24 February 2008

A brief scene analysis

There is a scene from Pride & Prejudice that makes me squirm with dramatic-ironic delight every time I watch it. The Bennett family comes to collect Jane after she has stayed a while at Pemberly, being sick with cold and fever when she was forced to ride to the house in the rain. Lizzie and Mr. Darcy have established their mutual disaffection for each other, and yet, he offers his hand to assist her climbing into the carriage. Without a thought, she accepts.

Finding her properly climbed in, he drops his hand, spins on his heel and stalks off.


Their individual reactions to their unexpected but assumed encounter are unique but striking. Lizzie, obviously impacted by his actions and perhaps by her own, watches him walk off with a look of conflict, confusion, and intrigue.


Exciting enough for a general audience member, true. But ah! It's Darcy's reaction that is so entangling!


So much is conveyed in that simple hand gesture! Discomfort, dignified embarrassment, awkward propriety, excitement, repulsion, perhaps even a certain electricity he intends to shake out. Though we see his set jaw a moment later, it is his hand that expresses all we need to know about their exchange. His hand puts the audience directly in his place and we know exactly how we are meant to feel in that moment.

This, my friends, is why I love storytelling, in all it's forms.

19 February 2008

Deutsch

ANGST. ANGST. ANGST.

Ich hasse Deutsch. Ich hasse, wie es mich macht, fühle dumm als ein Stein. Ich kanne die Wörter oder die Regeln nicht erinnern!!!

Das booooooo:(

13 February 2008

What's happened to the theater?

Especially where dancing is concerned.

Hey. So, it turns out I'm in a play right now. Also turns out it's a pretty adorable show.


WHO: Me, but mostly a bunch of my talented friends and a Boston Terrier.
I wear fox furs, you guys. Like, two foxes scalped, stuffed, sewn together, and thrown around my shoulders. Also, these people I get to work with are pretty spectacular soo... bonus for you as an audience. The Boston Terrier's name is Maximus and he is a very good dog. Oh, and for any Timpview grads-- Mr. Chris Brower is playing piano and gracing the stage.

WHAT: "She Loves Me"
It's pretty much "You've Got Mail" only a musical, set in 1930s Hungary. I mean sure, you're not going to hear Tom Hanks say anything about going to the mattresses, but hello, The Godfather hadn't been produced in the 1930s. And letter-writing is WAY more cute than screen names like "ShopGirl."

WHERE: Hale Center Theater Orem
225 W 400 N
Orem, UT 84057
(801) 226-8600

WHEN: February 14 - April 5
It's true. You have almost two whole months to get around to stopping by. And LUCKY YOU, I'm appearing nightly! so you won't miss out. I mean, should you feel so inclined to come see it that is.

WHY: For the love of musicals/1930s fashion/Boston Terriers/adorability/Me
I'm not even tooting my own horn here, this is a seriously boss show. It's STINKING cute, and Jerry Elison makes us all cry with adorable heartbreak every single night. I hate overusing words, but really, "adorable" is all that comes to mind. Adorable adorable adorable.

HOW: It just might be your lucky day...
As luck would have it, I have a number of FREE VOUCHERS still available to use before March 13! What? How do you get your hands on one/more of these? Foist come foist served, my friends. I'll give them away till I don't have any more, but they are limited in number. But listen! Don't feel bad if I run out! You can still come see for a small fee. As an added benefit, most guys will easily impress their dates as their dates will be ready to fall in love with anyone by the end of the evening-- plan accordingly.


Anyway. There's my shameless plug. If you'd like to see me in fox furs or looking like Nancy Drew, now you know how.

12 February 2008

43-- mildly well-read

Here is a list of top 101 books voted on by customers in an Australian bookstore. Bold the ones you've read:

1. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
2. Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
5. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
6. The Hobbit (J.R.R. Tolkien)
7. Harry Potter 1-7 (J.K. Rowling)

8. The Power Of One (Bryce Courtenay)
9. Magician (Raymond E. Feist)
10. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)

11. The Time Traveller's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
12. Cloudstreet (Tim Winton)
13. Cross Stitch (Diana Gabaldon)
14. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
15. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
16. Tuesdays With Morrie (Mitch Albom)
17. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)

18. The Alchemist (Paulo Coehlo)
19. Mao's Last Dancer (Li Cunxin)
20. Catch 22 (Joseph Heller)

21. Little Women (Louise May Alcott)
22. The Bronze Horseman (Paulina Simmons)
23. The Bible (God and assorted others)
24. Eragon (Christopher Paolini)
25. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
26. The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. The Book Thief (Markus Zusak)
28. Tomorrow, When the War Began (John Marsden)
29. Ice Station (Matthew Reilly)
30. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)

31. The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy)
32. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
33. Perfume (Patrick Suskind)
34. Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)

35. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
36. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
37. Twilight (Stephenie Meyer)
38. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)

39. The Pact (Jodi Picoult)
40. A Suitable Boy (Vikram Seth)

41. Angela's Ashes (Frank McCourt)
42. April Fool's Day (Bryce Courtenay)
43. Captain Corelli's Mandolin (Louis de Bernieres)
44. Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
45. Shantaram (Gregory David Roberts)
46. The Chronicles of Narnia (C.S. Lewis)
47. Tully (Paulina Simmons)
48. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
49. The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

50. A Fortunate Life (A.B. Facey)

51. Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier)
52. River God (Wilbur Smith)
53. Wild Swans (Jung Chang)
54. Nineteen Eighty Four (George Orwell)
55. Midnight's Children (Salman Rushdie)
56. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
57. Persuasion (Jane Austen)

58. The Shipping News (Annie Proulx)
59. War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)
60. The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame)

61. Birdsong (Sebastian Faulks)
62. Possession (A.S. Byatt)
63. We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lionel Shriver)
64. Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
65. My Family and Other Animals (Gerald Durrell)
66. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
67. Bridget Jones's Diary (Helen Fielding)

68. Dune (Frank Herbert)
69. Emma (Jane Austen)
70. Marley and Me (John Grogan)

71. Middlemarch (George Eliot)
72. Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen)
73. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)

74. The Secret History (Donna Tartt)
75. Chocolat (Joanne Harris)

76. Dirt Music (Tim Winton)
77. Looking for Alibrandi (Melina Marchetta)
78. My Brilliant Career (Miles Franklin)
79. The Ancient Future (Traci Harding)
80. The Belgariad (David Eddings)

81. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
82. The Eyre Affair (Jasper Fforde)
83. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
84. The Shadow of the Wind (Carlos Ruiz Zafon)
85. The Stand (Stephen King)
86. It (Stephen King)
87. Northern Lights (Nora Roberts)
88. Diary of a Young Girl (Anne Frank)
89. The Memory Keeper's Daughter (Kim Edwards)
90. The Outsider (Albert Camus)

91. The Riders (Tim Winton)
92. Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson)
93. Across the Nightingale Floor (Lian Hearn)
94. Atonement (Ian McEwan)
95. Circle of Friends (Maeve Binchy)
96. Seven Ancient Wonders (Matthew Reilly)
97. Tess of the D'Ubervilles (Thomas Hardy)
98. The Godfather (Mario Puzo)
99. The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)
100. The Other Boleyn Girl (Phillippa Gregory)
101. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)

10 February 2008

On Roommates

I am a college student. I cannot afford my own apartment. Even if I could, there are few/none to be found within the required 1-mile radius from campus, so I join the ranks of starving college students throughout the world and share my house with other starving college students.

Some people are lucky (or wise) enough to rent rooms with people they know. Sure, you always run the risk of losing friends because sometimes even the best friends make the most lousy roommates, but I'd argue that the odds for success are better between familiar roommates. I've been burned a few times in past, so I made the decision this year to find a place where I could have my very own, private little corner.

*Benefits to having my very own, private little corner:
--100% control over the clutter factor. Any and all clutter is my own problem.
--I may have a repeated love affair with the Snooze Button, with no concern I'm waking someone up or annoying them.
--Closet. Space.
--Earphones are an accessory not a necessity, especially after 11pm.
--Undisturbed escape from unwanted/uninvited/loud guests.
--I could sleep naked. I don't, but the option is mine.

*Similar bnefits also apply to having my very own, private pantry for non-perishable food, though I can't say I'd want to sleep naked in my pantry.

As far as I can see, really the only drawback to having a private room is padding my rent check with a few more bucks than the girls who share a room but honestly, that $35 is priceless. At least in theory.

For the most part, having a private room has been all it's chalked up to be. It's very nice to be able to come in at night as late as I want without having to be respectful and quiet for the person fast asleep four feet to my right. But really, for all the benefits of a private room, sharing a bedroom isn't all that bad.

In my experience, what I have found most difficult in sharing an apartment with 2-4 other girls is not so much the bedroom area, but the public area. Sharing a space between two people may be aggravating and perhaps a bit compromising, but when you start sharing things between 5 people, that's when things start to get messy... And I do mean that as literally as I do figuratively.

One would think that five girls between the ages of 20 and 23 would be grownup enough to be able to divide the limited space of a refrigerator, for example. There are many factors to take into account-- potential leftover containers, how many individual gallons of milk might need to be stored, how large an item should be in relation to how quickly it's going to get eaten, etc. At the moment, this is what I have stored in our fridge/freezer:
--1 tub margarine
--1 bottle Ken's Lite Caesar salad dressing
--1 container leftover Massaman curry from Bangkok Thai
--1 jar tomato sauce
--1 jar salsa
--6 frozen dinners
--1 lb frozen ground beef
--3 bags frozen vegetables
--3 popcicles
--1 container cottage cheese
--1 package sliced cheese
--1 package Deli-sliced turkey
--(Until this morning when I finished it) 1 gallon milk

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is not a great deal of food that needs to be refrigerated. In my opinion, even if you multiplied this by 5 girls, it would not be enough to actually fill the fridge, much less to the capacity to which mine is currently filled. I have been known to check myself when grocery shopping, preferring to buy groceries that do not need to be refrigerated so I don't have fight to fit my things inside, not to mention label it in an obvious enough way so that my milk is not suddenly gone after four uses. Though I'll be honest, labeling is not even a guarantee for anything.

The disaster that is the rest of the kitchen, due to the dishwasher and various cleaning products being ignored, is too large a topic to attempt to tackle just now.

Juggling the living room can be a feat. Here we only have one television. While much of the time housemates may be indifferent to what's playing, it's usually a first-come-first-served arrangement. Tension may run high, however, in the following situations:
--Pleasant quietness interrupted by loud roommates arriving home
--A long string of questions beginning with "What's this?" when a roommate walks into a film or TV show in progress
--DVDs are lent out at will, regardless of who they actually belong to
--Taking extended naps (as opposed to accidental naps) on the couch in the middle of the day
--Dishes, trash, schoolbooks, clothing, blankets, etc. left strewn throughout the room until someone else picks it up

Another potential problem is the shared bathroom. Ah, the shared bathroom. The only thing better than having my very own, private little corner would be to also have my very own, private little bathroom (recognizing that my very own, private little apartment is not an option).

There are a number of tricks in sharing a bathroom including scheduling showers, using the mirror, and purchasing toilet paper. You must be sure to wash all extraneous hair that may have pulled from your head from the shower walls. You must keep the number of Bath and Body Works shower gels to an appropriate amount, since you have to share the corners of the bath with other people and they have shampoo too. Globs of toothpaste left behind in the sink may be acceptable to you, but it is never acceptable in a shared bathroom situation. Prescriptions of any kind may not be shared, even if they look harmless, like a face wash. The prescription was written for someone specifically, and you don't know how much that face wash costs, please and thank you!

Moreover, it must also be explicitly assumed that it is unacceptable to use toiletry items, such as hairspray, makeup, or tissues, that are located within the sacred walls of the very own, private little corner belonging to someone else, particularly if the door is SHUT. For that matter, do not enter any room where the door is shut unless it's your own. For that matter, do not enter any room that does not house any of your personal belongings unless given permission.

And, as if it needs to be reiterated, do not, under any circumstances, open the closed door to a room for which you are not paying rent and have the audacity to help yourself to ANYTHING. Typically, a person is paying extra money for a private room so it remains exactly that: private.


So I guess as much as I enjoy the benefits of my very own, private little corner, they cannot possibly ever outweigh the benefits of living blissfully, comfortably alone. Grass is always greener, isn't it?

01 February 2008

Once, I got new glasses

And I love them. Behold.

The reactions I've had to these new glasses of mine have been varied. Generally positive, but then of course there are those people who can't decide how they feel about them-- they're not entirely hateful, but they're not some people's taste, so they stare at them a while, considering them until they realize I've noticed they're staring. That's when they say, "I like your glasses" because they can't come up with any other polite way of telling you they don't actually like them.

True, they're men's glasses. True, they're quasi-tortise shell frames and true, they air on the side of Coke bottle glasses in that they magnify my eyeballs a little bit. But hello? Do you see many other people prancing around with glasses like mine on their faces?

Cue resounding: No!

Luckily most people laugh and say something like, "Only you can pull those off." I'm pretty sure it's a compliment, though vague. I'm not above padding my ego every now and then with stolen compliments.

But what exactly does that mean-- "Only you can pull those off." I mean, I know I have a sparkling personality and everything, and I love clothes. I'm a fashionista as long as a trend amuses me. Well, actually I'm not so much a fashionista as much as I just wear trends that amuse me.

Take, for example, the shoes I'm wearing now. They're little flat slip-on sneakers with staves of music printed all over them. I haven't sat down at the piano just yet to play my shoes and figure out what sonata is written on them, but I'm pretty sure it's Bach. I feel safe saying most musically-inclined clothes credit Bach. Anyway, I've never seen another person wearing these shoes and I think there are few people I can even picture wearing them. My sister, of course, which is why she was delighted when she saw them.

So between my music shoes, my man glasses, and many other choice items from my wardrobe, I've got myself set up to be pretty unique. But it baffles me. This term unique doesn't really have a very solid definition to me, mostly because I look around campus and see hords of students who evidently use their wardrobes for self expression. Gag. Maybe it's the traditionalist coming out in me, but I have little patience for this self expression business. It falls into the same category as feminism and songs like Take Me or Leave Me. What if I don't want to take OR leave you? What if I'm indifferent and would rather just let you be? Then all your whining was for naught, wasn't it?

Anyway, I think it goes without saying that people who are actively using their clothes as a form of self expression are trying to make some kind of statement. Usually I'm not really sure what their statement is supposed to be stating, so mostly I ignore it except to think to myself, That is the ugliest pair of furry boots I've ever seen in my life. If that's what they intended me to think, then I guess they were right on. But if we've got all of these people trying to make statements (consciously or unconsciously), then how many of those statements are actually being made? Have we just become unique for the sake of being unique? And frankly, I'm pretty sure it actually trendy in itself to be unique. If our collective goal is to revel in our own uniqueness, exactly how unique are we?

There's a paradox for you.

This is why I don't pretend to wear clothes that do anything more than tickle my fancy, aside from the basic societal and environmental need to not be naked. I don't listen to indie music because I need to be individualistic, I don't watch and claim to love ca-razy artsy-fartsy movies that will never win an Oscar because it's unconventional. I like things that amuse me. I'll like things until they cease to amuse me. This is the sole reason why I chose this specific pair of glasses.

I guess that could be interpreted as shallow or fickle. If I'm merely amused by things, exactly how deep is my investment here? But in a world where goucho pants are EVERYWHERE one summer and totally out by wintertime, I personally don't see why my "style" should aim to achieve anything beyond amusing me. I don't care if they're not "in." I don't care if I've never seen another person wearing my shoes, and I don't care if mittons are popular.

Here's the catch-- I also wouldn't care if everyone else on campus was wearing mittons like a 5-year old (or in this case, me), too. If one day I'm the only one traipsing around with these glasses on my face and then suddenly everyone else is as well, I don't care. To paraphrase one classy guest on the Montel Williams show, "I wear what I want!"

But to be clear, my glasses are not, in fact, making a personal statement. I do not wear them for any particular obnoxious form of self expression. I saw them, and they amused me, and if you don't like them well, you can take me or leave me.