Prying Open My Third Eye

So, life has been good around here this week.

For one thing, I think that I got everything all worked out with the Mike situation. We are finally talking normally, as friends and nothing more. FINALLY. I'm glad that we've managed to reach a decent compromise because for a while I thought that was never going to happen.

On Sunday I went tubing on the Guadalupe with Chelsea, Katy, and Scott. I'm glad I got the chance to see Scott and Katy, it was so much fun. Tubing on Memorial Day weekend is crazy. The river was absolutely full of people, most of them college students, most of them drunk. Why do people think that every time there's a group of young adults and a body of water a beer bong needs to be involved? Oh, and my personal favorite group was floating a grill. Who floats a grill?! Surprisingly, it seemed to be working well. Or at any rate, it was standing up and lit every time we saw them. Being on the river reminded me a lot of being in Padre, actually. It was the same vibe, although slightly less frantic (thank God). We floated a cooler with a bunch of drinks and sandwich stuff and had about five hours of just drifting lazily and chatting punctuated with a few moments of screaming whenever we hit "rapids".
Coincidentally, I ended up running into my friend Aaron on the river. Aaron and I were friends in high school and I haven't seen him or talked to him in any sort of meaningful way* since we graduated five years ago. I knew Aaron lives in Austin and I figured what with being Matthew's "emotionally detached hag" I'd run into Aaron at one of the gay clubs eventually, but it never happened. Wouldn't you know, two weeks after Matthew moves to Houston I run into Aaron in a totally random place. Anyway, it was great to see Aaron. Chelsea, Aaron and I did a lot of reminiscing about our high school days and he reminded me of some people and events I'd literally completely forgotten about. God, we were laughing so hard. High school isn't something I'd ever want to do again, but it sure is fun to laugh about it for a couple of hours. It's so weird to think about how much has happened and changed in the five years since I left high school behind. It freaks me out a little bit in a weird way I can't quite put my finger on, but it also makes me really excited to think about the potential of the next five years of my life, if the last five have brought so many major changes.
All in all Sunday was pretty perfect. Every day of summer should be like that.

But my summer vacation is on hiatus now since I started my summer school class on Tuesday. I have to say, I was a bit wary of doing this summer program. Shakespeare is not my strength. True, it's possible that Shakespeare isn't my strength simply because I've never done any in-depth Shakespeare before, but whatever the reason, I don't feel very confident when it comes to Shakespeare. Oh, I can read and comprehend the plays, it's not that. I took a Shakespeare class for an English credit at TCU and read a ton of plays and sonnets and wrote some decent papers. I'm great at English class Shakespeare. I have the reading comprehension bit down. But Shakespeare from an acting/theatre perspective is a different thing entirely, and it's pretty much all new to me. So I was scared of the idea of taking a class that has so many performance elements when a) I'm not a very confident actress under the best of circumstances and b) did I mention that I've never done any Shakespeare performance at all whatsoever? And that most of the people in this class are acting emphasis? I don't even need the six hours of credit I'm getting for this course. Pretty much the only reason I took this class was because I had a thousand dollar summer scholarship that I wasn't going to be able to use otherwise, and the idea of giving a thousand dollars back to the school was killing me. That, and I'll never give up an opportunity to travel, especially to England. I LOVE England.

Well, let me just say that I'm already so glad that I am in this class. I already like Dr. C, and she is team-teaching the class with a woman named Patricia, who has awesome credentials and is just a cool person. She's really cool so far, anyway.
Today we worked a lot on scansion and I scanned my very first piece, ever. I kind of can't believe I've been studying theatre for five years and have never had to do any sort of scansion work before, but it's true. I knew the basics but had never applied them until today. And it's fun! It's like...cracking a code or something. And then we've already had a couple of good lectures, and Patricia has us working on yoga, releasing our bodies and working on our breathing. She's one of those people that says things like "Now send your breath into your hip sockets" or "Relax your third eye". I'm always really scornful of stuff like that until I spend an hour really focusing on it and then I remember that it actually works. I feel terrific for an hour or two afterwards. I also just really like being in a group of people focusing on body movement. It makes me realize exactly how much I miss dance class.

Anyway, there's still a bit of trepidation on my part. I'm still very worried about actually getting into the scenework portion of things. But so far so good. I think a struggle will be good for me. I don't challenge myself very often, and I'm not used to doing things and not being one of the best. In this class I definitely won't be one of the best. And you know what? I'm okay with that.

*The occasional two line IM saying something along the lines of, "We need to hang out sometime!" or a MySpace message hardly counts as meaningful in my book. Although it does count a little bit. It's better than nothing, anyway.