Tuesday, March 28

• Hey class. I'm late. Whacha gonna do about it?
• Side project.
• Gym.
• Soup & Burger & 2 cartons of milk.
• Plotting and Scheming.
• Daily Show.
• Happy.
• Sleepy.

It is better to have beauty than to be beautiful.

Monday, March 27

• Another rehearsal, more blocking.
• Early gym.
• A relaxing evening with:

• Reading.
• Fake news.
• Music.
• Riya.

Poetry is the art of failing to define love. Good poetry fails with grace. Bad poetry fails oppositely.

Sunday, March 26

• Another proto-project.
• A student production took my language away.

Lion: My God, my children murder children.
God: Yes.

Saturday, March 25

• Stuff stuff.
• Gym gym.
  
• Guen's birthday party. I had a uniformly great time.
  

I'm not happy, but I am awake.

Friday, March 24

• My big day off!
• Strolled about town, reading.
• Watched some public domain flicks: Nosferatu, Reefer Madness, and Plan 9 From Outer Space (dear God).
• Began work on a proto-project involving streaming Internet video.
• Saw Thank You For Smoking.
• Saw Cruel Intentions.
• Slept.

Guen figured out my straight edge: I've just got a superiority complex.

Thurday, March 23

• 11:50: People who wake up after noon are losers.
• 12:00: Wowzers! My back hurts.
• 1:00: Hey, a use for my yoga mat.
• 2:00: Class. MEH!
• 5:00: Phirst phood of the day. I'm phucking starving!
• 8:00: Guess I'm not going to the gym.
• 9:10: Guess I am.
• 12:00: More phood.
• We'll see: I simply can't keep awake another second. PLOP!

"Live clipboard" fascinates and excites me.

Wednesday, March 22

• Great day at studio, Steph's class stood out (had a great contact improv with Argun).
• First real rehearsal with Jimmy.
• Got my iPod replaced.
• Spring is here: my suitemate and his girlfriend have been fucking (loudly) on and off for five hours. The stamina amazes me.

Note: I've got a new feed link on the left. That feed will contain every post regarding my personal life, be it from this or any other blog, Flickr, Zooomr, you name it. If you get this site through a feed reader (and why not!), be sure to use that feed, not the hipolsoc.blogspot.com one.

Tuesday, March 21

• Class.
• Ideas.
• Gym.
• Internet.

Happy Equonox!

Monday, March 20

• The second year conservatory kids did their poetry projects. One chick's pendulous boobies were wiggling around all during her piece and Lex and I could hardly keep ourselves together. I don't think I've laughed so hard in years.
• Rehearsals for Cloud Nine began on a fine foot. The readthrough went fine, sans Stacy as it was.
• I spent the whole rest of the night photocopying my face and dicking around in Second Life (I made a working copy of my script).

I forgot.

Sunday, March 19

• It turns out Laura is the All Time Universal Champion of Pinball. Who knew?
• The flight was fine.
• As was the SuperShuttle.
• While eating dinner, I recognized a girl from Flickr. We chatted for a bit. How nice.
• Gymed a skosh.
• SPRING CLEANING!

Smelling is not so good a sense as touching.

Saturday, March 18

• I got the JACKPOT in pinball. Take that dad!
• Mom made cookies.
• We went to get milk and movie and pizza.
• Dad won chess (gotta give him something).
• Steve came over during Momento.
• He and I made off to Krispy Kreme.
• We pursued town and I revealed my trade secret.
• Back home.

"Only if it's worth blogging about."

Saturday, March 11

• Went to go see the sis at Speech tournament.
• Took some pics (see Flickr).
• She didn't break.
• In fact, only one person from EV is going on to Nats.
• Went to Brittany's house for some TV.
• Went home for some computer.
• Went to bed for some book.

Friday, March 10

Our story begins innocently enough:

• Bade my studiomates goodbye.
• Hopped the SuperShuttle to LGA.
• Our driver divined his way through foreboding Astorian byways, but we made it all right.
  

At this point, things make a turn for the worse:

• No sooner does the boarding process begin, than they remove everyone from the plane and we sit once again at terminal ten.
• We wait and wait while I fall asleep.
• I finally awake to the PA announcement that this whole section of the airport must be evacuated. Yeah.
• When a few thousand people try to make it through one door, it takes more than Metamucil to get shit moving again. The funniest moment came when a disembodied voice addressed the gridlocked throngs with the message, "Folks, we need everyone to please get out of the terminal right now." That gave all of us a good chuckle.
• I really wish I'd gotten that doosey, but this slightly less amusing clip will have to suffice:

• It wasn't long before the bomb dogs arrived. As before, I missed the really good shot (this time of the crazy bomb dog scamp'rin' all over the place):

• I eventually made it on the plane and, from there, home. Always fun!
  

Tuesday, March 7

• I rot, or so I feel.
• Prepared a birthday gift.
• Memor
• Plotted and Schemed.
• ized.

My bag is lost, my chair is broke; surely this is the end of me.

Monday, March 6

• Mental health day.
• Read and watched Call of Cthulhu. The HPLHS did a bangup job.
• It's been a few weeks coming: this OS install is no longer tenable.
• Re-install from 1:30 AM to 6:20. Fuuuuuuuuuun. (Some pics are up)

How much I sweat in the weight room is not a function of my own physical activity, but the number of other people working out.

Th23

• Class was cancelled.
• I read.
• I saw the Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane dance company. It was transforming.
• I stayed up later than I should have.

Social moralities are relative; individual moralities are absolute.

W22

• "Scenes are not performances." I am referring to the two person scenes we prepare and present in studio and I am, of course, lying. When one performs one's work for the class and the instructor, it is part process and part production. For each part, one judges the showing by a different set of criteria. As process, one recognizes shortcomings, acknowledges accomplishments, gains understanding, and (usually) achieves progress. As production, one suffers another judgment which has little - if anything - to do with reality. A scene is either "good" or "shit" on the whim of one's humors, audience reaction, and, above all, teacher praise. While the former judgment is the objectively valid of the two, it is the latter that assaults one's piece of mind at bedtime. By every logical system of observation, my work has steadily improved over the last three and a half semesters. Logic notwithstanding, I have felt my most successful work thus far to have been "The Real Thing" which Scarlet and I performed this time last year. That changed today. With historically brief preparation, Patrick's and my "The Importance of Being Earnest" is the new gold standard in ego stimulation.
• We repeated the Crucible and it is now lain to rest. At last.
• Poor roommate is terribly ill again.
• Gymnasium.
• I intended to go to bed early, but plans change.

I'm a picker. Nits, buggers, scabs; I pick.

T21

• Waking can sometimes be a joyous, gentle transition from peaceful void to sensual reality. Today it was not.
• One does much walking in New York. I probably average an hour or more of walking the streets in a day. Podcasts - God bless them - fill the time nicely, but when one is all out, one must invent more creative methods of amusement. Enter the Imitate-Other-Peoples'-Walks game. It is a game to be played alone and is ideal for young actors training in the art of human observation. I will skip the description of the rules and share an anecdote from my game today. I passed a man with a stiff limp in his right leg on 2nd and 17th. I adopted the limp for some blocks, imagining the cause of my malady (army, accident, defect, disease) and I was trucking along pretty well for a fellow with a hindrance, when I passed a man without any legs. I dropped my limp with guilt.
• "The Politics of portraiture" continues to demonstrate its bullshitiness.
• "721 Broadway" is both the address and the title of the building that headquarters the Tisch School of the Arts. It is strange for the building of an art school to bear so utilitarian a name, but the business school had a previous claim to "Tisch Hall." Seven Twenty One is an attractive, well-equipped facility with 12 floors. It is the high level of decor that further emphasized the anomaly of floor #9. When Chrissy suggested we conduct our Crucible rehearsal on the ninth, I imagined some wonderland of sound-proofed, climate controlled rehearsal studios of which I was unaware. Instead I stepped from the elevator into a destitute, deserted, half-demolished Twilight-Zone-esk dimension of trash and exposed insulation. It was as though a single floor from some abandoned building were wedged into the middle of our high-tech tower of tasteful lighting and Ikea furniture. How truely bizarre. Interestingly, there were two or three other groups of actors rehearsing elsewhere amongst the rubble (I assume from a few glimspes that they were actors; they might actually have been angry, drug dealing squatters). After failing to open a number of locked rooms, we came upon the doors without any doorknobs. A small and relatively uncluttered room proved a fine practice space and we had a productive time. I must return some day soon to this Bermuda-Triangle-Like paradox to take some serious pictures. Until then, I can only hope this Creepy Narnia respects my wishes and STAYS THEY HELL OUT OF MY DREAMS!
• Despite two semesters of groupmatesmanship, Pat and I have never had a scene together. So you can imagine our glee last Wednesday when Jimmy paired us up for The Importance of Being Earnest. In fact, it was so great, we totally forgot about it! The three day weekend came and went with nary a thought to the scene slated for the coming Day of Wednes. It wasn't until today that a fuzzy little memory ticked the backs of my eyeballs. "Oh Fuck!" I may have said. I called Pat immediately and discovered that he had rehearsal until 9. Since another scene scheduled for that day had already canceled, there was no way we could pull out. With script in hand, I trek down to Water St. at 9pm for the cram jam of a lifetime. Well, suffice to say, it was crazy. We cut a third of the lines, drilled the remaining dialouge, watched the Daily Show, ate hotdogs, ran lines some more, paced up and down, took turns on and off book, ran the lines more, until, by 1:40, all of my brains had leaked out through my ears. I crashed on Pat's couch with the script under my pillow. How will this fadge?!
  

Beauty is youth.

The Three Day Weekend

I've spent most of my three day weekend embarking on a new project. It involves subways and computers. I went through the arduous task of setting up a server and reacquainted myself with PHP and MySQL. I've hacked together a nice little website that uses Google Maps to display the location of every subway station in NYC and which trains stop where. That's not a terribly special achievement: there are already sites out there with such info (in fact, I bummed the whole data set from someone else - though getting their data into MySQL involved a brief detour into Python). The cool thing I've done is add the ability to overlay the route of each train. So, for the red 1 train, you can see a red line showing the train's entire path, not just the stations where it stops. The code-writing has been slow and steady (as it always is for me) but fun. The Google Maps API is a joy and, despite a lack of forethought and some atrocious naming conventions, I've build a nice, flexible system. The site lives on my machine, so it's only up when I'm on and running the server. Feel lucky? See if it's up. If it's not, try again later.

F17

A pretty standard day with all of the usual suspects:

• Studio.
• Meals.
• Sleepiness.
• Greater-than-usual joy.
• Only mild sadness.
• Gym.
• Computer.
• Pictures.
• Music.
• Humor.
• News.

"If you're feeling sinister, go off and see your minister." - Belle And Sebastian