Eat, Work, Sleep, Repeat (Most of the Time) [2012/12/12]

Seriously though, you guys. Finals.

People keep asking me, "How are your finals going?", which generally results (depending on the day/hour/minute/second) on me either laughing or staring at them with dead eyes until they start to feel uncomfortable. Which is silly, really, because my finals have actually been really spread out this year — I had my taiko performance a week before classes ended, all my fiction stuff due the next Tuesday, and now I only have a research paper for Commodity Consumption (yes, the class I'm TA-ing, people always seem very surprised about this) and then... the rest of my first thesis chapter. I have twenty pages so far. I am halfway through. We're not talking about that right now.

We can talk about all the things I've done/attended in the week and a half since I last updated my blog, though! These things include: the Worlds of Dance performance, Winter Formal, a reading by senior poets, The Tempest, Winter Dance, and other things that can be found under the cut.

So I went to the Worlds of Dance performance because three of my absolute favorite people (what, you don't rank your friends into absolute favorite, pretty favorite, and not as favorite?) were performing: Delightful Housemate Kristen was in one of the sections of Intro Dance, and then my friends Christina and Joey were in two different sections of Hip Hop. It was really fun, actually; obviously the performances were incredibly different (DNK said at one point that apparently their dance was based off of... sea anemones? Which was false advertising and I was very disappointed in her for the fact that it did not look as ridiculous as it sounds like it should have — in fact it actually looked pretty cool) but it was an excellent afternoon's viewing. Hip hop dancers are super badass, it's really astounding.

Also all hip hop dancers look like this. Complete with water. (Image from Step Up 2.)

Then on Monday night (WHO SCHEDULES THIS STUFF) I went to Winter Formal, which is one of the Senior Events. The timing may not have been the greatest (the Ebony Singers required final concert was at the same time, and so the seniors in that class couldn't go to Formal), but it was still fun — an excuse to put on a pretty dress, eat a three course meal, and dance. It was kind of like prom, except they actually provided alcohol. (Also there was food. The only food we had at my prom was a few platters of fancy tiny cookies and some fruit. Here I got rolls, a salad, a small thing of penne, and then a giant veggie lasagna that was so heavy I could only finish half of it. The most hilarious was definitely the beef option, though, because those people got a piece of prime rib that was actually a hunk of meat practically the size of my head. It was a slab of meat. We started cracking up pretty much the second it got to the table.

You may be asking right now, "Do you think I care about this?" The answer is yes. Yes, you care. Otherwise I wouldn't be telling you. Obviously.)

I did like the opportunity to dress up, though — I got to wear this gorgeous green velvety dress that used to belong to my great-aunt way back when. And seeing all my classmates in their fancy outfits was kind of cool; we all clean up surprisingly nice.

Here is where my mom would probably suggest that I include a photo of myself in said dress, but I'm actually pretty okay with having the only photos of me on here be my dreadful photoshop drawings of myself, and while I could just crop it down to the dress and not my face, the only picture currently on the internet of me in said dress is framed in such a way that it would pretty much just be a picture of my cleavage. You don't need that, internet. I'm sorry. Maybe sometime next semester I'll post either photos of all the dresses or I'll do a badly-drawn-in-photoshop roundup.



I feel that I should interrupt these proceedings to mention right now that Housemate Katie just came into my room to vent for about three minutes about how Forever 21 is awful and terrible and the company owners and policies are awful and terrible. (This is for part of one of her final projects. It's a thing.)

Anyway, so that was Monday. On Thursday (after my last Anthro Seminar class! nooooo, I loved that class) I went to a reading by some of the Wes poets who happen to be seniors, which included two of my coworkers, two people who lived on my hall freshman year, one person who lived in my program house sophomore year, and one person from my Commodity Cultures class. Well, two, but one was already on this list. This seemed like a surprisingly large number when I wrote it down, and then I remembered that I lived on Writing Hall freshman year and in Writing House sophomore year, and it suddenly got way less confusing.

Anyway, it was nice? I mean, there are a lot of mad talented people at my school, I just remembered fairly quickly into the proceedings that I have ambivalent feelings about hearing poetry read out loud, especially without being able to see it on the page. I like seeing the line breaks. I also like being able to skim the bits I don't understand, because I am a plebian and I have never pretended otherwise.

Seriously, though. Mad talented.

The night after that I went to see the Tempest! Which means I can finally put in a picture that makes sense, hallelujah, you guys must have been going crazy with all that uninterrupted text. (EtA: Actually, I looked back at the post and I was going crazy with all that uninterrupted text, so I went back and fixed it. BETTER NOW.)



It was only about an hour, which was very stripped down, and there was this sort of Concept about Prospero being in a hospital? except not? and Caliban and Ariel might have just been in his head? maybe? and it's entirely possible that anyone in a mask was actually a hallucination but it was hard to tell because there were only four actors and I wasn't sure when they were just doing very clever double duty? It was cool, though! It looked gorgeous (I liked what they did with the set), and the actors playing Caliban and Ariel were AMAZING. I mean, all the actors were good, but I think they really managed to strike the necessary Shakespearean balance of making both your words and the emotions behind them understood.

And then on Saturday I went to Winter Dance, which means another picture! Yay!


This was the photo they used on the program and posters, for the record.

It was really cool! Full of stupendously talented people, and I was really impressed by the work of the student choreographers. There were three that I really preferred, but that had more to do with the fact that I'm more interested in dance when it's set to higher-energy music. Also there was one that used blacklights to excellent Tron-like effect, which looked amazing.

So that was a lot of things over the course of a week and a half! I'm pretty proud of myself, considering that the rest of the time it was a toss-up about whether I would actually manage to leave the house. I've been spending a lot of time trying to do work and having a very difficult time gathering the energy to write sentences, even about things I know like the back of my hand. It's incredibly vexing.

Oh! Chanukah also started, which is cool; I made myself some Indian-spiced vegetable fritters (so basically South Asian-fusion latkes) to celebrate, since grating multiple different types of vegetables is more interesting than grating just potatoes and onions. They were delicious, although I don't have photos of them. Also I spent the first night of Chanukah (Saturday night) dancing around the dining room to Candlelight, which is the ultimate Chanukah song forever and ever barring none. Except maybe the one by Adam Sandler. Also the dreidel song, but this one is much less likely to make you want to set yourself on fire when you get it stuck in your head.

Candlelight - The Maccabeats

So I was going to show you pictures of how my thesis has invaded my room, but this post is already super long (that's what happens when I do things, I guess...), so that's going to have to wait for my next entry. See you then, ducklings. Let's keep our fingers crossed that finals period doesn't chew me up and spit me out.

[Original tags for this post: Dance, LOOK I DID THINGS, mentions of delicious food without pictures of delicious food, more dance stuff, once again I have made promises that I have put off until next week, poetry, senior cocktails/events/whatever, theater, there are very few pictures in this post and for that I apologize but am too lazy to change, whoops that’s a lie guess I wasn’t too lazy after all WHATEVER]