Photography

We've reached the photography unit of my composition class and were assigned to read Susan Sontag's essay "In Plato's Cave". It is all about photography and underlying issues related to picture-taking. One quote in particular stuck out to me, "the camera's rendering of reality must always hide more than it discloses". This is basically just a scholarly way of saying that pictures lie. After reading this essay I agree whole-heartedly with her on this, and I don't see how anyone can disagree. Everyone knows the cliche story of the family portrait. The big smiles hiding the fact that the husband is cheating, the 14 year old daughter is doing drugs, the 12 year old son is getting picked on at school, and the mother is contemplating suicide. Yes, I know this is an exxaggeration and I am in no way saying that this is true of all families. However, no family is perfect, yet that is the image that is captured by the camera. When anyone sees that photo they will see a happy couple with two beautiful children, living the American dream: the ideal family with 2.5 children, 1 dog, and a white picket fence. The moral of this story: cameras are the biggest liars. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, yet not even a quarter of those words describe the surface. The real words, the ones that give the picture true meaning are the ones that are never spoken, the words lingering below the surface and never see the light.
I have no idea why I felt the need to refelct on that, but I did. So there it is. I'm going to go finish revising my formal response to the essay now (which doesn't actually include any of what I just said lol)

Tech Week

The show is really coming together, we open next tuesday which means we go into tech this week. tech week is basically the hell week of theatre. thursday is our Q-Q in which we go through the show skipping all the acting bits and focusing on just the technical aspects, calling each cue and making sure everything is right, fixing things that aren't. So that will take a few hours. After that we have full tech runs in show conditions, until we open next week. So my life is being eaten. I can't wait for break I need to get some rest! Shows suck everything out of those involved, but yet we keep coming back for more. Other than that I still have to deal with classes and homework and everything. I have a visual research project due on friday, all I have left to do for that is scan my pictures into a computer and make them into a movie, which should take me a few hours, nothing terrible. I also have my research paper due next wednesday, the research is pretty much done, I just have to sit down and write it. Other than that it's the usual readings for lit classes and such.

On a less pleasant note, Jay and I are no longer on speaking terms. We got into a huge fight today and he said some really nasty things to me. We decided it would be better if we just didn't talk. Thanks to him I realized who my true friends are and I want to apologize to them for all the times I neglected them to spend time with someone who obviously doesn't care about me. To Noelle, Chelsea, Nikki, and Ashlee especially, you girls mean everything to me and I love you to death! Q-it baffles me how you always know when I need to talk to you. The fact that you randomly called me today was exactly what I needed. You're the best and I don't know what I'd do without you. Danny boy-I know you probably won't read this but I want to thank you anyway. You're amazing and I'm so glad we've become so close.
To the family I love you all too and I am really upset about not being able to come home on saturday. I think it's time I figure out a way to get a new car-one that's more dependable.
I have the most amazing support network, both at school and at home and I'm so greatful for everyone of you!

Gym

As unhappy I am with the current weather patterns, it actually worked out for the best so far. A little background first: wednesday was gorgeous in the morning, T-shirt weather nice. Then it rained. Thursday I woke up and it was snowing, but when I went outside later that evening it was nice out. Light jacket, seeing grass nice. Today...there's a frekin' snow storm! Oh upstate NY, how you irritate me!
Either way, as i said it worked out rather advantagously. I usually have five classes on fridays. I went to my 10am (almost fell asleep, but i went). My 11am was cancelled. Went to tap at noon. Had lunch at 1 as usual. Went to my 2 o'clock. We stayed for ten minutes cuz the prof had to pick up her kids cuz the public schools closed. So I sat around and read until my 3 o'clock. Dr Lee shows up and decides that since people have to drive, he was going to cancel class. It was pretty sweet. Because these classes were cancelled I actually had time to go to the gym today! I was exstatic! I haven't had time to go to the gym in weeks! So I ran a couple miles and putzed around in the dance studio just playing with my taps. It was a good time. I feel so much better for it :-)
Well my hair is still sopping wet and I have to be at rehearsal in 30 minutes. Bye for now :-D

Better

So life has improved since the last post. Not a ton, but enough so that I am functioning under a normal amount of stress. I think I am starting to get sick though. When I went to sleep last night i could feel my throat getting tighter and very scratchy. So it's either me getting sick or my allergies. I felt fine today so I think it might be the allergy thing becasue it's always worse for me at night with that whole deal. I guess I'll just start taking my meds for that again and hope it helps.

Tonight I only have to read about 69 pages for world lit (no journaling YAY!) , revise my paper for advanced comp, and work more on my scene design visual research project. Yes I realize it's already after midnight, but that means nothing to an college student, especially when she's also an insomniac. I also have to have a rough draft of my research paper done by wednesday so I can have my professor go over it before I hand it in to be graded at the end of the month.

As far as the show goes, we only have 10 rehearsals to go until we are in tech. We're getting down to the wire here but I think we're going to pull it off. Lines still need work, but they have it for the most part. We still don't know what's going on with costumes but we have someone ready to jump in at a moment's notice. She's very good at it too so I am not worried in the least. This thursday the director is taking us all to dinner and then we are going to see CINDERS, the first show of the semester. I'm pretty excited about it. i love just about everyone working on this show and I never dread going to rehearsals because they are so much fun. I wish I had the pictures that Sarah has been taking, they'r pretty amazing lol.

So things are still very busy, but since friday I feel so much less stressed because I no longer have to worry about my reading journal (which was my main stressor along with the research paper). I also got to spend time with Nikki and Jessie this weekend and had a really fun night at Lawn last night. Most of the people who are not in the theatre honor society went over to hang out. (APO was haivng their lock-in). So we all just hung out and played Balderdash for hours. I won, it was great. I lapped Kerri and Andrew haha. We also listened to about 7 of the NOW that's what I call music CDs and just went crazy singing all the hits from when we were all in high school lol. I spent the night there because I had a couple drink and was not about to drive back to campus or leave my car and take the bus. Matt and I slept until about 2pm...it was crazy. Apparently neither of us realized just how sleep deprived we were. So I hung out there for a couple more hours then came back to campus to take a shower and go to rehearsal. All in all it was a really fun weekend :-)

Oh Stress

This semester is stressful beyond belief. No matter how much I try I can never seem to control my own life. I was finally comfortable with the point I was at in my life when a couple of huge events took place that shattered what little security I had. So now my life is completely topsy turvy and I have no idea where the heck to go from here. I'm not going to go into detail about things, but I am so confused right now I don't know which way is up.
So on top of my personal life being ridiculously complicated beyond belief I also have school to worry about. There are not enough hours in the day for me to get everything done and I'm going to tear my hair out. As of right now I have a five page paper, reading for western civ, research for a 5-8 page research paper (which will probably be more like 10 pages), start a rough draft of said research paper, reading for world lit along with a reading journal documenting everything we've read for the entire semester, reteach myself the choreography for tap, and a scenic design visual research package to work on. All that is due this week. I'm probably forgetting something and more will probably be assigned throughout the week. I realize I should have gotten some of this done over the week long break I just had, but I'm sorry I like to take a break from school for a bit. I did get a little bit done but I really didn't have much of an opportunity.
I also have the show to worry about too. We are off book now, which is irritating in and of itself becasue the actors don't know most of act 2 so it's painful to sit there and feed them lines for 4 hours. Our costume designer is MIA and one of our actors may have to be replaced. I'm having a great time.


I keep threatening to drop out and run away. It will never happen, but a girl can dream can't she?