Tech for Tattoo Girl starts today. I’m already completely burned out. Usually it takes me until about the Wednesday of tech week, when we’re in dress rehearsals, to be exhausted and sick of this crap. But I’m there now, a few days early, wishing I could just …. skip rehearsal for the next week. Which is completely not possible.
The last week of school is also bearing down on me. That, I’m more pumped for, because that means it will soon be reading week, when I’m going to sleep in til ten (that’s late for me these days, except for today), work leisurely on some papers or something, and go to rehearsal. It’s going to be relaxing and great and I can’t wait.
But one week stands between me and that bliss. One week. Tech, I will vanquish you.
I will vanquish you very slowly, and I’ll probably complain about it the whole time.
I wish I weren’t stage managing this quarter. I’m having fun with the Tattoo Girl process, and I’m looking forward to getting started on the Bacchae, but I miss my evenings off.
If I still had my evenings off, instead of having chicken nuggets and hasty salads and hot pockets for dinner before running to rehearsal at 5:30, I would cook everything on the Eat Yet? blog. Everything. Their most recent recipe for warming winter squash looks like just the thing I need to pull me out of my “Is it really snowing AGAIN?!?!??” funk.
I think I will be attempting their red velvet cupcakes on Thursday, to bring to rehearsal for Valentine’s Day. There is a scene in Tattoo Girl in which something or other is described as a “red velvet map”. Since we blocked that scene we’ve all been craving red velvet cake. It’s time to satisfy the craving.
In other news, I’m still smarting over Ingrid Michaelson’s having been denied even a Grammy nomination. There must be some reason for it that I’m missing. Maybe her album came out in the wrong month. Maybe it’s just deep magic from the dawn of time. Whatever the reason, I’m still bummed about it.
I took my laptop to school and left it there for a few days. So when blog inspiration struck while I was sitting on the couch these past few days, the daunting task of trying to keep warm in my frigid bedroom to get it onto the Internerd through my desktop kept me firmly planted in place.
Here’s what’s up, though.
I have essentially finished Endless Ocean. By “essentially”, I mean that I have completed the vague storyline and figured out what triggers the credits. (No spoilers, but despite the relaxed, hands-off, lazy plot, it was actually super cool.) I haven’t explored the whole map, though, or discovered every type of fish, or spent nearly enough time just kind of swimming around and playing with my dolphin friends, or riding whales, or lying on the beach chair on the deck of the Gabbiano – my “small but sturdy ship”.
You can do that, you know – sit on the deck and look at the virtual ocean for however long you want. It’s an island vacation right on your couch! (Blegh.)
I managed to discover all this in between the onset of midterm season and the start of Tattoo Girl rehearsals and the casting process of the Bacchae. I forgot how insane my life is when I’m not taking time off from theatre. The thing is, it usually doesn’t take me this long to get used to it and start liking it again. So tired! No wonder I’m becoming an English major.
In other other news, I bought a thoroughly secondhand copy of this book:
I bought it because it contains a recipe for “Sweet Potato Lobster Loaf”. I don’t think I have any excuse for not bumping this up to the top of my Recipes to Try list.
Other enticing dishes from this tiny (30 pages!) cookbook include avocado soup, mango steak, guava catsup (??), mango whip (sounds much more promising than prune whip, don’t you think?), and banana fudge.
To pick up where I left off yesterday: I’m sick, but not dead yet. My ears aren’t infected but there is fluid present. The doctor irrigated my right ear which I must say was the coolest thing ever! It was like a warm bath for my eardrum. It felt great. I was out of the doctor, Sudafed (with pseudoephedrine, none of that sissy on-the-shelf-at CVS stuff) in hand and bloodstream, in time to make my last class, which was good.
Then the onslaught started. I’ll spare you all the details but suffice it to say that stage managing two different shows, one of which is trying to last-minute schedule impromptu callbacks while the other is having a personnel crisis and having to cancel its first rehearsal because one of our leads dropped out, is pretty taxing.
The good news?
I bought Endless Ocean. For the uninformed:
I haven’t come across a blue whale like the one in the video yet, but I did make a dolphin friend (I named him Jeff, God of Biscuits) and hang out with some sharks for a while. That was pretty cool. Endless Ocean is a pretty great game once you get over the fact that all you do is swim around. I mean, sometimes you have objectives – take a picture of a certain kind of fish, explore a certain area, take a foundation bigwig down diving with you, whatever – but you don’t even have to complete them. You can just swim around.
It’s the best soothing, bedtime game I’ve ever seen.
