Tempura fried everything

I keep saying to myself that I'm going to do some serious writing this summer break, which is hard because I don't know where to begin. I try to psyche myself up, assuring myself that I always have a few false starts when I work on a project and if I just power through them I'll punch through the other side and make something wonderful, but really... without deadlines, I'm not getting much done.

I went out for sushi and tempura tonight with a friend, and we spent about an hour talking about how we looked a lot like hipsters (Me with my bangs and what he called a "hipster bun" and a cardigan, him in horn-rimmed glasses and a very hipster button up) but weren't hipsters... I'm pretty sure if you spend an hour talking about not being a hipster, you by definition now are a hipster, congratulations.

And then I had the bright idea of putting an entire tempura mushroom in my mouth, which ended about as well as putting an entire tempura mushroom in your mouth can ever end. (Hint: it burns.)

We played hot-potato with the leftovers before passing them off on one of the guys working the night shift at Gamestop, who is a friend of my friend, and who he is buttering up in hopes of scoring a job, and then grabbed bubble tea while trying to stall before driving back. It was raining pretty hard, but it showed no sign of stopping so we decided to bite the bullet and head in. It was like driving under water. I was doing ten to fifteen under speed limit on the highway and for once no one cared. The lightning was INTENSE.

And then when I got home it happened to be the one place in the city where it was merely drizzling. But then the rain started a bit later and it was a frickin' monsoon.

A typical June in northeast Florida?

Pretty much.

So I'm thinking of picking up a foreign language next semester...

What do you guys think? I could do a higher-level French class (Good to retain what I know, possibly the most useless language to take, though) or Spanish (useful as all get out, but I'd probably just mix it up with French), or Hebrew (good if I go to Israel next summer like I'm thinking about, and I already read it and speak a tiny bit), or Mandarin (probably the most "useful" next to Spanish, but I doubt I'd get much use out of it and it's supposed to be tricky to pick up) or Russian (Really, all I want to do with my life is learn how to read Cyrillic, because it looks awesome.) course sign ups for Speaking Freely don't go up until fall semester, so I've got a while to think on this, but I'd like some opinions. So! What language should Aliza learn next semester?

What to work on next?

I had two options for this month: Revise Dog in Space or do another draft of my screenplay from last semester.

Tonight I feel like working on the latter.

Also, saw X-Men First Class tonight and enjoyed it a lot! However, the Rise of the Planet of the Apes trailer?

...I'm glad they used entirely CGI animals, because it's the ethical choice and adult great apes are basically impossible to use in entertainment - they wind up using juveniles who are "retired" to research facilities when they become too much for their trainers to handle. But the CGI looks really uncanny valley. Not bad, just horrifying.

Also, those Orangutans were the wrong color. I went back and looked at the screencaps. Orangutans are orange, not black. Anyone who has ever seen any Orangutan could tell you - they're redheads. And anyone who has ever seen a chimpanzee can tell you that the alleged chimpanzees in the trailer... look nothing like chimpanzees, or even bonobos. They're just creepy.

I feel like I need to see it just to pick it apart.

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.

I'm flattered, guys. I really am.

What. What. What is this.

This is more hits in a single day than I usually get in a month. From more countries than I have ever been viewed in. And lets talk about that bizarre spike. I mean I know why I have so many hits and it's because those pictures and not because of me but this is seriously unreal. Because over 600 hits. In a day.

I'm flattered. Really.

But I know that it's temporary.

YPF Roundup.

Guys? Reposting my photos with proper credit is fine, but please stop editing them. I'm uncomfortable with it.

Well, back in Florida! Those four words are kind of anti-climactic, aren't they? I remember on the last day of the 2010 festival, I killed time at the theater for like an hour after the show before leaving, on the idea that I didn't know if I'd ever come back. I was fifteen pages into an idea that didn't really feel very new or exciting and although I had begun trying to think of something else, nothing was really sticking yet.

I had a trip to the Museum of Jurassic Technology fresh in my mind, a google history full of searches about Russian Space Dogs, and a five hour plane ride in front of me. At 30,000 feet I popped open my MacBook and wrote down the basic idea for Like a Dog in Space: What happens to ideas when they are forgotten, and what do the ideas themselves do to avoid being lost? I had Ivan. I had the prototypes for Innovation. I had a frame story about a schizophrenic Astrophysicist and his little sister which will have to wait for another play to get used. I had Milena and Gennady.

I had no idea what I was doing. I took the idea in as a set of two for my Playwriting I class, and we decided it was the one I ought to pursue. And suddenly, with deadlines set and a professor waiting for me, things came together. The play got written. I had a complete first draft to show my family when I visited at Thanksgiving.

Four months later, I took a hacksaw to the play and in the course of four days cut four characters and thirty pages. A month after that, on the 50th anniversary of Vostok I, I got a call that I was heading to Blank YPF. You cannot make these things up. That's the timing.

So it's a play all about ideas, and about space and exploration and it's all very meta but it's also Pinocchio in Space and every time someone describes it to me as such, I get kind of happy because really, really, when you strip the meta stuff away it's about trying to discover, looking outside-in, what it is to be human. What about our experiences makes us so unique? And I think what the conclusion the play draws is that being human is a constant re-evaluation of what things are important to you, and what your goals are, and what's going to make you happy, and sometimes the things you think will make you happy are completely out of your reach and sometimes the things that would have made you happy... by the time you realize what you should have said, the moment is past. Ivan and Valeri meet once as bright young scientists on the dawn of one of the most explosive decades of human advancement.* They meet again, decades later, and it's no longer the right moment. They can't pick up where they left off, because they've become two entirely different people. And in that moment, Ivan wishes that he had stayed.

*[The timeline for this stuff is really, really amazing.

Sputnik is 1957. Vostok I is 1961. Apollo 11 is 1969. That's a beepy satellite to a man on the moon in twelve years. What's a little healthy competition between nuclear superpowers if it helps you step foot on another celestial body?]

So on Sunday, I hung around after the show for about an hour because, the fact was, once I left... I really wasn't going to be back. And some of these people had known me for four years now, had watched me go from Awkward Sixteen-Year-Old to Slightly Less Awkward Nineteen-Year-Old. I thought I was going to cry.

And then I didn't. Instead I, in no particular order:

• Talked to a couple from "Gale Harold's Chinese Fan Club," who said they'd come all the way from China to see him in the play? And they actually talked to me and took a picture with me and told me how much they enjoyed it, which is... more than can be said for more of the people who mobbed him every night. So, shoutout to Alex and [I am really sorry but your name escapes me] for being cool and world travel-y, and there is probably a picture of me on one of the fanboards, in Chinese.
• Enthused to the production costume designer about "Where the heck did you get ISS Mission Patches I mean seriously where are those from." Apparently army surplus. What. But apparently he's sending me some.
• Was serenaded that "you're nobody until somebody loves you." The song choice makes more sense in context but it was still in front of my parents.
• Was given a plush dog, who was promptly named Laika.
• Took lots of pictures. Most of them wound up blurry, because my mother bought her camera in a vending machine in the miami airport last fall. Here are a few that are okay.

There are a lot more relevant pictures on the official festival website, which I have to request that people DO NOT steal and claim as their own because the photographer is a really nice guy and you'd have to be a jerk to steal his work I mean really who does that. :|

And I'm back in Florida. Still a depressing statement. But it was a good week and I have my work cut out for me tackling the rewrite. Tomorrow I'm driving up to Savannah with my aunt to help clean out my cousin's apartment while she's in the hospital, and hopefully I will find at least /some/ time to think on the car ride. I've also been advised to bite the bullet and get a new phone because the iPhone 5s are looking as distant as ever. So that might happen soon.

Anddddd... we now return you to your regularly scheduled youtube link spam. On that note, here is a group playing the Doctor Who theme song on a set that includes a Didgeridoo. Only in Australia.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, and good night.

#historicalfiguresinunlikelyplaces

Last night I had a dream about Buzz Aldrin (the astronaut) talking to me about skydiving. Seeing as Opening Night for Like a Dog in Space went fantastically, I am going to take this as a sign that the universe is smiling at me. Which is a pretty cool feeling to have, all in all. I mean, I don't really know why my subconscious chose last night to pepper my dreams with retired spacemen, or why they were talking about extreme sports, but it left me feeling kind of warm and fuzzy, so it can't have been a bad dream.

Anyways, opening night was brilliant. A friend who I knew was coming showed up, and then I was surprised by another friend who I hadn't seen in about two years, and a fun time was had by all! All three shows this week are really, really strong, and the other two playwrights are really sweet and smart and talented. Like, I could not have asked for a better group of people to spend my last YPF with, and they give me a lot of hope that the festival's going to be A-OK in the future, because they're already giving me a run for my money and they're 2-3 years younger than me.

If you're in LA and reading this blog post in the weekend it was written, I strongly encourage you to come see the show, if not because Emma, Nicole and I are awesome then because the week's cast is amazing and fun to work with and has all kinds of cool credits under their collective belts and it's a 99 seat theater so there are No Bad Seats in the house, pretty much anywhere you sit you will be close enough to feel them spit (if that's what you're into). Or if you don't go this week, go another week, because it will still be just as cool, it just won't be us.

I got some "Soviet Flowers" and lots of hugs:

All of my other pictures are on other people's cameras. This is... just as inconvenient as it sounds, really.

My brother got in last night but he hasn't seen the play yet - that's what he gets to do tonight, or maybe sunday? I'm not sure what the plan is yet. He did steal my contact lenses this morning, but I promised not to tell that whole story so I guess I'll leave it at, "That happened and it was frustrating at the time but hilarious afterwards."

Also my brother says about the flowers, "In Soviet Russia, Flowers smell you!" which is actually kind of funny.

My face hurts from smiling and I only slept like five hours last night because I was really jumpy and excited and I am actually really, really okay with this because I get to go back and do it all again in less than 12 hours, which is awesome.

Also, people who leave during intermission and don't stay for the third play are losers. Because, I mean, I got A WHOLE EXTRA ADJECTIVE in the curtain speech ("fantastic, marvelous little play after intermission") and people still left during intermission and it's lame. Like, the ticket price has gone up since last year, you might as well stay and get your money's worth!

Also, shout-out to my lovely, brilliant, beautiful cousin Faye who is currently spending a month in the hospital after pelvic surgery and a waterski accident. :( I love you and hope you have a smooth recovery!!!!

Also, MINIATURE WATERMELONS ARE ADORABLE. WE ARE EATING ONE FOR BREAKFAST RIGHT NOW AND IT IS THE CUTEST THING EVER. (But not Too Cute To Eat.)

Also, I saw two grown women in full-body pajamas "planking" in the Hollywood and Highland Complex yesterday. Like, I was aware that this was a thing, but do people understand how silly they look? And also, why would you want to lie on those stairs? the whole thing seems vaguely unsanitary to me.

Also, that was a lot of Alsos.

Sensationally yours,

Leez.