Tag Archives: quotes

Personal Blog

On Wikipedia

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Will made a remark about Wikipedia which I find quite brilliant, so I will repost it here:

“You have to treat Wikipedia like a really huge store and pretend you’re shopping for trivia. You’ve gotta go in with a mission, grab it, and get out, ’cause otherwise you’ll spend all day browsing through the pretties.”

It is true that the link-filled nature of the wiki is akin to some carnivorous plant, slowly drawing you in, entangling you more and more, until you are digested over some extraordinary amount of time. Here is my current trail:

Sweeney Todd -> Titus Andronicus -> Seneca the Younger -> Medea -> Argonauts -> They Might Be Giants -> Tiny Toon Adventures -> Muppet Babies -> The Garbage Pail Kids

And then I had to stop, because it’s late and I have to wake up early tomorrow for the Adventure Module!

Personal Blog

5 Shredding Tears and 1 Lisa

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What a fun week! The Shredding Tears performance on the roof of Glassworks was faaaaaaaaantastic! They are such amazing performers! Also, the sound was really nice, kudos to Ken for finding whoever ran sound for that show.

The next day I clambered into the tour van of said Tears and set out with them as an official roadie. The trip was delightful, and their show in Toledo was quite fun. I actually tried very hard to convince Bauer to let me help out, but he was confident in just having me assist Graham in guarding the van as they loaded in and out.

Graham and I make the perfect ominous guard team: a blind man and a short girl. Go us! Here are some highlights from the trip…

Favorite Quote:
“The only thing I’ve ever lost in the band was the band fund which I didn’t lose.” -Bryan Scary

Most amusing moment:
At a pit stop with single user restrooms, Scary attempted to expedite the process when he discovered the men’s room had both a toilet and a urinal by inviting a COMPLETE STRANGER into the bathroom to pee with him (just being polite, the man was next in line after all). Upon the door closing, Mike, Graham, and myself exchanged the most befuddled, horrified, and bemused expressions. What I would give to have captured them!

And the winner of the “It’s Clearly Obvious these guys have spent so much time together that they have assimilated one another’s vernacular” Award goes to…
The word “absurd”

Thanks again to the Tears, who are so very lovable and wonderful people, who let me hitch a ride along their tour so that I could get back to Pittsburgh. I hope they come here to play some time.

Personal Blog

Moving and Theater

More busy moving times! Wednesday afternoon, evening, and night was spent moving DC and Beth out of their condemned apartment. Scott, Will, and I wandered over around 4:30 and joined the party of shoving large furniture and piddly boxes into vehicles, soon joined by more friends and family, caravaning the stuff out to Beth’s parents’ workplace, wherein a warehouse existed to hold their belongings. It was a very efficient and successful move.

If my work in the theater has given me one thing, it is the appreciation of how tame the average move is. After working numerous strikes and road shows at the Norton Center, moving and storing the entirety of DC and Beth’s belongings in a single day was a mild ordeal (I mean, we had the whole day! It was practically leisurely!)

In the theater, no person, even the smallest, escapes the frantic, precarious, and downright hard physical labor of tearing down and packing up shows. Even after many ninjutsu-like escapes, I took my turn carrying the damned sound board up the stairs of the Norton Center. Common household furniture is nothing! After detaching and loading an intelligent stage light with the sickening knowledge that it was probably worth more than my life, I can move fragile and sentimental belongings with utmost confidence. Scraping myself on a bookshelf is nothing compared to being bitten by an alligator clamp.

Though my work in the theater was often grueling, it has made me strong and confident in the face of common moves. I am very appreciative of all that the theater has taught me. So, future moves, I fear you not! For no matter how big the couch, no matter how many boxes, it will never be as painful as striking a show. And so I close with the words of Bill the Props Carp, spoken as he and I attempted to get a precarious chaise lounge off a very tall shelf: “You know, once mankind finishes filling in that periodic table, we’ll find something heavier to build this out of.”

Personal Blog

Friendship and Role Models

Today’s quote is Mother Theresa’s “God does not call us to do great things, but to do small things with great love.”

The other day I was talking with Will, and we were talking about each others values and how different ours were from the other’s and prodding around about how we got that way, and it brought to surface some interesting insights.

I was trying to figure out why friendship is such an important value to me, while for other people it is family or self-advancement or something else that is more important. I figured that my parents and family were good role models for teaching me how to maintain and value friendships.

I’d never really thought about it until during said conversation, Will asked me who my parents hung out with as a lead-in to something else, and I said, “Well, their friends…” and was puzzled because I didn’t know what else the answer could have been. My parents have always had close friends in their lives.

Nancy and Greg were the first and most prominent examples I had growing up. “Next door” was as commonplace as another room in our house, and watching how my parents maintained their relationship with the Fowlers must have been my earliest lesson in how important, and yet how ordinary and expected friendship was. This is also likely why Nancy’s death affected me and continues to affect me so much.

As I grew up and acquired new friends, so did my parents’, and to this day my mom and dad seem to have a more active social life than I do, but oh well 🙂

It wasn’t just my parents, but my grandparents as well, as I can remember their friends being around on a normal basis. I have noted several occasions my surprise when I found out that this person or that was not actually related to me, but just a family friend, simply because they were always around I had assumed the former.

It is strange to figure out how these role models were the source of my values, when looking back on it it seems rather obvious.

So what about YOU, internet. What are your values and where did they come from?

Personal Blog

Steak

Today’s quote is…

“Yesterday is but a dream, tomorrow is only a vision.
But a today well-lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness,
and every tomorrow a vision of hope..”

Now that I’m mostly cooking for myself, I more easily leave things out of my diet. Red meat, I have noticed, has all but vanished. I decided to get myself a little filet for dinner tonight, since I have been known to have problems with the anemia from time to time.

(In my defense, the last time I donated platelets, the lady said that I had a very high iron count…for a girl. So there!)

Hey, do you want to hear something kind of disgusting? Wheeler said that it was also adorable, but I think it’s mostly just disgusting.

Sometimes when I have a steak that is particularly delicious, but that I know is too big for me to finish, I will cut bites of it off and chew them like gum.

When all the flavor is gone, I spit it back out onto the plate, and get another bite. I do this until the entire steak has been sufficiently gnawed (rest assured, I also never do this in public, or even when anyone else is around, even Scott).

The resulting pile of masticated meat always makes me amazed at how much a stomach can hold.

Personal Blog

Japan Trip Update Number 1

Well kiddie winkies, it’s that time! However, I am not going to do this “About-my-Trip” update in the usual sense. This is because everyone hates to read chronological accounts of trips. No no, don’t deny it, I know it’s true. It’s like telling someone about your dream–no matter how well you tell it, it’s never, EVER as exciting to other people as to you. So, I’ma update by topic! Pictures and stories will be all mixed up, but I’ll cover everything. And for those of you who insist, I will provide a chronological listing as my very last post.

Also, even though I’m putting them behind cuts for the LJers, I’m still doing linky thumbnails, cuz there are just lots of pictures.

Food!

Personal Blog

Junior High Education

From Denali, as we were both discussing our disappointment with Girl Scouts in our youth, because we thought that it was supposed to be like Boy Scouts only for girls…

“Jr. High’s science class made up for it, though. Alaska being Alaska, a year of science class was dedicated to wilderness survival. They taught us everything from different ways of building a fire, how to turn your pants into a floatation device if you end up in the ocean, how to make fire-starter sticks, signaling aircraft and rescue boats, what’s edible and what isn’t, etc. This training concluded with an optional survival trip. They put us on an island for three days and we had to pack everything we thought we would need to survive with into a three-pound coffee can… and that included our shelter. We were allowed to carry sleeping bags, though!”

No fair! I want to learn how to do all that stuff. I haven’t even been camping since freshman year of college.