Best. Wedding. Evar.

Not much else needs to be said.



The DDR pads at Dave and Buster's better be ready for me when I get there tonight.

Live and Learn

Disclaimer: Despite the promises made in the last post, I haven't watched High School Musical yet. I'm still the same person as before - a liar and a coward. But soon, very soon...

So in a stunning turn of events, I actually find myself having to retract my prior statements on my recent performing arts workshop. While it may have been true that by the end of Wednesday night I was ready to smash my head into concrete, Thursday proved to be almost an entire 180 - it seemed everyone's cumulative frustrations in our group resulted in a razor sharp focus the next day, with many new ideas to help improve our act. Everyone's contributions mingled and merged, which eventually turned our disaster of a play into something cohesive and actually somewhat entertaining.

I was feeling much more confident by the time Friday rolled around, with the only remaining worry being whether or not people who came to the show would get involved. The concept of forum theater is that groups of actors create short plays which address certain issues or social problems. Each play is performed once through, and then repeated in exactly the same matter after all have been performed. The difference the second time through is that audience members have the opportunity and are encouraged to stop the action of the play (by literally yelling "stop") at the appropriate moment and take the place of the protagonist in the show. They are then able to alter the course of the narrative, showing how they would solve the social problem and ultimately beat their oppressor.

The night before the show, someone in our class asked what would happen if no one wanted to participate, to which the instructor said "I've never seen that happen. Ever." Our show was no different. The first two sketches were about materialism, and big businesses sacrificing the environment for money. Our group went on third, and we did a sketch which addressed technology, and how cell phone usage actually moves society more towards isolation than towards being connected. It was a little cheesy, with myself and another girl playing the malevolent spirits of technology who are out to ruin a party by keeping people from interacting through text messages, but it was overall played more for laughs, and I think it got the point across.

It was the fourth group, however, who stole the show, addressing illegal immigration. Their sketch involved an illegal immigrant working at a clothing store who has to confront his boss about why he was being payed less than minimum wage. Apparently, this was an issue that hit home with nearly everyone in attendance - the time spent reenacting this sketch was nearly an hour, making it so that we never actually got a chance to replay our sketch a second time (which was both a relief and kind of disappointing at the same time.) Solutions to the issue included flattering the boss, taking legal action, forming unions, blackmail, and even shoplifting from the store. By far the most exciting moment of the night came when one of the audience members actually managed to start a full on protest on stage, which involved all four groups storming the stage to become protesters.

In all, this issue seemed to be something that many people really cared about. I also feel like the ones who didn't care all that much about it cared a little more when they left the show. So, I have to take back what I said in the last post; I believe that, while we may not have actually solved anything, we did accomplish something, and hopefully inspired a few people.

Following the show, everyone enjoyed snacks and refreshments, during which actors could talk to the audience members and such. While I didn't hear much about our sketch or the first two, what with the immigration group clearly being the highlight, I was surprised and extremely flattered when at least four different people approached me saying that they remembered me and my DDR act from the last performance and how much they liked it. One woman said that she was deeply moved by how I've managed to use a hobby to get myself back on my feet, and someone else said that they were actually inspired to go out and buy DDR - none of this I was expecting, though I guess I didn't stick around long after the last performance for people to notice me. I'm really happy that I was able to inspire people - something I don't have much experience in.

At some point, Sarah, the other malevolent cell phone demon from my group, hooked up her Ipod to the AV system and started playing Daft Punk and some other cool dance music. Normally, I don't dance, nor do I do it in public in front of strangers (as Brett put it, "I've got the rhythm, but I don't have the moves.") None of that stopped me on Friday night, though. For about 6 or 7 of us it turned into a crazy dance party. Karen Schaffman, one of the instructors of this course, even tried to talk me into taking up a dance minor - unlikely, but I don't think I'd rule out taking some dance classes for fun. That all lasted for nearly an hour until we were all too tired and decided to help clean up and go home. Before I left, I made sure to thank Doug Paterson, the artist who led the workshop, for opening my eyes to another form of performance art, despite my initial frustrations. I ended up getting home at midnight, where I then had to write a paper on the shipping industry and containerization...

So I've been feeling pretty good as of late. I seem to have found a good balance between school, work, and friends, at least for the moment. I had a bunch of my friends over on Saturday night for "movie night", which was real relaxing, and also a nice change, as people don't usually visit my house.

My birthday is on Tuesday, but as I type I can feel myself catching a cold. Hopefully it'll peak tomorrow and I'll be well enough for Dave and Busters by Tuesday night - it won't prevent me from going, but potentially from enjoying myself. Regardless, some Spanish homework, and then time for bed.

"In order to summon the power for the conflict to come you must first have power over that which conflicts you."

Half Time

I'm sitting in my car, listening to OC Supertones and waiting for performing arts workshop. And, I feel like writing, I guess.

Started the day heading to my 9am Spanish class slightly late, and traffic was particularly bad this morning, so I did my homework in the car at stoplights. I've gotten pretty good at that actually. I used my Tech/Social change class as a chance to catch up on some journal assignments for the course, as well as pay my bills, which was funny to me. Thank God I can use my laptop during that class.

I left school at around noon to discover that my gas gauge was way below the E on my car. Last time it was that low, I actually did run out of gas. I had to find a creative way to make it to the nearest gas station while using as little gas as possible. I ended up riding down hills most of the way. The car started sputtering just as I pulled up to the pump.

I went to work for three hours after that, mainly putting up High School Musical 3 promo materials, and planning to put up more High School Musical 3 materials. I'm starting to get a little carried away with this. I've decided that, yes, it has to happen, I'm going to watch the first two movies. In fact, I've decided I'm not going to blog again until I've seen at least the first one. Know this - I might not necessarily write anything about it in my next blog, but I WILL have watched it by then, so it'll be like a completely different person blogging.

I went to Fry's after work to price party lights to add to my High School Musical display (and because I've always wanted party lights for some reason,) but I instead became distracted by DDR. I was pissed off when every song I tried to play unexpectedly ended half way through, resetting the game. Must have been in some kind of demo mode. Fuck that, said I.

So now I'm here. I'm waiting for this session of workshop to begin. I have to say, I really haven't enjoyed this one very much. It's supposed to be about forum theater, "Theater for the Oppressed", and it's supposed to promote community and such and such, but I think most people in the workshop agree when I say that I feel more oppressed at the end of each night. Furthermore, I'm tired of people arguing about which issues are relevant for theater, which "problems we need to solve," etc. Surely I'm not the only one who realizes that we AREN'T GOING TO SOLVE ANYTHING through this workshop - we're just beginning actors. I'm really afraid that this performance is going to come off as childish and/or be a disaster. In short, I've come home feeling murderous rage after the last two nights of workshop. At least most of the people are still cool.

When this is over, I'll be going back to work for another 3 hours to do marquee and such. So my schedule will have been school, work, school, work by the time the day is over. It's only half-time, and I'm already beat. Ugh.

Well, that was probably interesting to no one. Time to head to class.

Don't Panic

Some real quick notes today...

A few months back I made an untitled music mix, which I wrote "Don't Panic" on the label. It was a lot of sappy/dreamy music, along with some Disney tunes. It was good to sing along to in my car when I needed to stop stressing. And it helped me not to panic. Today, I destroyed that mix and deleted it from my computer. I feel empowered - go me :)

This week was long, with trying to balance school, work, and sending off Laura, who is now happily situated in Scotland. I will miss her, but we had a very good last couple days, so I'm happy about that. Pics from Universal to follow soon.

My Saturday night was a good break from my busy week, seeing Lakeview Terrace with Amy and Vince, and then hanging out with the floor crew at a late night bonfire (with a Denny's run afterward.) I was happy to hang out with some people I don't usually hang out with.

It appears I have another busy week ahead of me, what with another performing arts workshop and all. But, all in all, I'm doing just fine - haven't had a reason to panic yet.

Now I need to stop procrastinating on this homework, or I will have reason to panic.



PS: Here's something.

Fading Into Obscurity...

I've been on a high for the last two weeks or so - a complete contrast from most of August, which felt like my sanity was hanging by a thread almost all of the time. It's a great feeling to enjoy every day.

One of the courses I signed up for this semester is a performing arts lab. When I signed up, I did not know that the format of the class would be workshop based. There are five of them, each a week long, and you are required to attend three of your own choosing. So really, instead of meeting every Tuesday night from 5 to 830, there are three weeks of the semester where I go to class every night of each week from 5 to 10; the other ten or so weeks have no class sessions. Each workshop is held by a different visiting artist, each with different backgrounds.

This past week, I experienced my first workshop with Pat Payne, who is a spoken word poet. I was hesitant to sign up for this workshop, as I've never been much a fan of poetry, but seeing her perform really opened my eyes to what poetry can be. The workshop itself opened my eyes even further. Having no experience with performing arts of any kind, this workshop was really intense for me, but also the most fun I've had in a while - I actually looked forward to going to each five hour session every night. The workshop taught a lot about stage presence, and how to perform in front of an audience. We did all kinds of ridiculous exercises, often embarrassing, and I was surprised by how much I was able to open up around people I'd never met.

The workshop culminated in a student performance on Friday night, where students performed poetry ranging from simple recitations to full blown performance pieces. My piece was one of the latter. Taking much inspiration from Pat, I did a piece about (what else?) DDR. Using one of my old dance mats as a prop, I created a performance piece about how I've used DDR not only as an effective exercise tool, but as a way to relieve stress, defeat my inner demons, and gain control over myself. I related the act of stomping arrows to the act of ridding myself of my problems, with the arrows representing little bits of adversity, and the act of stomping my foot and making arrows disappear synonymous with the act of making my problems disappear and regaining control of my emotions.

Like many, I ended up touching on some sensitive subjects during my performance, and I was surprised in myself to find that I could reveal these things in front of an audience mainly comprised of strangers (I was happy that Lona and John both came to see my performance.) Despite this, I also kept it light, and was glad the I got a good amount laughter from the jokes I threw in. Being that many of the other student pieces were ultra personal, pour-your-guts-out kinds of works, I wanted to use the humor to sort of differentiate myself, and I think it worked. All in all, the whole experience was unlike any I'd been through before - this was not my first time on stage (I'd been in several band concerts in high school), but this was the first time I came out all on my own, in a setting where I was the spotlight, and did something completely original and self-composed. I think it all went really well and I hope the next workshop provides a similar opportunity.

One of the more interesting and delightful side effects of this performing arts class is that I am finding myself talking more to my peers at school. Not since high school have I bothered to talk to anyone at school, much less hold conversations. My class is filled with many cool and interesting people, and I think our shared experience of embarrassing ourselves in front of each other has been a good social catalyst. Many of these people I'd seen in other courses at CSUSM before, but not until now have I spoken with any of them or even gotten to know most of their names; hopefully this new trend continues.

My other classes have not been anywhere near this caliber of experience. I still hate foreign language, my Tech and Social Change class has some interesting readings but ultimately boring lectures, and not a whole lot has happened in my video class yet. However, I do have a couple people in my video class that are also in performance lab, so I'm hoping that knowing these people will make collaborations on film projects down the line a little more fun. Despite my rather bland class lineup, I've found an interesting past time in going to school: running up the largest staircase on campus and up to the top of the arts building at least once everyday. Now that I've finally met my weight loss goal of 205, same as it reads on my drivers license (or, as Lona put it, now that I'll no longer be lying to cops when they pull me over,) I find the stairs a much easier foe to defeat. It's bizarre to think that the last time I had to climb said stairs I was 40 pounds heavier. Since they are no longer an issue for me, I'm going to continue running up the stairs everyday, and then maybe graduate to seeing how many times I can run up and down them in a row. Sounds crazy, I know, but this is all really exciting for me.

News on the work front is scarce. I have no projects to work on, and this has been the slowest Fall season since 2003, so hours have been hard to grab. I am finding myself promoting High School Musical 3, mainly because I think my boss is trying to give me something to keep me occupied. I am terrified that, through this, I am going to become completely hooked on the High School Musical franchise - I've never seen any of the HSM movies, but after watching the trailer for the third installment a few times, I can't stop singing the songs to myself, and I fear that a viewing of the first two films is in my inevitable future.

Thursday night held yet another bonfire. It's strange - a year ago, no one I knew (including myself) had the energy or organizational skills to pull one of these bonfires together, and now it feels like they happen every couple of weeks or so.

This particular bonfire really tested my limits physically. It started with sumo wrestling with nearly everyone in attendance; since this was an activity I did not participate in at the last bonfire, everyone wanted a chance to take me down. It finally took two guys to do it (on their second attempt.) In the process, I got hit in the eye with someones forehead, I was accidentally punched in the nose, and I almost dislocated my right arm when Jay jumped on me. A game of kickball followed. I joined mid game, when my team was already losing (I honestly can't remember where I was during the first part,) but we continued losing until we all decided to stop keeping score. I think around 10 innings were played, and I fell and slid numerous times, all adding to my injuries.

What finally destroyed me was our ultimate experiment in hole digging. Having already dug a five feet hole, I was buried (along with Jay and Dorian) while standing up. Once finished, everyone flat out refused to un-bury us. In attempting to wiggle, stretch, and finally dig out of the pit, I managed to pull muscles I didn't even know I had. Standing shoulder to shoulder made it difficult to move, and the fact that we were put in a pre-dug hole caused the pit to act as a vacuum; the more we dug, the tighter the dirt's grasp became. It probably took us a good half an hour to break free. Between that and the aforementioned activities, I am still sore all over, a whole three days later. Thank God for the Davis family spa.

All in all, I find my life calming down in general, feeling much less stressful and relaxing, despite my busier schedule. I'm not sure why it's turned out that way, but I'm going to enjoy it while it lasts. As a kind of end-of-summer tribute, here's a video I threw together - It's basically a recap of my summer, minus the drama. Almost no effort was put into this; I pretty much just took a bunch of images and dropped them into Photostory and let it do all the work, but it still turned out nice I think.

Looks like I've ended up writing much more than I set out to this evening, so it's time to find my end point. I'm getting up in the morning to go to Universal Studios with buddies Laura and Vince, as Laura is leaving on Wednesday to study abroad in Scotland for a year and I want to spend as much time with her as possible in the next two days.

I wish I could end this very long ramble with something insightful, but it's just too late to think at the moment, so I'll use one I think I've already used before:


"Don't fake the funk on a nasty dog" -Homsar

Hi. This is Mat.

Mat
is just
like me in
many ways. He
can be twirled, he can
make burritos appear,
he can duet Broadway tunes.
When he's gone, I'll miss him, but I'll
pretend not to. I hope he enjoys
living in a world of falling lemons.















~minimum system requirements~
*3 hrs sleep
*10ft x 10ft space
*12 units school or better
*$8.25 or better
*1 hr daily exercise minimum
*basic hearing/visual capabilities

~recommended system settings~
*13 hrs sleep
*all you can eat prime rib
*a quiet pleace to create
*to find my groove
*sweeping vistas upon which to reflect
*a job that satisfies
*zombie hunting capabilites
*climbing mountains at midnight
*to find my place in the universe

**JOYFUL SQUEAL**

Today is a glorious day - Super Mario RPG has finally been released for download on the Wii. This is one of my favorite games ever made; easily a top 10 pick, maybe even 5. If you own a Wii and have never played this before, it would be 8 dollars well spent.

Expect to see a lot less of me in the next week or so.

Tidbits

Just some random thoughts and bits of info to cover from the last week or so.

- As nice as it is to have most of Monday and Wednesday free nearly every week, it's really a pain to get up at 8 am and drive to San Marcos and back for just one 50 minute long Spanish lecture. It takes every bit of restraint I have to not ditch it... lets see how long I can keep that up.

- Slowly but surely I've been fleshing out many of the pages on this site that have been under construction since the site has been online. Hopefully I'll get to posting updates sometime in the next week, if I feel like it.

- I wrote a short story called "Switchbacks". It's about a guy who is trying to impress a girl he likes while waiting in line for a roller coaster. I think it's okay right now, but I want to expand and improve it; I might post it here afterward.

- Labor Day was spent doing homework for the most part. I also got a chance to fix my sister's computer early in the afternoon. The thing had been sitting there broken for nearly six months, and had I not been putting off fixing it for so long, I would have realized that the problem was something simple a long time ago, meaning that my sisters would not have had to share my computer for so long. Whatever.

- I randomly had this sudden urge to reorganize everything on my computer desk and entertainment center in my room the other night, kind of as an excuse to throw a bunch of stuff out and tame the jungle of cables and wires under my desk. My workstation is now much more comfortable, and I have a nice, new place to stack my PC games. Which is a reminder of how many PC games I still want to but haven't played yet. Which is a reminder that I need to upgrade my computer. So that's probably going to happen soon (now that I am conveniently debt free.)

- Just recently I read through all of the Twilight books that everyone's been so excited about lately. As a whole, I thought the series was pretty well written, and it felt like there were a lot of things to relate to in the characters (things I may not want to admit.) I was kind of disappointed by the anticlimactic ending of the last book, though.

- Last night, I found myself randomly singing "Part of Your World" from the Little Mermaid in front of a class of 30 complete strangers as part of a performing arts workshop. Pretty scary. I also acted out a scene from the movie Mystery Men, but I played all the characters. All in all, it was really exciting. I was surprised by some of the comments that people liked my singing. That made me happy.

- And, finally, Lona introduced me to the world of Balloon Shop. Behold.