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Personal Blog

Happy Happy Crash

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Today we presented our Round 4 worlds for BVW. They were all amazing, and all very well received! But I have been suffering a common course after every BVW presentation.

That is, the weekend before, and especially the night before when we’re scrambling to meet the deadline, I get on this huuuuuuuuuge energy high. It was especially high last night, because our world was SO AWESOME and I was so excited about it. Then the day of presentation, I’m all excited and giggly. Then everyone presents, and it’s awesome! Like, every single world was awesome, there weren’t really any duds.

And then it happens. All the worlds have shown, the class is over, and I drop down off my energy high. And goodness, what a crash! The minute I walk out the door I am depressed and on the verge of tears, and it is purely a result of my body trying to normalize itself. Still, how stressful!

Jesse told me that many professional actors are chronically depressed for the same reason, because of the highs and drop-offs in energy level scheduled around performances (D Flo, do you find this to be the case?)

I said “how do I fix it?!?” But Jesse just smiled knowingly and slipped out a door. Drat! That means it’s one of those stupid “life lessons” things, doesn’t it? Grumble grumble!

Many of you know that I am terrible at taking care of myself in times of emotional stress. What should I do to avoid being dreadfully depressed after the BVW show??

Personal Blog

Friendship is like a garden…or maybe like a petri dish

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The hardest thing so far about the ETC is not its rigorous work schedule or high expectations (though I will admit, those are pretty freakin hard), but rather how the potential of emotional bonds are dangled in front of us like tantalizing carrots, just out of reach.

What I mean is, there are a lot of cool people here. A LOT. And we are bonding in such a way that we’re all in the same room, working through the same experience, stressing the same stresses, and the like. But I’m finding that there is not much time to nurture friendships outside of the building.

Certainly I have made friends and I of course broke everyone in to my huggable nature early on. However, when I work at a friendship I tend to be a digger, and pick at a person and poke them and learn about them and burrow down into their soul to figure out who exactly they are. It is a delicate process, and takes time and diligence, and sometimes I even have to do it one person at a time. I cannot help that I am slow at this.

So, what I am left with at the moment is a deep emotional strain. I want to know my new ETC friends better and cultivate my budding relationships, but there is little time to do so, and I’m feeling terribly empty because of it. And yes, there are large parties from time to time, but as a card carrying introvert, those don’t do much more than wear me out. I am unsure of how to handle this dilemma.

I’ll have faith, though, as I see how close the second years are with each other, and the strong friendships that they’ve established among themselves. So, perhaps I just need to give it time, who can say!

I miss the ballers, and I miss Brenna.

Personal Blog

Of Storytelling and Message Board RPGs

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A huge focus at the ETC is properly educating us young’ens, as potential game developers of the future, about the intricacies of storytelling. Today’s ETC Fundamentals class was focused on “The New Poetics,” which takes Aristotle’s Poetics and applying it to digital media, as done by Janet Murray. What this means is in addition to the Plot/Character/Theme/Diction/Music/Spectacle elements, adding the new element of “Interactivity,” which is further explored in Murray’s text.

This all reminded me of message board roleplaying, which I used to do quite a bit in high school and early college.

Yes, I’m a geek, I embrace it. Let’s move past that…

Continue reading Of Storytelling and Message Board RPGs →

Personal Blog

Moving and Theater

More busy moving times! Wednesday afternoon, evening, and night was spent moving DC and Beth out of their condemned apartment. Scott, Will, and I wandered over around 4:30 and joined the party of shoving large furniture and piddly boxes into vehicles, soon joined by more friends and family, caravaning the stuff out to Beth’s parents’ workplace, wherein a warehouse existed to hold their belongings. It was a very efficient and successful move.

If my work in the theater has given me one thing, it is the appreciation of how tame the average move is. After working numerous strikes and road shows at the Norton Center, moving and storing the entirety of DC and Beth’s belongings in a single day was a mild ordeal (I mean, we had the whole day! It was practically leisurely!)

In the theater, no person, even the smallest, escapes the frantic, precarious, and downright hard physical labor of tearing down and packing up shows. Even after many ninjutsu-like escapes, I took my turn carrying the damned sound board up the stairs of the Norton Center. Common household furniture is nothing! After detaching and loading an intelligent stage light with the sickening knowledge that it was probably worth more than my life, I can move fragile and sentimental belongings with utmost confidence. Scraping myself on a bookshelf is nothing compared to being bitten by an alligator clamp.

Though my work in the theater was often grueling, it has made me strong and confident in the face of common moves. I am very appreciative of all that the theater has taught me. So, future moves, I fear you not! For no matter how big the couch, no matter how many boxes, it will never be as painful as striking a show. And so I close with the words of Bill the Props Carp, spoken as he and I attempted to get a precarious chaise lounge off a very tall shelf: “You know, once mankind finishes filling in that periodic table, we’ll find something heavier to build this out of.”

Personal Blog

Cellos

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The cello will be my downfall! At work, the school’s bell choir often practices in the foyer outside my office. This is all fine and well, but today they had a girl playing the cello with them. For some reason, the cello pulls and tugs at me and makes me want to cry the way no other sound does. It is tugging things loose.

You see, when I started taking this medicine, I stopped crying. I am guessing this is because my medicine is a selective serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor, meaning that in addition to managing my pain threshold it has the bonus side-effect of also being an anti-depressant. Last year, when Nancy got sick, I started crying on a pretty regular basis. When she died I began crying pretty much every day. When I started on the medicine, it suddenly stopped, and it was rather jolting.

However, I don’t think I’m done grieving. It is similar to how the medicine works on my pain: I can still tell that something is not right, that the pain is still there just below the surface, I just can’t feel it. Similarly, I feel like my grief is still there, just below, being numbed out by neurotransmitters. And, just as drastic shifts in barometric pressure strip the numbing layer off my pain threshold, some things open up the emotional haze like a seam-ripper.

That brings us back to the cello. Still, it fascinates me how tone and sound can evoke such strong and specific emotional responses. Sound is a mystery to me, something I can’t grasp the way I can drawing and painting. It is always so sharp, too. My exposure to the cello is pretty low, I’d say (except when I was questing in the damned blood elf land with its damned blood elf music. I was teary-eyed through the whole zone!), so it always surprises me how strong I react to it. And it’s a very specific tone, too. The bass is too low and the other strings too high to make me weepy.

Baffling.

Personal Blog

Thanksgiving

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Every year at the school I work at they have a Thanksgiving prayer service. Everyone writes letters to people thanking them for something and some of the students and teachers read their letters at the prayer service. This year one of the seniors read a letter to her mom, who is dying of cancer right now. It was very difficult for me to listen to.

In fact, I didn’t want to go to the service at all, because I knew she would be reading it and I knew it would be hard. Will told me that it might be good for me, but that it would also be pretty rough to listen to. I responded that I wish the things that were good for me didn’t always involve roughing me around. He said that if I didn’t need to be roughed around, then it wouldn’t rough me around. I hadn’t thought of it in that light before.

Grieving is awful. Even the word “grieve” is a horrible sounding word. It sounds like the name of a damage-over-time spell that a warlock would cast on you. But I suppose the sound of the word is the most accurate means of describing what it even feels like. There are times when I feel like the lining of my throat, the inside of my chest, and the coating of my nerves will be grated away to nothing before the end of it. I know, though, because people have told me, that it doesn’t ever really end, it just changes into something different. I know because they’ve told me, but I don’t really know yet.

When all my weird physical pain stuff showed no signs of going away, and when I decided that it’s just going to be something I’ll learn to deal with, my Soke told me that one of the easiest ways to cultivate happiness is to start giving open thanks for the things I have. The tiniest things, here or there, or the big things, just on the spot when I happen to notice them be thankful for them. It helps to actively do this, rather than fret and worry because I know I’m taking so much for granted, which is what I tend to do. My boss at work is one of those people of the mindset that time is a human constraint, and that God is timeless, so it doesn’t matter what you pray for and when, even if it’s after the fact, because there is no time in the end. I suppose in that line of thinking it is not “too late” to say thank you to somebody after they’ve already died.

Continue reading Thanksgiving →

Personal Blog

WoW Personalities

Nerd Post! Nerd Post! You have been warned!

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’ve picked up World of Warcraft. It’s Will’s fault, peer pressure and all, though Kyle and Ian were playing first as hunters. Anyway, I immediately chose a warrior, and Will plays a healer, and some might think that odd. Since when does quiet, caring Lisa charge into battle and hit things a lot? And Will, a healer? He’s the fighty battle-one, right? Analysis!

Will: speaking of, I figured out our playtypes a little better. to bring WoW into a personality analogy. and it’s actually not that weird.

me: really?

Will: the character classes have stereotypes. but the stereotypes only fit their roles in solo environments I read a big article on Instance Theory this morning. and how most of it is based around the “Holy Trinity” Tank – Healer – DPS is the optimal team of 3 (which, conveniently, a Warrior, Priest, and Hunter fill quite well)

me: (indeed)

Will: the Warrior is actually the one that cares after the group. it’s more protective than it is “ugh, smash!” like, it starts out as mindless weapon swinging. but turns into protective organization, watching out for danger, and keeping everybody safe.

Will:the Priest, on the other hand, is the super star who actually doesn’t do that much work. he’s also the first person to get blamed for a wipe, regardless of who was at fault.

“Where was my HEAL?!”

but in big groups, they’re not expected to do any damage at all. they hang back, look cool, and keep everybody alive, motivating the group or whatever (maybe adding snarky comments) but they don’t really directly protect anybody much, they’re mostly cleanup for tank and whatever gets past the tank.

Will: and then the Main DPS (usually a mage, warlock, rogue or hunter) just actually kills the dudes.

Will: You like protecting people directly. I do too, but indirectly, and I like being showy about it and Kyle and ian just like killin’ dudes.

So there you have it. I am a protective, caring type, concerned for the well-being of others. Will is indirect and showy, helping out on the side but getting attention in the process. Kyle and Ian? They just like to kill dudes.