Noticing

I walked out of the front door of my dormitory building and noticed the sunlight coming through the branches of our maple tree and illuminating the yellow-orange leaves. The angle of the bright light hitting the trees and the grass and the bicycles was simply beautiful. It was the simplest of scenes, one I walk into every single day, but this time it demanded to be noticed.

I have figured out that one of my favorite feelings in the world is the one when I stretch my legs out under the covers for the first time as I get into bed. The blankets and sheets are still cool and soft, and I can feel my muscles as they extend from a formerly compacted position from my toes to my back. The stretch feels better because it's one of the last things I do in the day, and I know that I'm lying down to relax and enjoy my sleep.

Monday, I didn't really notice how rough my day was until I ran into a friend. I was overwhelmed by the amount of reading I had to do, had an 80-minute lecture shouted at me, and had my usual 10-minute rush from one class to the next. During that walk, a friend greeted me with a smile, hug, and "hi how are you." It was the most ordinary gesture, but it was the high point of my day.

I'm trying to be more perceptive and appreciative of the awesome things that are happening in my life. I think between China and some of the content in my sociology classes I've become so much more aware of the way privilege functions in my life that I want to be more aware and thankful. Sure, I have relatively rough days and certain types of stress, and while my emotional reactions are just as legitimate as anyone else's, the causes are certainly varied based on advantages and disadvantages. If I focus on the positive, the negative goes away. I guess that day with the sun in the tree re-centered me on my mission of having a real "why today is awesome" for every day, and the idea of Noticing has been a resonant rephrase.

Since Monday, when I realized how much a hello meant to me, I've been doing a lot better. I got in control of my work and have spent time with more friends who continue to make me smile. I've just been thinking about Noticing for about a week now, and it's become very important to me, so I just wanted to share.

Today is awesome because it was warm and sunny, I had some smiling times with friends, and I'm feeling on top of my work. 

MacTech Week

This past week (and until Sunday), I have once again entered the black hole of tech week. As the title of this post would indicate, the show is Macbeth (The Scottish Play? Blog isn't really a performance space, but I have been reluctant to say it). It's been super fun, and now I'm going to talk about it in depth.

Last Sunday (in the rain...boo), we loaded in our set. After measuring and taping out our space, the lighting designer and I set up the booms (poles/pipes that run horizontally and vertically in the space) so we could be prepared to hang lights on Monday. This went very smoothly, and I was very happy to get to use my new red and black measuring tape. We hung the ten lights we had, set up the board, and called it a day.

Monday was a little odd. The representative of the lighting rental company was fired during the time the order for the show was being placed, so things were a little haphazard over there, and we couldn't get our stuff until 3PM, which is pretty late in the day. I had class until 4:50, so I got there at 5 and except for a break from 8:30-9:30, didn't leave until 1:30AM. In that time, we did all of the cabling, patching, and focusing. The lights were all hung between 3 and 5, so I wasn't as involved with that. We scheduled the hang and cable for Monday and focus for Tuesday, but since we focused on Monday night, we saved some time. It was pretty great.

I got to compensate for my sleep on Tuesday morning, and then after I ate lunch, headed over to the space. The designer was already programming the cues, and I started taping down the cable according to the safety codes. I did run an errand to the theater department light shop to return some gel and ask for a donut, which was fun and also gave me some face time with the guy who runs the light shop that I haven't previously had, so that was good. I had class, then went back, but it was locked, so I headed over after dinner to finish my taping, and I stayed through rehearsal with some reading in my bag. I find that during tech week it's easier for me to go to the space and stay longer than I have to than to motivate myself to walk there once I'm already tired. I stayed until midnight, then went to sleep.

Wednesday, I went in the evening, but the job I was planning on doing was already done, so I watched the run, had the prod meeting, managed the hanging of curtains, then chatted with friends until I decided to go home. Before the run was really fun because we had a massage chain and then went to Starbucks for coffee. I had a lot of coffee :)

Thursday I didn't go to the space. Around 4PM I started feeling overwhelmed by looking at my computer for the work I was doing and had a really bad headache, so after dinner I took a three hour nap then decided to stay home. As much as I love opening night, this was a health decision that I had to make. And besides, if I had left, I wouldn't have found the two-inch scary alien insect on my wall as soon as I did so it could have crawled on my stuff instead of my wall. It went crunch; I'm a little scarred.

I've also had Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog stuck in my head all week, so I've been singing that all over the place. 

Anyway, this was a pretty awesome tech week. Things went a lot better than expected. I had planned ahead to get all my homework done before going into the week, but I ended up having a lot more time than anticipated because things were faster and smoother than usual. I love it when things like that happen. The team for this show was fantastic; just a group of friends making art, and that's my favorite type of team to be on. I've worked with this lighting designer before, and he gave me a lot more autonomy and responsibility than in previous shows, and it just felt good to be working with him instead of for him this time around. I think that contributed to the goodness of the week.

I'm very excited to attend the final three of five performances, and I'm really proud to have been a part of this show.

Today is awesome because this project is getting an audience tonight!

The Self-Defense Fireside and Stuff

I live in a dorm that does a thing called "Firesides" which are programs on a topic that can range from religious intermarriage to swing dancing. The first fireside of the year was announced last week to be a self-defense fireside. I, as a martial artist of five years, am always interested in such a topic and immediately wondered who would be teaching.

Teaching self-defense, and martial arts more generally, is an important thing to me because I train under extremely wonderful instructors. They fully grasp the concepts of what they try to teach and find ways of connecting with their students that makes the material, which can sometimes be a bit foreign, make sense. These instructors of mine are fourth degree and above, which is at least ten years of training, often more. These are qualified instructors; this is the standard I am used to.

At school, that type of quality is harder to come by because clubs are run by people like me who are passionate students who take what their awesome instructors have taught them and then transmit it to peers in the college setting. The clubs, from my experience, are not so great. I stopped going to the Tae Kwon Do club after a quarter because the student leaders did not incorporate a diverse or creative curriculum into the training sessions. There are other clubs for martial arts I am not qualified to judge, but I'm sure to the experienced practitioner, it is a similar experience.

When the fireside was formally introduced and they announced the teachers from one of the clubs (students in a club that isn't Tae Kwon Do, but I'm not going to name it on the internet), I was debating how to react. On the one hand, I could just go, be an anonymous student who picked up on things surprisingly well, or I could own up to my Tae Kwon Do experience and be pre-judged by that. I have strong feelings about the club who was slated to teach the fireside, and my biggest problem with them is that they take a superior attitude about the thing that they practice. I don't really like dealing with them, and I haven't really since freshman year, because they obviously didn't respect me as a martial artist or as a woman.

Then, yesterday, the day before the fireside, the fireside chair sent out an e-mail and a google doc asking us to sign up for the fireside because the club wouldn't teach a class smaller than 20 people. I live in a dorm of 50; attendance of 20 is an unrealistic expectation, and any experience martial artist knows that a class of 20 people who don't know what they're doing is not going to be an effective learning environment. This is when I chose to intervene. After the second plea for sign-ups, I replied to the e-mail and offered to lead the fireside if they cancelled. This was mostly because I didn't want the first event to fail, and I figured there was only a chance I'd have to do it. Anyway, I've taken enough self-defense classes that I could do it, right? So volunteering wasn't a big deal.

Well, today I got the e-mail that they were non-responsive and I would be teaching. I was excited, but then I freaked out. Now, I knew I could do this, it's not a matter of knowing the material, I was mostly nervous because I felt unqualified. I still do feel unqualified to teach based on the awesome way that I've been taught throughout my journey, but that's a different inferiority complex. Knowing my demographic, I planned a curriculum of basic grip escapes (wrist, bear hug, headlock, hair grab) and knew that I wanted to talk a bit about the principles of self-defense and the types of situations that make these women nervous.

Then, as I was writing about my nervousness, my friend came into my room to tell me that the club guys showed up to teach, which totally got me off the hook. I decided to go with the pwnage plan to not reveal my rank and then be miraculously impressive/major hip throw them off their guard. Not gonna lie, I was kind of disappointed that I wasn't going to teach just because I think I know my audience better than these club guys and I have more respect for martial arts than they do. The other problem with club martial arts is that the primary demographic of these clubs is guys who want to beat each other up, which is not all that martial arts training is about.

Well, those guys arrived half an hour early expecting that they were on time, then they deemed twelve participants to be "a handful," and they left after about fifteen minutes, so I was on again. My dorm mates did not respond well to their presence, and so when it was decided once more that I would in fact be teaching, I was just ready to go.

I started by introducing why I was qualified to teach and what my background in self-defense was. I also went over the preventative stuff like staying in groups, in well-lit areas, not to look for trouble, not to be in the situation in the first place. Then I had the group call out some situations that make them nervous in their lives at school. This was stuff like men jumping out of bushes, drunk guys, and aggressors at parties. I started with two basic wrist grab escapes to address the drunk guys at parties thing (which I was expecting to come up and wanted to do anyway), then talked about bear hugs to address men in bushes. I then went over if hair is grabbed, because every participant had long hair, and did a basic escape from a headlock. They wanted to talk about punching and a specific choke, so we did that as well since it came up. All in all, they responded well, felt liked they learned something, and had fun while learning.

It was kind of cool to be instructor for the night, and I'm glad it worked out that way. I'm still a little weirded out by it because I totally still think of myself as a student in this area, so I say that it happened in a kind of "this is strange and I don't think I was the best person but I did it anyway" type of tone. I'm okay with that for now, but maybe in a week it'll be easier to be proud of it. I think that it's just publicly doing something I know how to do, but saying I know how to do it is one of the things that embarrasses me because I know that my instructors/superiors are going to see that I did it, and I always get embarrassed when I do something in front of a person who is an expert in that thing, like speaking Spanish to a Spanish speaker or singing in front of my musical theater friends. My own insecurities; whatever.

Other than this fireside drama, I had four meetings about lighting stuff (DM interview, meetings with two designers for whom I am master electrician, production meeting), music class (I got a conductor's baton, it's really exciting), fellows lunch, and a trip to the gym. It's been a long day, I didn't get enough reading done, and now it's time for sleep so I can function tomorrow.

Today is awesome because of all the cool stuff that went down (detailed above) and I wore my green Halloween owl socks while doing the fireside.

P.S. 200TH POST!!!!!!!!!!

Falling Posters

When the weather changes, all my posters fall down. This is not a new thing, it's just the way the walls and adhesives react to changes in temperature. It's just kind of scary when things crash down on me. Last night, I came home and my huge poster over my desk had fallen. Luckily it didn't get damaged, and I was able to put it back up, but it was a nuiscance. Today, I was awakened by the falling of my Doctor Who Exploding TARDIS poster, which hands over the head side of my bed. It made a really loud noise and I was too scared to go back to sleep even though it was still kind of early. This is a story from my life.

Today is awesome because I cleaned my room and got pretzel bread.

The Beginning of Junior Fall

I'm at a loss for how to share what's going on right now. There's a lot that happens with the beginning of a new school year, and I'm feeling a little inconsequential on the internet. Short statuses don't really encapsulate the human experience, and I'm feeling like if someone want's to know what's actually up in my life, they should take the time to read a few paragraphs on this blog. The whole quick update thing makes me feel at once self-centered and inconsequential, because what can I say to both express myself and catch your attention for long enough to think of me as something more than annoying? That's why I blog; not for readers, but to keep things flowing in a way that feels more genuine. It's like I'm writing a letter to a reader who actually cares, less of a shout into the void.

After that slightly morbid introduction, I have to say things are pretty awesome right now! I'm taking four fascinating classes, have an amazing group of friends around campus and in my dorm, and I just feel really good about how things are going right now.

So, classes. I've got Demystifying Classical Music, which is all about listening and appreciating and I have to go to ten performances; Modern Jewish Literature, which is reading and discussing and writing relating to amazing novels and short stories; Population Dynamics, which is a sociology class on demography that will be super interesting; and, finally, School and Society, which is another sociology class about the way the educational system is a vehicle for social reproduction. I think I'm most excited because my classes all have TOPICS and aren't simply a primer on how to conduct research that will happen in the future external to that particular classroom experience.

Now that I have my syllabi, I know my homework load and the logistics of Thanksgiving and finals, so that's good for planning. I spent a long time getting organized tonight despite the mountain of reading that was assigned today for Wednesday. I'm glad to be organized, but I didn't really get to reading until 9:00, so now that I'm tired and still have a lot to do, I'm eager to get to the point in the week when I can start reading for next week.

I had lunch with a Nerdfighter today, and that was really cool. It was the first time I'd met her, and she was super nice. I was happy to get to talk with her. There are also so many new students who are asking me about how to get involved in theater, which is really cool to be a resource for. I think I'm pretty knowledgeable about the logistics of joining technical theater, and I also understand how non-majors want to and can get involved. It's neat to be the person being asked for advice.

On that note, it's also really odd to be a junior. How can I be in my third year?!?!? I feel kind of old when I look at the freshmen, and it doesn't help that I'm one of five in my year who live in my dorm. It doesn't feel very different from sophomore year, but there are bigger things that I'm worrying about now, like what comes after college and getting internships and jobs and professional experience, all while maintaining grades, work-life balance, and time to have fun.


I did set a silly and sad goal for myself this quarter. Silly because it's so simple, but sad because it's necessary. The goal is this: do not injure my right wrist during fall quarter. The past two years I have hurt that hand, once sprain and one break, but I have vowed to sustain no new damages to that body part. It's sore enough from last year as it is.

So, that's a rambly update on how classes and junior year are. Thanks for caring enough to read. I'm also approaching 3000 views on my blog, so that's exciting, and I'm really proud to have produced enough content that I have earned such readership. I write for myself, but I put it out there for you, and it feels good to know that someone hears my shout into the void.

Today is awesome because I've had all my classes and am organized for the quarter.

5 Reasons I'm Loving Dorm Life

I absolutely adore my dorm this year. I was rather unsure how it would be to live in the dorm for a third year, which is very unusual at my university, but I'm loving it in the first week. Here are some reasons why:

1. We got renovated over the summer. Sure, the rooms are all laid out in the same way, but it is amazing what some paint, lighting, and furniture can do to the place. Last year, everything was kind of old, dark, and worn out. This year, we have new lounge furniture, a table that isn't mysteriously sticky, fresh paint and wallpaper on the walls, new flooring on the first floor, and we came back to find a significant amount of power cleaning had been done. The desks and dressers have also been refreshed. I was concerned about moving off campus to a place less good in facilities than the dorm, but staying in the dorm ended up being an upgrade.

2. My room. It is at once familiar and freshened. I haven't had any trouble sleeping here because it is my room and feels like my room.

3. The changes I made to my bed. Since I knew what my bed would be like, I got myself a mattress topper, quilt, and body pillow for the return, and it is extra comfy now. It also changed the look of the room to have a different bedspread, so that's a fun bonus to the comfort.

4. The people. Last year, I had plenty of friends and I loved the community, but this year the residents really want to live here and be involved. There are always people in the lounges hanging out and ready to chat, and they never cease to make me smile. I've only known them for a week, but it feels like we've been friends a lot longer, and that never really happens.

5. The residents like the same things I do! The first person I introduced myself to loves Doctor Who, and upon meeting another, the first thing she said was, "Does anybody else like Buffy, Firefly, and Avatar the Last Airbender?" I had to give her a hug. On the same night, we had a Sound of Music, Potter Puppet Pals, and Starkid singalong. Nobody in China liked any of the things I liked, but now I can nerd out about my fandoms with people who understand.

I'm going to stop the list at five, but there are continually more and more things that I'm loving about living on campus this year. I don't think I realized how isolated from friends, people with similar interests, and constant laughter and excitement I was before coming back to school. That's not to say I wasn't happy and engaged; I totally was! I just was not constantly surrounded by people who get me and laugh with me. It was a sporadic surrounding, so for those of you who were in the sporadicness, thanks for making those parts of the summer awesome. I just feel great about being always around the awesome.

Today is awesome because it is the first weekend back at school, so there's farmers market, a football game, and, most importantly, DOCTOR WHO tonight. I'm having a viewing party in HD on our big lounge TV.

Back to School

So, here's the update now that I'm about to go to sleep in my dorm room once again. Last week was my last at home, and it went really fast. I had a fantastic sendoff from both my genetic and tae kwon do families, then my dad and I drove to school on Saturday. I saw my dorm friends that evening. Sunday, we did the shopping trip to Target, and I got to move in today. It was a little odd because I was out with theater friends last night and didn't get nearly enough sleep to be as energetic as I was.

My dorm has been renovated. Not the big structural stuff, but everything is now spruced up and lovely and clean and new looking. Somehow, they incorporated really modern furniture into our Hogwarts common room style lounges and it still has a wonderfully homey, old building feel. And we have cool wallpaper. My room has had some changes as well. The desk lost its shelving and has been painted a steely blue-grey. The dresser is now green. I have a new desk chair and the bedframe is different. New mattress pad. The carpeting is gone and I think it's a terrazzo floor now. The walls were painted, so no more cracks in the corners. They also removed one of the closet doors, so it only closes halfway now, but that may be on its way back.

I gave my furniture a different layout this year. My bed is still in the corner away from both the door and the bathroom, but I have a spot for my snack bin in the opposite corner next to the dresser then my purple cube grid, desk, and fridge. My three-drawer cart is shares the foot of my bed with the trunk.

The new fixtures I brought with me are a body pillow, quilt, mattress topper, and rugs, all of which I love. My decorating is a bit simpler: I have my Exploding Tardis poser above my head, then the Hunger Games poster that has lived in each of my dorm rooms, and my two China watercolors (a panda and a landscape) between the mockingjay and the mirror. The opposite wall has my Chinese shadow puppets, collage poster, Chinese calligraphy, and, to inspire good work this year, my research poster lives above my desk. My bed is super fluffy now, the rugs are a fantastic accent, and I'm just really happy with my room.

Since moving in, I've been meeting the new members of the dorm. I'm surprised by how many are transfer students, and each one I have met has been wonderful. When you meet a bunch of new people, it makes mathematical sense that some of them might give you a weird vibe that you might not get along, but I genuinely think that I can have a friendship with each of the people I have met. It's really exciting to me.

Things haven't been eventfully exciting, but I'm so happy to be back home at school with my friend-family. It is so amazingly awesome to see these friends I have been missing for three months (which felt a lot longer than three months), and I feel very positive about the way things are beginning.

Today is awesome because I am happy with my home.