Things I Keep Forgetting to Write About, But That Happened Awhile Ago

Yes, blog readers, I have some stories in the vaults!

1)I got hit by a cyclist. Yeah. On my third or so night here. Thankfully I didn’t die, because that’s an embarrassing way to go. I was on the Jack the Ripper tour with my school group, walking towards the front of the crowd. We were all following the tour guide across the street (with the green walking man signal and everything) and this biker was coming towards us. The group sort of split up in order to let him through, but he didn’t know that and the streets were wet, so he swerved and even though he hit the brakes, the roads were wet, causing him to skid and collide with me. Thankfully, he had slowed down enough that it only caused me to stumble, but it did give me a shock. I thought he was going to yell at me- that's the usual response- but his apologies were just as profuse as mine. And even though I wasn’t hurt at all, I got asked if I was okay so many times by my very caring schoolmates that you would have thought I had been run over by a car. It's nice to be loved :p

2) The Globe wrote me back. How cool is that? When I was looking up theatres to audition at, that was, of course one of them. I knew it was a long shot, but I wanted to try anyway. As per the instructions, I waited until January 3rd (the day I arrived in London. Yes, the first thing I did was mail out a casting submission) and emailed my headshot and resume. I figured that was it. I mean, it’s SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE. But even though I would only be able to do the first production, it was Much Ado. I’m the perfect age for Hero, and she has very few lines- the ideal situation when Shakespeare and I are put together.
A few weeks later, I got an e-mail. A personal e-mail, not a form letter. The woman who wrote me, Chloe, said that because auditions are by invitation only, they wanted to see me perform. She said that if I was in a show, I should send them the details and they would come and see me. You all know the issue there, so I won’t go into it, but either way- I got an answer from the Globe. Perhaps they answer everyone just as nicely, but I like to think my resume had something to do with it.

3) My friends and I (and a poor random lady who happened to be standing near us) were treated like criminals in the tube station. When Lauren came to visit, we of course had to take the tube home. When we went into the Camden Market station, I had to top up. Casey and Deanna went through the gates, and I thought Lauren did, too. This is why I was so surprised when I went through the gate and didn’t see her with the other two. Finally, we saw her on the other side and waved. She tried to get to us through the gate, but her card wouldn’t let her. Sometimes this is due to lack of money, but a lot of time, the gates just malfunction.
A security guard saw her having trouble, and he must have also seen us wave to her. He asked her what the problem was and she answered that she didn’t know. “Did you have someone pass their card over to you so you could use it?” He gave her a look that said that she didn’t have to answer- he knew that she had. He know wrong, however. None of us had done this- it’s illegal and pretty easy to get caught. One of the first things we were told when we got here was to never use anyone else’s card because you will be found out. This is true, as we saw that night- no matter how many times Lauren stated that it was her card, the guard wouldn’t believe her. He looked at the other three of us. I was standing closest and he pointed at me. “You. Let me see your card.” If I had actually done something wrong, I would have been extremely panicked. As it was, I knew I had done nothing and so stood there calmly as he scanned my card and saw that it had only been used once in the last few minutes (plus, Mr. Security Guard, if I had lent her my card, she still would have been holding it.) He did the same thing to Casey, Deanna, and a random woman who happened to be walking by. Eventually, he had to admit that we were all telling the truth and the gate was just malfunctioning. Sorry to disappoint you, sir.


Tonight, I return to the theatre for the final four shows of the run. Tonight's behind-the-scenes experience will be memorization for me. Adaptations performance in Thursday morning! The last few hours has been all of my group members and me Facebooking in rapid-fire abou plans, final drafts, and script changes.

"Rediscover Yourself."

This is what I was told by a lot of people before I came to England, or some variant of the phrase. My playwriting professor added at the end of his review of my final project, "There is so much to see and do in London. Explore, explore, explore. You will come back a different person."

I have been thinking about the idea that London will change me, and I realised that I still don't know what that means. What am I meant to be changing? Is it a conscious thing? Will it be? Should it? Am I supposed to be making my choices based on the fact that it might change me as a person? That sounds like it could be dangerous.

As I said, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be changing. I know I need to be braver in general. Coming here was a step in that direction I hope- I was as terrified as I was excited to come to England. But now that I'm here and in love with the city, am I changing? Am I rediscovering? Is settling into a routine bad? (Well, either way, I'll be fixing that in five days when school lets out.)

But I suppose change is not necessarily synonymous with rediscovery. To discover is "to see, get knowledge of, learn of, find, or find out; gain sight or knowledge of something previously unseen or unknown." So... I have to do this? See, gain knowledge of, learn of, find, gain sight or knowledge of, myself?

I almost typed, "How will I know if I'm doing this right?" but then realised that there's probably not a right way to do this. Perhaps this is also a step up, being able to see the problem in that statement, as I'm generally always concerned with getting everything perfect. I don't think it's possible to rediscover perfectly.

I guess I just want to be able to tell if I'm doing what I was instructed to do. I don't want to go back to the people who told me this and have them say, "You haven't changed at all." Then again, there are parts of myself that I don't want to change. But that could be part of the problem, too, I guess. I hold on very tightly to things.

*sigh* This is what happens when I do analytical assignments late at night. I start to think. What are your thoughts on this? I would be interested to hear them (and I'm not necessarily talking about how they pertain to me. Just in general :) )

"If You're in a Tragedy, Don't Drink Anything!"

So I realised that even though I told you about my birthday, I didn't show you! So here are some pictures from the day of my twenty-first:

The package my family sent.

The cool thing about the package (besides all the yummy food and the ostrich) was that it came while I was Skyping with my mom, so she got to see me open it! (She also got to see me go to sit down at my desk, miss my chair, and fall on the floor :p) My friend Laura also made me some delicious chocolate chip cookies!

Outside the gift shop at the Titanic exhibit

My delicious replacement for alcohol! (I've got much less than that left now!)

The best garlic bread in the entire world.

And now for some random pictures I took yesterday:

An ad on the tube that makes me laugh every time I see it.

Poetry on the tube!

Don't you just hate it when your cough is all tickly? :p

I'm almost done with my second week of classes- one more in two parts tomorrow. I had Adaptations today and while really love it, four hours is just a really long time to have a class. But I did have fun today- it was a smaller than usual group, as some sort of sickness seems to be going around and other people had to drop the class, so we had a really good discussion about the play we were reading, starting with dissecting the title and the different connotations it would have today and then going through definitions of words we had to do for homework and finding moments in scenes from the play that matched it. Then after tea we discussed the articles we were supposed to read. As it happens, because our teacher skipped around a bit, I read a few articles too many, but it taught me a lesson, anyway. I had underestimated the amount of reading that needed to be done, thinking it could all be done in one short shot... but as you can see from this list, it was a little too extensive to sanely do in that timeframe.

So while I did get it all read in time, my procrastination meant that I was up until the wee hours of the morning reading and then got up an hour early to finish.. after not being able to fall asleep for a long time and having to be in class at nine. So never again!

I thought the booklets we got for some classes were a little weird, but after using mine, I actually quite like it. Instead of handing us articles to read each week, they're all in the booklet. Not only is it very neatly put together, but this way it's easy to refer to past articles. I found it a very good resource- not to mention that all of the articles we had to read for class today were really interesting (well... save for one.) Here's what my booklet for Adaptations looks like:

And on the inside:

So I'm really finding that handy. I also felt like I could hold my own in the discussion today. I think our orienters kind of exaggerated the differences between the English students and us; they made it sound like our English counterparts would eat us alive in class and we'd feel dumb all the time. But I contributed a good amount to the conversation, got some "that's a really good point"s from my teacher, and made more Shakespeare references than I even knew that I knew (my class loves to reference Shakespeare.) The quote in the title was said in our discussion; since so many people are poisoned in tragedies, we feel it's a good rule to follow in general. So so far, I think I'm doing all right in my classes.

Random fact of the day: here, you don't just call your teacher "professor" because they teach you. In the UK (and perhaps all of Europe), professor is actually the highest rank, and you have to work up to it. So while it's not an insult if you accidentally call your instructor "professor," they like to be called by their proper title (I suppose much like addressing an American professor as "doctor"- they usually correct you and say that they're not a doctor.) So while some of my teacher may be professors, others will fall into the following categories: Lecturer, Technicaly Director, Senior Lecturer, Reader, or Performance Supervisor. Now if I could only figure out which of my teachers fall into which category...

Oh, also... apparently, the weight of another year of life is too much for my body to handle. Halfway through my birthday festivities yesterday, the muscles of my right knee decided to completely spaz out, leaving me hobbling around and unable to climb stairs like I was 121 instead of barely 21. Now they're still quite painful and I don't know what's wrong with me. Getting older is FUN! :p