So, when Mike linked me to this video, I wondered just why my ex-boyfriend was sending me to a video of two scantily clad girls with boxes on their heads. But really people, give it a chance. Because this is pretty cool. Make me wish I were cool enough (bored enough) to come up with something like this. That and that I had their nicely sculpted thighs. Either or, really.
Harder Bodies Faster Stronger
I went out to a reading at Collected Works this evening, featuring a few very talented Ottawa authors. All you need to know is that I would gladly marry Ian Roy, and you should all bug Jennifer Whiteford to work on her next novel. Constantly. I want to read it.
Every time I go to a reading-type thing, I think about how much I'd love to do that. I mean, I'm not the most confident person, in terms of being confident in my writing, but to be in front of people like that, sharing your work with them, doing the banter thing... I love that. I had a little taste at coffehouse and loved it -- though not many people were watching or listening. But I enjoyed it. It didn't matter who was paying attention. It's like improv, but with more planning. Paradoxical, I know.
The other part of my evening was dinner and West Wing with Davis, who conveniently lives two blocks from Collected Works. Sounds like a good night to me.
If you, like me, tend to watch a lot of TV (guilty pleasure!) you have heard about the Writers' Guild of America strike (am I the only one who loves that the entertainment industry gets guilds? I want to join a guild!). Also like me, perhaps you have been casually saying "yeah! They deserve to have their demands met!" or something of the like, without actually knowing what is going on. My good friend Erin has written a great post explaining it all here. It has the added bonus of being tagged with the tags "doom", "the stupid" and "the intolerably stupid". Then watch this well made video on YouTube, grab your button makers and get to work!
Incidentally, if someone has a button maker they want to let me use, email me. I want to make some buttons.
Here is what happens when you wake up 30 teenagers at 4 am, tell them to go to school and put them in a cafeteria together. It's called Lisgar's United Way Pancake Breakfast.
4am wake-up, though not wonderful, is not a new concept to me. As a rower (cue Bailey yelling ("brrrap") we do this waking up at 4 thing three-four times a week during the month of May when we are on the water training and competing. But since it is now November, and not May, my poor body was not sure why, oh why, I was waking up at 4am.
When I finally rolled out of bed and down the stairs, and dressed myself in my "pyjamas"* it was 4:30. I just barely grabbed breakfast before I ran out to the door to my ride -- from Jake. Who was blasting Aqua. I love getting rides from my friends with G2s. We pulled up, parked, and went down into the caf. Where there wasn't much for us to do.
Well, I decided we should get right to work on the balloon arch. After some Erica vs Jake/the world drama, the arch came together quite nicely. Let me tell you, it looked completely professional, and it was just a few high school girls tying balloons to a ribbon.
We were almost done... when the piercing, screeching sound of the fire alarm sounded in the school. Everyone stopped what they were doing and walked over to City Hall to escape the building and let the firemen check to make sure everything was ok. No, we didn't call them -- they automatically get a call when a fire alarm at a school goes off. That's how you can tell if the admin planned a drill -- the firemen don't show up. If they do, you know someone is getting suspended. Or the school is on fire.
All was righted quickly enough, and the main school alarm was turned off, so we were let back inside. Only, the cafeteria alarm, separate from the other school alarms, wouldn't turn off. The poor firemen wandered around for half an hour, Ms Gledhill in tow, looking for the shut off switch. We were about to go nuts from the noise by the time they go it off -- after guests had started arriving.
Another side effect of the fire alarm (thank you to the griddles in the kitchen where someting was burning) was that we were incredibly behind on cooking everything. There was a forty minute line just to get the food, but then when the thing ended, we had loads left over. So I got to eat lots of pancakes. Mmmm.
******
It was my birthday yesterday! Birthdays are a huge deal at my house, and always have been. Everyone goes all out. My sister made me crepes for breakfast as well as biscotti, which were part of my present. My mom made me a wonderful birthday dinner (give me a tub of tomato and feta salad and I will die happy) and, as is our way, spoiled me with presents. Right now I'm listening to my new Patrick Wolf (thank you Kevin Lu!) with my new speakers (Mom: There were these ones and another set. The other set were better quality, but these ones have their own travel case. Evey: Ohh! It zips up!) while clicking with my new mouse. And wearing a new Tshirt. How lucky, lucky am I.
*It was also pyjama day. I wore sweat pants over pyjama pants and wore them sagged down so I looked like a teenage boy, and let me tell you, you actually can't walk like that.
I took a mostly sick day yesterday.
Yesterday I went to school, but by third period I had a definite fever and felt awful. I stuck it out through improv practice until 5, but I wasn't doing so hot, so I took a day off. Sleeping until 10:30 did surprisingly little, unfortunately, as I still feel super sick.
I did head in to school for improv practice. We were to have our pre-Connors Cup training session with KY. Now, I bet there were quite a few things in that last sentence many of you didn't understand. I'll elaborate. Connor's Cup is an improv competition, totally separate from the official regionals/nationals and named for Ottawa's regional co-director and improv legend Al Connors. The training session is something every team gets before the Cup, run with three other teams, to make sure all the teams know how to improvise. Finally, KY is Katherine Young, head judge, regional co-director and COG volunteer of 11 years.
Now that you're in the know, I'll go on. These training sessions are fine, but Lisgar doesn't usually go, because we're Lisgar, and we usually don't go out for Connor's Cup (last year we threw together one team 2 days before and one team the day of) but since most of our team is in grade twelve, we get one shot. So we all want to make the most of it, especially when it comes to Connor's Cup. This year's team is all new and Lisgar has a reputation, so we all want to come out with a bang.
So. Training session. We showed up there, ready to be among our peers, people as nuts and exciting and into improv as we are. Jimmy members were a little stressed because we haven't really been feeling it lately, and we want to pwn. We were the same night as Brookfield and Immaculata, and almost everyone was new to improv. Great! We're all on the same level. Things started off well, with minor confusion about taking shoes off (KY asked us to take our shoes off. Lisgar already had all their shoes off, but Brookfield got very confused and complained about the smell a lot).
So, what happenned was that Lisgar did super well. We knew our stuff, we made good scenes, and I got to stand up in front of everyone and make a scene that was exactly what KY wanted -- and she nicknamed me "glasses" because she likes mine. It's true that this was to practice and learn, but it felt good to know what I was doing. Improv period felt good.
At the end of the night, we split into our teams. I knelt down next to Ms K, and felt something wierd going on with my knee. Or rather, behind my knee. Back up to earlier that day when I was pulling on my jeans. I felt something wierd as I put them on, but then it seemed to be fine, so I went on with my day. Jump back to the improv workshop. I reach up my pantleg... and pull out yesterday's underwear. I turned very, very red while silently thanking God that they hadn't fallen out while I was walking... or on stage. In front of Brookfield. IN FRONT OF KY.
I probably would have gotten a different nickname...
I will start off today's post with a fine OOC*:
Student 1 (walking into Ms A's room): Why is it so cold in here?
Student 2: They have to keep Ms A's heart at its natural temperature.
A (nodding, impressed): Yeah. Good one.
Now Ms A is not exactly the world's most predictable teacher. She latches on to random things, yells often, and gets very worked up. She often seems personally offended by her students/society/something we say. She is a perfect old woman, except younger.
She has decided that she doesn't like me. I have too much attitude. I express opinions. I'm disrespectful. Etc. Well, I hate to break it to you Ms A, but I am not like this at all in any of my other classes. I'm reserved (unless someone is being an idiot and I need to tell them to shut up), I don't yell things, I don't disagree with everything the teacher says. No, miss, it's pretty much just you. I disagree just for the sake of disagreeing because I don't like you very much.* I'm sorry. If you respected me more, I might return the sentiment. But instead I disagree, something I am incredibly good at, might I remind you, as I am a teenager and it's practically a sport for us. So really, you don't want to try to take me down. I will be the clear winner.
There's a big division at my school, between the new Ms A and the old, much beloved Mr Hodgson (old and new to the school, not in age). The Hodge is a Lisgar legend. Everyone loves him, everyone wants to be in his classes, everyone defends him (so it sucks to be the one in like 50 who doesn't like him. It happens, though rarely). We love how he teaches -- the yelling, the dancing around, the clear passion for the texts.
Ms A is totally different. She is analytical, she structures the hell out of everything, and she has crazy idea about theme. She confuses the hell out of students who already took AP Writer's Craft. Everyone just wants their Mr Hodgson back. Hence the division. We disagree with her, we dislike her insane moods and really, we just want theme back to the way it was when it didn't have to be a cause and effect or the moral of the story and we understood it. It seems like not much to ask.
So I suffer through her class and am actually pulling an 89 (yes!). Let's hope I can keep my marks high until I get to my dream semester next -- Mr Hodgson all morning.
* OOC is a section of the Lisgarwrite in which we print things teacher have said. Silly things.
There was this add that used to be on TV when I was younger that was on all the time. It ended up driving me nuts and it was probably the first commercial my sister ever memorized and wouldn't stop repeating (luckily she has now moved on to singing songs, and her musical taste is what I would call Good Top Forty, so that's better than singing the subway adds).
This add featured various children doing various activities. The commercial's line was "What's your thing?" There were male ballet dancers, kids with bugs, kids doing magic tricks and one kid who could make T-rex noises, which my eight-year-old self thought was pretty cool. It ended with the kids says "Nobody's good at everything, but everybody's good at something. What's your thing?" Watching this commercial, I'd mentally peruse the various classes and activities I was enrolled in (ballet, tap, gymnastics, art class, etc.) and wonder what my thing was. I liked doing all those things, but I didn't feel that any of them were my "thing". Years later, I have found my thing.
If you read my blog with any regularity, you are familiar with the concept of improv and its constant presence in my life, as well as my feeling of awe when I watch it. So this year, I tried out for the improv team, The Improv Team, Jimmy, of the Ligsar Improv Dynasty. I felt like the kid who's staying up to watch Grown-Up TV with her parents and is afraid she'll be asked to leave at any moment. A pretender, a poser. But I tried out anyway, because it made me feel so good to do improv. Last Thursday, the list went up... and I was on it. I jumped up and down, I screamed, I yelled I cried... I had to read the list a few times to be sure. But my name was really there.
Last night, we had our first team rehearsal. Both Jimmy and Jimbo, the B team, were there, and Ms K sent Jimbo out in to the other room accompanied by former team member Ben Farrow to work separately. When they left, suddenly the feeling in the room changed. The eight of us looked at one another, and there was in incredibly feeling of This is it. This is it. It's us. The group felt so small and so tight, and I just felt this incredible energy in the room. During the practice, Ms K told us "improvise", no prompt, no theme. And we did it. We just... did it. For an hour. No stress, no worrying about anything else, no thoughts of anything but that moment and those people and that feeling. It was easily the most amazing feeling of my life.
After the practice, I was left waiting for my ride and chatting with Ms K. "Did you feel it?" I asked her. "It was so amazing," was her reply. There's a word in french, s'extasier, which is basically complete ecstasy as a verb. To enter into ecstasy. That is how I feel about improv. Je m'extasie. I have found my thing.
This is obviously the best way to spend my spare.
I am just back from a wonderful weekend in Quebec City with my mother. I bet after reading those words many of you gasped and are now in shock. Words like "How?" and "Why?" are now flashing through your minds, quickly followed by "What's wrong with her?". I can assure all of you however, that I have not lost my mind, I actually did have a wonderful time spending every waking moment with my mother for 72 hours. I know, I was shocked too.
