Don't put me in a box, man.

Unless of course, it is because I am smaller and can fit in the box in order to more efficiently screw in the runners for the drawers that will eventually be in this box, which is not actually a box, but the beginnings of a lovely new buffet/sideboard thing for the dining room!

Me in my jammies with screwdriver

Putting this thing together was not so encouraging, since all Ikea pieces tend to reveal their utter flimsiness as soon as you get them out of the conveniently flat-packed box. I looked skeptically at the wavy, paper-like piece of particle board (which actually featured a piece of duct tapeholding it together) that was supposedly to become the back of this piece. But Brian and I set to work, and got it together in record time. And I love it! It's exactly what we needed in that space. Now we can mingle with guests over artfully arranged platters of cheese and crackers. And most importantly, we don't have to throw the mail on the floor.

More pictures of little apartment details to follow, as soon as I borrow Mom and Dad's camera again...

That's right.

So we're just trucking along...Brian's had class all of this week and last, but it's finally over as of today. Tonight we celebrated the end of it, giving ourselves heartburn and delirium with Bite's delicious Thai green curry and chocolate cream pie. Ouch. Hopefully this weekend we'll be very nearly done with the additions needed in the apartment, like a kitchen table and living room chairs. It's looking good though. In the meantime, I've also become completely addicted to thrift stores. I've always liked them, and in high school went all the time for clothes, but nowadays I'm finding myself seeking that treasure hunt all the time. You know the one; the feeling that the perfect armchair or dinette set is always just around the corner. And along the way I've also discovered a previously untapped desire for funky painted plates, weird coat hooks, and colored glass vases. Who knew?

In other items, I like this article in Dwell magazine about Chicago. Maybe it's because it's an interview with a Chicago architect, but journalistic pieces about the city rarely mention such specific, cool things. Also, he talks about scullers rowing in the Lincoln Park Lagoon at dawn-- holla, Dad!

Ow.

Let me first preface this post with the assertion that the vast majority of my move-in process has been great fun, and not at all painful. Brian is back, and we've had a hilarious time moving our crap in and finding furniture and other cool things. We've broken down and disposed of most of the boxess, started sanding the kitchen table and hanging artwork today, and our office is the coziest. I wish I didn't have to ever find a job, so I could spend my days arranging things.

However, there are a few things about moving in that I could live without. One is the absurd amount of stupid stuff that refuses to budge from the living room. Another is the fact that every time I run an errand to a store to get all the "things we need," I inevitably forget several important items. And finally, there are the injuries. It's kind of unbelievable how many times I've yelled "ARRRRGGGGHH!!" during the last week. Here are a few examples:

1. Awhile ago, I (think I) broke my pinky toe, and it pretty much healed. Not much you can do to speed that process. But I banged into Brian's foot and broke it again. Then, the very next day, I ran over that same toe with the shopping cart at Target.

2. I kicked a drill while wearing flip-flops. That was just dumb.

3. Moving the couch up the three flights of stairs was the hardest thing ever. That whole fiaso resulted in bruises on my shoulder from banging it into the hallway wall, an ouchie foot from momentarily setting the couch down on it, and a scraped ankle from kicking the corner of a wall while shimmying the damn thing in the door. But the couch was such a great find that it was worth it.

4. Brian and I decided to use a sander in the kitchen, which was not a good idea and which caused sawdust to gently float in the air and settle on top of everything, and also to clog our lungs and invade our eyes. Awesome.

But, in the end, there is very little visible evidence of my injuries, and very much visible evidence of a happy apartment. So I think it's worth it.

Something so special about that phase...

My life is in flux! Transition! Upheaval! It's one of those times where I think about certain things all the freaking time, and then other, more important things, just slip my mind. Like what day it is. Or to stay at home to let the painter in at 3:30. Or to call that potential employer back.

Here are some things that make my mind go all wacky:

- I don't have a job. Although I have several possible options simmering, those options are all very uncertain and hard to imagine, and I sort of wish I could do all of them at once (although it's unclear whether I will get any of them).

- I have no furniture at all in my apartment except for a table and chairs (which are, admittedly, quite cool).

- I am really sick of the look of my blog, and I just want it to be pretty, and I don't understand CSS.

- I miss my sister and Susie and Abbey.

- I have not seen my boyfriend in six weeks.

Here are some exciting things!

- I very well might get a really cool job soon, and in the meantime it's also pretty fun to not have to go to work or generally do anything.

- I got a haircut that I really like. One of those that make me go "hee!" (And also part of that whole "my life changes, hence my look changes" thing.)

- Even if I can't redesign it, at least I have more time to post on my blog. Which is the important part.

- My parents have been so wonderful and hilarious.

- Our new apartment is so cute and bright and airy, and I can't wait to fill it with awesomeness.

- Brian gets home in less than two days!!

Strangely, when I'm feeling at my nuttiest, things are also so easily definable somehow. Clearly Brian will be back, I will find some furniture, some job. In the meantime, there's something comforting about being able to chalk up every forgetful blunder, emotional reaction, or skin breakout to everything that's "on my mind." Sweet.

How did they do that?

I love Ok Go already, but this made me love them so much more.



Thanks, Brendan and Annie!

I have an assignment to finish...

...and yet, Abbey got a new MacBook with a built-in camera and effects. Which would you choose?

Seriously, I am thisclose to being completely done with everything related to grad school, and I am fascinated by nothing but how utterly creepy I can make myself look.

There was another one, but Brian said it made me look like The Predator, so I refrained.

And I even scored bootleg Baile Funk CDs.

Well, Senhor Boal made very sure that we had plenty of extra things to do before and after his daily workshops, so updating has been a little tough. I'm still in Rio, the program ended Sunday (Woohoo! Done with grad school!), and I'm now in a charming little hostel with free internet and free time.

I have very few plans for these last few days. I've been hanging with friends of mine from the program that stayed also, and we've been stumbling upon some pretty great ways to spend time. Yesterday we took the bomde (streetcar) up to Santa Teresa, a gorgeous old neighborhood high in the hills. The bomde itself was an experience in and of itself, because it's so much more than just a streetcar. It was part charming San Francisco open-sided, wooden-benched, "ding-ding" streetcar, and part amusement park scary rollercoaster ride, complete with sudden stops, dizzying heights, and frequent losses of electricity. It starts in the business district and immediately travels across the Lapa Arches, which are extremely high above the street and no wider than the car itself. It was hilarious. Here's a very tame picture of it:



...it's so much freakier and more fun at night.

Anyway, today was unexpectedly great as well. A friend of mine from the program has a Brazilian friend who has begun an NGO in one of the favelas (slums) here, and he took us with him to visit a famous NGO/community arts organization called AfroReggae in another favela. It's the organization that the movie "Favela Rising" is based on. We got to see their facilities and watch young kids singing orignial samba compositions and doing Afro-Brazilian dance, all in these crazy centers whose walls are covered in the most beautiful grafitti art, in the middle of the favela. Apparently AfroReggae--which started as a music group and branched out to arts education--has made unbelievable progress in bridging the divides between rival factions in the favelas and reduced what was basically a war zone to an almost violence-free area, giving youth alternatives to gang and drug activity, which is pretty much the only other option in favelas. I kind of couldn't believe that I had somehow ended up there today, it was like we were still in our class doing a site visit or something, but I was just having a day hanging out in Rio.

Rio-diculous!

....Aaand, Brazil. I have arrived for the final leg of my ridiculous summer journey, and it's going rather well, not that I ever doubted it would. I arrived here on Sunday morning without issues, and since then I've been balancing some really stimulating workshops with a fair amount of relaxing beach time.

The reason I'm here is to do a course with Augusto Boal, a pioneer in the educational theatre field. Just a little background in case you aren't someone like the good Dr. Science who knows this already, and I'm sorry if it's a bit too verbose...Boal developed a methodology called Theatre of the Oppressed, in which a group of people examine their specific ideas of oppression and dialogue about ways to break the oppression through the language of theatre. In this form of theatre, spectators become spect-actors by offering alternative solutions to breaking the oppression, and actually trying out their ideas onstage. The entire thing becomes what he calls a "rehearsal for change." There are many, many facets to his practice, which includes a massive body of games and image work, but that is the absolute most basic gist of it. This week we are learning about his techniques called the Rainbow of Desire, which attempts to explore people's more internalized oppressions (or "cops in the head") and ways in which they and others would deal with them. It's all quite fascinating, as is the opportunity to work in Rio's Theatre of the Oppressed Center. I've found Boal to be quite accessible, as well as committed to challenging us and engaging in constant dialogue.

He's also the cutest ever. He's in his seventies now, and he's this spritely man who wears flowered shirts and jeans and grandpa Reeboks. He has always been known for his huge mass of curly gray hair, but now he seems to have cut it in some sort of longish layered dealie (the "Rachel"?), which is even better. He is as articulate as his books, and full of stories. He also has an amazingly trained staff of "Jokers," or facilitators of this kind of work. So it's going well.

As for Rio, it's incredible. I don't know if it's the beach, the mountains coming straight out of the water, the music, the people on the beach and running by the water, or any other of a million things that have stood out to me, but I'm loving it here. I need to come back for a longer time very soon. And I NEED to learn Portuguese, because even though a mix of English, Spanish, and mutilated Portuguese words has served me fine, I hate how mute I feel here, and how pretty the language is when people who actually know it speak it. I have to say though, I'm getting a lot more today than I did yesterday.

So yeah, that's me. I'm here until the 24th, and I have several days to explore after the program ends. More later!

Dublin, Week 3 (and 1 and 2...)

Okay, so I am still in Dublin, and the program is, unbelievably, coming to an end. It's been both the quickest and most packed 3 weeks of my life, which made blog posting difficult, besides the fact that my internet access was always about a 3-block walk away. When you have time for the 3-block walk only at midnight and the choice is between blogging and talking to Brian or sleeping, I think the decision is obvious. But I feel like I need to just do a general overview of what I've been up to, even if it's a bit longer than I might like.

My time here is also really hard to synthesize. We've been staying on the campus at Trinity College, in the building where Oscar Wilde lived when he studied here, and we get to work in the Samuel Beckett theatre. Trinity is the most beautiful place, it's this 400-year-old walled campus, full of cobblestones and right in the middle of the city.

I think I've interrogated theory and looked at my own practice during these 3 weeks more than I have throughout my entire master's program. The whole program is focused on community-engaged theatre...and there's no one definition of that. Much of the first week we got to see many different examples of community-engaged theatre in Ireland, meeting tons of people and seeing their programs. We saw shows in Dublin, got to see kids perform at their famous children's theatre (The Ark), traveled outside the city to Dalkey and Dun Laoghaire where we got to meet people who run Heritage Centres, and spoke with artists who draw the most amazing stories out of people and then, somehow, have them render those stories artistically. And at the end of it all, we made up wee performances with the help of the Upstate Theatre Company at the top of a mountain in Cooley.

We've worked with the most amazing tutors. We created our own educational workshop projects around specific plays, learned about facilitation skills, and began devising original performance pieces around a number of themes. In the middle of it all, we spent an entire weekend in Belfast, which was a really intense experience. We worked mainly with the Educational Shakespeare Company, which showed us an unbelievable amount of work. We were able to visit a prison and have a workshop during which a group of incarcerated men did a reading of their original adaptation of Macbeth. We were able to see work with homeless youth and kids, and beyond the ESC, we were able to look at how people just go about doing theatre in that city. As for Belfast, we were given a pretty complex picture of the place, and saw how the community is still very much divided, and how it has worked to heal itself in many ways. It wasn't easy to see-- to not understand the context and to try to piece together what you think, while being plopped in the middle of where the Loyalist/Republican conflict happened. There were times when I didn't understand the work and when I really connected with it, and still other times when I felt I was a spectacle in the middle of it. It's hard also to feel like you're being barraged with the conflicts and sub-conflicts of the place, and to try in the midst of that to observe how the city itself is really very vibrant, and for the most part people are still going about their lives.

Aaaaaanyway...and then this week we came back and everyone worked their asses off to devise original performance pieces, which came out beautifully. My group used the campus of Trinity College as inspiration for a site-specific piece, which involved text and movement and singing and traveling audiences. It was the best! I can't describe it, and I don't have pictures of it yet to post (because of the whole can't take pictures of yourself while performing thing), but I will as soon as I get them.

So I'm almost done, and right now I have to finish my final papers and all that. I really wish I could have had a witty, pithy way to sum up my experience that would make everyone laugh. If I had had wireless internet in my room, it might have worked. But there's always Brazil...

P.S. I am trying to insert a bunch of pictures and I've even uploaded them, but for some reason this persnickety Irish computer won't let me insert them into the post right now. I'm working on it.

Just wanted to say that I'm alive...

...and extremely intellectually and artistically stimulated, and very, very, busy. Dublin is amazing. I promise I'll write more later!

So, apparently I'm still in school

I'm such a deadbeat. No, I'm not still in Amsterdam. Annie and I made it home and I even got to stop in Queens just long enough to say hi to Susie, Zack, and Graham, and to hear all of Astoria erupt at the ending of the World Cup final game. Since then I've had a wonderful two weeks at home, during which Brian and I found a sweet apartment (September 1st, get ready for cuteness), and even celebrated at my lovely friend Kelly's wedding in Savannah! We kind of couldn't believe how hot and humid it was down there, but nevertheless we had a great time.

Dare I say it...I'm packing for my other ginormous trip right now. I'm off to finish my grad program on a study abroad trip in Ireland, after which I'll just zip over to Brazil for week for another course. After that I'll be decorating my new apartment and hyperventilating daily about my lack of employment and my plethora of loan payments. For the time being, however, I'm psyched!! I can't wrap my mind around the idea that I'm leaving for a little over a month. I've had a little trouble deciding what to bring...



...so I'll probably overpack just a tiny bit. Updates to follow, for realz this time.

Euro trip?

Aaaand...I'm not home yet. Annie and I are stranded in Amsterdam for a night. We don't even know how it happened, just suddenly we were in the airport in Amsterdam and some expressionless lady from the airline was telling us that we wouldn't make our connecting flight because our first flight was delayed, and the next thing we knew, we were given "overnight kits" and shuttled to a hotel. A couple hours later our bellies are full and we are the proud owners of wooden shoe keychains. Both of those things helped immensely, since before that we were pretty much a wreck.

So that sucks. The only good thing about all of this is that we were bumped to business class. So much for my funny return post filled with pictures. All I'll say is that my birthday celebration with my cousins on the boat involved some very, very hilarious (and well-documented) karaoke. Now I have to make some phone calls.

Nouveau message.

Bonjour!

Okay. I know that I made this big deal about this being a travel blog and all, but here are three legitimate reasons why I haven't posted yet:
1. Internet service on the cruise is 50 cents a minute. Highway robbery!
2. We have had almost no free time when on shore.
3. I have been sick with some fierce, um...G.I. issues.

But now I'm in France for the first time, which is quite exciting! My parents and sister and I had the most amazing lunch in a teeny bistro in Nice. And tomorrow I finally get to see Aix-en-Provence, which Brian has been raving about. Before this we went to the Amalfi coast, Rome, and Florence. It's lovely to see family that I don't often see, and to go to so many cool places. However, cruise travel is also very strange to me. If I had to attach a general theme to it, I would probably pick "Buffet." That applies, most directly, to the food situation. What's up with the constant food? I mean CONSTANT. The only reason I haven't gained 10 pounds on this trip is because I literally have been too sick to eat. But the travel part is also a buffet of sorts too, since you just get a little of everything. I find it a little stressful to have to spend such a short amount of time in one place each day, but whatever. I'm certainly not complaining. The positive side of a buffet is that there's something for everyone. And it is kind of amazing that my 6-year-old cousin is just as occupied and entertained as my 83-year-old grandmother. And my whole, 26-person family on this trip is highly, highly funny.

Barcelona was absolutely stunning, we spent about four days there at the beginning, just Annie and I with Bridget. We saw tons of stuff, and had the perfect mix of seeing significant things like museums and architecture, and doing relaxing walking around and having sangria on the beach. I need to go back there.

Alright, family is gettintg antsy, as usual. Time to find un cafe, I believe. More later, and pictures when I get back, for sure!

Afloat.

So a year ago (or maybe more) I updated my blogger profile, and in the "About me" section, I wrote "Packing and unpacking." Funny how that's still totally true. And with that...

Welcome to my TravelBlog!

It's just becoming a travel blog by default, since I will be blogging while traveling for the next few months. I just spent a lovely week at home in the Chi, spending QT with Brian, running around getting ready for my trip, seeing my parents. And now it's far too early in the day and I'm in my sister's apartment in Brooklyn. You see, tonight she and I leave for Barcelona for a few days before our entire family gets there and we all go on a cruise. I've never been on a cruise before, let alone Conway Family Boat Extravaganza '06; I'll let you know how it goes. Anyway, right now Brendan and I are sitting across from each other on matching Powerbooks, having coffee and tooling around on the internet before we both go get Mystic Tans. That's right, yo.

So yeah, Barcelona here we come! I'm definitely excited for that, I've never been there. More when we get there, I promise. I've been berated enough for my blogging laziness. This is it, folks.

Crap, I forgot to download that Catalan podcast so I can brush up...

Crap.

Leaving is hard.

More on that later.

The unclassifiable.

Some things:

1. Danielle Gasparro is wonderful. Check out her music, and also try to see her live. Fun fact: she's Andrew's temporary roommate.

2. I am packing to move again. Already? The good thing is, for some reason I actually seem to have less crap than I thought! This is amazing, since every time I've moved I have been completely and totally floored by the amount of useless shit I own. This change may have to do with my impending divorce from my hetero-lifemate of six years (something I cannot yet actually face, let alone talk about), or it could have to do with the fact that said housemate and I, when packing to move to NYC a year ago, made some last minute, er, deposits, in the alley, of some very large piles of stuff that we simply didn't know where to stash at the last minute. So the last move was productive. But don't get me wrong, the amount of useless shit I still have is astounding. Astounding! Why on earth was I ever sentimental about Disneyland postcards? Why do I mysteriously have so many of my sister's high school pictures? And why, oh why, have I never organized my photos and continue to lug around torn, disintegrated envelopes full of them? The other good thing, however, is that I'm becoming less attached to crappy things and so very much more willing to chuck it all. God, it feels good.

3. Remember a few posts ago when I posted a picture of me in a scooter helmet, looking coy? Well as it turns out, I didn't look quite so flirtatious the entire time I was wearing that helmet. I also, apparently, did dances. Like this:

I just thought you should see that.

4. Back to this: Holy crap, I'm moving again? I don't even have a truck reserved and my stuff is supposedly being taken back to Chicago this weekend. I'm going to try to focus on how well I'm doing at throwing out crappy knick-knacks.

Fleet Week 2006: Success!

Well kids, I am now about to expose my real reason for relocating to New York City...to snag myself a sailor during the much anticipated yearly celebration of Fleet Week, when all those ships dock in the NYC harbor and the Navy lads go looking for fun. And did I ever bag me a seaman! Check him out:



Okay, okay...he's not really a random naval officer I picked up in a bar, and he may not actually have taken me to the Fleet Week ball. But we did have lunch at Cafe Bar in Astoria, Queens, while he was all gussied up in his dress whites. Doesn't he look sooo Top Gun?! "He" is my dear friend Andrew, a rabbinical student here in NYC who has worked as a chaplain in the Navy. He had a special meeting with an admiral, so he got to get dressed up, and we decided to make an afternoon of it. Hey, those creases take time!

Turns out it was a weekend of Andrew fun, which is a special brand of fantastic. Today we spent all day at his sweet place, reading Hebrew children's books about where babies come from, cooking a meal of fajitas, mango salsa, and peach-apple pie, and watching many of our very favorite episodes from the Buffy box set.

But that was only the end of my day. After a night of salsa dancing and a slumber party with Annie and Brendan, we got up this morning and walked around Fort Greene with our coffee mugs. Then Annie whipped up a brunch of pistachio french toast and ricotta fritatta muffins.



You know, just your typical Sunday morning spread.

Updates.

I am so ready to be done with this semester, for so many reasons. I'm trying to finish up two final assignments, and it's taking me waaaay longer than it should. It's frustrating. I need to have time to think about other things.

I'm currently in huge limbo right now about the decision of where I'll be next year, NY or Chicago. I don't want to think about it right now, but since it's consumed my thoughts for the last week or so, I thought I'd mention it.

So Sus, Josh and I woke up on this beautiful Saturday morning and watched the series finale of Six Feet Under as a family. We've all been watching the episodes at different times, but we all waited to watch the last one together. How is it that the end of a TV show can seem like the end of an era? It was amazing, and heart-wrenching, and I went for a run after and could only listen to soft, melancholy music. All of us talked about how we love the characters and how this is the only show where we truly think about them like we know them. Sigh.

In other news, my parents are coming to town today for my sister's various graduation events, and they're staying the whole week! Fun fun. They've never been here for that long since we moved here, and we're both excited for them to see actual parts of our daily lives.

Back to work. Once I'm done I'll post more, I'm sure. Ha. Speaking of which, I wish I knew how to redesign my blog template myself. It's just too much work to learn it now, but I want a new look.

Where does the time go?

I actually have negative time to be posting this week. I haven't been slacking, I've been busy having fun and, well, being busy. Brian came for a lovely extended weekend, and we were also graced with the presence of our long lost friends, the fabulous ATF and Lizzie. They joined us all the way from northern Michigan, a far-off land where all they eat is almond-crusted whitefish and cherries. We took them for big city food like dim sum and, um, italian...and we hit museums and bars and the hookah.

It was awesome. And I completely neglected my work, which is how it should have been. But now I have four papers due and I should have been in bed an hour ago. Yar!

On another note, for so many many reasons, I can't believe it's almost May.

I understand a love of shoes, but come ON.

We have lots of magazines in my apartment. Only one is technically mine--RealSimple--and that was a gift, but between the roommates we subscribe to TimeOut, The New Yorker, Blender, Harper's, and Cook's Illustrated. It's a lot of freaking breakfast-time reading material, to say nothing of the tremendous weight our coffee table bears.

So it was kind of out of the ordinary the other day, while I was standing in a mind-boggingly endless line at the drugstore just wanting to buy a snack for the train ride home, that I began eyeing a Marie Claire on the rack by the register. This is the reason they put those magazines there, because people buy them impulsively at the last second, and I knew that. I knew it. But I was facing an hour long train ride home, I was exhausted and not in the mood for my novel, and I'd never really read that particular magazine. And besides, the real reason I finally decided to buy it was because the largest, most prominent headline on the front had to do with hairstyles and related ideas, and to be honest I need a haircut so desperately right now that I think about my rat's nest a lot. So I bought it, as a guilty pleasure, and I really wish I hadn't.

Ugh. These are the kinds of magazines that sociologists and psychologists talk about. It's not Cosmo, because everyone, even subscribers, knows that Cosmo is ridiculous in a more overt way, what with hot pink covers and their same "HOT sex!!" headline every single damn month. It's much more difficult to take all of that seriously, even though I'm sure people do. But something like Marie Claire, which masks itself as a more understated, straightforward fashion and human interest glossy, is what I believe is doing more damage.

The first thing I noticed that pissed me off--though perhaps trivial--was the aforementioned hair feature. The biggest part about that was this huge pull-out of different celebrities' hairstyles, meant to give everyone the perfect for their face shape. Clearly this was not going to be the final authority on hair, but in this large spread of 80 pictures (literally), there were perhaps two with curly hair. This kind of stuff has pissed me off since I was twelve, but I was just sad to see it continue.

But that's not even the worst part. The "big features" that this magazine boasts? An investigative report into the "unbelievable duties" of Japan's sex volunteers, men who volunteer to deflower women who are nearing or past 30 and are still virgins. Thank goodness these men are around to, as the article says, help embarrassed "good girls learn about lovemaking"! Next up in the Features section: "Could you give up your razor for a month?" Gasp!! And my personal favorite: "I surfed naked for a pair of Manolos." Aside from an interesting article about human trafficking, that was pretty much it. Now, I know no one expects freaking Marie Claire to be changing the world, but can we ever begin to revise our idea of who exactly reads these magazines? Am I overreacting? It's true, most people pick these up so they have a fluffy read, and that's why I bought it too. But the readers do have brains, and sometimes I feel that things like this are actively trying to turn those brains into molasses. That's all.

Sigh.