The Original Drama Queen

The awful cold I had turned into bronchitis, so I’ve spent the past week laying low and trying to get a lot of rest. I’ve been through my course of antibiotics and am almost done with my inhaler. I still have a bit to go in getting better, but I don’t cough as much, I can actually talk, and people tell me I seem a lot more peppy than I did last week.

This weekend, I saw Antony and Cleopatra, the second play in the Roman Repertory going on at the Harman Center Shakespeare Theater. It still had the “Rome-by-way-of-Japanese-steakhouse-décor” sets, but by now I was used to them. This was a very exciting and moving production, and although being a tragedy, the humor in the piece came through and added an extra umpfh to the play.

The woman who played Cleopatra seemed to be channeling Bette Davis/Joan Crawford, which was rather fun – it IS a rather dramatic role, since Cleopatra did seem to be the original “drama queen.” (Ba dum bum!)

This is the last week of both of the Roman plays, and the next set of Shakespeare plays doesn’t start up again until September. By now, my friend J and I have seen eleven (out of 40 or so) of Shakespeare’s plays performed here in DC (and several in multiple versions.) It is an accomplishment that I am very proud of and I hope to be able to let the streak of playgoing continue this Fall.

In other news, with all the rest I’ve been forced to get by being sick, I have been able to plow through several books in the past couple of weeks:

Moneyball – Michael Lewis
A Long Way Down – Nick Hornby
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – Michael Chabon

I really enjoyed all of them, but I think the one I enjoyed the most was Kavalier and Clay. I do recommend all of them though (even Moneyball – I was a huge fan of his Liar's Poker and The Money Culture and this book is actually more about reasoning processes than sports, but you certainly learn a lot about baseball, that’s for sure!)

I hope everyone is doing well!

“The Most Honorable Man of All”

On Saturday, I went to see Julius Caesar at the DC Shakespeare Theater’s Harman Hall. It is a lovely brand new facility (the one where I saw Major Barbara actually) and it was great to go on a Saturday afternoon and not be in a full rush and panic trying to get downtown after work. By observation, I do believe the average age of the usual Saturday afternoon attendee is around 72, although it was a rather more diverse crowd than usual, which was heartening to see.

I did enjoy this production of this oft read Shakespeare play – the production was about 3 hours with intermission, but the time really flew! The only quibble I had was with the sets, which upon first glance looked to me like Rome by way of some Japanese Steakhouse décor – lots of rich woods and retracting stairs and balconies, which did make the sets very versatile. Once I got over that, I was fine.

As you all know, the story is more about Brutus than Julius Caesar and the gentleman who played Brutus was amazing. My friend J didn’t like the fellow who played Mark Antony, however, I thought he did very well, especially considering that the original person who had been playing the part injured himself a week ago, so this fellow had not been long in the role. I thought he did the “Friends, Romans, Countrymen . . .” scene very ably and with a good bit of humor, which usually you don’t notice when reading the play.

The play runs through the first week of July, and is running in repertory with Antony and Cleopatra, which I’m also going to see this weekend. I’ll let you know if that play is good too – a lot of the characters overlap, which will be interesting to see.

In other news, the schedule for the DC Fringe Festival is out and I am very excited. This year it is going to run from July 10 to 27, and have events in more venues all around the city, not just in one area. You can check out the offerings here. It’s almost like Christmas, I’m so looking forward to it, and I do want to see as much as I can.

I hope you all had wonderful weekends!

PS – Yes, my sister is in the States for good this time. Her tenure in the Army should be ending at the end of December – unless she decides to re-up, which then I’ll just have to have myself a coronary . . .

Random Pop-In

Quick hits:

*I came down with an awful cold over the weekend and am still trying to get over it. I slept for pretty much three days straight starting on Sunday and am looking forward to another weekend of much needed rest.

*My sister landed in the U.S. at 5 AM on Saturday and the first thing she did was call me at home. I didn’t pick up the phone in time (um, because it was 5 in the morning), but was glad to hear her cheery message. Spoke to her a few evenings ago and my parents and younger sister went to her home Army base to meet her. She had four days of leave, so she hung out at the hotel with my family, just shopping and eating and hanging out. I’ll be able to do the same with her when she comes to visit around the 3rd of July. Yay!

*Only three more weeks of teaching ESL. Yay! It will be nice to have one more evening free . . .

*This weekend, I’m going to see a play – will let you know how it turns out.

Hope everyone is doing well!

On Random Losses . . . and a Special Flower

Life comes and goes in an instant.

There is the life that exists before . . . and the life that exists after.

One moment, someone or something you know and care about is here on the earth. You probably take the presence for granted, that the presence will always be around, so you may not pay the presence much attention sometimes. But the presence is always there in the background, and you are comforted in the knowledge that it is there and all is right with the world.

Then something happens and the presence is not there anymore – taken away when we aren’t at all prepared for it.

Or maybe we are kind of prepared for it – we can see the signs – but we choose to ignore it and the shock of the event *actually happening* throws us for a loop. Our lives had been touched and they will be touched no more.

These are not original words or original thoughts, and they are not even that well written, but they are true.

Yesterday, Mr. Random actually called me from work as soon as he found out that Tim Russert died. Mr. Random works at a Random Publication which has sort of a tangential association with that world, and his publication has a lot of guys who fit Mr. Russert’s profile – middle-aged, kind of heavy journalist – so it struck really close to home. DC is a small place, and circles overlap, so it really was a bit of a blow.

But yesterday something else happened. For the past two weeks, my friend J had been dog-sitting a large poodle named Daisy, who was 14 years old. I had met Daisy a couple of times before and she was the sweetest dog, very well behaved and, since she was so old, had a bit of trouble with standing up and going up and down stairs. Yesterday, Daisy wasn’t eating at all and wasn’t herself. The owners were supposed to come back earlier in the day, but their flights got screwed up and only one of the owners came back early enough to help J take Daisy to the vet. It turns out that Daisy had to be put to sleep last night. J was there and very upset about it and called me after it happened, since I was one of the few people who actually met Daisy, and I was very upset too . . .

So I decided to write this post. Because while Daisy wasn’t as big and famous as some other people who died yesterday, her life had meaning to those of us who knew her, even briefly.

It may seem cheesy, and I didn’t write this very well, but this post is in honor of Daisy.

Well done, sweetie! You were a good girl! Sleep well, my dear.

This is My Brain After a Conference

My brain has been much too fried to write anything coherent these days. Last week was the Random Non-profit’s annual conference – Quite a slog and a very overwhelming experience, especially if you aren’t an extrovert. There were times when I had to sneak out of a plenary to find a quiet place to check my e-mail and take a moment to get myself together. The turnout this year was better than expected and I think that our field gained a lot of useful information – we had some better speakers this year than in the past, although no one who was headline worthy. I did get to see Chris Matthews (of MSNBC fame) walking out of another conference being held at the same hotel, so I did have at least one famous person sighting . . .

Good news! My sister is on her way back home from Iraq. She is waiting for the rest of her unit in an undisclosed location and should be landing back in the States for good at the end of this week. Yay!

I wish I could write more, but my brain is having problems with linear thought today and I’m doing well just writing this sort of coherently. I'm just exhausted. I'm lucky that I was able to dress myself somewhat this morning - only by wearing a suit - but I still screwed it up by somehow thinking that bright pink socks would work with a black suit and black loafers. I feel like I'm channeling 80's-90's Michael Jackson whenever I'm walking around . . . which is rather unfortunate, fashionwise. See, this is why I need to remember to lay out my clothes before I go to bed, because my most dubious fashion choices have come about in the early morning hours . . .

The weekend is coming and I am really looking forward to having a very lovely Saturday.

I hope you all are doing well!

Yet Another Random Book Meme

These are the top 100 or so books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users. Bold the books you have read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

It’s really weird because a lot of the books that I haven’t read, I actually DO have in the stacks somewhere waiting to be read. Those I’ve marked with an asterisk . . .

I’m kind of bummed and embarrassed that I can’t check off more, since I do love reading so much, but I have been so lousy at the concentration thing recently. Now funny thing is that over the past few months on Saturdays I often end up in coffee shops and in parks where it’s pretty easy to just settle in and start reading. Once I do that, I’m pretty focused and tend to plow through pages, just like when I was younger. But when I get home, oy! The focus is gone. There’s too much other stuff distracting me . . .

*****

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Anna Karenina*
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: A novel*
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote*
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel*
War and Peace*
Vanity Fair*
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: The life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo (saw the miniseries w/Gerard Depardeiu, which was AWESOME!)
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath (reading right now)
The Poisonwood Bible (I hated it)
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray*
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes: A memoir
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States: 1492-present*
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces*
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved (I hated this one, too. It annoyed me to no end)
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves*
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed*
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion*
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything (working on right now)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An inquiry into values*
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood: A true account of a multiple murder and its consequences*
White Teeth (I don’t know why I couldn’t finish it – I just couldn’t get into it . . .)
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

*****
I hereby tag any person who wants to take the time to do it, otherwise just feel free to comment!

Keeping the Spark

Let’s see . . . what’s been going on in the Random world since I last wrote?

I’ve had several very lovely weekends since the graduation. Even this past weekend, with all the rain and the hail on Saturday afternoon, had some definite awesome parts. Some crappy parts too, but the lovely outweighed the crappy. I like wonderful weekends . . . they make getting through the rest of the week so much more bearable . . .

An old friend of mine has moved back to the area after a several year absence and we briefly caught up on the phone on Friday. He and his wife just had their second child, a little boy, and their daughter is almost 3 years old. He works for one of the many defense-contracting firms in the area, doing things I probably don’t want to know about. I actually felt a bit sad and disappointed talking to him, because he didn’t really sound like himself – or at least the person I knew a decade ago. He has many more responsibilities and now and isn’t quite the same bubbly, happy-go-lucky guy anymore. I know we all change and grow, but it felt like something was lost there and it made me feel very sad. Some of my friends I have had for years, and while they have changed and grown too, they are still pretty much the same as when they were young and single. My friends, the R’s, have a boisterous little boy now and it is fun to see how these two people who we adore and who we’ve pretty much grown up with navigate their life changes while still maintaining their humor and personality. Even though I don’t have kids, we can still hang out and have fun and great conversations (although we have to keep looking out for the little one and making sure he isn’t tormenting a cat.) There are some people . . . that the spark is just gone. And it hurts when it happens, but it’s part of life and I should be used to it by now . . .

I found out that I received an “A” in my spring Microeconomics class. That was rather unexpected, since my final paper was dreadful upon dreadful, but I’ll not look a gift horse in the mouth . . .

I will be at a conference beginning Wednesday morning through Saturday evening. I am not looking forward to it, but at least it will be something different.

In service of my ongoing Shakespeare project, I’m going to see Julius Caesar in a couple of weeks, and hope to see Antony and Cleopatra soon after that. Yay! And this year’s Fringe Festival is coming up quickly (mid-late July) and I’m always pleasantly surprised by that experience.

My ESL class is humming along. Some of the students have dropped off for life reasons, but the core group I still have are very lively and interested. They always ask great questions and make me want to try to figure out more effective (but fun!) ways to teach the material, which can be deadly dry at times . . .

Just wanted to update you all quickly and let you know I’m still puttering about!