Weeks 7-11: Not Exactly "Comme Il Faut," as it Were.

It certainly has been some a while since I have had the requisite time to sit down (or, more accurately, lay down) and write a post for my adoring fans. Oh, and then there is you all! (Just...take that as a compliment. That is the intent behind it.

Well, lets go in somewhat of a chronological order, shall we?

Whenever midterm grades went out
I discovered that if my midterm grades were my end-of-semester grades, I would have a semester GPA of 3.43. That is a huge deal for me. HUGE. HUGE! GIGANTIC!!!

Friday, 31 October
-I went dressed as an original character from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Read as: I wore the TNG uniform and made myself look pretty.

Wends-Sat 5-8th November
-The performances of The Caucasian Chalk Circle by Bertolt Brecht that I knew I would be involved in since this February. So, it was an event quite some time in the making. It was a pretty good show, and we got a pretty good reaction from the crowd. Since this is a blog about my life, I have no qualms saying that people complemented me more than a few times on it. That made me happy! It was the 40th production I have done. I made the ballsy move to render my pronouns as masculine (the way I prefer them) in my bio and whoever edits the program took it upon themselves to "correct" them. That was set straight right away because the director of the show is one of the best allies I know.

Saturday, 8th November
-A wildly good day. First I had the Alpha Psi Omega National Theatre Honors Society interest meeting.  My parents came up to see Chalk Circle. It was my half-birthday. I had some good pizza. I went to the cast party. An all-over fantastic day!

Monday, 10 Novemeber
-This January, I am designing the costumes for Cardboard Alley Players' production of "The Actor's Nightmare" by Christopher Durang. We had our first production meeting. It is going to be a very, very cool show.

Wednesday, 12 November
-I will be going to the American College Theatre Festival this January. It is in Hyannis, MA. I have never gone before, but it should be really great, just by looking at the other people who are going and what I have heard about it. Surely it will be a great networking, and, more importantly, learning experience. It is a Kennedy Center thing.
-APO UNDERSTUDIES SPRING 2015!!! Yes, you read that correctly. I will be/am an understudy (inductee) for APO this year. (Nu Iota Cast) Those of you closest to me know how much I have wanted this and for how long. And I am finally getting it. It means so much. One of the biggest things it symbolises to me is that I am accepted with the other theatre students and that I am forgiven. But, honestly, all it means is that I meet the requirements, I know that. It just feels like so much more.

14 Novemeber
This semester, I managed to have two workstudies, both filling up my allotted 7 hours/week. For reasons that should not be on the internet, I needed to quit one of them. The need was there for a while. On 14 Nov, I finally had the guts to do it. Go me. Lucky for me, since it is only three hours and the theatre department kind of likes me, I've picked up theatre work study to fill the missing time. I have to say, I feel pretty empowered.

~There has been more than all of this.~

~Looking back, these are just the things that stick out!~

(the) NEXT (few) WEEKs

On Friday (21 Nov), I will leave for home for Thanksgiving break, where I will stay for the remainder of the month...wow. On Saturday, the family and I are going to see Craig Fergueson. I cannot tell you how stoked I am for it! Then, on Sunday, I'm going to see BTC do their production of Big Fish which seems to have been getting all sorts of great press! I'm so proud of them. 

SIDE NOTE: I have started a GoFundMe campaign to help with what I want to do this summer. Basically, I want to take a week-long design course in London. GoFundMe is a more personal version of Kickstarter (crowdfunding). Take a look at my project here. It's starting to be the holiday season, and every penny counts :)

Weeks 4-7: Many Things, and Yet, Nothing

Well, recently there has not been anything really to mention. Hence why I have not mentioned much. I'm still doing quite well with grades and such, but an expense of it has been some stress. Thankfully, I have solidified my friendships enough that I have the right people to talk to.

Living at the lake has still been fantastic. It is pretty great to be able to go home from campus.

Speaking of home, that is where I am presently. It is the end of October Break, and I go home tomorrow at noon. The highlight of being home was getting to see my friend Kevin in The Fantasticks. Picture to the left.

In other theatre-y news, it is all but official that I will be doing the costumes for this January's production of "The Actor's Nightmare" by Christopher Durang. It is a great little play. It has about 13 costumes for five actors and 22 pages. It should prove to be quite the...experience.

Rehearsals for Caucasian Chalk Circle have long been in full swing. After this Friday. we will have reached the milestone of no longer being permitted to call for line. I won't say that it concerns me...but I will say I am not as prepared as I'd like to be.

Oh, and my Doctor Who/Fandom Blog just hit 70,000 views :3

NEXT WEEK

Well, this week is already underway. I have a huge essay that I may or may not have started due Sunday. It really is a may-or-may-not situation: I've only sort of started it. Regardless, hopefully it will pan out. Oh, and it is officially the second half of the semester. Wooooh! Friday and Saturday are the Haunted Pine Lake thing, which I so enjoyed doing last year. I think that because of rehearsals I will only be able to do Saturday. It is basically like being in a Haunted House except outside. Saturday also is the APO interest meeting.... Sunday (26 Oct) I'll go into the city with school to see Cabaret which should be amazing as not only have I really wanted to see it for a while now (#AlanCumming!) but my friends will be there with me :)

Weeks Three and Four: Rehearsals Start, and Not Much Else

3:
There was not really anything overly enthralling this week, hence why it is being combined with another week. I started rehearsals for Caucasian Chalk Circle. I continued to not miss any assignments, I realised that if I take one more English course (190), with the one I'm taking now and the four drama lit courses I have to take for the Theatre Arts major, that I will be able to have the English minor. Cool beans.

4:
This week I was sick. Bleh. Sort of allergies but I also have not one, but two ear infection! (As a friend of mine said, at least I don't have three!) I celebrated Rosh Hashanah with two of my good friends at the lake and it was awesome. We had a meal, with recipes courtesy of my Bubbi, and read the generally accepted portions from the Tanak. My director was nice enough to give me off of rehearsals. I also got the fantastic news that I will be going to New York Comic Con this year, for free with one of the clubs I'm involved with. Yay! I feel like there was more this week but I don't really think that I'm right on that. Also, as of right now, I'll be designing the props and costumes for the jTerm show, "Actor's Nightmare". Awesome. Cool. Fantastic. Yes.

NEXT WEEK

At present, I can't think of anything really worth mentioning...

Week Two: Theatre and Technical Difficulties

What a weird week.

Well, not weird as much a complicated.
Monday started off it all. It was auditions for Caucasian Chalk Circle, the mainstage this fall. Tuesday, everyone got callbacks, and Wednesday only 10. Casting came out on Thursday. The show has 65 or so roles, and we're doing it with 13 actors. Three of my roles I'm really excited for, and the others I'm not very familiar with. One is called the First Doctor, so no need to explain why that's cool. Another one is a farmer's wife, which will be my first speaking role that is female. And this is my 40th production. The only other one I know that truly means anything to me with only having the bits of the script we used for the callbacks is a role called Nephew. needless to say, he is the nephew of someone--but that someone is a prince who is tryung to place my character in power as a pawn. He is nicknamed "Little Fox"  and just oh my god its like the director knew that they are one of my favorite animals and it couldn't be better yay.
We get our scripts and start rehearsing tomorrow.

On Wednesday, I was trying to do training for my work-study. The job requires I know my way around Hartwick's website's content management system (CMS) and how to create in it. So that is what I was learning. My computer had been giving me issues for quite some time--blue screens, insisting on boot that it did not have an OS installed, not lancing applications, thinking programs weren't even installed when they were running in the background--the usual (#Sarcasm) so I brought it to the tech center. Well, apparently it was having issues reading the hard drive, which is being replaced. I should have it back tomorrow. They gave me a loaner in the meantime. Hopefully their back-up was successful. I've heard reports of it being not so. Either way, my really important stuff is on Dropbox or Google drive, so I'm not overly concerned. The only real loss I can't think of is my single-player Minecraft world and the ready-to-upload video of Imbalances., the show I did this summer.

Friday at 7p  kicked off  Hartwick's 7th annual 24-Hour Play Festival. This year, I stage managed one of the plays and it was absolutely fantastic. My good friend, Brian, wrote it, and it was directed by Lynda, another friend of mine. The cast and story was fantastic. It was about a college junior, Clarissa, who is about to leave (like, her plane leaves that night) for a year-long study abroad in Europe when she finds out her father has advanced cancer, and may not be there when she gets back, and she has to decide whether or not to go on her trip, keeping in mind that he Dad, who is a single parent, has worked very hard for her to be able to have this chance to see the world, which is a chance he never had. Ultimately, she goes, knowing that it is what her father wants to do.

Now, as I think I wrote last year, there was a black out that nearly meant an outside performance for last year's 24. This year, we have new LED lights (they're sooo cool!) and it was the first time they were being used, and about half an hour before the show was to start we started smelling a smelly smell that smells when you smell the smell. Many of us were very concerned that something was going very wrong in the dimmer pack (in short, its the connection between the console where the lights are controlled from and the lights themselves). It smelled like our old vacuum cleaner, which I always thought smelled like velvet, but not in a good way at all. At first, Campus Safety was called, but, to say the least, they were a tad out of their element in a technical aspect of theatre. They were, of course, worried about fire, and for a few minutes the show was going to happen without the lighting and just the florescent, which was really tragic because having the LEDs make it so we basically can use any colour at any time, so the lighting was beautiful. But, after a call to the technical director, who postulated that it was just some dust burning off as it was the first time the lights have been being used this semester, and were on for while, it was decided that it wasn't very likely to burst into flames, so we ran both shows, successfully, with the lighting. Yay! I have to say that I think it was the best 24 yet.

NEXT WEEK

Monday: Rehearsals for Caucasian Chalk Circle start. It will be my first mainstage at Hartwick.Th rehearsals will take over my life, but that's a good thing...right? I also have my first day of my other work-study.

Week One: I Didn't Drop the Class, I Threw It on the Ground.

I can't say with honesty that this week was overly eventful. There was only really one highlight, or , um, lowlight.

If you asked me what classes I was taking any time before 11:15 on Wednesday, I would have listed Mandarin as one of them. That, however, quickly became untrue. As much as I was excited for it, I thought it would be taught in the fashion all my other language courses had been. But no. The instructor planned to teach it in an immersion style. Immersion is great if you're in a country where that language is often spoken, or even just in an environment like that. But immersion for 5o minutes three times a week...at least for me, that would not work. She also wanted us to memorise and perform the dialogue from the CDs that came with our books. With out knowing the meaning of the words. Just the sounds...? What really made me decide to drop right away was that her syllabus was a Power Point--I could not print it out if I wanted to, and that we were getting the assignments only a week in advance, leaving me no real chance to get ahead if I wanted to. I knew I would get a bad grade if I kept the class, and I need to bring up my GPA. I also knew that it was a hard choice between Mandarin and a course on sound systems used in the theatre, which are being taught at the same time. So, for a third semester in a row, I have a class with Ken Golden (head of the the Theatre department) at 11:15.

All my other classes, being Intro to Theatre, Intro to Bible, and Victorian Literature (henceforth Vic Lit) seem like they are going to be really cool.

Today was the first fencing club meeting and it was great to get back to that. There were more new people there than returning members, which is great, but it was mostly teaching the newbies the basics, so not that riveting for those of us who couldn't really benefit from getting taught what they were being taught, yet not skilled enough to teach it in they eyes of the eboard.

Oh, and the chipmunk has not dared to make another appearance!

NEXT WEEK

Monday: Auditions for Caucasian Chalk Circle (call-backs Tuesday and maybe Wednesday)

Next Weekend: 24 Hour Play Festival

Week Zero: Welcome Weekend Skits and The Chipmunk

The title here really speaks it all. Well, not quite.

The reason this is Week Zero and not Week One is because I came back to Hartwick a week early because I was acting in the Welcome Weekend Skits that Alpha Psi Omega (APO), Phi Mu Alpha (PMA), and Cardboard Alley Players (CAP) perform for our first-year students (freshmen, transfers, etc). The skits talk about everything from what not to eat in the Commons to how to navigate Perrella Health Center, to the dangers that come with going parties. I remeber watching them my freshman year and they did have some influence on me. A lot of the behaviours they cautioned, like going out to frats aren't really my scene, but I have never eaten the cheese cutlet, which Salad effectively beats in a dance off.
What was really the great part of being in the skits was that I got to be included with the members of APO, of which I am a prospective member. They are generally the more senior theatre people, but also there are people there from my year. Its nice to feel a bit more "in" with the people I want to be friends with. It makes a nice segue that several of the people there live at Pine Lake.

In addition to this being my first week on campus, this was also my first week living at Pine Lake, not counting Awakening (but I'm actually staying here and not living out of a suitcase so its a bit different). It has been incredibly amazing and just so fantastic. Each morning I wake up to birds and a beautiful mist around the lake. My room also has grape vines growing around it, so it really adds a nice feel--plus, in a few weeks I'll just be able to reach outside my window and have grapes!
There has only been one...drawback...here.

Thar she be.

If you know me personally, and not just online, you probably know that I live with a therapy pet, which is a hamster named Espresso. He is awesome. So, this teaches you that I like rodents. But its a bit different when you wake up to something that sounds like a bird but isn't a bird barking (note, I did not write chirping) at you from beneath your desk. I was at first horrified at the possibility that it was a bird. I do not care for birds in such close proximity to me. That was just the begenning. Allow me to regale you with my Facebook statuses:

August 28th

10:04AM
Waking up to birds chirping? Yeah, kind of nice.
Waking up to a bird in your room? Not so much. 

11:30AM
Update: the bird is actually a chipmunk. I never knew they made that noise.

August 29th 

10:26AM
Continuing the Chipmunk Saga. My lovely housemate found a bunch of fur and a ~TAIL~ on a sticky pad used for catching mice under our sink. A friend of mine informed me that chipmunks and similar rodents can drop the skin of their tails as a defense mechanism.
I'm horrified I'm going to wake up to a chipmunk with a bone tail barking at me tomorrow morning.
Absolutely.
Horrified.

August 30th 

2:19PM
THE CHIPMUNK IS BACK.

Luckily, upon its return, it seemed to have a tail. Unfortunately, this tells me that there were likely multiple critters.

NEXT WEEK

Next week will start classes on Tuesday. Until then, I have no reason at all to even leave Pine Lake. I'm looking forward to the semester for so many reason, but I know it will be the hardest one yet. In addition to taking the most credits I've ever taken and being in the mainstage ("Caucasian Chalk Circle"), I also need to get some really great grades to make myself have the GPA I need for APO. It should be eventful and I will try my best to give weekly updates here!

Hellooo Hartwick!

Well.
I have arrived! I can't quite with great honesty say that I am entirely unpacked, but most things are in their place and my room is starting to look like a place where someone is--which is an improvement from this time 24hrs ago.

This week I have rehearsals for the skits that the new students see at the Welcome Weekend. That's why I'm here early. I'm pretty psyched to be here a week early and to be spending it with friends!

I'm going to try to update at least every-other week. We'll see how that goes.....

No Title: There are No Words (Repost)

~~

This post was originally published on my other blog, Time and Relative Dimension in Style (TARDIStyle).

~~

This isn't really a post that has too much to do with Doctor Who. But it is still a post that needs to be written. Because something cannot be seen if it does not exist.

Mrs Doubtfire is quite posibly one
of my favorite movies ever.

By now, everyone who knew who Robin Williams is (note that I refer to him in the present tense--he will always be alive, in our minds and on film) probably knows that he has died. If you had not, I am so, so sorry to be the one to break the news to you. I can't say that a celebrity's death has ever caused an emotional response as deep as his passing has. The fact that it is likely a suicide makes it even more close to me. As soon as it was revealed that it was a suicide, everyone who had ever loved Mrs Doubtfire or Aladdin has immediately become The World's Best Suicide Prevention Advocate. While it is fantastic that the issue is getting the attention it is due, why did we need to lose one of the century's best performers for it to have that attention?

People assume that depression, and mental illness in general, is something that is obvious. But it's not. It's something that can hide for a long time, even in plain sight. 

Those of you who have seen this post already know about my struggles with my condition in a broad sense. But let's talk, let's really talk. 

The big thing that set my mental illness into motion happened in 2004/5. In short, and not to disclose any one else's personal information, my parents separated. I was about 10. I did not start self-injury until I was almost 17. The signs were there. Everything that would build up to that first cut fell into place quite nicely. So incredibly quietly that I was completely unable to identify how it all began until quite recently. I laid those pieces, some of them, in response to others being laid. Like how when you do a puzzle, to extend our metaphor, you put together the outside pieces first (if you didn't know that, enjoy your pro-tip for the day!) Yes, I made choices. But those choices were made in response to my biological programming having an error. If you're familiar with Star Trek: The Next Generation, (if you're not, go watch it; it's fantastic!) you know that Data's positronic brain establishes pathways in response to repeated stimuli. Ours do as well. It is a basic part of how we learn. We see a colour, someone tells us it is purple. Wash, rinse, repeat. Eventually, you learn that that is purple. This is how almost all learning takes place.

I'll get back to the point. The more those connections are reinforced, the stronger they become--and the harder it is to break that pathway. It becomes a habit. A few years after that habit was developed, I reached a roadblock. That behaviour was no longer producing the desired effect. It's like how an addict eventually needs more of the drug to get their high. (Do NOT read that as that I had done drugs. That is not the habit I am referring to at all.) So, my "drug-of-choice" changed. It became self-injury. No--not became, the self-injury was added to the mix. That first disorder did not leave.

Since this is primarily a DW blog,
lets add some DW to it.

A sad byproduct of self-injury that it is not only a sign (a very big, red sign) of depression, but it also causes depression if the person isn't already depressed. It's a bit wibbly-wobbly: the cause-to-effect isn't always what it is assumed to be. I don't know which came first for me. But I do know what happened next. I became suicidal. I lost count, but am proud to have survived no less than 4 suicide attempts. A lot of that number depends on what one considers an attempt. But the only person whose definition of attempt matters is mine and my doctor's. 

Ultimately, I had over five hospitalisations in a psychiatric unit, all occurring within two years of each other. This November will mark two years since the end of my last stay. Hopefully, that date will stay that way. 

When someone has cancer, it starts in one part of the body and can spread to others if not accurately diagnosed and treated effectively. This process is called metastasis. Mental illness does this as well. Of course, it all stays within your brain, but it moves to different parts, different manifestations, often without leaving that first place entirely, if at all. And just like other, more physically tangible diseases, it can leave it's mark on your body. Self-injury in all it's forms is not only seen in depressed patients. (Fun fact? We are not the only species to self-injure.) It can happen in patients with a multitude of disorders. 

"So, Ley, what are you getting at?"

Here is what I am getting at. The biggest thing we need in to do to prevent suicide is talk. I did not talk about that first disorder because I was scared of the consequences--disappointing people, losing friends, the whole deal. Because I was worried about people's reaction, it didn't get any light thrown on it until it was--almost--too late. If that stigma hadn't been there, if I wasn't worried about getting in trouble, there would be a totally different outcome. The fact of the matter is that even as I write this, I have a filter, because I know the same people who I didn't want to disappoint will probably see this, even now that I know that doing what I did wasn't quite as much of a choice as it was a requirement of my biology. We need to recognise that mental illness is not a choice the patient makes. I didn't wake up one morning and thing, "You know what would be fun? If I establish a set of learned behaviours that will ultimately lead to multiple suicide attempts! Yeah, let's do that." Once we rid ourselves of the assumption that people choose to have a mental illness, we can talk about it. And once we can talk about it, we can prevent it. Maybe Mr. Williams' death will really start a conversation about all this. We've been dancing around the issue of mental health for far too long. Let's not just have this death be a point in our society's road where we could have taken a shortcut but did not.

I think it's at least worth a try.

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, please, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 1-800-273-8255. If you live outside the US, click here for a the listing of the equivalent service in your country. It will get better, it really will--I promise.

Hartwick and SUNY Oneonta Fencing Match

Today was one of the coolest days I've had in a long time. Actually, scratch that--it's quite warm under all that fencing gear.

As I am told happens most springs, Hartwick's and SUNY Oneonta (SUCO)'s fencing clubs met today. We fenced all three weapons, foil, sabre, and épée. Let me clarify that "weapon" is just what it's called in the sport. As you can imagine, it was a bit tiring, but fun. For each tournament, we split into two groups and did round-robins in each. The first fencer to score 5 points won. The points a fencer scored minus the points scored on the fencer gave us a number of points that decided the seed we were in the bracket, in which the victor is declared at 15 points. We all fenced in the same bracket, of course; splitting in to two groups for the round robins was far faster. It's true that the point totals would have been different if we had been in different groups in the beginning, but who knows whose favour that would have worked in.

The first up was the weapon I use the most, foil. I didn't win a single round-robin bout, but still wasn't the last seed, which was nice. I lost in the first round of the brackets, though. I was very disappointed with my performance, and I don't think I was being aggressive enough. My friend, Carson (also the club's secretary) won the tournament.

Next we had épée. Before today, I'm not sure if I had even ever picked up an épée. I won two out of the three round-robin bouts. I believe I was then the third seed in épée, and lost that match to the Hartwick club president 14-15. In the end, Carson won--again!! I was really impressed at how well I did with épée, especially considering it was my first time, and I was kind of like, "how do I hold this?" It was nice to do so well after such an upset for me in foil.

In foil, the target area is the torso, no arms or legs. In épée, if you hit the person, you get a point, even if you hit each other at the same time. In foil, there is something called right-of-way. This means if both fencers hit each other at the same time, the one who is advancing gets awarded the point. The only caveat to épée is that the point of the weapon has to touch, and the same is true for foil.

The last weapon we did was sabre. In this, you can hit with any part of the blade, from the waist up, including the head. I had used sabre back in jTerm and again last Saturday, so I don't have much experience with it. I did pretty okay with it. Alex won the brackets.

It was really nice that all the people who won the brackets were from Hartwick. There were only three people from SUCO. That is only a fraction of the team, and two of those people were faculty/staff of SUCO and only one student. Apparently the teams liked it enough that we will be holding joint practices once a week. It will definitely be interesting to see their styles of fencing, as there was a very palpable difference between the two club's forms going into the matches.

Acting in the Face of Judgements

In the sixth grade, I picked up Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None after something about it had been brought up in class (I honestly don't remember what exactly). The teacher took one look at me reading that and said "Hailey, I don't think you can handle that book." My reaction? Of course, keep reading that book, and write a B+ essay on it. Bam.

Although that was eight years ago, that trend still follows me.

I wanted to sign up for the Victorian Literature course for this coming fall semester, so I did. A few days after I registered for it, my academic advisor said that she needed to meet with me. Earlier today, when we met, she told me that the professor of the class thought that I could not handle the class. Technically, she could not bar me from taking the course as although it is a 300-level course there are no prerequisites for the class.

Where did this come from? The one time I had met the professor--almost two years ago--I was very anxious about a plethora of different thing. It was incoming students day, and we were meeting with advisors about course scheduling for the fall, etc., and I had to meet with the person who coordinates services for students with disabilities at the same time as this session. It was a new setup to have advisors meet with a group of students, and I was in a new place with new people and, honestly, a little scared about missing that other appointment. Long story short, we both left that meeting with negative views of each other.

When I saw that this same professor was offering a course on Victorian Literature, and it was a course that would satisfy the writing level graduation requirement, I was conflicted. On one hand, I really wanted to take this course. On the other, it was with her. But, I decided to put that behind me and sign up anyway.

I can't say I was overly surprised when the professor wanted to meet with me before this course. What I was surprised about was how well this meeting went. In fact, I'm not exactly sure it could have gone any better.

I came in with my tail between my legs. She started to talk about the course, in a way that seemed like she was trying to scare me out of taking the course, but it actually made me want to take the course even more. She asked what kind of literary background I had, so I told her about how I had been published with UAL last fall. On learning that it was about Doctor Who, she insisted that I meet a colleague of hers who was also a Whovian after we were done talking.

Just before we finished talking, I brought up that first circumstance under which we had met. I apologised. Her response was that she thought it was a "mature and professional" thing to do. I explained that I had a lot of extraneous stress, and that sealed the deal. There was a look of surprise on her face when I said "extraneous".

While introducing me to this colleague, the department chair came by. She introduced me to her, as well, although we had already met as the Theatre Arts and English departments are the same department. She said, "this is Ley. She will be taking my Victorian Lit course in the fall."


I think there is still some reservations that she has on me. I know that I will have to work very, very hard on this course to prove that I can handle it.

We shall see...