How do You Know?

Your whole body is shaking.
Every muscle in your entire body is quivering.
Your legs threaten to stop their ever present support of you,
Your fingers are beyond your conscious control,
Even your voice, your tool, your skill,
Has been given over to a much quieter, more tremulous, weaker version of itself
Than the one you rehearsed with.

Yes, everything shakes.

You stand there, on your miniature stage in front of the smallest, yet somehow most consequential audience you have ever before faced,
And you begin to speak the lines you have carefully prepared.
They rush out,
Sounding nothing like anything you've said before,
Nothing like the strong, confident-sounding monologue you spent hours working over.
Your breath continues to catch in the strangest ways as your muscles still refuse your command.

You finish speaking,
Your last syllable petering off into silence.
Your face muscles relax, move downward.

Downward?
This means they were up once.
Up, smiling, even during the prose that should have brought tears...
But it did.
You wipe the tears from your face, left over from the character in whose shoes you spent the last few moments.
Tears.
Yet..a lifted, smiling face.
Smiling, though you shook.
Smiling, though you cried.
Smiling, though you feared this judge worse than any before.
Smiling.

That's how you know you belong up there.
On that stage, facing that director at that audition,
The director who will tell you in a few fleeting words whether or not you are good enough.
And your face pulls itself into a smile, without you even realizing it.
A smile that blends perfectly to look like tears, anger, or ecstasy.
No matter what role you become,
What emotion plays across your soul,
You smile.

That's how you know.

The Castle!

So, through a terribly overwhelming process known as the Housing Lottery, I was assigned a living space for next year. I'll take a second to outline the Lottery for your viewing pleasure.

Mid-February I recieved an e-mail telling me that my number was 425. This basically translates to...well...no one really knows. Not even the Dept. of Community Living can tell you. It's a fair number. I mean, the numbers went down to like 1000 something. The housing areas for sophomores are thus (in order of desirability): The Village (AC, and they clean your bathroom for you), Rosenthal (suite style living, close to lots of things, but you have to clean your own bathroom-traditionally party living), East (at the bottom of a large hill, doubles or singles, no suites-but traditionally more social than), The Castle (a Hogwarts-esque building that is supposed to be super anti-social but really, who cares. IT'S. A. FREAKING. CASTLE.), a single in North or Massell( freshman quads. yes, living with freshman as a sophomore. Not. Fun.), or, like, a trash can on the Great Lawn.

So with my number I was also assigned a housing appointment time. My appointment was sheer hell. I literally sat in a room full of nervous people for 3 hours. Everyone was nervous because we were all watching the projector screen which displayed the list of rooms still available. By the time we got to the 400s, people were sweating. Rosie and the Village were closed completely, East was rapidly closing. Things got super tense.

But then...sigh. It was over. The end of the world was averted as people were finally assigned their rooms, mostly the ones they originally wanted. It just all seemed to work out okay.

And I got my Castle room. SCORE!!!! I'm going to be at freaking Hogwarts next year. Suck on that. Yeah!!!! It's lovely. Google image search the Brandeis Castle. She's a beaut.

Academia, Genocide, and Other Things

"So it wasn't just that things interested him because he didn't know from boring-it was the connection his brain made, connections he couldn't help but seek out."
~An Abundance of Katherines, by John Green

(I wanted to make that quote the title, but it wouldn't fit.)

Anyway, I first want to say that I just love how sometimes, my brain makes these lightning fast realizations that completely and totally fascinate me. It's what I love about college. In high school, I think my brain only got me really super excited like once or twice a year. In college, if I do all my reading and homework, it can happen several times a week.

Like now, for instance. I have a paper due in my Human Rights class in about a week and I am EXCEEDINGLY behind on my reading, so I'm catching up so as to write a good paper. I just picked up "A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide" by Samantha Power.

It's quite a read. And I'm only on like page 20. So far, Power has talked about the Turkish slaughter of Armenians and the international reaction to it. This was back in 1921, before genocide was even a word.

So my paper topic is thus: If you could advise the Clinton Administration on the situation in Rwanda a few years ago, what would you tell them? Go into Rwanda, damn the consequences, save the lives? Or stay out. Play it safe.

I had no idea how to answer (and I still don't) but upon reading Power's book, I realized that my entire question was wrong. I was looking at it like the choices were either
1. Enter Rwanda with force because it's the right thing to do to save the lives that we were no doubt capable of saving
OR
2. Stay out (and here's the important part) BECAUSE IF WE ENTER WE WILL BE DRAINING AMERICAN RESOURCES AND POTENTIALLY INVOLVING OURSELVES IN A WORLD CRISIS THAT IS NOT OUR OWN(I was thinking along the lines of another Viet Nam, or Iraq [although Clinton admittedly would not have known about Iraq yet].)

The problem with that, as Power points out, is that when looking at genocide (a word coined to describe the WWII Holocaust) the arguments should not be so self centered. It doesn't matter what AMERICA wins or loses. Intervene to save lives, or, and here is it, stay out TO UPHOLD INTERNATIONAL LAWS that protect sovereignty within a nation's own borders.

That maintaining sovereignty seems like it would be easy to brush away if what the nation in question was doing was perceived as wrong. But (and this ties into my anthropology class, which I totally dig), who are we to define what is WRONG? Americans as a group tend to see cultural phenomena purely from within American context. In order to correctly assess a situation, it has to be looked at from WITHIN the society being questioned.

This is not to say that genocide is ever acceptable, it simply needs to be understood in contextual terms before any extreme action is taken.

Okay...my mind is still firing so I'm going to go read more before I fall asleep. If you want to borrow the book, I will bring it back with me for the summer. Not quite summer reading, but once I'm done with this semester, I won't need it for a class text anymore.

Love to all!

Sometimes, Writing Happens.

I have no idea where this came from. I started out just wanting to jot down a line or two about the ice. Here's what THAT turned into.



Ice makes the asphalt glitter
It's so beautiful that for a moment
I forget the treachery of treading upon such a glamorous surface. My boot slides, refusing to grant me the traction I need to remain upright. I fall.
Fall.
Fall.
I open my eyes.
There you stand.
You hold out a hand
Which I take, gladly.
You help me to my feet,
Turning the world back up the right way for me. I tilt my head so that I may look into your eyes.
You smile.
I smile.
We walk away from the scene of my
Fall.
Your hand in mine
That you may hold me up
And help to balance my world.

Winterrrr

I'm sure most of the few readers I ever had have completely lost patience with waiting around for me to post. I know, I'm bad at regularity. But...isn't it fun when I DO write something? Worth checking anyway? No?

...

Well fine. :P Don't read this. I don't care. (I do.)

I landed in Boston Logan at like 1 a.m. this morning and took a cab to Brandeis where I promptly fell into bed. I didn't fall asleep until probably close to 5, but that's my fault. I do this thing called thinking, and it sometimes keeps me awake.

ANYWAY.

I woke up this morning, had a perfectly nice and polite conversation with my roommates, then Ilana pulled up the shade.

And it was snowing.
And I was excited.
Because I love snow.
Enough with the fragments.

So, I went through all my morning routines with the tooth brushing and the getting dressed and such like, then I got ready to walk to my first class...IN THE SNOW. I was really excited as I put on my boots, and scarf, and coat. I kept smiling all the way to my class, simply because I have a monumental love of solid-ish sky-water.

Class.

End of class.

I decided to walk over to get my mail. Did so, then had to walk back to Renfield.

By this point I has wet socks and my hair was curling really weirdly. Eh.

About halfway to my second class, I was done with snow. The end. Am I really going to be buried in this slushy mess until MAY?! I don't know how okay that is. My socks may never dry properly...oh well. That's the price I pay.

See you in the spring...

Finals Week

And so it begins.

Twenty-four hour quiet hours officially go into effect tomorrow at 11. Finals, and the end of semester 1 are nearly upon us.

...

WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO SEMESTER 1?!

But it's ok, because I don't have to take finals :)

But my freshman year is half over...that's insanity. Did I blink? Or accidentally sleep through a few months? I feel like it's all gone so quickly, yet I have been here forever. But not really changed, or accomplished anything.

Well, nothing much to say. I have papers to write, and stuff to pack. See you all on Saturday!

Rest in Peace

I found out this morning that my high school friend Brendan Irving committed suicide last night. Brendan was in my theatre troupe, and he was one of my friends. We were not super close, but he was one of those constant presences. He was a part of 2774. Member for life. And after?

Brendan was always making people smile. He never had any trouble making anything funny. So many memories. All good ones. Brendan was kind, a good actor, and a good person.

So Brendan my love, know that you are greatly missed and will continue to be missed for a long time. And rest in peace sweetheart.