It's 7pm. I'm completely exhausted. I'm hungry. I have to go buy different Audio/Video cables than the ones I bought this morning (and I have to deal with returning something to Fry's -- yuck) before I can watch a video, then I have to watch Casablanca and complete an assignment for directing class. I have to move all the furniture out of the living room because my couches are getting delivered tomorrow. I have to get a good night's sleep because I barely slept last night.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln...
(I'm eating macaroni and cheese. How's that for the total college meal? I'm eating it out of one of the glass saucepans that Rob and Laura loaned/gave me, and I know why I'm eating it out of the pan, other than because I'm lazy: it's because Darin always eats macaroni and cheese out of giant glass bowls.)
Today started out okay, despite waking up early after not being able to fall asleep. I decided to go run errands before going to school, so I went and did things like buy those ill-fated coax cables and drop a shirt off at the cleaners. I got to USC and got my USC ID card (finally! and am I having the mother of all possible bad hair days on that card!), my Cinema sticker, and a pap smear at the student health center. I know, you didn't want to know that. I was offended by some of the questions on the questionnaire I was supposed to fill out -- age of first sexual intercourse, current frequency of sexual intercourse, history of STDs...I left them blank. The whole reason for this checkup was it was early in the quarter so I had time and I'm going to need a resupply of anti-Darin drugs soon.
Writing class started at 3. I like this class because it's small -- I think there were 9 students in there. The teacher is all over the map and keeps apologizing for it by saying, "I'm rambling here." But right now I'm annoyed at the class and at the teacher, which isn't helping my blood pressure any.
Here's why: we had to do an assignment in class and then read it out loud and get critiqued on it. The assignment was:
The first person to go, the bravest amongst us (no, not me), got something like 20 or 30 minutes of critique. The teacher knew he was taking a long time; he said that this was for demonstration purposes. Then the second person read, and the teacher took maybe 10 minutes to critique that one.
Then I read mine. My character was Catherine (modelled on Catherine the Great, though that doesn't figure into it); my location was a racetrack (unintentionally hilarious with Catherine the Great); my scene went as follows:
Twilight. A barn at a racetrack. In the barn a horse stands in each stall quietly munching hay. The entire barn is lit by a yellow light in the center -- most of the stalls are almost dark, the ones at the edge almost completely black. The barn is almost totally silent.
Catherine walks in carrying her doctor's bag. The horses near her start to paw the ground. Down the line of stalls all the horses start to whinny and bump against the doors of their stalls. The frenzied noises increases. The lone light starts to swing back and forth, flashing on panicked horses.
Catherine walks to the center and puts her bag on a stool. She pulls out a syringe, checks it. She moves towards the nearest horse.
His reponse, in total: "Pretty good. Although things are never almost. They either are or they aren't. We don't learn what's making the barn quake. If there's a sound, name the sound specifically."
Then he moved on. Everyone else got several minutes.
Yes, that pisses me off.
Because, dammit, I want feedback -- I want him to say either that was incredibly great and I'm the best writer ever in the program, or I want more. It's like getting a non-response, the same as with the acting exercise last Thursday, when I got a "nicely executed." Should I go out of my way to be bad, just to get some kind of reaction? What is it that I'm doing to elicit a lack of affect from the instructors?
On top of that, I had really bad LA-type traffic on the drive home, complete with people passing in the emergency lane. The most amazing thing I saw was a white Ford Fiesta swerving between lanes -- and when the driver wasn't swerving, she was sweeping together her long hair to put up in a ponytail holder. With both hands. She was in front of me; I couldn't get away. I mentally prepared my will.
It's 9:40pm. I'm finally back from the harrowing experience of returning the wrong cables to Fry's and finding the right cables. Yes, Fry's is just as annoying down here as it is up north. I had to rip open several packages marked 6-ft. Stereo Dubbing Cable with Triple RCA Plugs before finding one that actually was. (The others just had double plugs with two adapters to Sony mini-plugs thrown in.) From the look of the cable area, I wasn't the first person to attack the cable boxes that way either.
I have my VCR hooked, but I haven't quite figured out the voodoo required to get the TV and VCR images to look their nicest always.
I can't watch Casablanca with any degree of concentration now -- now the question is, can I tomorrow night before Thursday's class? (Not as easy as it sounds: Tiffany and Allison are coming over tomorrow afternoon to watch Orlando and help me set up the couches in the living room.)
I'll give Darin a call at Rob and Laura's (where they are feeding him and making sure he's gotten all his shots) and then log in and finally post this. And then I'll sleep. Or not, as the case might be.