Alas, a Lamb!: Titles are for people who aren't sleepy. [2013/04/29]

Good afternoon, ducklings! It's shaping up to be a beautiful day, although currently I'm sitting inside my living room with the windows closed while my housemates discuss possible day trips we could go on during Senior Week as a house bonding thing.

For the record, in the Palace Theater, you can't bring your own alcohol inside, nor can you consume that alcohol in the parking lot. Which begs the question of WHY THEY NEED THAT RULE.

There are a lot of unexpectedly hilarious things in New England, though. I have a feeling we're probably going to find someplace with pretty scenery and just take a walk. (Not a hike. Certain somebodies among us do not like heights, for whatever value of “height” you can find in the alleged mountains of Connecticut.) I also want to see if I can drag them over to Wadsworth Falls at some point, because I’ve never been there before and I feel like I should go before I graduate.

…Okay, now it’s nighttime. IT’S LIKE I TIME TRAVELED OR SOMETHING. Or, you know, like I stopped writing in the middle of the day and then only got back to it much, much later.

(Also, for the record, tossing out ideas soon devolved into looking at our quote wall and seeing how much hilarity we could create by selectively replacing certain words with others. The answer, it turns out, is “a lot.” And I thought that I wouldn’t find stupid things as funny once theses were done!)

[Under the cut: Company, WesBurlesque, Foss Hill, and why my computer is trying to kill me.]

I keep thinking that I’ve been super-lazy this week, ducklings, but I did actually get some stuff done. I wrote two articles for the website that I blog for (a nail art tutorial and a webcomic review, for the record), I had two dance group meetings to hammer out our dance (final performance is on Sunday!!!), I did my readings and response for taiko (final performance is on Friday!!!!), I went to work, I cooked, I baked, I went to dinner with people, I saw shows…

Well, okay, it was still a pretty lazy week, but my point is that I wasn’t just holed up with my laptop for the whole time. Only some of the time!

So on Friday night, I headed out and watched Company, which you may remember is the show for while I spent nine hours in the 92 Theater last Saturday. I was very proud to look on the stage and see the spot lights I spent so long trying to make neatly rectangular, although I got distracted pretty quickly by the actual, you know, show. Which was great — I mean, granted, all the usual quibbles about the emotional range of college actors still apply (I love, love, love, love college theater, but I think there are some plays that work better than others, and I’m not convinced that a musical about a bunch of married thirtysomethings is necessarily one of them — although there were three characters with whom I identified a lot, so I could be blowing smoke right now) and the play itself had some transitions that I thought were a little abrupt, but I loved it. Transitions aside, it has an amazingly strong emotional core, but one that's flexible enough that my friends and I all saw it in our own particular ways. (I'm pretty sure are interpretations are mostly us projecting all over the place.) I’d heard some of the songs before, but seeing them in context was an entirely different ballgame. Plus, we have some truly fantastic singers here at Wes.

Then, magically, I managed to get into the midnight show of WesBurlesque — my ex-roomie (but eternal roomie in my heart) was dancing and singing for two of the performances, and not only did I obviously have to cheer her on, but I was also super curious. This is the tenth year of WesBurlesque, so obviously it’s been happening throughout my entire college career, but somehow it’s never worked out for me — either I’d have something to do that weekend, or I wouldn’t hear about it until it was over, or whatnot. That was actually what happened with the auditions this year, otherwise I might have considered making a fool of myself and trying out. (Probably for the best that I didn’t, though, given A] thesis and B] I wouldn’t have been able to see Company.) But I managed to get in this time, and it was FANTASTIC. There was a live band and singers, all of whom were in their underwear, and then there were the performances, which were sexy and fun and occasionally a little silly. Dozens of people, all of whom were dancing and wearing very little in the way of clothing, and everybody looked like they were having a good time.

Not actually a photo from the show, since they didn't allow cameras or any other sort of recording, but a promotional photo that the WesBurlesque directors used to advertise.

And then I came back home and was apparently shouting because sitting in the second row practically blew out my eardrums. So it goes.

On Saturday, I took advantage of the stunning weather to lie out on Foss Hill for a few hours and read a book. (I’m slowly making my way through What Einstein Told His Cook, a book about kitchen science. It’s SUPER INTERESTING. Science is magical!!) Housemate Katie and I were there with our friend Christina, although at around 3 or 3:30 we shifted location to the grassy knoll behind Olin so as to watch the Holi celebrations from a safe distance.

Holi is the Hindu Festival of Colors; Shakti, Wes’s South Asian group, organized the event and sold white shirts and bags of colored powder, which everybody threw at each other until the smears of orange and purple and turquoise started to blur together into sort of a muddy brown. Everyone involved seemed to be having a lot of fun, but I was just as happy to be out of the danger zone.

A photo from Holi 2012.

Then Christina, Housemate Katie, Previously Mentioned Housemate Natalia, and I all retired to my house for a delicious tex-mex feast, inspired by the fact that we got tomatoes, lime, cilantro, and onions for Fruit and Veggie co-op recently. That’s practically begging for a burrito night, if you ask me, so I bought some corn tortillas, mashed up some guacamole, and cooked some black beans and shrimp. No complaints.

I did some more baking today, actually — wheat bread, and salted chocolate cookies. The bread was a little underdone on the inside (although perfect on the outside — I think it needed to be a baguette instead of a loaf), but the cookies were unfairly good. Unfortunately, I was too lazy to take pictures. Sorry, guys.

And that… leads us up to now, which I guess makes me about done? I should probably post this before my computer decides to randomly turn off, which it’s been doing recently. I’m pretty sure it’s a battery problem, and I’m getting a new laptop so it’s not that big of a deal, but it’s really annoying — especially when it shuts down TWICE when I’m in the middle of watching a TV show. Or when I’m working on something and don’t have it saved. Maybe I’ll call ITS and ask for their opinion. Worth a shot, anyway, since my baby (aka my laptop) and I are going to be together until graduation.

Not that you care. So long for now, ducklings! Stay safe, enjoy the weather, and I'll see you next weekend, where I will have a ton of exciting things to recap. So here, we might as well close it off with a picture of interspecies snuggling: