The Story Wherein Kelsey Does Not Ruin Thanksgiving

Wednesday was the first day of Thanksgiving break. The plan was to go to Kels's house to help her pack some things and then go back to my place to be picked up by Mom and Rachel. Since I am writing this in my blog and since you have no doubt grown accustomed to my story set-ups, you already know that the plan did not quite work as expected. In fact, so many things went wrong that it almost seemed right.

First, Kels locked her car keys and house keys in her house. Also in her house were my keys to my house that I had forgotten. Everything was alright, though, because her landlord was just fifteen minutes away and said he would be able to come back because his work had not started yet. Kelsey went to go sit behind her house and wait. Because she was raised in Virginia and is polite, she texted him to advise him of her location:

"Waiting in back of house. Head hung in shame."

He texted back "No problem."

Twenty minutes later, Kelsey slowly came to the realization that her landlord had thought that she was telling him that she had gotten back in the house and that he had likely turned around and gone back to work. A phone call confirmed this, and her landlord informed her that he could not get off work until 3PM. Kelsey then burst into tears and started repeating the mantra "I killed Thanksgiving" over and over again. She had not, but she kept saying this.

Then- hope! I knew that everyone who had a key to my house (where I had a spare key to Kels's house which I had also forgotten to bring) was gone for break, but I did not know that Noah and given Davia his key to hold while he was gone. This provided a window of opportunity and a plan was hatched.

I took Mom's car with Rach while Mom and Kels stayed at Kels's place and drove to the law center, where Davia was working. Davia came out to give me the key and while looking for a place to pull over I scraped the car against the bumper of a mail truck. Davia helpfully asked me, in all sincerity, why I had hit the truck. I think I said something along the lines of "because that's how this day has decided to go and I'm not going to fight it anymore" but I am not sure she heard me. The truck driver came out and said there was no damage to her bumper at all so I could just go.

So I went back to my place and was shocked when I was able to get in without destroying something or ripping off the door-handle. Got my keys, went back to Kels's place, got her keys out and my keys back, and went on our way.

It was great to be back in Maryland for Thanksgiving. Rachel and I ran four miles on Thanksgiving morning so that we could eat more during the day. Well, that's why I did it, at least.

Friday morning we headed back to DC early because we had tickets to see Jekyll and Hyde at the Kennedy Center starring one of the guys who didn't win American Idol. To be fair to Constantine, he was actually the best part of the show. The show itself left me wondering how any producer ever thought that it would be any good. The plot seems written by a fifth grader:

A doctor wants to get his insane father out of the insane asylum and develops (don't ask how) a serum (don't ask what it's made of) to separate (don't ask how) the evil (don't ask what this means) and the good (this either) from man (don't ask where the evil goes once it is separated). Skipping all animal trials or even illicit volunteer trials, the doctor violates every rule of scientific method that has ever existed and injects himself with what appears to be 50 gallons of phosphorescent liquids that also happen to be conducting electricity (don't ask where THAT comes from). This turns the doctor into a terrible monster who takes a different name and takes his hair out from a ponytail in order to become ENTIRELY UNRECOGNIZABLE to people who have known him for his whole life. The doctor, when he is back to being himself, tells no one what is happening and tries to fix it himself by ordering drugs (don't ask why he knows these drugs will work) from the least efficient apothecary on the planet. Then he turns back into the monster and kills everyone BECAUSE SCIENCE. 

Someone looked at this plot and said "sounds great! But when we make it into a musical, let's be sure that there is only one real full company song so that we can fill the rest of the show with solo pieces because audiences love an entire show filled with nothing but one person singing to and with himself. Right? Right?"

I'm being harsh. It was a fun show, it just didn't make any sense.

On Saturday Kels and I went to see Skyfall, or as I like to call it: Home Alone V: Skyfall, because a large portion of the movie was basically a more violent and realistic interpretation of the home invasion sequence from any Home Alone movie. I enjoyed it.

Today I was able to see Brian and Kay as they passed through on their way up to Philly, and then it was off to work in the library. After the library we celebrated Jeff's birthday with some wine, cheese, chili, and cornbread. We almost celebrated with a tart, but it was moldy so we just sang a sad happy birthday song while Jeff held a moldy tart. We also decorated the Christmas tree, because it is Christmas season now and our house will smell like a pine forest for the next month because that's how Christmas is done.

Negotiations (Part 2)

This past weekend I did the second half of my two-weekend Negotiations Seminar. Though three 9-5 days (plus homework) over the weekend was taxing and difficult, the course itself was so good that I would do it again in a heartbeat. My role in the final negotiation simulation of the weekend was that of saboteur to a six-party multi-billion dollar deal. I got to gleefully pretend like I was engaging in principled negotiation tactics while in reality subverting the entire process. Though I didn't succeed in sinking the entire negotiation, I did manage to make two of the parties extremely angry at one another for absolutely no reason. Even after I explained that my job had been to derail the negotiations and that I had purposefully misled both of them against one another, they were still angry at each other. Negotiating is a very serious game.

My final project for this class is going to be a case negotiation that I will need to workshop, so I may bother some of you in the next month or so if you would like to help out.

I lost some time last week to a brief stomach virus. While I am 100% healthy and feeling great now, I had to spend last Tuesday in bed all day. At first I thought it was food poisoning and so I threw out everything that I had eaten that day, but then Kelsey and Josh got the same thing. It was a worse bug than I've had in a while. At one point, around 3AM, I recall being crouched over my trashcan whimpering "I have nothing left to give" to my body, in the hopes that it might cease its noble work of removing the perceived threat from my system by any means necessary. So that was fun.

Everything else about the week went very well. My students were half-overjoyed and half-dejected that I had shaved my mutton chops. Their attachment to the facial hair was unexpected.

Last night, Kels went to go see Twilight with Stephanie R., so Ben and Micah and I had a man-date. We went to the Beergartenhaus on H street and had liters of beer and many plates of delicious sauerkraut. Afterwards, Ben demonstrated his growing ability of drink mixing and created some remarkable cocktails with very uncommon ingredients.

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.