So Touch the Stars

Guess what song is being given away for free on iTunes today?
"Cynthia" by Millionyoung

It's the only song with my name in the title that isn't a country/Bruce Springsteen/ridiculously depressing song! Woot!

Check it out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZlp679Klq4

Meditation

Paper journal (#11) entry for 2/3/10
Written lyrics credited to Death Cab for Cutie : Where Soul Meets Body

Text transcribed from top to bottom, left to right:
"Sometimes words can be hopelessly inadequate."
"We speak human."
"'I'll do the best I can.'"
"being able to hear my thoughts and actually listen to them."
"Rooting Around in the Past"
"I do believe its true, that there are roads left in both of our shoes, but If the Silence takes me, then I hope it takes you too."

KCACTF

I haven't updated for a bit and for that I apologize. Honestly the things I could have written I didn't want to have read, which, I know, might sound strange coming from me. But you know, some things you just want to stay in your heart and once you let them out you can't get them back again. HOWEVER, I did come up with a magical new topic to write about: KCACTF.

KCACTF? What the fuck is that, you might be thinking...
Drumroll please!
Kennedy Center for the Arts American College Theater Festival.
Whew.
Can someone get me a glass of water?

That mouthful was what I spent a week at UNH for (yes....that could very well be what she said), and it was awesome (again, I know). I apologize for the lewd puns, I am a) still sleep deprived b) giddy with the start of a new semester (take two) and c) just coming off an entire week spent with 4 college boys and only 1 other female in a very small house.

In any case, last week 5 other friends and I drove up to UNH (though we stayed at my lake house to avoid expensive hotel fees) to participate in KCACTF which is basically a conference/convention/competition/festival for theater nerds. Bryan, Daniel, and I all entered our designs for Set, Lights, and Sound respectively for a show we put up last semester (The Dybbuk). Needless to say, none of us won anything, but it was a lot of fun to compete and to see everyone else's designs from all over New England. We also were able to attend a lot of workshops, such as one entitled How to Mutilate a Dead Body (a props workshop)...it was awesome. We also brought along with us our director (Lily), who participated in a program casting and directing a short 10 minute original play. Though this program wasn't a competition for the directors, her play did win the best script award, so that's something. It was very well done and we all love her for many sleepless hours casting and blocking it! Lastly, one of our actors (Dan) and his scene partner (Little Bryan) also came to participate in the acting competition. They also didn't win anything, but competiton was stiff, so it's all good. C'est la vie!

Regardless of the results, we all had an AMAZING week full of sleep deprivation, pasta, zucchini sticks, sexual inuendos, Transformers, awesome music, way too much driving, freezing weather, car trouble (SYDNEY PLEASE SURVIVE), no internet (except while on campus), meeting cool people, networking, french vanilla coffee, and SO MUCH THEATER! I really had a good time and, though I probably wouldn't go again, I'm really glad I went (despite the ridiculous amount of work I have to make up)...thanks guys for a fantastic week!!

Below are some pictures of our designs:

My Sound Design Presentation

Bryan's Scenic Design Presentation

Daniel's Lighting Design Presentation

Letting Go

Ah, new semester...breathe that air. It smells like slushy snow and being cooped up inside where it's not all that warm (Pomerantz turn on the heat!!). It smells like dinning hall food and roomie notes back and forth. Now, I know that you have to reach out to get back. You have to put something on the table to have someone give you something in return. It's only give and take, human nature at it's best (or worst, if you prefer). But sometimes I feel I've been giving my whole life and getting very little in return. And, you know, I'm only 20, I got time for the world to pay me back when I'm old and gray, but I'd sort of wished that I could get it sooner, or at least a taste of it, by dating you. That sounds some kind of awful when not said in my head. Put it this way: I thought maybe we were different.

For those of you who check this often and who caught the last post that I just took down, please disregard it. Broken hearts make you say terrible things sometimes. The truth is that I know that life goes on, and hearts mend, and all that jazz, but in the meantime, I can't help but sit here and mourn. Because I am so sorry, sorry that I forced you to tears, and sorry that I hurt you, sorry that in the end I couldn't wait for something that was sure to have been amazing if this was another time in our lives. But, truth be told, I too am also hurt, hurt that when I opened up you disappeared, hurt that you would ever consider what we were to be a "lovey dovey stage," hurt that as much time as I devoted to us over this break, all you did was evade me and lie to me. So I guess now we're both victims.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that this new semester is supposed to be about moving on and trying the new and letting myself change. I signed up to Associate Light Design a show this spring instead of my usual Sound Design. I'm going to start going to Charlamos and Triskelion and BOMS meetings again. I will make time to go to my job at Spingold and save away some money for the summer. I will not make the same mistakes as Freshman Semester. I'm going to sign up for one new club or activity at the Involvement Fair. I'm going to go dancing in Boston. I'm going to actually go to Boston to just walk around, see Andy and Rachel and Matt maybe. I'm going somewhere for February or Passover Break. I don't know where yet, but somewhere. I'm applying to out of state summer internships.

You see? I have all these goals, but they seem so hard to do, when I spend the better part of days still wondering what we would be doing right now if I had waited one more day and I had come home Thursday night and you had been so peppy like you were. I oscilate every hour between feeling so confident and feeling so lost. Maybe that's just how we're meant to go through life. Whatever this is, whether it is the violation of expectation or simply the process of letting go, I know I'll survive. In the back of my mind I always know it. But just know this: sometimes I fall into memories of you and then I have no idea where to go or what to do or how to act. I'd really like to hold your hand again. You were the only one who has ever promised to wipe away my tears and hold me when I needed it. Now I don't know if that will ever happen, and I'm not sure why I think that's the most valuable thing I've lost.

"The dust has only just begun
to form crop circles in the carpet,
sinking feeling.
Spin me 'round and rub my eyes.
This can't be happening."

- Imogen Heap : Hide and Seek -

I Believe

I realized recently, that I define myself by what I don't believe in, by what I stand against, by what I contradict. Slightly depressing, no? You can't define a an object by saying what it's not. The definition of a table cannot be "a thing that is not a toothbrush." We have to define things by what they are, even if they change later. A simple enough concept that has escaped me for nearly two decades of life. I'm thinking maybe 2010 should be about believing in things. I don't know what they are yet, but I've resolved to stop over-thinking my life, love, and future. Those relate somehow in my head. Letting things go, living out of control every once in a while, not analyzing everything, not stitching myself back up with melancholy, and beginning anew to have goals, dreams, hopes, a future that doesn't seem shadowy and looming.

So I'm starting now, under last night's Blue Moon gaze:

I believe in words. I believe they have power in their specificity. You can say exactly what you mean in text.

I believe in the need to believe. The human desire to put faith in something as opposed to merely surviving.

I believe in the subjective. I believe that the only way to ever actually connect with someone else is trust, because we are all separate beings, and there's no reason to believe that my brain sees the same color blue that you do.

I believe that this is sounding like a Mr. Bouton excercise, but I'm going to keep going anyway...

I believe in the sunrise, that it will happen every day. I believe in cycles. I believe in music. I believe in emotion. Yes, those are all related.

I believe in random acts of kindness. I believe in putting an extra dime or two into the parking meter. I believe in leaving pennies on the street for children to pick up. I believe in sincere compliments. I believe that the weather can be a perfectly good conversation topic.

I believe in finding and being found. I believe that there are sapphires in teardrops. Yo creí.

I believe that night reveals the brightest stars. I believe in sucking out the marrow of life. I believe that pitch black doesn't exist. I believe in hope. I hope for hope.

"Day after day,
give me clouds, and rain, and gray.
Give me pain, if that's what's real.
It's the price we pay to feel.
The price of love is loss,
but still we pay, we love anyway!"
- Next to Normal : Light -

As Wide as the Texas Sky

Today I dozed off and dreamed that your arms were around me, warm. But when I woke up, I could no longer remember what you smelled like.

A day ago, a friend of mine wrote in her blog, "I worry about my future and yet I dig my heels into the present."
Touché. I do as well.

A few nights ago I stayed up late in a house that had ceased to become a home for a friend of mine. Or at least, that's what it seemed like; bedroom taken over by a younger brother, ghosts of posters still on the walls even though he had debated taking them down for months because the "beat no longer suited him," sleeping bag and no pillows in the back room, threats of long-past divorce hanging in the air (or were they long-past?). We talked until 1am about God and how humans long ago figured out that surviving, while it can be done, is not worthwhile, and how it therefore became part of human nature to need to believe in something, to have faith in something, whether that thing is beauty, whether that thing is people, your fellow travelers, whether that thing is merely logic, whether it is religion. And if it is religion, how of course we, consciously or unconsciously make our lives our own. How certainly each of is is forever changed by our subjective universe, certainly each of our faiths is not perfectly symmetrical to the rest.

And I do not know yet what all these things have to do with one another, but they are linked, perhaps only because each is subjective and I am myself. Perhaps only because the soft silence of the way snow falls in New England and the way the lake starts to freeze over and the sunset steeps the sky in majestic blues and purples, an exotic tea, makes us turn our thoughts inward sometimes. Perhaps only because love, I've decided, is as wide as the Texas sky...

"And the piano's this melancholy soundtrack to her smile."
- The Airborne Toxic Event : Sometime Around Midnight -

Countdowns

Countdowns. Why do we love them as much as we do? I don't love them, not right now. 10 days. How can I love 10 days? I just want more time, more time with you, more time here. And I know, I know in 10 days the world won't end. I know, but that doesn't make it any better. Doesn't make me feel like I'm drowning any less. I wrote it before I even could feel it. The inevitability. The wind with it's first breath scattering it. I didn't find that, you did. And I know I have faith and you have hope and together it might very well be fine. But I'd still like some oxygen. Please.

Because, I finally found some peace these last few weeks. I finally found a home, in many ways. And I'm so afraid of loosing them, those homes, especially just after I found them. And I don't know for sure, but I feel like you've found some too... Can't we keep that? Please? Finders keepers? I want to keep you. I just want to keep you...

Y me sentí, cuando tú tomaba mi mano entre tuyas, que no va a ser bien. No sé porque, era solamente un emoción, yo sé este tambien. A me aparece que sé todo and sé nada al mismo tiempo. Me sentí como sentía en Madrid. Me sentí como sentía en el avion cruzando el mar Atlántico. Me sentí como estaba perdiendo algo que ya no entiendo. Me sentí como estaba perdiendo algo que no era importante hasta fuera perdida a mi. Pero, en Madrid, no sabía nada de la importancía de mi vida allí antes que saliera, y sabía todo despues. Sentí, en este momento, este tarde, que este no es el caso ahora. Ahora, yo sé. Cogé la realización que te amo. Cogé la realización que esta relación entre nosotros no voy a perder. No quiero a y no voy a. Y ahora, siento un poco triste, pero siento la esperanza tambien. Siento los dos. No sé si puedo hacerlo. Nadie sabe. Necesitamos esperar y ver y esperar. Y como siempre, este es el más dificil. Pero voy. Voy.