theatre: children by a.r. gurney

while i'm posting (i tend to do this in chunks anyways), i thought i'd just mention the play i saw, let's see, on thursday night. it was a play about family and children and grandchildren, but, as with everything in life, it was more than that too. about choosing, about living, about greiving, about moving on, about winning, about losing, about life. but then, the best plays are like that. they leave you somewhere - you don't know where - but it's somewhere and half journey is walking out of that theater in some kind of messed up form of discovery, recalling the experience. that's what i love about plays and musicals and shows - you can spend the entire show just being there, listening and watching, and it's not until the end when you actually think about it. it's that digestion period that somehow intrigues me. anyways, now that i've told you nothing about the play, i'll tell you that it was very well done and i think i am, thus far, rather a fan of a.r. gurney's plays (he also wrote love letters which a friend of mine was in this past winter).

i believe that whole incoherent ramble is my cue to stop.

happy fourth

so me and a friend of mine went to the parade down spring street today and it was surprisingly excellent - veterans, lots of fire trucks (who knew we had so many?), tractors, ponies, horses, covered wagons, goats, bicycles, brownies (the girl scouts, not the food), antique cars, and more that i'm forgetting. as we sat there, we did a lot of people watching waiting for the parade to start and get to where we were sitting on the curb. sooo many people on spring street, it was crazy. but anyways, we talked about how all the little kids were dressed up in their patriotic red, white and blue, but probably had no idea of what they were celebrating. things sort of get less exciting once you get to the point where you actually know what they're about - when you're little everything's really exciting or really sucks. at least that's the way it seems.

in any case, i realized that though i'm truly not patriotic at all, this was a fourth of july that i have, so far, enjoyed. it was great to see all the townsfolk who seem to be almost non-existant during the school year except for at a rare few moments and even if i'm not patriotic, i'm glad that i live here and that we celebrate this even if i only say that because it brings people together. despite the screwed up government (which, fingers crossed, is getting better) and the huge problems that never go away (think isms), i can't think of somewhere that i would have rather grown up. i don't know what it's like to live in another country but if i'm honest, i liked growing up here - i like the freedom of speech even to stay stupid things, that i could vote in the last election, among other things. living here, i've been blessed and altogether luckier than i should have been.

so on that note, happy fourth! and enjoy the fireworks! (even if they are bad for the environment =] )

what i'm listening to: lighthouse family

this is probably one of their most well known songs, free, but i'm falling in love with all of their songs - especially wish and high.

summertime.

so it's now been summer for more than a month - although anyone looking at the weather can clearly see that it is not summer yet. i'm spending the summer doing research with one of my professors from first semester and a former president of my college - they're writing a book on a leadership theory that they developed together. the book has a whole slew of case studies so that's mostly what i've been researching recently. it's pretty interesting but it involves a lot a lot of reading and so because of that i'm not reading thay many pleasure reading books, but at least my reading for work is interesting! i started researching mandela and mugabe and have since moved on to fox (founder of quaker movement) and noyes (founder of oneida perfectionist community in ny). all of which i should get back to since i took a long weekend and need to do some catching up from!

oh, and a few weeks ago, i finally saw up, which was excellent. it was refresing to watch a movie that didn't revolve solely around its plot and had a crotchety old man as its protagonist (and a cute chubby asian kid). it was so...human. the plot had surrealness to it, but the characters were completely real. anyways, i'd definitely recommend it.

"we have an obligation to listen"

Interesting NY Times Op-Ed that I think is a really important thing to be reminded of every once and a while. It can be really dulling to listen to or read the news because it seems that all you hear about are numbers of deaths and mass atrocities and nuclear testing on top of all that chaos that is your daily life. Or is at least my daily life.

In any case, I definitely know that feeling of giving up on changing the world. Gandhi says to "be the change you wish to see in the world" but there are definitely days when I feel like being that change is impossible. No one's listening anymore. It seems like all this change is just being thrown against a brick wall that's not going anywhere. But all of these issues and scary news events involve real people with real stories and lives and problems. Where has all the empathy gone? Where has all the motivation and action gone? I mean why are we criticizing Sotomayer because she has empathy. When did it become a bad thing? Even if we are talking about the Supreme Court, we're still dealing with people. Not automated answering machines and banking systems.

insanity. (tv quote)

"Were they always this insane?"

"Maybe they were always this insane but it was colder out so they moved more slowly and you couldn’t see the insanity."

irony break.