...

Well, today I was sitting at school (while trapped there for two hours) when I was suddenly struck by an interesting idea. Of course, such a thing is not uncommon--ideas come from so many different places and things that I'm used to it. It was the nature of the idea that intrigued me, though. I had the clear impression that there was some work I needed to undertake, that I was neglecting something that was left specifically to me.

The true shape of the project didn't set in for another twenty minutes, though. On my way to the bathroom, after putting my briefcase beneath my chair in my choir class, I began to sing--without really noticing--the song I wrote about a year-and-a-half ago: Nephi's Psalm. Somehow or another, while I was getting a drink the lyrics of that song congealed with a scripture reference my mother had given me, Ammon's Psalm in Alma 26. It was then I realized that I needed to write songs for the major prophets of the Book of Mormon. My roommate knows a pianist with too much time on her hands, and I already have it all but figured out which ones I need to do. By the time I'm done I should have a full program's worth of songs, including a duet between Moroni and Mormon and a song where a contemporary person is joined by all of the prophets as they give their advice to the latter days.

It should be epic, but it will probably take me several months. Who knows, maybe I will post some of the lyrics up here as I get them done.

So, what do you think?

Instant Wisdom

"It is better to be ignorant than to be mistaken." - Russian Proverb
"I'd rather not know at all than jump to the wrong conclusion." - Kirstin's translation

Romance:
It is not the pounding of blood and a reaction to beautiful words, this thing we call romance. No, it is the tango between two souls.

Money:
The empty god of a million wasted lives.

An Ode To My Man Harem

The past week has been something of a fascinating experience for me, of that I am certain. Oh, it would have been like all the others with the cycle of going to class, going home, causing mayhem, and sleeping if it had not been for one thing: a sinus infection. Third week of school and I get hit with something that devastates my ability to function and leaves me feeling so horrible that it is literally an effort to get my fevered bum unto the couch so my housemates knew I was still playing at living. Thankfully, though, it waited until Friday to really hit, and I was able to force myself to class because I had a much dreaded math exam that I simply could not miss. I didn't move the rest of the weekend.

So, today, a bit on the late side, I am going to type of a brief explanation of something for my creative writing class. Yes, I was too sick to even think in coherent sentences. The writing I did over the weekend is so bad that I am ashamed to claim it.

Dr. P, crazy thing that he is, decided to make life interesting; the entire class knew that one the moment he walked in carrying a stack of dictionaries that was trying its hardest to obscure his face. He then proclaimed that we were going to get into groups of five and randomly pick two words a piece from the dictionary given to our group. That seemed easy enough at first. And then he had us switch words with other groups and pass them out randomly. "Now, class, you're going to write a story off your list of 42 things I had you write for class, and you're going to use those two words you've been given," he said quite gleefully. Looking at the two strips of paper on my desk, I was horrified.

How in the world was I supposed to include "xenogenesis" and "Northamptonshire" in a story about me? Not only am I the near spitting image of my dad, but I also have a decided lack of experience when it comes to random shires in England. I was, to say the least, daunted by the task.

Well, in the end I decided to go with the prompt that simply said "man harem." A few of my classmates initialed by it, indicating that they wanted to hear the story, and I am more than willing to tell it. After all, it sounds a bit weird if you just mention a man harem. I think it probably caught their attention because it is such an odd phrase, and it seems to promise an interesting story at the very least. Personally, I think it's just a funny story that manages to capture my high school experience.

You see, my man harem was a group of guys that more or less treated me like a queen. It helps that one of them, Jon, was so obsessed with England that he was constantly going off about it, so that helps me use "Northamptonshire." I bet he said it at least once, knowing him. "Xenogenesis" presented something of a problem, but then I remember that we randomly had a discussion about how much they look like their parents (all because we were teasing Nick about looking like neither of his parents and more like one of the seminary teachers). "Illiterate"... Well, when you hang out with a group of guys who read manga and whine if you ask them to do more than that, it would seem you have quite an illiterate group. Worse, though, was the fact that they were all illiterate in the world of women. Honestly, the amount of advice I had to give them on getting girls was...sad.

Anyway, that's what I would tell in my story, and how I would use the words.