The Greatest Mystery

The musical is finished! I had a great time performing in The Mystery of Edwin Drood and working with my fellow GGSS actors once again. The greatest part about theater, though, is what a great excuse it provides for people to come visit! Also, parties. Also, growing out ridiculous facial hair. 

The mutton chops are now gone.

The Kelsey remains.

Both Absi and Kels wrote blogs about the show. Highlights for me included going to a party at Steph and Josh's new place (floor to ceiling windows!), seeing family, and reuniting with Brian and Absi. On top of that, I got to act every night with Josh, all my housemates, and Goo.

This week I am going to an event about Shakespeare and law that is being moderated by my Advanced Criminal Procedure professor. Beyond that, I am going to try to rest and get a lot of work done. We'll see how that goes. In the meantime, pictures from the show! (by Jonathan Zucker)

Kiera taught me to dance for Curtains, so I felt it was appropriate that my character in this show returned the favor.

The full cast.

This is the exact face Noah and I make when we see each other in the mornings. 

Because we're morning people.

Hurricane Watch

On Saturday morning, we were zombies.

Really.

We waited by the road for runners. Because we hate runners. Who doesn't? 

Kels had trouble with the "zombies don't smile" concept.

Some people would rather ford a river than face us.

Which makes sense, given our faces.

Saturday night, we were X-men. The party was at my place, so we didn't want to scare people away. I dressed as my students (having seen the evolution of my facial hair) requested. 

Not that I will ever actually tell them I dressed up as Wolverine.

The party was a great success, with friends from all around coming by. I should have taken more pictures of the house, because Jeff did a great job decorating.

On Sunday, it started raining. Then DCPS cancelled class. Then GULC cancelled class. Then I caught up on a little work and a lot of sleep while in a house with the best of company and plentiful supplies of food. All in all, the most pleasant hurricane I have been through. 

And today, today I am in my journal office trying to finish up five pages of a note before rehearsal. I am in very good spirits, though, because I got to teach a class earlier. My students have been working on projects for the last couple of weeks, and today was the first day I was able to take a look at some of them. There are some uninspired dud projects, to be sure, but a few students came up with creative projects that are just flat out amazing. I can't wait to get a copy of some of these things (posterboards, songs, poems, cartoons) so that I can share them.

Runventure

This was my Saturday:

The original plan was just to run to a museum (mile 2) and then to Kels's gym (mile 3) so that she could go to BodyDestruction or whatever the name of that awful class is where the pregnant ladies lift more than me and I am told over and over again that there's "just one more" set or curl or crunch or press or pushup but it is all a terrible lie... which is all to say that we got there and the guy at the front desk gave me a free pass so that I could experience aforementioned fun.

When we got out of the gym we sort of wanted falafel, and there is only one falafel place in the city that is worth going to, so we just ran there (mile 7). Then we walked back to where we started. It was a long walk.

This is a tree that Kels saw.

She liked the tree.

So she gave it a hug.

On Sunday we went over to Eastern Market to look at all of the stuff. Eastern Market is a place that has a lot of stuff. And food.

I took a picture of food using some mirrors for sale at the market. They were very large.

And that was the weekend! (Except for the part where I worked on journal for far too long. I left that part out because I take pity on both my current readers and on my future self reading this blog.)

"Rising up to the challenge of our rivals..."

I would like to say that I trained well for my race on Saturday. I would like to say that I ran at all during the two weeks leading up to the race. I sure would like to say that. 

But in spite of my foolishness in training, I survived and it was a great day to race. It would have been foolish of me not to run as fast as I could, given that it was 33 degrees and I was wearing shorts. 

We were thrilled to wake up at 5AM to get to the race. See?

We had some trouble finding the race start line (and the town the race happened to be in- who would have thought that West Virginia would nullify all of our GPS devices?) but got there and got our race numbers with half an hour to spare.

Kelsey used this time to get a coffee. Alex was making silly gestures of some sort.

The night before the race, I made a playlist, removed all the titles from the songs, and e-mailed it to Kelly, Alex, and Kels to load onto their ipods. At exactly 3 minutes before the race started, everyone pressed play. In this way, we would all be listening to the same music together no matter where we were on the course. The playlist was filled with epic songs that had to do something with either running or fitness. You know: Eye of the Tiger, Chariots of Fire, Born to Run... that kind of stuff. I even threw on Neverending Story near the end, just in case someone had to take more than an hour to finish the 10k. 

The course itself started in West Virginia and then went over a bridge into Maryland, up and down the C&O Canal. I was feeling really good about things until I started seeing markers in places. At the top of the marker it would say "10k" and underneath that it would say "3" or "4." Since I was running and cold, I did not really have time to process this other than figuring that the "3" meant 3 kilometers. This was extremely disheartening, as I passed marker "4" at 30 minutes and I had really wanted to run the 10k in under an hour. Later, I would find that these numbers were actually mile indicators and I was much closer than I thought.

The final challenge of the course was running back up a hill and across the bridge in order to get to the stadium in the center of the town. The hill was not pleasant and I slowed down considerably. Still, I pushed on and managed to not walk the entire race. As I ran into the stadium they announced my name (I was in a pack of one) and I crossed the finish line almost 48 minutes after I started.

Personal record! (of course, no matter what my time was I was going to get a personal record, since this was my first race.)

Alex beat me by about a minute, and Kelly and Kels showed up a few minutes later. Then the race organizers gave us free pizza and beer, because what we really wanted at 10AM after running 6.2 miles was a beer.

Kelsey got a Bud Light. She says it was because she prefers Bud Light. The rest of us feel it is because there was no one getting Bud Light and the Bud Light man looked sad.

The post-race party was at a very swanky Bavarian-themed hotel.

Upon getting back to DC, we were hungry again so we went to get more pizza.

We chose to make our own at H and Pizza. It was a solid choice.

Layer Upon Layer Upon Layer Upon Goat

Once upon a time I directed a play and my actors made a pretty good joke about how all of my directions essentially added layers of characterization upon other, conflicting layers of characterization.

Example (that Josh might give):
"I want to see love but also hate, and there's some malaise there about your place in the universe and you also think this might be a dream. But underneath that you've got a mischievous nature and you are also worried about the safety of your pet rat."

Anyway, I would expand on this metaphor if I had time (which I do not), but I am starting to feel like this semester is just layer upon layer upon layer upon goat. What is the goat resting on? Perhaps another goat. It's goats all the way down.

That said, the negotiation seminar is the best class I have taken since high school. Even if it did ruin my entire schedule.

In other news, an application (that will go unexplained for superstitious reasons) I have been working on for a long while (since August) is finally complete and submitted. This one is something that I actually want and, regardless of whether or not this particular application process works out, I have made some excellent contacts and have everything together to keep on submitting the application until they take me.

Thanks, Cold Readings

If my time acting and doing cold readings of scripts has given me anything, it has given me the ability to read things very quickly and then say them as though I was not just reading something. I was on call today in Evidence, which means that I was responsible for one out of four cases that we were going over. So I read two cases very well (okay, well I read ONE very well) and skimmed over the rest, because that seemed like the efficient thing to do. When it came time for one of the people on call to volunteer, I was the first to raise my hand and gave the synopsis of my case. I got it over with, I relaxed, I went on with my class.

Then it was time for the second case. The judges who teach the class asked for another volunteer from those on call. No one raised a hand. Then they pulled out the list. They always have a list of people that they have told to be prepared, and they just run through that list when someone doesn't volunteer. They called the first name on the list:

"Is ____ here?"

Silence

"Is _____ here?"

Silence

"Alright... is ______ here?"

Silence. They look back at me. "Would anyone like to save Mr. Johnson?" Classroom of a hundred people. No one raises a hand. (To be fair, the judges were running a class behind so everyone "safely" assumed that they would not get to this reading.)

I am auto-assigned every other case instantly. I spit out what I know of the second case and then try to read the small details of the third case while they talk. It was fun. I only said something that was directly contradicted by the case once, but I recovered quickly. By the time we got to the fourth case a very kind classmate had read ahead and took the bullet for me. Well, at least the judges know my name now.

Running = Free Stuff

Once again Kels and I took to the streets of DC over the weekend for a run and came back with some furniture. For those keeping score, this is now four weekends in a row. This time we found a lovely kitchen countertop-thing on wheels that can serve as an island in Kels's apartment. Even if there were not intrinsic rewards in running, I think it might be worth keeping up just for the extrinsic rewards.

Then again, there is also a 10k that I have to run in under 2 weeks. Uh-oh.

It is now the first week in October, which means that first assignments for everything are now coming due- Street Law monthly report, Journal mass proof, reading for negotiations seminar, model teaching assignment, etc.... so once again, the buzz saw is spinning up. Hooray!