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29 March 2010

150.8

Random 150.8 fact:  National Route 247, in Japan, is 150.8 km long.

So as of Friday evening at the American Cancer Society's Relay for Life my weight is now 150.8 lbs!  .3 more pounds and I will be at the mile marker of having lost 5 lbs!  This is very exciting to me.  However...at the moment, I am very tired, and I have two rehearsals today, one of which starts in 30 minutes or so, so I'm going to take a quick cat nap.

If you do nothing else today, believe in yourself!

23 March 2010

The Voice

What a beautiful day it is today.  I'm slowly but surely getting things worked out to build a full size model of my chair for Woyzeck and will begin working on it in the shop tomorrow afternoon.  In reading a friend's blog, Lavished, that had a really great song on it, I was inspired to put one of my personal favorite songs up here on my blog.  I'm off to get more work done, but here it is.


Peace,
LT

22 March 2010

Setting Mile Markers

A good friend of mine who is losing weight side by side with me, just broke through the 25 pound mark!

CONGRATS PAL!

So, I've decided it would be smart to make some mile markers for myself.  I figure that increments of 5 are good, yeah?  So anyway...as I stated before, I am currently at 153.2 lbs.  My goal weight is 120 lbs.  And, just for the sake of having well-ish rounded numbers, I'm going to start my counting, as I have in the weight loss countdown at the top of the page, with my original weight at the doctor, 155.5 lbs.

So here they are...in all of their glory...the mile markers!


  • BEGINNING
    • 155.5 lbs
  • - 5 LBS
    • 150.5 lbs  04/04/2010
  • -10 LBS
    • 145.5 lbs
  • -15 LBS
    • 140.5 lbs
  • -20 LBS
    • 135.5 lbs
  • -25 LBS
    • 130.5 lbs
  • -30 LBS
    • 125.5 lbs
  • -35 LBS
    • 120.5 lbs
Then I guess I'll worry about that last half pound when I get there.

That's all for now.

Peace,
LT

21 March 2010

Lent - Reevaluating Expectations

Today at church, my pastor talked about how Lent is kind of a time to press the reset button on one's life.  To reevaluate the expectations that one has for oneself.  To search deep within oneself and find out what has been building up inside to keep Jesus at bay.

For this Lenten season, I chose to give up self-doubt.  It's the first time that I've ever given up something like that...something that's not tangible, or an amount of time, or something like that.

It's been pretty great, actually.  For as long as I can remember, I've struggled to believe in myself.  Who doesn't, really?  But anyway, I just thought about it and came to the realization that God did not create me to think poorly of myself or to not be able to do things.  God created me, specifically, to be who I am, and so shouldn't I be who I am, believe in who I am, and do all that I can?

Yes.

So the realization that I came to in church today (and have been thinking about on and off for a while now) is that there are kind of two steps to Lent for me this year.

1.  Give up self-doubt (believe in myself).
2.  Go out and live.

Believing I can do things is wonderful...but not enough.  I need to do those things that I can do!  While believing in oneself is difficult sometimes, just deciding to do so has kind of made it easier for me...but the thing is, whether or not I believe in myself, which I DO, there will be times in my life where I will fail.  But I can still give it my all and try not to.  And when I do fail, which I surely will, over and over again, I just need to kind of look at it in a "losing a battle but not the war" kind of way, I guess.

Anyway, just wanted to throw that out into cyberspace!  Now that I've done so (after church, Panera for a bagel and to see Melissa, working out, and showering) I'm going to get back to that pile of homework I've got.  Why?  Because I BELIEVE!  HaHa.

Peace out, Readers.

20 March 2010

155.5 -> 153.2 Getting Back on Track

153.2 Fact:  Preston, Trempealeau County, Wisconsin has a total area of 153.2 square kilometers.

After having a check-up with my GI specialist here in Indy on Thursday, I've learned a bit more about what's going on with my stomach and consequently, possibly why I've been struggling with weight loss.  The down side is that he thinks that I'll be feeling like this for about 3-4 more months while my body resets or something like that.  It's kind of complicated...but the main thing is that I've got some problems with my stomach, and I ended up getting a severe infection, which was the acute problem that led to the discovery of what's been going on.

Anyway, I need to start taking better care of myself.  I always say that I try really hard to be good...and in some ways I do, but I know now that I just need to be more systematic about this.  So...as I've recently picked up this blogging thing pretty well...I've decided to do the unthinkable, and just be honest about the fact that I'm working on becoming a healthier me.  In all honesty...why should anyone want to hide that, right?  But there's a big part of me, and maybe it's a part of other people as well, that always wants to find a way to lose weight in secret.  I don't know exactly what it is...but it's like I want to be able to go back home from being at school and surprise people by how good I look/healthy I am.  Or come back to school from being at home and do the same thing.  I get all weird about people knowing that I'm trying to lose weight...I'd just rather have people realize that I've lost it.  But...as I've no desire to become a hermit (and even if I had this desire, I'd not be able to do it) this mindset just is not at all feasible for me.

I've had a few problems with EDs in the past...so weight loss has now become this liminal space between making sure that I'm not starving myself and starving myself...or something like that.  My apologies if this is too much information for anyone, but honestly, don't read it if you don't want to.  I don't mean that in a bad way...I'm just saying.  Besides, I don't even know if anyone's reading this.  I officially have one follower (BIG SHOUT OUT TO CARRIE!) and that's all that I know of.  Anyway...I feel like writing about it and if someone feels like reading about it then that's fine too.

Here's the bottom line (I've been stalling).  As an actor, a woman, and as myself (maybe it's just myself and not the first two) it is really hard for me to be honest about this.  But being honest about it is the plan.

At the doctor the other day, my weight was 155.5 lbs.  (That's the heaviest I've ever been...and I do not plan on being heavier [save for the possibility of pregnancy down the line, I guess].)  So...there it is...

155.5

That is officially now my starting weight.  But today, I am at 153.2!  That's a loss of 2.3 pounds (for those of you who cannot, and by cannot I of course mean prefer not, to do the math)!  Some of this may be due to a difference in scales, as 155.5 was at the doctor and 153.2 was at the HRC today.  I'm not going to worry about that though.

At the HRC today I tried rowing (1,100 meters) which I really liked doing and plan to do more of in the future.  Also I got back to my boxing a bit on the speed back and the weighted dummy trainer (That speed bag is so dang high though...what...are there no short boxers other than myself?  I think it is adjustable though...I just need to find help to figure out how to lower it.) which was nice.  I jogged for a bit (a very small bit, ha-ha), did a lot of walking, and tried spinning for a bit.  Felt pretty good about it.  Hopped on my bike...

That's right!  I got my bike out of storage today!


...and came back to the dorm.  In a bit I'm off to Walgreen's to pick up a new medication that may help some more with my stomach.  Then an entire evening of homework (definitely did not intend to sleep in today).

I'm out for now.  Peace everyone!

16 March 2010

Well...here we go.

This past week has been spent in a vacuum of love and support, which is great.  Sometimes it's just wonderful to be able to go back to that pocket of the universe where it seems that no matter what you do, everyone is just perennially proud of you...where all of your ideas are fresh and new...where it almost feels like you can do no wrong, just so long as you stay true to yourself.

For me, that place is my home.  Bristol, Indiana.  Home to the spectacularly amazing (while my opinion is biased it is also 400% correct) Elkhart Civic Theatre!  It was hard to leave my home theatre, my farm, and my entire town behind.  It always is.  But it is here in Indianapolis where I can do wrong...and in fact, I've actually mastered the art of wrongness...and it is here where I need to be so that I can learn from my mistakes.

Soon, more of my design work with be scrutinized, as it rightfully should be, and part of me looks forward to it, as that's why I'm here.  At the same time, it's just a weird transition to go back and forth between just being happy with sheer existence on a llama farm in a two stoplight town and striving to always be a bit better than I think I can be and go a bit farther than I think I can.  Today (Tuesday) I return, after a long hiatus due to sickness and then spring break, to my design class with Bernardo.  I'm learning so much about myself in this course and in the process of designing Woyzeck with Bernardo and the other students in the class.

Emotional endurance and depletion.

I've dealt with that numerous times in acting...but never before did I know that it resided in the realm of design.  That's not to discount the realm of design (I LOVE DESIGN), it's just that I seriously had no idea.

Tomorrow (Wednesday...which the astute reader may have surmised from the "Today (Tuesday)" above) I will be presenting my design for A Midsummer Night's Dream.  Unlike Woyzeck, this set is not actually being built, at least not now, who knows billions of years down the road, right?  Still...even without that element...a lot of hard work and thought has gone into this.  (Pictures soon.)

It's 3:36 am.  I've not been able to sleep yet, but golly I refuse to stop trying!

G'night.
LT

12 March 2010

Family Support

Kyle and my dad just got home from Washington D.C. last night (the Spring Break vacation that I had to stay home from to do makeup work).  It was great to have them back.  Now Kyle and I can work on homework together some of the time and veg out watching movies some of the time.  Anyway, that's not the point.

They got gifts for both my mom and myself which was really sweet.  Firstly, I got this fascinating new Tea Tumbler from Starbucks.  Kyle said, as he was handing it to me, that it really had nothing at all to do with D.C. but they wanted me to have it anyway.  It's honestly really neat.  When filled with tea (or another hot beverage) a design appears on the exterior...and...the interior is coated with a certain kind of porous clay from China that absorbs the flavor and aroma of whatever you put in it.  (For that reason you're supposed to use it for either coffee or tea, not both.  Also, I think I might need to pick my favorite flavor of tea and just stick to that.  At the moment, that would be Teavana's Samurai Chai Mate...so I think I'll go with that once I'm back in Indy this coming week.)

Thoroughly interested in my new tumbler, I was reading the card that came with it...researching...planning which tea flavor would receive the honor of being the exclusive tea for that cup, then Kyle reprimanded me for focusing on the tumbler when I had something else to focus on.  I wasn't aware that I had another gift, but I did, and the story behind it touched me to the core.

Once I put the tumbler on the coffee table, Kyle pulled a book out of one of their bags from D.C. and handed it to me.  The first two words on the cover were George and Washington so I was a little apprehensive...history is not my thing...AT ALL.  My mom loves historical biographies, and maybe someday I would enjoy them, but I'm still jaded from primary school social studies.  Being the strong person that I am though, I pushed through the pain of this being a potential history book and read further.  Upon doing so, I found that this was hardly a history book, but a collection of Letter's written by George Washington's adopted daughter, Eleanor Parke Custis, to her best friend, Elizabeth Bordley Gibson.  The letters span from 1794-1851.

So I was pretty excited about this to begin with...I opened it to read some bits and pieces but was told to wait as there was a story behind the gift.  Kyle and my dad bought me this book, George Washington's Beautiful Nelly: The Letters of Eleanor Parke Custis Lewis to Elizabeth Bordley Gibson, 1794-1851, after seeing an actress somewhere in D.C. (in some important building, I'm sure) portraying Eleanor.  They spoke to the actress, who said that she had used this book as research for building her character.  They thought knew that I would be really interested in this...and they were right.  They got me the book thinking that maybe I could turn it into a one woman show.  I was so touched that I seriously almost started crying.  I am so beyond blessed to have such a supportive family that is emotionally and intellectually (not to mention monetarily) invested in my career.

After we talked about that prospect for a while, my dad added on this invaluable piece of information:

"Plus, we figured you could play her because she had hair similar to yours."
"Like curls?" I asked.
"Yeah, and color, too" my dad responded.  When I asked if she had red hair or my natural hair color, my dad, without even pausing for one moment, answered "both."
"Wow," I said, Kyle and I smirking at each other, "that's some hair!"

We laughed and went on with the evening...I must say that I'm really looking forward to reading these letters and seeing what comes from them.  Surely something thrilling...I mean...two-tone hair...in the 18th and 19th centuries?!  LEGIT!

09 March 2010

I'm NOT Piscicidal...Honestly!

Those of you who know me are most likely aware of Spaz, the feeder fish that I adopted from Petsmart last year for 12 cents.  He's no llama, donkey, dog, cat, or bird...but he's a fantastic fish and I'm allowed to have him in my dorm room, which is a plus.  This past year I've been trying to find him a friend, not just for him to have some company, but also to keep his tank a little cleaner.

Plan A was to get a Red Cherry Shrimp and name him Jacques after the French cleaning shrimp in Finding Nemo.  I was rather excited about this prospect but there were two problems with it.

  1. Petsmart did not have any of these shrimp.
  2. Kyle thought that the name lacked originality and creativity.
From Plan A's failure Plan B was born.
  1. Kyle decided that regardless of what kind of cleanly friend I got for Spaz, Kyle would be the one to name it and its name was to be Lee Harvey Oswald.
  2. Since the shrimp were not in stock a nice young woman named Audrey, touted as the "fish expert" by her fellow Petsmart worker, told me that an Otocinclus would work quite well in my one gallon tank with Spaz.  She said that it would be good addition to help with tank maintenance and that its contribution to ammonia production would be negligible.  Sounded great to me.
  3. And so it was...that on that day, in that Petsmart store, an Otocinclus was bought by myself, and as it was decreed by Brother Kyle, he was called Lee Harvey Oswald.
Plan B worked out pretty well...Spaz and Ozzy got along just fine most of the time.  Once in a while Spaz would have the need to nudge Ozzy around just a little bit, but it was nothing that my fishy little assassin couldn't handle.  Then, months later, Ozzy seemed to be kind of off...my friend Stephanny was over to work on some of the Woyzeck design with me and I informed her that it seemed as if Ozzy's end might be in the near future.  I checked around the tank and saw that some of the gravel pieces on the bottom seemed to have no more color to them, as if Ozzy had gotten a wee bit overzealous with his cleaning duties.  Shortly thereafter, Ozzy was no more.

Rest In Peace
Lee Harvey Oswald (Ozzy)
? - February 12, 2010

So I came up with all of my possible reasons for Ozzy dying.  I didn't know if it was from the gravel...or if he just died...or whatever...or if it was Kyle's fault.  In the long run, I decided to blame it on Kyle, thinking that surely only bad things can come from naming one's pet for an assassin.

Then came Plan C.
  1. I got sick and rushed to the emergency room which prompted my mother to come down from home to take care of me.  (Yes...for anyone who was wondering, I definitely just slipped into my default phrasing for writing down the backwards dominos of action for Play Analysis in accordance to David Ball's Backwards and Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays.)
  2. During my mom's stay with me at school, she bought me a new Otocinclus to cheer me up/give Spaz some company.
  3. Seeing as Ozzy died because my brother gave him an unfortunate name...I carefully chose the name of my new fish on my own.
  4. I chose to call her Antigone, after the title character of Sophocles' tragedy.  For with such an honorable namesake, I reasoned, a fish would never die.
  5. She died.
Plan D.
  1. My mother decided to take me to Petsmart on Monday because she wanted to try once more, fearing that maybe Antigone was injured during the move from Indianapolis for Spring Break.
  2. Learning from my past two problems with fish names/deaths, I decided before even laying eyes on this new fish, that its name would be Lazarus.
  3. Then...after picking out the fish that I wanted...the unthinkable happened...when I asked the Petsmart woman to get me the fish that I wanted she started questioning me about what kind of fish I had at home...what kind of tank...yadda yadda yadda...she then told me that it was probably my fault that Ozzy and Antigone died, because my tank was not big enough to support a goldfish and another fish.  I was greatly saddened by this...but then she continued, telling me that my tank isn't even big enough to support Spaz himself!  "Well I have two goldfish and I have them in a 20 GALLON TANK!!!!" She says to me.  Basically she went on to tell me that I was suffocating my beloved fish by denying him the proper housing.
  4. You could tell that she was at least making an effort to be nice about it...but her eyes told me that in her mind she could see Spaz's internal organs trapped in vice grips.
  5. We left Petsmart...without a new fish...and much to Petsmart Girl's chagrin, without a 10 gallon tank.
In the car on the ride home I really felt bad about how I'd been stifling Spaz's ability to grow...but when I could no longer take the guilt I diagnosed this Petsmart girl that I don't know with a random mental illness and deemed her, therefore, an unreliable source of information.  That made me feel better for a while...and when I sat down to blog about these fish tales, if you will, I found the following article:


So the question is now this...is ignorance really bliss?  Because honestly, I don't find dead fish to be all that blissful.

04 March 2010

Designing Madness

Lately, much of my time has been devoted to scenic design.  I'm currently taking two scenography classes, one from Rob Koharchik, a theatre professor here at Butler Theatre and a founding member of ShadowApe Theater Company and the other from Bernardo Rey, a visiting professor who co-created the Teatro Itineratne del Sol with Beatriz Camargo.

Bernardo is directing Woyzeck as the final production for Butler Theatre's 2009-2010 season and as one of the eight students that are in Bernardo's scenography class, I am partially responsible for the set design of the upcoming production!  It has been a lot of work and it has been very difficult...definitely have been learning a lot and have not only been forced to go outside of my box, but also been told that the proverbial locks on my box have been changed!  It's been awesome, nuts, enlightening, amazing, and crazy all at the same time.  The madness ensued in a more literal sense when Bernardo was inspired by something that Dr. Owen Schaub said when he visited our class one day:
"We are all mad."
This statement inspired Bernardo and led him to his decision to set our production of Woyzeck in an abandoned mental hospital, with all of the play's characters being patients.

So we were basically told what the setting was going to be and then told to run wild with our imaginations to start creating.  For myself, at least, it seemed to take a while to get into the right rhythm for designing the show...but after a while things started click and now we're really on the way with things!

I won't bore you all with the many details that led to how things came to be...but I will say that through the group process, my desire for using observation windows as a prominent theme in the set and the ideas of fellow classmates that the audience is isolated from the action and possibly elevated as well, became the basis for our space.

The image above is my rendering of our concept for the space that we used in our presentation for the department on Monday.  What we've ended up with, essentially, is a common area in a mental institution with large observation windows on opposing walls (through which the audience will experience the show).

The space is bare for a crucial reason.  The set pieces are all being designed by my class as well.  Each object/set piece must have its place in an old/rundown mental hospital.  It must also have the ability to change into three different objects, and by change, I do not mean that it must be utilized in different ways but actually physically transform into different things.  Each student designer has an object and mine is a chair.

1.  The chair first enters the space, not as a chair, but as a pile of wood that Woyzeck has chopped for the captain.
2.  Then, obviously, it can also be used as a chair in its natural form...for sitting purposes and such.










3.  Shortly after the chair's entrance as a pile of wood, it is transformed  by Marie (portrayed here by my bear, Bear [yes, I was über creative with names as a child]) into a makeshift cradle for her bastard son (portrayed here by a red bendy smiley face man from a college care package).




4.  And last, but not least, when this hunk-a-hunk-a-burnable wood isn't being a chair, a pile of wood, or a crib, it's being toted around as a drum and drumsticks by Marie's lover/rapist (it's creepy and awkward...just like the play), The Drum Major (once again taking one for the team is Bear, the Buckeye fan).



That's all for now.  Let me know what you think!

Peace,
LT