E-lim-i-nate the negative

It's a sad truth that no matter how well the rest of your life is going, you feel compelled to complain. I'm going to ignore that urge today and focus on the positive. Good Lord it gets exhausting. I still don't really think of myself as an optimistic person; the majority of my life has been spent feeling sure that something horrible lurked just around the corner and it's only recently that I've tried to ac-cen-tchu-ate the positive. It certainly takes practice and the songs aren't nearly as good. Right now I'm getting kind of tired of keeping the ol' chin up, but I don't want to slip into the Slough of Despond just at the moment, so let's brainstorm.

The weather is lousy...but nice if you're indoors. The grosser weather becomes, the more fun it is to stay indoors with a cup of tea making playlists and doing homework. (Especially when your professors have a sense of humor and put jokes in your exams.) Today I sacrificed breakfast for 15 extra minutes of sleep, so after Chem when I found myself downtown in the disgusting sloppy rain, I went to Woodstar and got a bagel and hot chocolate. They drew a heart out of cream on my hot chocolate, the bagel was delicious (and I think it was homemade), and if I had had a copy of the Times I would have been completely at peace. All around me were folks having late breakfasts: trim older ladies wearing neutral-toned fleece, twentysomething guys with laptops, one or two fellow Smithies, and several people taking their coffee at a leisurely pace over the morning paper. It was very pleasant. I rarely get to people watch in the morning, and in any case people watching at a college isn't very interesting because people have similar things going on and there isn't much to wonder about. I'm far too cheap to frequent coffee shops, but when I do get to one it's a nice change of pace.

Yesterday, a restaurant downtown that's going out of business held a tag sale, and I got a 10" cake pan (no springform, unfortunately--I was so close, but it was already sold.) and a large saucepan that's completely metal and won't melt in the oven! Before you say anything, family: I'm going to enter the Friedman lottery in my senior year, so these purchases are a lot more practical than they seem at the moment. Plus, restaurant-quality kitchenware isn't something you get for $3 every day. In honor of our new purchases, Alice and I are planning a dinner party a few weeks from now (scheduling is tentative). I'm so excited, partly because we haven't had a dinner party since last year's Emily's-going-on-med-leave shindig, and partly because for the first time ever, we don't have any crazy allergies to work around! We can cook whatever we want! More details to follow; I'd hate to give everything away all at once, but suffice it to say that I'm very excited for how it turns out.

Looking ahead, I have a good day before me. Today is ballet class and Dance in the New Millennium, then in the evening I have hours in which to study forever, alone or with my friends or maybe both. Tomorrow I have an exam that I'm bringing my A game for, Leading Ladies dinner, and a run-through of the first half of the show. I get to sing my song and clown around and generally have fun with nice people. It's a great way to end the day.

There we go, I feel much better now. What do you know, this optimism stuff really works!

Ailing

Hello lovely world! I have had a very long week, despite having the day off today. (Hooray Rally Day!) On Monday I started to feel sort of terrible, and by Tuesday, lo and behold! I had the flu. My friends (but especially Alice) are wonderful and beautiful and took such good care of me, checking in, bringing me food, and just being super nice in general. The fever's gone but I'm still feeling pretty rotten. My friends are all out getting pizza right now, but I'm not sure I could get downtown without collapsing, so I politely declined and am going to bed early. Today in rehearsal, I thought I was feeling better than I really was, so when we learned a dance I did it full-out and promptly felt worse.

Speaking of rehearsal, they're going well! I still can't believe how nice everyone is. Thursdays before rehearsals we have dinner together in Northrop, which is a small, less-frequented dining hall (technically just for residents of the house, but since the cast has several I guess it's chill?), and today was the first one. There were two other ladies there, and they were extremely nice. I quickly got over feeling intimidated and had a great time. Even better, I'm really having fun with the character. Being in Leaf Coneybear's head is awesome: he thinks everything's funny and has his own little world to play around in, even though he knows everything isn't really perfect all the time. It's nice to explore.

I had to miss all my classes on Wednesday because I was too exhausted to move, and now I'm anxious about making up everything I missed in Chemistry. I'm going to speak with my professor tomorrow but it feels like I'm dangling right now. In the lecture I understand everything perfectly, but once I sit down to do my problem sets, I have no idea what to do. It feels like I'm doing everything wrong! I really like/need the class, and it's frustrating to be confused all the time. I think I need to give myself more structure.

New things

I had a red-letter weekend. It started out with a wonderful snowstorm, Bananagrams, chocolate chip cookies and How I Met Your Mother. Then on Saturday, my friends and I went sledding by Paradise Pond. It was frozen solid, but I was still wary of sledding into it. Luckily, that fate was avoided (although Erika gave it a try and wound up in a thicket of bushes). Alice went sledding for the first time, and she wasn't crazy about it, but she tried, so props. After sledding for a while, we walked to the island in the middle of the pond. It had clearly been visited a few times before, as evidenced by various messages scrawled in the snow. I made my mark with "Under Me," but nobody got the joke. Everywhere, people were enjoying winter: there were some people making an ice rink, an older couple snowshoeing on where the path ordinarily lies, cross-country skiers, and Smithies sledding on everything from garbage bags to plastic storage containers. (I like garbage bags; they give you a faster ride with the added perks of distributing your weight and smoothing out the hill.) It was very picturesque.

Yesterday was also an exciting day, but before I describe it, I must admit that I've been holding out on you. I secretly auditioned for the Leading Ladies spring show this week. I decided to do this about a week ago when auditions were first announced, but I decided not to talk about it. I'm a very superstitious person, so partly I didn't want to jinx anything, and I partly wanted to avoid the awkward posts that I made last year when I systematically got rejected from every a capella group for which I auditioned. I figured if I didn't make it in, no one would be the wiser (except for all of my close friends).

The show is 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, which I've been in twice before. The first time was in my junior year of high school, and the summer after that I did it again at Unirondack, playing different roles both times. This time I auditioned for the role of Leaf Coneybear, a hippie kid with ADD who's sweet and weird and wears a cape and plays with finger puppets. The first Leaf Coneybear I saw defined the role for me; my best friend, Marty Gartz, lived Leaf. He wore the cape around all the time and carried his finger puppets in his pockets several weeks prior to the show. It helps that Marty is also a very nice and extremely weird person himself, so the part suited him exactly. When I hear the soundtrack to the show, I'm always slightly surprised that it's not his voice on the recordings. I told Marty that I auditioned for the role, and he gave me his blessing. I felt confident. My audition song was "Simon Smith and his Amazing Dancing Bear" from the Muppet Show, and I did a bear voice and a sort of awkward little dance. They liked me!

So on Sunday afternoon, I attended callbacks. From 1 to 5 pm, I sang, danced, read, and did improv exercises, trying as hard as I could to be chipper and adorable and just weird enough that I wasn't off-putting. That last part was by far the hardest; I always go overboard when I'm trying too hard to be funny and get just plain weird. Fortunately, everyone else at callbacks was friendly and encouraging, but even that wore me out after a while. The whole thing was exhausting. By 4:30 I was sure I wasn't going to get cast. I was sure I blew it. I left Sage Hall feeling very A Chorus Line.

But I got it!

I'm so excited. Rehearsals start on Thursday, and I'm going to have a great time.

Partying crazy

Starting from 5th grade until graduation, Saturdays meant rehearsals from 1-4. It was really relaxed and fun; we would dance very hard of course, but we also joked and kind of clowned around when we were offstage. In the summer we would creep on the brides getting married at the church across the street and critique all the dresses. A couple times every year, we would have to cancel for one reason or another, and I would be at a loose end all day long. After reading The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright, I had gathered that Saturdays were supposed to be wild times for frolic, but usually it was more fun to be in rehearsal than driving around running errands. 

I still hold Saturdays to a sort of high standard. Maybe I secretly think Saturday night should be a time for crazy partying or something, because I get really excited when thinking about it, but then I don't do anything special. Friday nights are the real occasion for me and my friends. We watch movies and chill out and come down from the week, and it's really nice. Last night we watched Pitch Perfect and Anastasia, which (as usual) gave me a lot of former-Marxist feels that I was commanded to keep to myself. But seriously, in that opening sequence, when the grandmother is going on and on about Imperial Russia's majesty and beauty, who can resist thinking, "while the poor were dying in the streets"? Comedy gold, people. 

Tomorrow, I'm going to see Alison Bechdel and Gloria Steinem speak as part of an archives event about activism. Very exciting stuff. I'm doing all my homework today to free up Sunday for religious services and fangirling. 

Musical feels

It's been a rough couple of days. I'm never going to underestimate an unpleasant living situation again, because this one has put me through the mill and it's only been four days. I've been a neurotic wreck in that brief window; even ballet class did nothing to make me feel better. (Incidentally, I started to write about that but it turned into a rant, so I'll put that post on hold.) When I get really upset and I'm far from my family, sometimes I read books that remind me of them, but since my schedule is a little busy I opted to listen to music that reminded me of them instead.

I do that a lot, actually. For instance, at camp over the summer we had really nice Saturday morning breakfasts. It was supposed to be a good send-off for the campers, and everyone did look forward to those breakfasts, but I did not. Everyone's favorite fancy breakfast is a warm, gooey cinnamon roll, so I had to stay up late on Friday night (while everyone else was at the dance party in the lodge) and roll out a hundred-some cinnamon rolls. The next morning, I would get to the kitchen at 6:30 in the morning to proof and bake the rolls, and since that's pretty much a one-person job, I told my fellow cooks to sleep in. It sounds kind of grim and lonely and cold, and it was, but I also kind of loved those mornings when I could ease into the day doing what I loved most, all by myself. As I proofed and baked, I listened to the Avett Brothers and thought about all the mornings I had dragged my mother out of bed so I could get to chorale rehearsals. It made me feel close to her, which turned those solitary mornings into something to look forward to.

This morning I listened to The Roches album A Dove. It's surprisingly hard to find, but the songs are the stuff of my young childhood and that album reminds me of riding in our old red minivan, singing along to tapes. Man that memory dates. It's a really great album, and the Roches truly rock, but it didn't make me feel any less sad. I twitched and moped the day away until after dinner, when I settled in with Songza and my Bio notes to do a little studying. Songza is awesome (and Alice totally invented it) because it lets you choose your music based on what you're doing while you listen. I chose to study to jazz from the 50's and 60's, which is so evocative of my dad that I felt like he was in the room with me, telling me get a grip and identify the sax player. It's pretty awesome that music can have such strong associations, and I have to admit that I feel a lot better.

I think ur a contra

This is such old news, but I did a thing! I went contra dancing last weekend! My friend April who is completely lovely (albeit elusive; she's in the sciences....as am I, I suppose, though to a much lesser extent) posted on Facebook about a contra dance in Greenfield, and I decided to go. A friend of April's from UMass gave us a lift, and over the 20 minute drive I turned on my most charming personality. Apart from the driver, there were two Smithies who I had never met, one I did not know very well, one who I consider a good friend, and one with whom I would like to be friends, but that's kind of a work in progress. I really didn't get out much during J-term, so these ladies were the first new people with whom I had spoken in quite a while. They were all really nice, and most of them were wearing long, twirly skirts, which made me feel a bit like I had missed a memo, but whatever.

Before Saturday, the last time I went contra dancing was last New Year's, with my mom and Caroline. There was contra dancing at the Smart's wedding, and as a bridesmaid, I felt honor-bound to talk everyone into dancing. I did this at the Unirondack wedding I worked over the summer, too, but that wasn't contra dancing, so it was a little harder. The best way to acquire a wallflower, I have found, is to wear something low-cut, approach with confidence, smile a lot, and when you ask if they want to dance, appear confident that they won't say no. The only people who have resisted my encouragement are people with actual injuries preventing movement. But at an actual contra dance, everybody wants to be there, so that aspect of the evening is unnecessary.

The band was great--there was a tuba! And the caller was pretty good, too, but there was one major flaw in her technique. In case you've never been to a contra dance, when a new dance is introduced, the caller talks you through it, so you and your partner will know what to do before the music starts. It's like marking a combination in a regular dance class. I'm a quick study usually, but in the past, every caller at every dance I've attended has covered the marking parts really thoroughly. I guess all these people were regulars, because the caller kept referencing moves that I had never heard before, and everyone just rolled with it. As a result, I looked like I didn't know what I was doing (and just as the cherry on top, every one of my partners asked if I was a student and what I studied, so I looked extra incompetent). It was fun, but I got kind of frustrated toward the end. Here's hoping my first ballet class in a year and a half doesn't end the same way.

Still, the evening was really fun, I met a lot of cool people, and I think I'll go back again soon.

Die Babys

I'll certainly miss working at Sunnyside next semester. While I've never really been good at devoting five hours of a day to childcare (it's too much and not enough at the same time. I do best when I can focus my energy on one thing or several things in one day, without making any abrupt shifts. A full day or like two hours would have been better.), working with adorable children has always been great. Today I worked from 8 to 4:30 with the 4 to 5 year olds, the same age group I was with when I started last spring. I've been with slightly younger kids this past semester, and it's amazing what a difference a few years can make. I'd forgotten how articulate the 4 and 5-year-olds are, and how freaking energetic. They reminded me of the kittens, only the kittens don't shout "Come and get me, Monster!!!!!" (I earned that nickname in the context of a game of chase, I'm not some kind of tormentor.) They had so much energy, and I had a great time putting my claws up a la Lady Gaga and leering. They weren't great at tag; I was willing to throw in the towel after they made the snow home base, but they still wanted it so I still delivered. The game lasted hours. One kid, when saying goodbye at noon, actually called after me, "Goodbye, Monster!"

Because I was working all day, I was given a break of indeterminate duration during which to eat lunch. Nobody specified how much time I actually had, but I'm not much of a rebel, so I cantered to King/Scales and ate at turbo speed. The highlight of my lunch was the massive sour dill pickles that were provided with cheeseburgers. Seriously, these pickles were big enough to upstage the entree, but they were just in a bowl! Like they were something pedestrian! If my friends had been with me, I would have opened my mouth really wide with enthusiasm and pointed at the pickles, unable to articulate my excitement, but I was eating alone so I had to keep it together. I spent my lunch happily thinking of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and mulling over the many ethnic slurs I learned from said novel.

If the kids' energetic performance had in any way led me to believe that they would be exhausted after lunch and ready to nap, I was wildly mistaken. I've been spoiled by toddlers who actually sleep during naptime. These kids spent two hours whispering and reading every book on the bookshelf. What's worse, the teachers weren't even around for most of it, and at one point the other assistant left to make snack, so I had to contend with twelve raucous four-year-olds all by myself. Maybe four of them were actually asleep. They were my favorites. Quiet hours are from 1 to 3 in the afternoon, and all the kids in the place are asleep, or they should be. Since the youngest kids are literal babies, quiet is really pretty important, and I had to keep scolding these kids for talking too loudly (of course young children aren't great at modulation, so this was a common problem). The only redeeming aspect of this exasperating situation was the kids who were getting increasingly pissed off when I told them I couldn't read out loud, because it was quiet time.  It was kind of funny actually; one kid tore at his disheveled curls but couldn't say anything because, after all, I had a point. It's rare that I'm in that position (being 100% in the right and there's nothing you can do about it), and it's a testament to my pathetic position in life that I sort of relished the experience. That's right, bub. It is quiet rest time.

Little kids are super cute, and they really do say the damnedest things, but they aren't big readers. The only time I've read to one of the younger kids, it turned out to be a book called Goodbye, Papa about kids dealing with a parent's death. I was really not expecting this, so when the kid who wanted to hear the story seriously didn't get it, I was not prepared for her questions. "Where's the dad, Lily?" "Oh, um...he's not around any more. Do you need to wash your hands? Let's go do that." But slightly older kids will park you at the couch and have you read book after book, without question the best part of the gig. And the cherry on top is that Sunnyside has excellent taste in books. I've read books by William Steig (now there's a good potential HoF nominee), Frances books, Frog and Toad, and just today, Lyle, Lyle Crocodile. That finished off a good day. The kids were finally worn out and, like Jinx and 13, they cuddled up to me and handed me one book after another, until it was time for me to leave.