Stars full of Jazz in 2019

Last year I wrote a post about Alyson’s end-of-year Jazz Under the Stars concert. It’s a yearly event that is a lot of fun because you get to see the students at their peak and raise some money for the arts.

But this year Jazz Under the Stars was a bit more hectic for the Rochlins, since we were in charge of the silent auction.

I say “we,” but all the credit goes to my Mom and Dad for picking up the project a week or two before the event to help a band program struggling with administrative issues. They rallied together 50 items comprised of even more bundled contributions and stayed up until 5:00 a.m. printing the sign-up sheets and programs.

All I did was help organize the goods and watch the auction tables that I helped set up and tear down.

Oh, and I did some social media stuff while I was at it:

We’ve got items up for sale for every creed. Movie tickets from @Fandango, art and music lessons, jewelry, food, even a signed autobiography from @Cary_Elwes! pic.twitter.com/2K7eeBPzIu

— Jason Rochlin (@jdrochlin) June 1, 2019

Current estimates are that we made about $2,570 for the Band & Dance Guard, which is a fantastic achievement for how quickly the auction was pulled together.

Seriously, I’m beyond impressed with my parents. They’ll deserve every ounce of sleep they get after pushing so hard.

The students also made out well in the end with $45,000 granted by the Redondo Beach Educational Foundation and the Ahmanson Foundation.

Big bucks for the @RedondoUnion music program! #RUHSJUTS2019 pic.twitter.com/26e3D518GB

— Jason Rochlin (@jdrochlin) June 1, 2019

The band director, Raymundo Vizcarra, obviously seemed happy.

Here he is chatting up some auction browsers — including my parents.

But that’s just the money-side of the event. Naturally there was food: A mobile taco vendor, shaved ice and (my personal favorite) fried twist potatoes.

Potate

You’re not here for the food, though. That doesn’t work well over text.

You’re here for the music.

A number of different bands performed throughout the night. The Adams Middle School Band, the Redondo Union High School Jazz Bands (A + B) and combinations of the various bands with alumni.

The final song of the night, “Willowcrest,” was particularly special. It had a god damn bongo solo that actually rocked pretty hard.

But more importantly it featured a flute solo by my little sister.

Check her out, standing in the red!

It was a killer song… And it was very long. Easily six or seven minutes long as jazz tends to do.

I recorded the whole piece for you all to enjoy, including the multi-minute long introduction from Vizcarra and the band bowing at the end. Check it out if you want some smooth jams:

Just before that piece, I recorded the same band’s performance of “Act Your Age” from a totally different angle.

Decided I would try to shake things up with my cinematography.

I got pretty into it after my Dad asked me to be the point man running his Facebook livestream of the event for a while. It was a relatively new experience for me, and even though I think three people were watching at most it was a lot of fun.

Had to take the extra initiative and photograph myself recording the event, because that’s what any good media-focused journalist would do. Right?

Well maybe not, but I wanted to keep record of my own exploits either way.

I had a lot of fun taking in the music and putting my skills to work basically running social media — at least for my family.

Especially because doing so gave me the chance to nab some wonderful candids.

Tribute to well-worn clothing

I wound up lingering around the house today in lieu of some planned activities because of unexpected car troubles.

Instead I did some chores around the house.

Mainly blowing through this mountain of laundry I’ve avoided for too long.

While doing so I had to confront that age-old question of what you do when something you’ve worn for a long time is pretty much beyond repair.

That white shirt I featured up above has been one of my pajama shirts since 2014.

I can tell you that specifically because it was a promotional gift I got at a baseball game in San Diego with a bunch of my old High Tide coworkers.

The game (and I couldn’t say what game it was because I was terrible about using Facebook — he said as though he’s any better now) was played up as an event to coincide with the Journalism Education Association conference happening that week.

We were in the city for that conference’s write-off competition, where I happened to win this award that’s still hanging up in my room:

Good times.

Somehow that shirt continued to be huge on me for the next five years, but it has served me well in the realm of Dream Land.

Until about two weeks ago.

A small hole in the seam just underneath the shirt’s armpit tore far wider than I could have anticipated. Not just along the seam, but inward toward my sternum. My family leveed some complaints but I mostly dissuaded them under the conviction that it shouldn’t matter for something I’m just sleeping in.

Now that I’ve had time to mull it over, however… The shirt is not the most flattering thing in its current condition. Pulling it out of that pile of clothes really hit home.

So that means it’s about time I got rid of it.

By all accounts it’s just a shirt, and the objective part of me has no problem tossing it aside.

Yet I think it’s worth taking a moment to archive the story behind the shirt. Because it may just be sewn-up pieces of fabric, but it’s sewn-up pieces of fabric with a backstory that I recall with a certain amount of fondness and nostalgia.

If you can really consider five years a truly ‘nostalgic’ period.

Hopefully writing up this little account can give all of you at home the chance to reflect on some fond memories toward your possessions as well. Because if you ask me, it’s important to remember that it isn’t really the goods that make us happy.

It’s the tales behind them that do.

So if you have any good memories you want to keep alive about innocuous goods, let me know. I think it’d be a fun little conversation to start.

Statistically surpassing 2017

About three days ago, the amount of views my blog has accrued this year surpassed the total from 2017.

With a lead-in sentence like that I’m sure you’re expecting this post to be an exercise in prideful self-fellatio.

To an extent I suppose it is, but part of the reason why it’s cool is because of interesting insights I believe I can pull out of the analytics. As I tend to look at.

For instance, here are the yearly statistics as of my writing this:

The bar graph shows an overall trend toward increasing views, and that’s sensible considering my blog has evolved from a class requirement to a digital resume and regular part of my writing life.

In 2018 the number of views jumped sizably compared to the growth from 2016 to 2017 due to my Summer Initiative and its aftermath.

Last summer was when I shifted the emphasis of my blog from writing a few times a month (mostly archiving stories) to writing nearly every day.

The jump from 1,944 to 4,210 views makes sense when audiences have a higher volume of content to consume on an almost daily schedule.

Notice the shift around June 2018.

And that was when I only wrote daily for half the year.

This year I’m halfway to that number and we’re only at the end of May, which bodes well for further growth. Especially if I get a few more breakout posts like my Redondo Union Archives write-up:

Post uploaded on March 25, 2019

I may be on-track to surpass 2018 in views, but other aspects are faltering.

“Likes” is one statistic I have trouble explaining due to the lack of a noticeable tracker on WordPress. I can tell you that I received 129 likes on my posts in 2018 compared to the paltry seven in 2019 so far, but I can’t tell you why that might be.

However, I can say something about the trend in daily views and viewers.

As you can see in the 2017 v. 2019 analytics, I surpassed my views from two years ago with about 30 fewer individual visitors.

I’ve also noticed a pattern of more views-per-day recently in spite of less visitors coming overall. I used to see about six or seven views at most every day, but recently it has hovered closer to 20:

Even yesterday, where I was so busy with family Memorial Day barbecuing and playing Minecraft with my friends that I didn’t write a blog post, my site received 33 views.

The last time I hit views near that high was April 24, when I wrote about my collection of graduation gowns.

If nothing else, I hope this post can be a positive affirmation for you regular viewers that people notice when you put extra energy into something. Even when that something is as silly as a personal blog.

I find the analytics fascinating to sort through so I hope you found them just as interesting to consume!

But if you didn’t, how about you take a look at this views-per-country breakdown:

Because the map is always a fun thing to see in my opinion.

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Featured Image courtesy of Carlos Muza via Wikimedia Commons

Meeting expectations

If my life were a series of Sesame Street episodes, the word of the day would be: Meetings.

Pretty much as soon as I woke up, I joined Mom at a local Starbucks to have breakfast with Tatjana — the wife of Magic Moreno, who I spoke to for Gladeo not long ago.

Worth reading if you haven’t.

Breakfast was a nice, quiet opportunity to relax and sip down a little coffee. Both of which are very important the week before Finals and graduation.

Speaking of relaxing. I mentioned Tarantino movies the other day, but I’ve also been chilling out by watching some speedruns from various Games Done Quick events.

For those of you who don’t know, GDQ is a series of video game marathons where games are played for record times, under conditions ranging from basic 100 percent completion to multi-player races and even bizarre hacks like randomizers.

All to raise money for charity while showing off cool tricks. Definitely worth supporting.

My tastes are currently aligned with Super Metroid, A Link to the Past and Mario Sunshine.

However, I’m watching a neat Super Mario RPG run while writing this post, so that’s worth a shout out.

GDQ aside, after breakfast I made my way to Fullerton for the semester’s last CSUF Society of Professional Journalists meeting.

We ate pizza, discussed what did or did not work about our events and elected part of the board for next year. Most of the current group is graduating, so it’s a big old passing of the torch.

My girl Kristina, who is not graduating, will be taking over as President. And I know she’s going to kill it.

From left to right: Jared Eprem, me, Harrison Faigen, Rick Piñon, Kristina Garcia and faculty advisor Frank Russell. Photo taken by Anita Ally.

Guess I’ll have to update all my social media descriptions pretty soon to reflect all this graduating/moving on from things.

That’s certainly what I started doing last night.

In the meantime, why don’t you go back and read the thing I wrote about my Smash Bros. Cinematic Universe if you haven’t! That was a fun thing to pull together and it could probably use some more hits.https://t.co/F0k6HrkxCe

— Jason Rochlin (@jdrochlin) May 8, 2019

Job applications. Gotta love them.

I’ll get back to that eventually. In the meantime, from SPJ I went to my next meeting in the Honors Center to try and complete a few more graduation requirements. Namely getting my Honors Project title page signed off on.

Which I did:

Now all I have to do is compile the stuff I’ve done so I can officially turn the damn thing in and move on.

While in the Center I had a lovely chat with Dr. Simoes as well. We spoke briefly at my presentation, but today he was more than happy to congratulate me for getting the project through this next step.

He even told me he’ll be buying a copy of my book once it’s published — so long as I sign a first edition for him.

It was very sweet.

After all of that I came back to Redondo and set up a meeting with Michelle to give back that lovely computer I’ve been holding onto. Too bad I never got it to full working condition on account of internet issue, but it’ll be much happier with a video editor where it belongs.

Once that was done, I went to probably my most important meeting of the day:

A meeting with the treadmill.

Because with all of this graduation stress on my shoulders it honestly feels great to go burn some calories and let off some steam.

Highly recommended stress relief, folks. Especially if you can watch some dope GDQ runs while you’re running!

You know I’ve got those great set-up/pay-offs.

The dungeons prequel

We are officially one week away from Dungeons and Dragons day in my Gaming in American Culture class.

Toward the beginning of the semester I listed D&D day as one of the enticing course elements, so being on the cusp makes me salivate with anticipation.

Considering I barely have any experience outside of one character building session in high school, I’ve gotten a little practice. We played D&D at the party I brought my Redondo Beach friends to in Fullerton over Spring Break.

I kicked ass as my pre-built elf sorcerer Elfson.

But in-class today we prepared for our upcoming escapades in a different way: Talking about the moral panics caused by D&D.

Because you know. If something is fun and leaning in a pagan direction, parents are going to freak out about it.

Looking at you, Pokémon. And also Pokémon.

… Okay, it’s not entirely fair to simplify that into a joke. We actually discussed interesting aspects behind the 1980’s D&D panic, including the perceived loss of self-identity to multiple, fractured fantasy identities steeped in olde mythological traditions of witchcraft and monsters.

It just so happens that you can only showcase the moral panic by laying out all of the over-the-top examples of role-playing game hysteria.

Most notably: Dark Dungeons.

This amazing comic created by Jack T. Chick in 1984 seems to be the perfect embodiment of Big Brother wiping out imagination and personal expression in exchange for the conformity of true-blue American Catholicism.

Or that’s how my boy Mitchell perceived it, at least.

There are arguably kernels of truth in Chick’s fear of fantasy overwhelming reality. It’s hard to take the guy seriously when you write such lines as:

“Lord Jesus … you guide me through life. I want You to be in charge of everything…not that lousy D&D manual.”

Following the deus ex machina of random friend appearing to save the damsel in distress — having apparently prayed and fasted for her off-screen.

Or at least… I find it hard to take this comic seriously.

Apparently others do not, as a short film adaptation came out in 2014.

Something I only know about because my friend Jonathan reminded me that JonTron put out a video about the movie in 2016.

Isn’t the internet just a god damn beautiful mess?

But wait, that’s not all!

On top of Dark Dungeons, we spent part of our class period watching and discussing Mazes and Monsters.

The 1982 Tom Hanks flick where then-unknown sentient toy cowboy / crazy stranded FedEx employee / historic figure with a pension for chocolate almost kills himself after getting so invested in a parody of D&D that he can no longer distinguish fantasy from real life.

It’s amazing that Hanks went on to have one of the most successful actor careers of all time with a start as wild as Mazes and Monsters.

With all of that said, it only makes sense that we get to risk our lives playing the tabletop role-playing game for our entire next class period.

By God am I looking forward to it.

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P.S. — There was another cool part of my day that I wanted to talk about, but could not think of an organic way to include it. Outside of there being vaguely related fantasy elements.

So I’ll just pin it down here.

During the break between my classes, Dr. Sandra Perez (the Director of the University Honors Program) brought over an underclassman while I was working in the Honors Center because she wants to write a fiction novel for her senior project.

Apparently I was the expert in that department, as Dr. Perez said she was very impressed with all of the pre-planning she’d seen me do for my novel.

It was nice to be considered an expert in something like that!

Or at least the most readily available spring of knowledge.

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Featured Image courtesy of Philip Mitchell via Wikimedia Commons

Racking up hours

I promised something more exciting than hang-out escapades at the end of my post yesterday, but let’s just say I never got around to doing anything more exciting.

To be fair I made “more exciting” impossible by staying up until 1:30 a.m. playing Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice with my boys, finally learning why people love From Software games.

I seriously went from this:

Played Sekiro for the first time today.

Felt really good to throw a whole bunch of shuriken at the Chained Ogre and do literally no other damage! pic.twitter.com/JgHOUTS3Q8

— Jason Rochlin (@jdrochlin) April 5, 2019

To absolutely exploding with hype as soon as we began picking off mini-bosses with Sly Cooper levels of stealth.

But I also didn’t come up with something more exciting to talk about today because I spent most of it working.

I’ve hit that point (as always) where thinking about the things I have to do before summer turns me into a quivering mess of stress and food wrappers.

Except this semester has the added benefit of stress about graduation too!

My goal was to use Spring Break to catch up on homework. Namely my internship hours and Senior Honors Project.

Most of it has been spent throwing myself against those internship hours, much to the detriment of progress on my novel.

For now I’m hoping to hit my 120-hour mark so I don’t have to worry about that ever again, since I have a bit more time to finish my novel on the backend.

I have made decent progress (approaching 90 hours), and there are enough other things coming for Gladeo that I think I’ll be fine.

In fact, tonight I finished transcribing my interview with Dr. Nicole Wesley, the Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources for the Redondo Beach Unified School District.

Also my ex-Principal at both Adams Middle School and Redondo Union High School. We’ve stayed in touch.

I transcribed almost 7,500 words for a good couple hours and still have to put the piece together, so she’s been a godsend. Alongside other stories in the works.

I probably won’t talk about her again until stuff gets published, so I figured I would leave y’all a nice teaser from the end of my transcript:

“I think that before you become a teacher, you don’t realize the level of difficulty and complexity that comes with the job. But as complex and frustrating as it can be, it is equally if not more rewarding in every other sense. Even on the worst day, you will experience a situation that brings joy and hope in a way that is inexplainable.

I think that may be the case with a lot of jobs. There are no perfect jobs and you’re going to work really hard, even beyond the seven hours you’re paid. But the memories and relationships and the impact you make are second to none.”

— Nicole Wesley

Great stuff. Can’t wait to pull the Profile and Spotlight together.

That was about the most exciting part of my day. Unless you want to get into my orthodontic adventure.

… Actually, I did talk about this problems, so it might be worth writing closure.

Toward the end of 2018 I broke my permanent retainer at a celebratory end-of-semester dinner with my friend Mimi. The cherry on top of an already relentless day.

I took a little too long getting to the Orthodontist after that, so my teeth had moved out of alignment. They told me to wear my plastic retainers 24/7 for a few weeks and come back.

School got busy. So I wore these bad boys all day, everyday for probably a good month or two.

Just be glad I didn’t get a gross picture of the new brace in my mouth.

Spring Break offered the rest I finally needed to make a new appointment, so $250 later I am back at full capacity.

Only having to wear these at night again is a true blessing that I will never take for granted.

… Until probably half a year from now when I stop bothering.

But I’m hoping to be better about that this time around!

And that, ladies and germs, sums up my day. Lots of work and orthodontic care.

I’ll try to stop promising cool things on specific time frames because I seem to keep failing to keep my word.

At this point Shantae will be taunting me for the rest of my life.

All I’ll say is, don’t be surprised if I come out with a few more silly posts or life dump posts for a while as I attempt to keep writing through my imminent semester-end burnout.

God knows graduation will be the death of me.

Under pressure

I told myself I wasn’t going to do this.

“It’s too cliché,” I said. “Everyone will make fun of you for capitalizing on a wave of popularity.”

But you know what? This is my blog and I can do whatever I want.

Also, I couldn’t come up with anything substantial enough to be a feasible alternative.

So. Taking inspiration from my pressure cooker as well as Queen after the music copyright lecture in my Comm Law class (a follow-up to lectures I watched this weekend), I decided to go with it.

Let’s talk about how pressure led to me not knowing what to talk about.

Yesterday I wrote about the cool things I learned from Archivist Therese Martinez during a brief visit to the Redondo Union High School Alumni House.

To be honest… I feel like I half-assed that post.

Everything I talked about is great, and I genuinely learned a lot from Therese. But I write the vast majority in ~30 minutes while sitting in the Main Branch Public Library with less than 20 percent battery.

The ticking clock of my power situation, on top of knowing it’s a topic I will return to, led to silly things like stuffing information into a slideshow.

However, in spite of my reservations about the execution, Therese loved it. So much so that (after I made adjustments to inaccurate dates), she shared the piece with Admin.

Then with the Archives’ Facebook group.

I scratch her back, she scratches my back, I scratch hers.

Suddenly this interesting, somewhat half-assed look at historical goods in my alma mater made my dinky personal blog blow the hell up.

As of 7:40 p.m., about four hours after she asked to share.

That’s pretty awesome.

Except…

I don’t know about you, but when I have a burst of popularity it comes with baggage. Most notably the desire to follow-up with something significant and not disappoint those newcomers.

I’ve been stressing over what to write for a while now.

My first inclination was to write about my recent purchase of:

On the Nintandoh Splorch!

There’s a bit of a story behind that purchase.

Yesterday, WayForward announced that they are on the verge of releasing the fifth game in the Shantae series — a collection of games that have been around since the Game Boy.

Today we're thrilled to announce Shantae 5! You're invited to join Shantae in a brand-new adventure later this year on PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC… AND the newly announced Apple Arcade! Stay tuned for more details! Learn more about Apple Arcade at https://t.co/KwXqXtb2ft pic.twitter.com/SFc1iOswHT

— WayForward (@WayForward) March 25, 2019

I adore Shantae. In my Sophomore year I binged the first three games on my 3DS after finding the fourth on Kickstarter. Mostly while waiting for my history class with Dr. Paulo Simoes.

However I never got around to playing Half-Genie Hero when it came out because money.

So Shantae 5 was announced, and guess what I found out next:

I see your game, @WayForward. Making 1/2 Genie Hero be 25% off on the Nintendo Switch the same day as you announce Shantae 5 is a dangerously effective strategy.

— Jason Rochlin (@jdrochlin) March 26, 2019

It truly was a dangerously effective strategy.

That seemed like the perfect opportunity to write something about my adoration of video games.

Open-and-shut case for a blog post. Right?

Well… It would have been. If I had any time to play the game beyond the title screen. But I haven’t, and probably won’t until Spring Break.

Hold that thought. I’ll probably have a review of the game sometime soon.

With that struck down, it was onto idea #2: Honors Project stuff.

For those of you who don’t know, I’m writing a fantasy genre subversion novel for my big Senior Project — the equivalent of a thesis for the University Honors Program.

One of my favorite pieces of side-content for the project has been my world map.

You know the kind. Those continent overviews you see at the beginning of Tolkien books.

I wrote a whole long post all about my adventure in mapmaking this semester, so you can read that to catch up.

The important thing is that I’ve continued to make adjustments to my novel’s continent Drocux in the weeks since. Namely adding names to every location, but also adding details like rivers and roads for more realistic topography:

HexTML continues to serve me well, and it has been fun writing out lore to explain outlandish names (such as the Xilbalar Canyon above being named after a prominent Elven activist).

But I’m still adding new ideas almost every day, and if I’m going to deep dive into my EXTENSIVE LORE, I would like to do so with the complete product.

Thus, two ideas have been struck down.

And I couldn’t come up with a decent third.

By the time I combed through possibilities, I was home and had my magical encounter with the InstaPot in my Featured Image.

The rest, as they say, was history.

Hopefully you newcomers don’t feel like this was a waste of time — or get too annoyed at my somewhat blatant attempt to throw a lot of my old posts at you. All I needed to add was something about my journalism awards to give the full flavor of Jason.

Speaking of, tomorrow I’ll probably have a more serious post about the next Society of Professional Journalists meeting.

Assuming I don’t change my mind, I’ll look forward to possibly seeing you there.

Perusing the RUHS Archives

Editor’s Note: On March 26, 2019 I made a few corrections to dates throughout this post after the RUHS Archivist, Therese Martinez, offered some notes.

Now the piece should hopefully be even more accurate.

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Sometimes work can take you to unexpectedly interesting places.

In my perpetual search for Gladeo interviewees (because internship hours), today I took my Mom’s advice and spent time with the Archivist at my alma mater, Redondo Union High School.

Apparently I’m just gravitating toward the school this weekend, be it for theatre or history.

About two years after I graduated in 2015, an old storage space for janitorial goods was converted into this fancy Alumni House.

The school has been around since ~1905, so there’s a whole lot of alum to keep track of.

But more importantly, the Alumni House became a space for memorabilia — old class photos, yearbooks, furniture, mascot costumes, etc.

Much less dilapidated now.

Since this wasn’t a place when I attended high school, I never got to check any of it out.

Now that I did, I’m pretty upset that everything wasn’t so open and available back when I was working on the High Tide. Would’ve loved to peruse for a story or two!

Some of the archived pieces go way back to the 1920’s.

Like this mirror, a senior present for the school from the class of 1925:

In that same vein, there were publications like yearbooks and newspapers from around the 20s, as the High Tide has been in business since 1920.

Old versions of the yearbook, called “The Pilot” (which had even earlier publications going back to 1915), were particularly cool because a lot of them had student signatures from all those years ago:

It’s pretty incredible to not just see pictures of folks long since entering the cradle of old age, but to see what and how they wrote to one another.

Gotta love an age where everyone wrote in clean, precise cursive.

And where nobody wrote “HAGS” because they weren’t enmeshed in a culture of shorthand acronyms and emoji that have cursed our modern, digital age into regressed diction.

… Sorry, did I say that out loud? My old man is showing.

A few other specific items on display were of note.

Like this class photo from 1921 — the oldest one we have available, apparently:

Or the old met version of our mascot, Sammy the Seahawk.

Apparently dubbed “Scary Sammy” because… Well…

Look at him.

That is a terrifying mascot costume.

Though alongside the old costume, I also found out that the first time RUHS received the “sea hawk” as its mascot was in the banner of a High Tide issues from 1926.

A lot of the other things around the Alumni House were just as cool, but in the interest of not having a 3,000 word post I think it’s safe to share the rest in a neat little slideshow:

 

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

However, don’t think this is the last time you’ll hear from me about the Alumni House.

I’ve already started the gears turning to get a video interview with the RUHS Archivist for Gladeo, alongside a Career Profile on being an archivist.

So whenever that’s coming together, assuming I’ll be on set as a producer of sorts, you know I’ll be sharing bits and pieces of it.

Stay tuned.

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The content of most photos here are courtesy of the RUHS Archives.

Into the orchestra

Another year, another Spring musical by the Redondo Union Theatre Arts Program.

This time around, my alma mater put on Stephen Sondheim‘s take on Grimms’ Fairy Tales: Into the Woods.

Le playbill

The show had live music by a pit orchestra, in which my sister took part. When they did Crazy for You last year it was the first time in a long time that a musical had live orchestration at RUHS, so I’m glad to see the tradition continue.

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Editor’s Note: I thought I wrote about that show but apparently not, so forgive my semi-random link up there.

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I don’t have too terribly much to say about the show itself. The theatre kids put on a nice performance that I would say shined most in its stage design.

To create the titular woods, stage hands dragged tree stumps into the mid-ground, and logs were lowered onto them from the ceiling. It was a really neat little effect that got enhanced by fog machines.

Those gave everything a mysterious Midsummer Night’s Dream forest vibe.

And of course, the music was wonderful. Which I only say in part because this post is a shill for my sister (who deserves credit, but still). Even though the sound mixing was not optimal and a lot of the actors kind of got lost in it.

The only major complaint I have about the show was an odd framing device added on top of the story.

They decided to have Into the Woods, in the context of their continuity, be the content of a book being read to a lost little girl in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The stage set up as a disaster relief area before the show.

Bit of an oddly paired metaphor.

It didn’t bear enough of an effect on the story to ruin it necessarily, but at the same time the fact that they didn’t elaborate on it much just left me asking why it was included at all.

I suppose I will say that it contributed to an immersive theatre-going experience.

All the kids got to mess around and play their hearts out in the aisles of the auditorium before the show. Asking audience members if they’ve seen family or friends lost in the hurricane, requesting food in exchange for voodoo crystals, so on and so forth.

It was a lot of fun, and added to a nice overall presence through things like a faux red carpet backdrop in the lobby:

Didn’t get a picture with the backdrop because I’m stupid.

Pretty cute stuff.

That’s just about all I have to say about the show. It was originally going to be my main blog post of the day before I exhausted myself last night and decided to save my Us review for earlier.

But I didn’t want to leave my sister hanging. Especially after I got such a cute picture of her.

So you’re getting two-for-one today, and I don’t have to feel as bad about skipping another day of writing in March.

Stranded in Suburbia

I’m in a bit of an odd predicament.

In my 22nd birthday blog post, I based the whole thing on the fact that there isn’t a lot of external fanfare surrounding 22 compared to 21.

But there is one specific thing that happened when I turned 22, which I sort of alluded to yesterday.

I was able to get a new driver’s license when I turned 21, one that would be horizontal instead of vertical to assure certain establishments that I am of age for things like drinking. But I didn’t have to get my new license because the old one wasn’t expired.

I can no longer say that because the expiration date came yesterday:

Be glad I’m not showing you the full picture… It’s bad.

For the first time in close to four years, I am no longer legally able to drive myself.

Now I know some of you are probably saying that it shouldn’t matter, because what are the odds of getting pulled over?

Well… Sure. I could still drive around if I wanted, because it’s not like the license is inherently visible unless asked for specifically. I could still do things like hit the gym if I wanted, as I had planned on today to start working off that birthday cake.

After all, I hit 200 lbs on the scale as of my visit to the hematologist last week, and I don’t want to lose too much progress on my journey to become healthier.

But that being said, I live by the same anxieties as my Mom when it comes to these things. Twelve other people could be driving around with expired licenses around me, but with my luck I would be the one who gets caught and pays the price.

So I won’t be driving around on my own today. Just on the off-chance anything happens.

I could still get driven around by my parents, and Mom has gone to the gym with me in the past. It’s not like I’m totally stuck.

… Except for the fact that I stayed home this morning while the rest of the family went out to do chores. Because for some reason I decided doing homework was more important.

And you know, by ‘for some reason’ I mean because I have assignment deadlines.

Deadlines I could be working on instead of this blog post if I didn’t enjoy living on the edge.

Thus, as the title implies, I’m stuck at home doing work today. I even took that artsy Featured Image through the screen door just to imply bars.

Kinda proud of it, honestly.

On the bright side, my pseudo-house arrest shouldn’t last long. I have an appointment at the DMV tomorrow that I’m… Completely looking forward to…

But you know what, if I have to miss my morning class and suffer through government bureaucracy in order to get my driver’s license back, I suppose it will all be worth it in the end.

Who knows, the experience might even give me something interesting to talk about around here.

Guess we’ll just have to see.