Optima Dies . . . Prima Fugit

Some Things I Learned in 2006

2006-12-30T00:19:00.000-08:00

1) No matter how thin you slice it, some men are just scuzzes. Flee such men. Some men are also awesome. Keep those ones. Learning to differentiate between the two -- now that's a growing up thing.

2) Moreover, we're all capable of being just a little bit scuzzy.

3) It is a stupid and artistically stunting idea to direct the same show twice in eight months.

4) It's the friends who will feed you peanut-butter-and-chocolate bunnies and Irish whiskey at three o'clock in the morning after you've been dumped by the love of your life who are the ones that matter.

5) You should never trade long-term happiness for a few cheap kicks.

6) If you've got a dream, you should go for it and worry about its practicality or lack thereof another day.

7) It is a depressing fact of life that there are no 7-11s in the greater metropolitan Atlanta area, and no workable substitute.

8) God really doesn't give a flying damn about chapel veils and the problems of Vatican II; go solve world hunger and fight to end the culture of death, then maybe you'll have time to worry about whether He wants you to wear a doily on your head.

9) Nothing ever works out as planned. Get used to it. What we call curveballs, God calls opportunities for grace.

10) Don't ever bring your cute best friend to any wedding where hot guys potentially are.

11) Mountain Dew Amp is the greatest invention since the wheel.

12) You can love someone a hell of a long time after they're gone.

13) People die, suddenly, frequently, and often. Make sure they always know you love them -- just in case it's the last time you ever get to tell them.

14) Your mother really was right.

15) Teachers do not go home at 3:30 p.m., no matter how easy you in your naivete think their job is. Teachers go home at 10:30 p.m. -- and then work for a few more hours.

16) You can get by on charm for about fifteen minutes. After that, you'd better know something.

17) Call home.

18) Credit cards are the devil.

19) Furniture is overrated.

20) Boys are also overrated.

21) Shoe shopping is the greatest therapy the human condition may ever know.

22) Lindsay Lohan is a talentless hack, and she looked better as a redhead.

23) Romances between two people who both work in theater do not bode well for anybody.

24) Eleven hours is not too long a drive for a hug and a homecooked meal.

25) I have accumulated some really scary ex-flames over the past year. I have also accumulated some very cool ones.

26) Do not rekindle old flames unless you're sure you can handle the conflagration.

27) Your high school friends have known you since you were like, fourteen. If you're going to trust anyone's judgment of your character, trust theirs.

28) Keep at least one friend around who tells you the truth when you least want to hear it.

29) Don't text and drive.

30) Stay away from brainless hot jocks.

31) Most decisions made after midnight are stupid ones.

32) Prank calls never, ever, turn out well, particularly when alcohol or ex-boyfriends are involved.

33) Posting everything about your personal life on the internet is asking for trouble.

34) Everyone has dated a Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. If he boils your small pets, run.

35) You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too many socks.

From Ahaz to Zerubbabel

2006-12-25T00:27:00.000-08:00

Come Christmastime every year, we often hear these oh-so-familiar seventeen verses from the first chapter of Matthew at church:

"A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ the son of David, the son of Abraham: Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar, Perez the father of Hezron, Hezron the father of Ram, Ram the father of Amminadab, Amminadab the father of Nahshon, Nahshon the father of Salmon, Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab, Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth, Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of King David. David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah's wife, Solomon the father of Rehoboam, Rehoboam the father of Abijah, Abijah the father of Asa, Asa the father of Jehoshaphat, Jehoshaphat the father of Jehoram, Jehoram the father of Uzziah, Uzziah the father of Jotham, Jotham the father of Ahaz, Ahaz the father of Hezekiah, Hezekiah the father of Manasseh, Manasseh the father of Amon, Amon the father of Josiah, and Josiah the father of Jeconiah and his brothers at the time of the exile to Babylon. After the exile to Babylon: Jeconiah was the father of Shealtiel, Shealtiel the father of Zerubbabel, Zerubbabel the father of Abiud, Abiud the father of Eliakim, Eliakim the father of Azor, Azor the father of Zadok, Zadok the father of Akim, Akim the father of Eliud, Eliud the father of Eleazar, Eleazar the father of Matthan, Matthan the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ. Thus there were fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Christ."
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From an English teacher’s standpoint, the story of salvation history, for being God’s bestseller and the greatest story ever told, begins with some majorly plodding exposition.

As a little kid at midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, I would of course let loose my few requisite giggles at the funnier names like "Jehoshaphat" and "Uzziah", then, when roundly berated by my parents for giggling during Mass, promptly fall asleep through the rest of the genealogy. My next real exposure to Matthew’s genealogy was at seventeen when, during my freshman year of college, my then-boyfriend and his friends adopted "Abijah", son of Rehoboam, as a sort of celebratory interjection akin to "Dude!" (Ex.: "Abijah! I just kicked your ass at Halo!") And even when studying Scripture in college theology courses, I would typically skirt over the genealogical passages in order to get to the good stuff. I mean, seriously -- what with a mysterious star and singing angels and visiting shepherds and wandering Magi and fleeing into Egypt, whether or not Shealtial begat Zerubbabel seemed an awfully superfluous point.

Yet, in the words of the incomparable G. K. Chesterton, “If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe. If you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.” Tonight, at Christmas Eve Mass, I found my eyes restlessly wandering down the page of my missal during the interminable litany of the ancestry of Christ. My gaze came to a full stop on verse 5: “Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab . . .” The name “Rahab” rang a bell. I paused to filter through my atrophied knowledge of random Old Testament trivia, and vaguely recalled her as some prostitute who helped save Israel by offering hospitality to spies sent by Joshua, Moses’ successor.

Intrigued, I moved on to verse 6. “David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah’s wife.” David, of David and Goliath fame, of course we all know. The “man after God’s own heart”, who in a moment of weakness, succumbed to his lust, slept with Bathsheba, knocked her up, and then sent her poor husband Uriah to sleep with the fishes to cover his own tracks. Yet here in Matthew chapter one, we find that the incarnate God of the Universe Himself chose to descend from the lineage of this sometime slipshod adulterer and murderer.

In verse three, we find mention in the lineup of “Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar.” While a seemingly innocuous listing, a few minutes of Old Testament reconnaissance will reveal that Tamar disguised herself as a temple prostitute and was impregnated by her father-in-law Judah with twins Perez and Zerah. We are talking some terribly twisted and bizarre people with whom the Savior of the world chose to share bloodlines.

Uzziah, whose name I found so amusing in childhood, started out all right but, on a serious power trip in 1 Chronicles 26, recklessly appropriated the office of the High Priest, burst into the sanctuary, and burned incense himself.

Ahaz, another of Jesus’ great-great-great-granddaddies, was a wicked king of Judah (check out 2 Kings 16) who brought about his own kingdom’s ultimate subjection to the Assyrians by choosing to ignore the warnings of the prophets Isaiah, Hosea, and Micah. He died a tragic death at thirty-give, and Scripture tells us he was such a wretch that he wasn’t even permitted burial in the sepulcher of the kings.

Baffled, it suddenly dawned on me by the middle of the Christmas Eve Gospel reading, with my kid sister beside me snickering over "Jehoshaphat" and "Uzziah", that a disproportionate number of the ancestors of Jesus Christ were heathens, prostitutes, murderers, foolish rulers, and worldly failures.

To me, this revelation means two things this Christmas season that I wanted to share with you.

First, that we have a God Who is so gloriously nondiscriminatory about His offer of salvation that He rolled up His sleeves and entered into grubby, dirty human history to die a grubby, dirty death on grubby, dirty Calvary Hill for the sake of a bunch of grubby, dirty bipeds who really, at the end of the day, didn’t deserve such an awesome outpouring of divine humility; that He has called to Himself not only the pious and unsullied and innocent of the world but also the St. Peters, the St. Thomases, the Mary Magdalenes, the St. Augustines, the Tamars and the Rahabs, and used all of them, whatever their walk of life, whatever their failings, whatever the enormity of their past sins, to fulfill His plans and accomplish His purposes; that, fortunately for all of us, God wants to take us as we are, where we are, beaten and bruised and lazy and flawed and sinful and wallowing in the muck, and with the transformative workings of His grace, make something beautiful of us; that He has chosen the weak of this world to shame the wise, and that His power is made perfect in our weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9).

Second, that sometimes God’s plans take a seemingly haphazard and roundabout path to reaching their culmination, and we often fail to recognize them because they don’t come to us in the packaging we expected. Yet if Jesus Christ Himself was descended from a bunch of hookers and hit-men, none of God’s more convoluted workings in our own daily lives should ever take us too much by surprise. I know in my own life, if it weren’t for some painful and unhappy detours which the past two years of my life took, providential happenstance would never have landed me in a random city six hundred miles south of home finding the most amazing job of all time. I am thus eternally grateful for some of life’s dodgiest curveballs sent in love by one who knew what I needed better than I knew myself, and for the incognito workings of grace that ultimately got me where I needed to be. “For we know all things work together for good, for those who love the Lord, who are called according to His purpose.” (Romans 8:28)

I guess, ultimately, this is all just to say thank you, each of you, for touching my life so markedly in the unique and individual ways you have over the past days and months and (some of you) years. I love you all.

Have a merry Christmas, and a happy New Year!

The hardest job you'll ever love

2006-12-23T17:44:00.000-08:00

I got the role of Shelby in Steel Magnolias -- which means I have 260 lines to memorize in the next week. When I get back in January, I'm not only doing this show, I'm also directing Guys and Dolls at the high school, flying to D. C. to help chaperone the kids on the March for Life, going on a missions trip to the poorest area of West Virginia over spring break, teaching five classes, and possibly going to Honduras at the end of the semester.

On that note, how can I possibly sum up the last five months of my life in Georgia thus far? As you know, I've been an inconsistent blogger, at best. The only explanation I can offer is that in my declining years (all twenty-one of them), I've begun to shy away from some of the more flagrant forms of emotional exhibitionism of my salad days. I guess I've just become more aware of the fact that some things are sacred, even in the twenty-first century. I guess I'm changing, in some little, unforeseeable, nearly unnoticeable ways.

In the last week or so, I've written finals, graded finals, posted grades, shipped report cards, and have in some quasi-official capacity or another become at last entitled to the appellation "high school teacher". What have I learned thus far?

It's been busy. Insanely busy. I've barely had time to breathe. I've been, for all intents and purposes, Dougie Howser, Ph. D -- the youngest member of the faculty with the most to learn. I spent a good 50-70 hours a week at the school. I've had parent-teacher conferences. I played Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker. I directed a Georgia State High School Association award-winning production of Midsummer Night's Dream, taught The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, and Huck Finn, explored Plymouth Rock with the Pilgrims, wandered in Walden Woods with Thoreau, and learned about the American Dream from Jefferson, Paine, and Patrick Henry. I rolled my eyes at my students' interpretive dances of rafting down the Mississippi and their expository essays about getting an XBox 360 for Christmas. I've stayed up till 4 a.m. chaperoning coed retreats and 2 a.m. making donkey ears for the fall play. I had a whole lot of fun and (hopefully) imparted at least a little bit of knowledge. I listened to woebegone sixteen-year-olds cry to me about their breakups, chaperoned high school dances, sang karaoke with my kids while setting lighting cues for a show, wept at their defeats and rejoiced in their triumphs. I've learned to field intricate moral conundrums like "Is getting drunk a mortal sin?" and "How far is too far?" like a pro. I've made some amazing friendships with my awesome colleagues who continually inspire me to strive for the highest and to continue to touch these kids' lives. I've watched my students buy shoes like mine, make "your mom" jokes because I do, read Gone With the Wind because it's my favorite book, and pick up my facial expressions, favorite vocabulary words, and mannerisms. I've laughed. I've cried. I've learned that whether I notice or not, they're watching and emulating my every move. I've taken some small part in causing starry-eyed faces to light up in amazement over a sudden glint of understanding of Gatsby's green light or Hester's scarlet A. I've had sixteen-year-old boys who would rather be playing Halo and sixteen-year-old girls who would rather be painting their nails stop by my classroom after their finals were already done with to discuss individualism, existentialism, moral theology, Dostoevsky, and their everyday lives -- just because they want to talk to me.

I started this semester praying to be delivered from the pangs of broken hearts and unrequited love, beseeching God, O Divine Master, grant that I may never seek so much to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. As a result, I've tried to instill charity in all that I've done, even when it's been at its most insane and hectic, to love, even when there is no return. I've failed, often. I've gotten stressed and cranky and unhappy and mean. But for all the craziness and the spasticness and the 15-hour workdays and the crying students and the irritable parents and the conferences and the red tape and the zany moments, there's a quiet joy underpinning the whole endeavor that I'm not sure, having once tasted, I could live without.

Sure, it has its wretched moments. But I love my colleagues. I love my superiors. I love my students. I love my job. Right now, this is my life, and right now, this is where God wants me to be, right smack-dab in the middle of podunk Fayette County, Georgia, doing what I'm doing. No, I'm not the person I ought to be yet, and I'm not claiming to be, but these kids make me realize anew every day how much I need to be better, for their sake -- but most of all, for my own.

Steel Magnolias

2006-12-05T09:25:00.000-08:00

Midsummer was over, Christmas break was coming, life was finally calming down...

And just when you thought it was safe to go back in the bloggernacle...

My Miracle Worker director -- who's friggin' awesome -- is directing Steel Magnolias this winter and I'm auditioning for him after work tonight. (I think he's having me read for the Julia Roberts role?)

I'm officially a glutton for punishment.

Help: Angsty and Stuck in a High School!

2006-10-20T14:32:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting in my classroom. I've spent 25 of the last 36 hours here.

The whole school has strep throat and so do I, I've given out more detentions this week than I care to think about, I've been working my tail off because the one-act competition is next Saturday, parent-teacher conferences were all last night, I've been at school for going on twelve hours now today helping decorate for homecoming and showing other schools around our sound and lighting board alternately (and I have to stay at least till halftime at the game tonight because I'm announcing homecoming court)... I'm dead and exhausted and want to sit and cry and have someone hug me.

I had an awesome time last night hanging out with one of my coworkers, though. I desperately needed to get away from school and chill after all the P/T stuff, so we went and wandered around a local park and explored it (we fenced with sticks - I felt about five years old again), and then hit McDonalds. It was sweet.

I'm just so... tired. If you don't hear from me, or I owe you money or something, I'm really not avoiding you. Well, I am, but I'm avoiding everybody, so take solace in that.

Peace, love, and pixie dust. To my friends: I love you, but don't expect to hear from me till Christmas. :)

Stop and smell the pumpkin spice cookies

2006-08-30T08:33:00.000-07:00

I'm slowly learning that God often writes us love letters when we least expect them. I was stressed to the limit today, with my final dress rehearsal tonight (my lines being far more shaky than they ought to be), about thirty papers on The Red Badge of Courage left to grade by tomorrow, and functioning (as has been the norm for the last several years) on about two hours of sleep and two liters of Mountain Dew.

Then, along came one of my drama students into my study hall. "Miss S., I brought you a cookie!"

A yummy, delicious, homemade pumpkin spice cookie. Singularly delicious. I just finished it.

Yep. Unmistakably a love letter from the divine Pen. There's an old platitude that says something like "courage is just fear which has held on one moment longer"; as a corollary, I'm rapidly learning that joy is just angst which has taken a nap.

2006-10-12T12:33:00.000-07:00

Walker Percy (great Catholic-literary-revival-novelist) is the man. I'm currently reading The Moviegoer. He's a singularly brilliant thinker. Concise, but brilliant nonetheless.

"We love those who know the worst of us and don't turn their faces away."

"You can get all A's and still flunk life."

'Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam...

2006-09-28T06:28:00.000-07:00

Hurray! I'm going home tomorrow for a three-day weekend in Maryland and Virginia -- woot! In the words of Bon Jovi's unlikely country-music duet with Jennifer Nettles, "Who says you can't go home? There's only one place that calls you one of their own."

On that note, I have several friends who I think have literally dropped off the planet. It's really disturbing. All I can figure is that the rapture must've happened and I got left behind.

But, once I find that they are, in fact, alive, all will be well.

Life is good.

Exhaustion reigneth

2006-09-25T13:46:00.000-07:00

I love my job.

But I am so... tired...

Can... no longer... string... coherent... thoughts... together......

"Immortal Horrors or Everlasting Splendors"

2006-09-22T06:32:00.000-07:00

"It is curious—curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare." (Mark Twain)

I am slowly learning that genuine courage is generally not the stand-up-and-take-notice sort of thing that you find on the screen at the cinema or in the squalor of the battlefield; most of the time, it's simply learning the rather tame and unremarkable art of daily stripping yourself of your own swollen, insolent self-will. How many men, I wonder, throughout human history, could conquer civilizations -- but not their own bosom sins?

And how many of us must count ourselves in that number?

As time goes by, I'm beginning to recognize that within my story, the divine Pen is the narrator, but I am both protagonist and antagonist rolled into one. Tricky business, that.

And if I've come to know myself at all over the fourteen-and-half months that have elapsed since my house of cards collapsed, I know that I'm never content with mediocrity, that for me, the chaotic neutral, the passionate drama queen, it's either supreme sanctity or the sordid depths of sin. There is no via media. There is no turning back. The salvation or damnation of my immortal soul is utterly dependent on a million insignificant yet eternally significant choices I make each and every day. A being of infinite worth hangs in the balance.

The way is clear before me, but do I dare? How can I possibly aspire, with all my angst, with all my past errors, with all the powerful potential for wickedness that I know lurks just behind the deceptive brightness of my big brown eyes -- to be a saint?

But more importantly -- how can I afford to not be?

Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved Thee.

Great quote.

2006-09-20T07:46:00.000-07:00

"People seldom see the halting and painful steps by which the most insignificant progress is achieved." ~Annie Sullivan

"Another opening, another show"

2006-09-01T10:05:00.000-07:00

I love my creative writing class. The assignments are so fun, the kids are so great -- it just altogether rocks.

Oh. Yeah. And Opening Night of MW is tonight.

AAAAAAAAAAUGH!

Great Movie Review. Wish I had written it.

2006-09-14T07:02:00.000-07:00

My students are reading the SL right now, so I found this review entertaining.

The Scarlet Letter (1995)

Attempting to justify this film's gross departure from the novel, Demi Moore once said, "Hardly anyone's read the book." Never mind that this isn't true -- what kind of reason is that?
It would have been ok had the movie's new material been as interesting and compelling as what was cut out. But sheesh -- this isn't a movie, it's a soapbox. As I said in my At-A-Glance Film Reviews review, "The original novel was a biting statement about Puritanical society and the devastating effects of its unforgiving nature. This film, on the other hand, is a rallying cry for 1990s morals, feminism, and melodramatic acting. It's as eloquent and sophisticated as a rallying cry, too."

Let me expound upon myself for a moment. Would you believe that in the end of the movie, when Reverend Dimmesdale has been publically revealed as the father of Hester Prynne's illegitimate child, Prynne (Moore) and Dimmesdale (Gary Oldman) actually deliver, from the scaffold where one or both of them may be hanged, a liberating, supposedly moving 1990s speech about tolerance and feminism? All I can say is, they're about two hundred years ahead of their time, and how on earth did they come to adopt those ideas when clearly no one else around them had? And furthermore, whom do they expect to convince? You can't undo generations of cultural and religious teachings by saying "we should be allowed to do what we want" and expecting everyone to nod and slap their foreheads and wonder why they didn't think of it before.

The book is a compelling exploration of hypocrisy, that is, if one can wade through Hawthorne's flowery writing style. In the movie, layers of complexity are pealed off by removing Dimmesdale's hypocrisy. He doesn't believe he sinned, doesn't preach against it, and therefore becomes the two dimensional character of a free love champion.
Robert Duvall plays nasty old Roger Prynne, Hester's lost and estranged husband who returns and acts all mean. As Roger Ebert said in his review, "The movie's morality boils down to: why should this sourpuss stand between these two nice young people?"

With that pathetically silly moral question looming in the background, the filmmakers fill the foreground with action scenes and shameless sensuality. The act of adultery, which takes place before the book begins, is moved to the middle of the movie, and the end is clogged up with new elements such as witch hunts and indian fights. And what self-respecting adaptation of "The Scarlet Letter" would be without the obligatory happy ending, where Reverend Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne ride off into the sunset to forge a life of their own?

Here's my theory. The screenwriters were all sitting around a table on day one, sipping coffee and brainstorming for ideas. Nobody really likes any of the ideas that get thrown out, and it's beginning to look like they've got a long haul ahead of them. Then one pipes up, "You know,
Hawthorne would have been a lot better if his books read like Harlequin romances."

And the rest is history.

2006-09-13T08:53:00.000-07:00

UUUUUUUUUUGGGGHH!

Pensees

2006-08-28T12:48:00.000-07:00

So, it's official.

I'm directing A Midsummer Night's Dream. Again. Performing in December. That'll make twice in 2006 alone. Oi vey.

I'm also utterly exhausted. The Miracle Worker opens on Friday night, and I've been at the theater every night for the past pretty much... forever.

Life is hectic.

Today (8/28) is the feast day of St. Augustine, which means Joe and I got engaged two years ago today. It's sort of a weird, trippy feeling. I've been missing him a lot lately, for the first time in a long time.

I'm beginning to realize how desperately I've been trying to supplant Joe in my life for the last thirteen-odd months, and moreover, how silly and futile that is. I opened one of my C. S. Lewis books yesterday at random and stumbled upon a passage about how we often refuse to take happiness on its own terms -- how, as human beings, we tend to stubbornly fixate on some point in the long-distant past, telling ourselves that that is happiness, and that anything which is not that cannot possibly make us happy. In this way, we self-destruct and sabotage the gifts God sends us which do not come in the packaging which we expected.

Two years ago, being engaged to Joe made me happy. Right now, this moment, in Atlanta, Georgia, that is not what God wants for me. That is not what He's trying to give me.

What is he trying to give me? That's the real question.

And more importantly, why am I not accepting it?

Ingenuity reigneth

2006-08-31T06:08:00.000-07:00

I absolutely hate coffee.

But the soda machine wasn't working, and I was standing desperately in need of caffeine.

Thus, ergo, q.e.d., I have invented Sugarsludge (TM): one part coffee to eight parts granulated white sugar. Stir; enjoy.

Well, they say necessity is the mother of invention.

If the idle mind is the devil's playground...

2006-08-23T05:12:00.000-07:00

I must be approaching all sorts of new heights of sanctity.

Busy.

Busy Busy Busy.

Pray for me.

Some days, even your lucky rocketship underpants don't help.

2006-08-13T19:26:00.000-07:00

I needed to give the kids in my Theatre Production and Creative Writing classes syllabuses (err, syllabi) for tomorrow.

Which you'd think wouldn't be so hard.

Donna was dead to begin with. Dead as a doornail. She had been chaperoning a retreat at school, and high school girls being high school girls, they decided to stay up until 6 in the morning.

So, I got three hours of sleep. I'm running on empty. I need these syllabi for my first period class in the morning.

But my printer is in Virginia at my old roommate's house, and I don't have a jump drive.

So I thought, that's fine, I'll just do them at school while I'm there chaperoning the retreat.

Only our server is down, so I couldn't print them at school.

And I don't have the access code to the photocopier at school.

So then I think, it's okay, I'll go to Staples and Xerox them this afternoon.

So the retreat's over and done with, I go home. Can't find a Staples. Anywhere. Apparently Atlantans don't believe in them -- at least South Atlantans don't.

Then I think, fine. I'll go to Best Buy and buy a printer.

But Best Buy is all out of the two models I can afford.

Then I have to rush to play practice, an hour and fifteen minutes away. The theatre has a photocopying machine, so I ask my director, hey, can I use it? Why, sure, says my kindly neighborhood director.

But the photocopying machine is broken.

Finally, in despair, I crash a friend's parents' house down the street from my apartment at 10:15 p. m. after an exhausting rehearsal (the big fight scene between Annie and Helen - I'm covered in bruises) begging to use their printer ...

To which they kindly agreed.

But the black ink just ran out.

So I've had it. My drama kids can just deal with having green syllabi.

Murphy's Law: If anything can go wrong, it will, and in the worst possible way.

A happy kind of exhaustion

2006-08-12T09:42:00.000-07:00

I'm really not ignoring all of you, I promise. :)

I don't have internet in my apartment, I wake up at 5:45, I drive to school, I teach, I sign out at 3:30, I drive home, I eat, I drive to play practice (1 hr 15 minutes away), I plan lessons, I crash on my air mattress in my non-furnished apartment at midnight, and then I start the whole thing over again. Tonight I'm helping with an event at school.

It's crazy, it's busy, it's scary, it's new, but it's awesome. I'm loving it so much.

Oh, and thanks for all the birthday wishes from everybody.

Except for John, who was two days late with his and has incurred my eternal and undying wrath, and all the rest of you who forgot. :-p

My new favorite quote

2006-08-12T10:23:00.000-07:00

"The fact that the world is a thousand times more scandalized when a Catholic does something wrong is only proof that the world expected so much more." (Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen)

How well do you REALLY know Donna?

2006-08-04T22:01:00.000-07:00

Go to... http://seekinghisface.friendtest.com.

Epiphanies

2006-08-03T09:14:00.000-07:00

To take a page out of Jen's book -- these are my discoveries of the day.

1) My boss is the most awesome one ever.

2) It is a feat of no small impressiveness to navigate Atlanta traffic in a pastel-colored dress while eating Taco Bell.

3) Sleep is my favorite thing ever. I will miss it sorely this year.

4) Loving people is much more important than charming them.

5) When all's said and done, in spite of everything, la vita e bella.

I'm...

2006-08-04T15:37:00.000-07:00

exhausted, that drained-good kind of exhausted.

But I love my job.

I love the other teachers.

I love my play.

I love my friends.

I love fresh starts at life. "To make a beginning is to make an end - the end is where you start from."

I'm so glad I'm here. Huzzah for life 'way down yonder on the Chattahoochee.'

Just to remind myself...

2006-08-01T13:11:00.000-07:00

"Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved." (Helen Keller)

My Show :)

2006-08-01T12:06:00.000-07:00