Swimming Lizards

I went to the zoo yesterday and was wandering around the reptile house when this guy came over and started posing for me, right at the water line in his habitat. He was such a ham! I just had to take a picture!

And then once we got out of the reptile house we got caught in a torrential rainstorm and there were screaming children everywhere and I did not get to see the Bonobos like I wanted to but it was still a blast, because the Jacksonville Zoo is amazing. I mean, it's easily one of the best zoos in the southeast - it makes me wonder why it's not more well known! 

Hidden treasure, I guess! 

I didn't know what this blog post would be about when I started typing it and I still don't.

So, I'm not really riled up about anything at the moment so this post is going to be more a logging of miscellany. As much as I'd love to do part two of last time's conversation ("Having minority characters does not make you diverse"), I'm going to hold off on it because I had a really good conversation about it in private and... unlike complaining about female characters, when I start talking about race people start looking at me like "You're white, shut up." So it's going to wait. Along with a discussion on why claiming certain people don't have the "right" to write certain character types is bullshit. All that and more... in another post.

I'm kind of amused that, two weeks later, most of my pageviews are still coming from links posted on fansites... but also mildly weirded out. Are you guys reading the rest of my posts? Or are you just looking at that same post, OVER AND OVER AND OVER again??? Because, um, if you're just using that link to get back to the blog so you can read other stuff... I have two separate methods of following in my sidebar that don't involve inflating the pagecounts on one post. And if you are just reading that post over and over again... is it really that fascinating???

I finally actually started to do some serious revision work on Like a Dog in Space yesterday, figuring out where I can add things back in and what I need to do to get it back to somewhere around its original length. Because I cut so many characters, I've got significantly less to work with in general, and changing the structure for the better means my opening moves faster - but also that I've just got stuff that used to take fifteen pages to happen happening in about seven. Which is good, because it gives me more time to mess around once that does happen... I just have to think of things to put there! Ivan and Valeri can only have so many awkward conversations, and the biggest thing I need to bulk up is their connection... which I actually think I need to build up before Ivan even comes to life.

The other thing I can do to take it back out to full length and put some coherency and world background in is add some of Mister Papers's long speeches back in, but that's easy. He likes to talk and even if I had to start over from scratch, he'd be easy. I could write that character forever. He'll probably turn up in another play given enough time. He can do that.

(Sometimes I try to think about how any of my plays would be connected/in the same universe. But there's no overlap between Florida and an unspecified town in New England, so it's like... even if Other People's Garden Gnomes and Allan Chang is a Totally Bogus Ghost were in the same universe... who would ever know?)

Anyways, I'm planning to do a more work on that today (Lies. When I don't have deadlines, nothing gets done.) and also figure out what kind of cool adventure we're going to have on Friday. I've wanted to go down to the Space Center for a long time, but I went in fifth grade and after looking at their website I'm not so sure if it's worth it... it kind of looks like it has't changed much since 2002. I think they're even still playing the same IMAX movies. But the price has gone up! So... maybe it'll be the Alligator Farm again. We haven't been there in a while. Or perhaps the Zoo.

Unless anyone has any suggestions about adventures? :)

Also this amuses me.

And now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

I went to Savannah, GA yesterday for a bit of an adventure.

(But mostly cleaning my cousin's apartment.)

But really I think it might be one of the prettiest cities in the country.

All little old row houses and shady blocks and magnolia trees and cobblestones.

And parks.

Parks everywhere. Every four blocks or something, there's a park.

It's gorgeous.

We live in a wonderful world.

And there's the other foot

Right when I'd finally, maybe, proven myself as a responsible adult, I made a stupid beginner mistake and screwed something up. But the show opens tomorrow, so NO TIME TO STRESS ABOUT THAT, TIME TO STRESS ABOUT THIS INSTEAD.

PICTURES SOON I PROMISE.

We had tech today and the show is looking really really great (except for the one moment when we kind of looked up and were like, "Without context, this looks like an AIDS play," and even that moment looked really good). So if everything comes together, then it just comes down to audience reaction and "IS THIS TOO CEREBRAL? I HOPE IT'S NOT."

But at the same time I hope it at least looks and sounds smart. Which it probably is.

Mom's in LA now and we went up to the Griffith Observatory for a bit after tech. It's really gorgeous up there, you can see the entire city, basically. We went to a slightly corny but really fun planetarium show which was interesting in that it had a live narrator with a really soothing voice - I haven't been to a planetarium with a live narrator since I was a little kid, and my student priced ticket was $5! In NYC a planetarium ticket has to be bought in conjunction with your museum pass and it's, like, at least $11. So that was interesting.

Also, they still had pluto in all their models and it was kind of nostalgic.

Final dress + Opening night tomorrow! Fingers crossed!

BOSTONNNNNN

I THINK I'LL GO TO BOSTON.

BOSTON.

WHERE NO ONE KNOWS MY NAME.

No, actually, I'm going to go see the Decemberists play, visit Max / Megan / PEOPLE, and have a good time.

SONG TOTALLY UNRELATED EXCEPT IT'S THE ONLY ONE I KNOW ABOUT BOSTON.

ALSO I LIKE IT. Also it is relevant to a play I wrote over break.

Dreams from Last Night

I have a tendency to have very vivid dreams about my teeth falling out. These are really unsettling because they're generally accompanied by realistic sensations of my mouth sans tooth (or teeth). Usually it's molars or incisors - for whatever reason, I don't usually lose my canines in my dreams. According to the internet, dreams about teeth are usually concerned with your appearance. But last night I dreamt about knocking out a canine tooth which, just based on anthropology last semester I sort of think that canine falling out dreams might be more about a sense of powerlessness. But enough about that.

So in my dream I knocked out a canine tooth and obsessed about that for a while, until my obsessing about my tooth was interrupted by the fact that I apparently worked on a bar at a space station, and I was expected to serve 4loko to weary space travelers. Or, actually, Jack Harkness and the Ninth Doctor.

Um, what?

Yeah, these guys.

Apparently I was out of 4Loko, so I mixed blue power-aide and vodka. According to my subconscious, this is the exact same thing. (In my subconscious's defense, I've never actually drank 4Loko.)

And then the Doctor waved his sonic screwdriver at me and told me I had a piece of the void between universes stuck in my head, and asked "How long has this been going on for, huh?"

So now my subconscious writes self-insert fanfic. This proclamation was about as far as the adventure (which would have probably been awesome) got before I woke up to the sound of rain and the realization that it was ten AM. I was kind of bummed, I was really looking forward to galavanting around the universe with two handsome rogues! Never mind that, though. Oh well.

Maybe I should watch weird british sci-fi before bed every night, because it seems to do good things to my dreams

Unrepentant dorkatude

My idea of a perfect day is getting up at nine AM, printing off an assignment, and hopping a C train uptown to the American Museum of Natural History, a place I am alarmed to say I am beginning to understand the floorplan of. To me, the AMNH is like Hogwarts. For one thing, it's basically a castle. For another thing, it seems like the layout is constantly changing. You take a twisting hallway and two staircases in search of the entrance, and you wind up in an exhibit hall you've never heard of or seen before.

I spent a whole day there today - an hour or so in the hall of human origins, followed by lunch (following a tip from my anthropology TA, I tried the brownies in the first floor cafe - delish!), followed by an IMAX documentary about the hubble space telescope (absolutely amazing), followed by something like four hours in the Hall of Vertibrate Origins, the Hall of Dinosaurs, and the Hall of Mammals and Their Extinct Relatives doing an assignment for Evolution of the Earth.

It was educational.

For example, did you know that reptiles aren't a scientific clade? A clade includes a common ancestor and all of its descended species. Since the reptile category excludes birds, who are descended from dinosaurs (and technically dinosaurs themselves, because the entire definition is based around a shared hip structure). This kind of thing makes me geek out unrepentantly.

I also really wanted to smash some heads together in the Hall of Human Origins.

Guy looking at an exhibit:

"So which one of these is the human arm, and which isn't?"

His friend, pointing to a chimpanzee's arm bones:

"That's the human one. It has an opposable thumb." (Pointing to the human arm) "That doesn't."

Me, interrupting because I think they're dumbasses:

"No, that's a human arm, and it does have an opposable thumb. All primates do."

The first guy:

"Thanks. Man, I told you so!"

The same guys, later:

"So, why didn't all the monkeys evolve into humans?"

And then I went over to the Space Center gift shop to see if they had any books that might be useful to me, but they didn't - I think I got the last copy of Two Sides of the Moon (book review is PFAD... when I finish it, but it's terrific so far) and they just never got more Astronaut Biographies in after that, or else they restock their book selection less often than every two weeks. I thought about getting some Astronaut Ice Cream because I haven't had any since I went to space camp in fifth grade, but then I decided that if I wanted to eat stale marshmallows I'd just eat stale marshmallows, and I didn't want to eat stale marshmallows just because it was nostalgic to me.

(Do real astronauts eat astronaut ice cream, or is it just a space center gift shop gimmick? I might need to investigate.

But all in all it was pretty awesome, and then later when I was waiting for the subway home I somehow managed to get into the same car as my roommate's boyfriend. Don't ask me how, but when the train stopped there was this white guy with dreadlocks sitting right in front of me and I was like, "...Bez?" and he was like, "Hi." New York is surprisingly small once you start to know and recognize people - you run into the same group of people everywhere, even when you least expect it.