Let's Hear It for the Rainbow Tour
Jul. 18th, 2009 01:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
violetclmSo, Sam, you demonstrated resounding insanity a few weeks ago with your 16,000+ word six-part epic, but what have you been up to since then?
The title is stolen from Evita and refers to last weekend, which was a tour because I went to or through a bunch of different cities in California and rainbow because they were in California. Seriously, this is our state right here. My destination was Oakland, CA, but there were a number of cities and transit systems in-between, quite a few of which I'd not experienced before. I took a normal bus to the Santa Cruz Metro station, then a Highway 17 to San Jose, then an Altamont Commuter Express to Livermore, where I stayed for a while before getting a ride to Dublin, from which I took a BART train to Bay Fair and then transferred onto another one to Oakland. Success! Nothing important went wrong, and I was quite pleased with my ability to search the internet for travel websites and then actually get myself around the state when the acid test arrived.
I went to Oakland to see an old friend from Middlebury -- I refer you to the fifth body paragraph of this post for details, the one from Bulgaria who didn't come from Reed. I was feeling low a couple weeks ago and she suggested I come visit her in San Francisco (later amended to Oakland because California geography is confusing I guess?) because she was instate for a couple months. I don't know if I'd really expected ever again to see her, so I jumped at the chance, although I went up with some trepidation because, as stated in the last post, we got along quite well some of the time but had drastic misunderstandings at other times. I was to arrive in town at 5:45 PMish Friday and leave at 8:45 PM Saturday, so I rather hoped we'd be happy with each other and not conflict at all. And then I got to the address she gave me, and it was a post office. This was worrisome. Was this a very intricate revenge for something or other?
Fortunately (especially since I couldn't find any wireless networks to look it up on) I had her number in my phone, and it turned out she had just given me her mailing instead of residential address by mistake, and when I finally got to her place at 7:45 (her mailing address was about two miles from the BART station, and I had to go all the way back to get to her actual place) we were both ecstatic to see one another and very much amused by the mishap. And that was the order of the weekend! There were many miles of walking, and things continued to go wrong in one way or another, but we were extremely resilient and fought it all off with laughter or smoothies. Someone almost showed up to repossess her table when we were going to eat brunch, but that didn't quite happen. For dinner on Saturday we went looking for Korean noodles, with a little over thirteen dollars between us (having spent the rest of the money we left with on smoothies and farmers' market strawberries), and accidentally discovered a hideously fancy Korean restaurant that put beef in absolutely everything. The best we could have afforded was a single appetizer. We left, but not before they had even brought water to our table. It was a glorious misadventure and we ended up making our own noodles bought from an incredible Korean Market, which I kind of wish I had photos of. The market, not the noodles. Or maybe both?
In-between we walked around a lot, sat at lakes, fed the ducks (we were just sitting there and the people on the next bench just spontaneously gave us four whole moldy rolls of bread to feed to them), listened to music, looked at photos, and talked about our lives in general and various people we missed from the German school. Not that we spoke in German for more than a few seconds. Unless I missed something, I don't think we fought at all -- all misunderstandings were ultimately humorous -- so instead we just had a great time and showed life that we're totally ready for it, at least a little. She'll be going to Columbia next year, so wenn she comes to visit Santa Cruz in a few weekends I am hoping to find a way at least to point out Barak, so that she may see why his hair might freeze sometimes. It all sounds brilliant, and I'm so glad I took her up on her suggestion of visitation. Oakland is a curious place, besides, lots of people asked me for directions which I couldn't help them with, and I met a charming homeless(?) man who kept on complimenting me and then asking if I was offended by his compliments, which I assured him seemed odd sorts of things for a person to be offended by.
The trip back was much simpler, as the Greyhound bus system goes from Oakland to Santa Cruz in a couple hours with only a few stops in-between. The trip up was so much more complex because I stopped in Livermore to visit![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bobfriediemajor, whose birthday I apparently missed by about a week... happy birthday, Sarah! I was only there for a few hours, but definitely enjoyed myself. We're not always on the same wavelength, and our respective Linguistics and Mathematics majors don't overlap too often, but I think that moves us to open our satellites a little wider than we might otherwise and we manage to be interested by one another in things that we don't actually do (or even understand). I and other people I've talked to went into Reed with the expectation that there'd be a lot of that, people going to classes and then explaining the cool things they were learning to people not in the class, and I think that manifests itself with Sarah somewhat more than most... she's willing to (/ it's natural for her to?) slow down and talk about interesting things without being caught up in the rush of the social world. And I got to meet her cat! And her mother! And another female whose role in the house I never quite determined! Funnn.
In other news, this weekend isn't so epic, but AFE Games Group was very nice yesterday, I made gingerbread after being inspired bynitoya2's on Tuesday and that seemed to go over well. I played a lot of games with myriadrainbows and varying other people, and we finally learned how to use the Mahjong set I got her a few summers ago. Maybe next time with actual gambling? Hmm. plaidsupersquid and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
spacelogic2 are both back from their respective adventures, which is exciting, although I doubt I'll be seeing both of them before Tuesday, when I'll be off to Connecticut for a little bit to visit my extended (paternal) family with youngest_pliny.
I'll be getting back from that in eight days, on Sunday, giving me just enough time to unpack in the evening before beginning the Acting Conservatory with Shakespeare Santa Cruz on Monday at 10 AM. (Shakespeare Santa Cruz is what it sounds like, a professional theater organization at UCSC that does a lot of Shakespeare plays.) I'm pretty excited... a two week intensive acting thing should be pretty cool, we'll be doing (Shakespearean) Rhetoric and stage combat and props and costumes and general acting and whatever else, and I definitely have faith in the quality of the instructors. I'll talk more about that when it's actually started and I have more to go on than speculation. It costs $600 or something normally but Terri, the person in charge of West End Studio Theatre which this is happening in partnership with, decided to add me to it in exchange for my turning a lot of her recordings of old shows into DVDs, which is going quite well even though some of the recordings are of entirely unexpected material. Hooray for cameras!
Thankfully, what the intensive acting conservatory won't be doing is conflicting with improv, which is on Sundays nowadays and still going strong. Our roster changes each week as people go in and out of town, of course, and the day/time have gone through some revision, and we don't meet in the same place quite every time, but it all works out! Last time we had our first longformish thing, structured around the proviso (once broken) that each scene is two persons in size and should involve one person who was in the previous scene. Some of the scenes went a bit longer than they should have, and I'm not sure our conclusion was narratively ideal, but I think it worked out quite well considering our rustiness in the field. It was set at college -- increasingly common for improv these days, I wonder why... -- and featured a pair of roommates, one a workaholic and one a sleepaholic, split apart by their personal differences and the prospect of a very prestigious intercollegiate academic competition. A couple friends of the sleepaholic also roamed the school, drinking coffee and generally getting in trouble in hilarious obliviousness. It would have made a great pilot episode. No regrets so far...
I am thinking of writing a new bio. A nice in-depth one. Actually I've been thinking of writing one for a while but maybe mentioning it will start the juices flowing? Details to come...
The title is stolen from Evita and refers to last weekend, which was a tour because I went to or through a bunch of different cities in California and rainbow because they were in California. Seriously, this is our state right here. My destination was Oakland, CA, but there were a number of cities and transit systems in-between, quite a few of which I'd not experienced before. I took a normal bus to the Santa Cruz Metro station, then a Highway 17 to San Jose, then an Altamont Commuter Express to Livermore, where I stayed for a while before getting a ride to Dublin, from which I took a BART train to Bay Fair and then transferred onto another one to Oakland. Success! Nothing important went wrong, and I was quite pleased with my ability to search the internet for travel websites and then actually get myself around the state when the acid test arrived.
I went to Oakland to see an old friend from Middlebury -- I refer you to the fifth body paragraph of this post for details, the one from Bulgaria who didn't come from Reed. I was feeling low a couple weeks ago and she suggested I come visit her in San Francisco (later amended to Oakland because California geography is confusing I guess?) because she was instate for a couple months. I don't know if I'd really expected ever again to see her, so I jumped at the chance, although I went up with some trepidation because, as stated in the last post, we got along quite well some of the time but had drastic misunderstandings at other times. I was to arrive in town at 5:45 PMish Friday and leave at 8:45 PM Saturday, so I rather hoped we'd be happy with each other and not conflict at all. And then I got to the address she gave me, and it was a post office. This was worrisome. Was this a very intricate revenge for something or other?
Fortunately (especially since I couldn't find any wireless networks to look it up on) I had her number in my phone, and it turned out she had just given me her mailing instead of residential address by mistake, and when I finally got to her place at 7:45 (her mailing address was about two miles from the BART station, and I had to go all the way back to get to her actual place) we were both ecstatic to see one another and very much amused by the mishap. And that was the order of the weekend! There were many miles of walking, and things continued to go wrong in one way or another, but we were extremely resilient and fought it all off with laughter or smoothies. Someone almost showed up to repossess her table when we were going to eat brunch, but that didn't quite happen. For dinner on Saturday we went looking for Korean noodles, with a little over thirteen dollars between us (having spent the rest of the money we left with on smoothies and farmers' market strawberries), and accidentally discovered a hideously fancy Korean restaurant that put beef in absolutely everything. The best we could have afforded was a single appetizer. We left, but not before they had even brought water to our table. It was a glorious misadventure and we ended up making our own noodles bought from an incredible Korean Market, which I kind of wish I had photos of. The market, not the noodles. Or maybe both?
In-between we walked around a lot, sat at lakes, fed the ducks (we were just sitting there and the people on the next bench just spontaneously gave us four whole moldy rolls of bread to feed to them), listened to music, looked at photos, and talked about our lives in general and various people we missed from the German school. Not that we spoke in German for more than a few seconds. Unless I missed something, I don't think we fought at all -- all misunderstandings were ultimately humorous -- so instead we just had a great time and showed life that we're totally ready for it, at least a little. She'll be going to Columbia next year, so wenn she comes to visit Santa Cruz in a few weekends I am hoping to find a way at least to point out Barak, so that she may see why his hair might freeze sometimes. It all sounds brilliant, and I'm so glad I took her up on her suggestion of visitation. Oakland is a curious place, besides, lots of people asked me for directions which I couldn't help them with, and I met a charming homeless(?) man who kept on complimenting me and then asking if I was offended by his compliments, which I assured him seemed odd sorts of things for a person to be offended by.
The trip back was much simpler, as the Greyhound bus system goes from Oakland to Santa Cruz in a couple hours with only a few stops in-between. The trip up was so much more complex because I stopped in Livermore to visit
bobfriediemajor, whose birthday I apparently missed by about a week... happy birthday, Sarah! I was only there for a few hours, but definitely enjoyed myself. We're not always on the same wavelength, and our respective Linguistics and Mathematics majors don't overlap too often, but I think that moves us to open our satellites a little wider than we might otherwise and we manage to be interested by one another in things that we don't actually do (or even understand). I and other people I've talked to went into Reed with the expectation that there'd be a lot of that, people going to classes and then explaining the cool things they were learning to people not in the class, and I think that manifests itself with Sarah somewhat more than most... she's willing to (/ it's natural for her to?) slow down and talk about interesting things without being caught up in the rush of the social world. And I got to meet her cat! And her mother! And another female whose role in the house I never quite determined! Funnn.In other news, this weekend isn't so epic, but AFE Games Group was very nice yesterday, I made gingerbread after being inspired by
nitoya2's on Tuesday and that seemed to go over well. I played a lot of games with myriadrainbows and varying other people, and we finally learned how to use the Mahjong set I got her a few summers ago. Maybe next time with actual gambling? Hmm. plaidsupersquid and spacelogic2 are both back from their respective adventures, which is exciting, although I doubt I'll be seeing both of them before Tuesday, when I'll be off to Connecticut for a little bit to visit my extended (paternal) family with youngest_pliny.I'll be getting back from that in eight days, on Sunday, giving me just enough time to unpack in the evening before beginning the Acting Conservatory with Shakespeare Santa Cruz on Monday at 10 AM. (Shakespeare Santa Cruz is what it sounds like, a professional theater organization at UCSC that does a lot of Shakespeare plays.) I'm pretty excited... a two week intensive acting thing should be pretty cool, we'll be doing (Shakespearean) Rhetoric and stage combat and props and costumes and general acting and whatever else, and I definitely have faith in the quality of the instructors. I'll talk more about that when it's actually started and I have more to go on than speculation. It costs $600 or something normally but Terri, the person in charge of West End Studio Theatre which this is happening in partnership with, decided to add me to it in exchange for my turning a lot of her recordings of old shows into DVDs, which is going quite well even though some of the recordings are of entirely unexpected material. Hooray for cameras!
Thankfully, what the intensive acting conservatory won't be doing is conflicting with improv, which is on Sundays nowadays and still going strong. Our roster changes each week as people go in and out of town, of course, and the day/time have gone through some revision, and we don't meet in the same place quite every time, but it all works out! Last time we had our first longformish thing, structured around the proviso (once broken) that each scene is two persons in size and should involve one person who was in the previous scene. Some of the scenes went a bit longer than they should have, and I'm not sure our conclusion was narratively ideal, but I think it worked out quite well considering our rustiness in the field. It was set at college -- increasingly common for improv these days, I wonder why... -- and featured a pair of roommates, one a workaholic and one a sleepaholic, split apart by their personal differences and the prospect of a very prestigious intercollegiate academic competition. A couple friends of the sleepaholic also roamed the school, drinking coffee and generally getting in trouble in hilarious obliviousness. It would have made a great pilot episode. No regrets so far...
I am thinking of writing a new bio. A nice in-depth one. Actually I've been thinking of writing one for a while but maybe mentioning it will start the juices flowing? Details to come...
