Facebook

It's official. Under peer pressure, I caved in and...created a Facebook account. For so long I was proud to not have a blog, to not be on Facebook. And look at me now - 2 years with a blog, 36 hours of Facebookness.

But it's great to be in touch. I went through and found a bunch of people I used to hang out with - at school, work, church, whatever. I did this by going through my friends' friends lists. "Oh I know that person! Add friend? Why yes, please." Click. It's so good to know that now my friendships with these people are official, secure - well, we're friends on Facebook, so our relationship must be stable. Oh, good. Now I can sleep better at night.

It's amazing to me how much time can be spent on Facebook; I think it's going to be my undoing. I should have waited until the end of the semester! I'm also somewhat concerned with how excited I've been to watch my friends list grow, as people accept my request to be their friend on Facebook. It's a great way to realize the superiority you have over other people who don't have as many as you do. :)
"Scott, I have 7 friends!"
"Honey, I now have 21 friends! That's more than you."
"Hey, guess what - I have 56 friends - no, make that 58. It's great being so popular."

It's rather pathetic.

Opening Night

Opening night was on Friday. And it was awesome. We had a great crowd; most of the seats were filled, Scott came to support me, and the audience was very enthusiastic (the play relies very heavily on audience participation, so this is crucial). Towards the end of rehearsals, when you're running the same lines over and over again without an audience there to react to you, it gets frustrating. It's easy to lose motivation when you're reaping no immediate reward. But on Friday, I was loving it. "This is what I've worked so hard for these past couple of months!" I told Ruben during intermission. I love the adrenaline rush that comes from connecting with the audience and seeing your hard work pay off. It makes those long hours and late nights all worth it.

Tech

Yesterday was a long day. Saturday's play rehearsal was canceled due to some scheduling conflicts, so the entire tech weekend was set on Sunday instead. All 12 hours of it. Tech is that wonderful time where all the technical designers, actors, stage crew, director, etc. come together and we try to do the show exactly the way it will be on opening night - with lights, sound, set, costumes, and props. Coordinating all of that is harder than it might seem...even though the first time we ran through the show we went cue-to-cue (which means that we skipped all dialogue that didn't require a costume change, light cue, or sound cue, so we could get timing right) it took us 6 and a half hours to get through the 90-minute show once. And then we did it again. Faster this time, though. :)

It was certainly an entertaining day. We ran into many a problem - actors' pants falling down multiple times, both onstage and off (not mine though, thank goodness), props falling apart in the middle of a scene, a piece of scenery knocking someone (me) in the head, actors not being able to change costumes fast enough and missing their entrances (or coming out with only half of their costume). And we open in 3 days.

How I love the theatre.

death of an Object

I never thought I could get so attached to an object. I've never been the obsessive type. But from the moment I received my laptop the Christmas prior to attending BYU, I was hooked. Addicted. Absolutely entranced. My fascination was bigger than the novelty of it, greater than the coolness I felt owning my own computer. It was an escape; a freedom.

As long as I had my laptop with me, I was never bored. I could always read, write, or design whatever I wanted. There were always settings to be played with: backgrounds, fonts, and colors to be changed, new tricks and shortcuts to discover. "Hmm, I wonder what this so-called 'button' does?" My laptop offered me a chance to have something truly my own, changeable at my will. Nobody could tell me what picture to have on my desktop, or how to organize my folders - the computer wasn't theirs, it was mine. And yet, that something of mine could be shared. I had a commodity, a convenience for others that I was sure could be traded for friendship. I felt so...needed. "Hey T, could I borrow your computer for a minute?" my BYU roommates would ask. I loved saying yes. I relished in the fact that I had something they wanted; not because I felt superior in any way, but because I could provide a service to them. If not for my computer, my roommates might have had to walk all the way to the library! How useful I felt. It validated my existence in some odd way, and made me feel like even though I was a burden to live with, I was at least partly making up for it.

Of course, owning my own computer whilst at college was simply practical as well. No need to spend hours at the library on their computers, and - not that this was a good thing - no need to write papers before midnight the day before they were due. How convenient. I brought my laptop with me to school nearly every day, relying on it for note-taking in my classes. The downside? Sometimes I would connect to the internet and even chat online during class. I know, I know - no need to tell me how much better my grades would have been had I paid better attention and shown up to class more often. I've learned my lesson.

This all has a point, really.

A week ago Wednesday my computer died a terrible death, one of hard drive malfunctioning. Oh how I mourn! The greatest misfortune isn't the now-gone black casing or bright screen or pretty buttons, but the megabytes of data I've involuntarily relinquished. Without a working cd-drive, I never backed anything up. Stories, poems, papers, pictures. All of them gone. Documents of funny things my roommates used to say, songs friends and I wrote, crazy videos we made when we were sleep-deprived and somewhat delirious. A folder on my desktop entitled "Random Folder of Documents to Clean Up the Screen Because Christine Couldn't Handle It Anymore". I kept every email of importance that I ever received, every IM conversation. I loved going back and rereading them, remembering funny things people said. So many memories - 4 years worth - lost. My husband says that we'll just have to make the upcoming years even better and more worth remembering. He's sweet.

The most pressing issue right now is that I'm in the middle of midterms. Not only have papers from semesters at BYU disappeared into oblivion, but midterm and final projects from the current semester are gone as well. I have a lot of work to redo, and my rehearsal and class schedules don't lend themselves to much redoing of work.

The small consolation for this is that on Monday I will get a new computer, with a working D-drive and Windows Vista.

Pumpkin Carving

I just wanted to post a couple of pictures. The other day a couple in our ward invited our newly formed group of young couples to come carve pumpkins at their new (bigger) apartment. I haven’t carved a pumpkin or roasted pumpkin seeds in quite a number of years, but Scott and I have been having a great time hanging out with the other young couples in our ward and decided to go. Here are the results:

Our pumpkin: cleaned out by Scott, carved by me (with the help of a stencil).

The group of pumpkins. I think we should go pro, don't you??? :)

Unexpected Call

It was certainly one of the most random pick-ups ever (though definitely beaten out by the Russian who, out of nowhere, flat-out proposed to me on an airplane once). It started in my American History class last Thursday.

"Hey, can I borrow your cell phone for a quick sec?" A guy leaned over to me in the middle of class and asked this in a whisper. "Uh, sure." I said. "Just take it outside to use it."

He did, and came back into class very shortly afterward, handing my cell phone to me with a "thank you". I thought to myself that it must have either been a quick conversation, or he didn't reach whomever it was that he was trying to get ahold of. "No worries," I replied and went back to taking notes.

This morning I received a voice message from a number I didn't recognize. I've been waiting for a call from someone named Dan, who is supposed to fix the huge hole in our roof, and thought it might be him. But it wasn't; it was the guy from history class (whose name I can't pronounce). Apparently his "quick conversation" consisted of him using my cell phone to get my number. I nearly choked on the carrot I was eating when I heard the message, and then burst out laughing.

I debated whether I should call him back right then, or wait until 2:00 when we had class together and talk to him face-to-face. Neither option sounded particularly tantalizing. Hoping for a voice mailbox, I opted for the cowardly technique of calling him. Unfortunately, he answered. The conversation was short and as awkward-less as I could make it; I told him that I was flattered but I was also quite married.

I didn't see him in class today; I hope it wasn't my fault.

The Play's The Thing

I was really nervous about the auditions, but I left feeling like I did pretty well. The question was: is "pretty well" good enough? I went in competing against people of quite varied talent level, and some of them I wasn't worried about. But there was a group of guys who knew the director quite well and had been in the Theatre Department at PGCC for at least 2 years. The other trouble was that the show consists of only 3 parts - 3 male parts. The director had said she was willing to accept females for a mixed-gender cast if she found the right ones.

And I got in! The play is The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: Abridged, and it's hysterical. 3 of us do all of Shakespeare's plays in 90 minutes, switching out roles and condensing the plays until there's nothing left but the funny parts.

The best part is that I get to play Hamlet...you can just picture it, can't you? :)

Pride of the Police Force

It had already been a long day. I had taken a Sister in my ward to the hospital at 2:45, and now it was a little past 9pm. We sat in the drive-thru at CVS, waiting for her prescription to be filled. A cop was parked near us, in the small and dark parking lot around the side of CVS that the drive-thru was on. He seemed to be having fun playing with his car - fiddling with buttons and knobs, flipping the lights on and off, and inspecting the decals that said "Police". His buddy drove up. The second cop's car was identical to the first's, but the two officers went through the whole fun process - again - of examining the features of their cars. Their conversation went from their cars, to inappropriate comments about some girl they know named Emily, back to their cars.

"Hey, man, I tried the lights yesterday. I turned 'em on, just to see what people would do, and zhoop, zhoop (imagine this sound accompanied by hand gestures indicating cars pulling over), all those cars pulled over!"
"Yeah, it's great, isn't it?"

The two looked extremely impressed with themselves. The pride of the police force then proceeded to turn their flashing lights on, backed up few steps to admire their handiwork, and began practicing whipping their guns out of the holsters reminiscent of the Old West. I rolled my eyes.

I admit I was tempted to get out of my car and confront the second cop about my feelings on his bragging about his misuse of authority entrusted to him by the city (or county, or state - I can't remember which level of government his car revealed that he worked for). But I didn't - even though I did confront some random guy in traffic the other day and told him I thought he was a jerk (I walked up to his car while he was stopped at a stoplight). But he couldn't arrest me and didn't have a gun.

I doubt that criminals who were in mid-crime last night realized how lucky they were that these two officers in particular happened to be on duty.

Remember to Breathe

We've officially lived in our new apartment for a whole week now. Sure, we've had furniture and stuff in this place for a good month now, but moving in has been a slow process. I've been holding my breath from the beginning, wondering if everything was going to go as planned.

I started packing in the middle of July, and did that for 2 weeks. The third week I was in Utah. The fourth found me frantically cleaning the old apartment for inspection, moving carloads of stuff to our new place - box by box, bag by bag - and unpacking what I could. The next week and a half Scott and I were in Texas. But last Tuesday we returned home, and, aside from a new (used) futon from Salvation Army and a $5 bookshelf (we were so lucky to find it - nothing around here is that cheap!) from Value Village, not much in our apartment has changed. But only now do I finally feel settled.

It's nice to let out the breath I've been holding for a month and a half! I think my face was turning purple...

An All-Too-Familiar Face

We went to church twice that day. First to 9am sacrament meeting at the local LDS chapel, then to St. Christopher's Episcopalian church for 10:30 mass with my father. Scott had not remembered ever going to an Episcopalian service before, and afterward he peppered my dad with sociological questions about the structure and policies of the church. Thank goodness there was no mention, and therefore no debate, about the actual religion.

I was looking forward to attending the LDS meeting, and for once Scott and I made it to church on time. (Why is it so difficult to do when we're at home?) We walked in right as the bishop was welcoming everyone to church on that lovely Sabbath morning, and settled in to the last row before the music started.

And then I saw him. Sitting at the sacrament table, dressed in white shirt and tie, was a man who was the spitting image of my stepfather - plus 15 pounds and 10 or so years. I froze. I finally tore my eyes away, and to keep myself from looking back at him I forced myself to stare straight ahead. The whole thing was extremely unnerving. A few minutes went by and I couldn't hold my gaze ahead any longer. I glanced back at the mystery man. I swear, it's him. Could it really be? No, of course not - but, sacre bleu, it looks just like him, only there are more wrinkles (stress, or age? very hard to say) lining his face. But he's got Richard's same brown hair, the same mustache, the same sad, tortured eyes. Even the way he holds his hands in front of him is the same. Oh, please, Lord, don't let him look at me. But the man did look. I turned away quickly, pretending to be fascinated by the hymnbook in my lap. I stole another glance. He caught me, and again I looked away. It became almost a game - I would stare at him and study his every feature, comparing them to Richard's, until the man would catch me watching him - and I would look away and pretend that I wasn't. Every time I looked at him panic would rise in my throat; it was like a horror movie that I couldn't help but watch, though it made my stomach churn to look.

This went on for a good 10 minutes. Only once was I not fast enough in glancing away, and our eyes locked momentarily. I very nearly vomited. The man stared at me curiously and I thought I saw (though very well could have imagined) in his eyes the very same fear and inner turmoil that was Richard's. I physically could not tear my eyes away, and I thank the Lord that the man broke the gaze first. Oh the panic I felt! It was all I could do to not run, shaking and in tears, from the room. But I stayed, and let the anxiety flow out of my fingers as I gripped my scriptures until my knuckles turned white.

I survived one Sunday but I don't know if I could handle much more than that. If I lived in Killeen I would go inactive pretty quickly - or attend church in a different area. I know that sometimes people stop coming to church because they don't like certain people in the congregation - but has anyone gone inactive because somebody looked like a person that they didn't like?