14 days...

What does a senior in college do 14 days before she graduates?

She doesn't have a summer job yet, her possible seasonal employer is really slow at everything...

She has something like a future--grad school--but that is still very uncertain. Next week, during finals week, she's going down to tour the school and look for housing. She is excited that she may be possibly adopting her aunt's dog, so she may have a roommate next year after all.

She has more homework than she knows what to do with and no ambition to do any of it!
She took a BIO 250 exam today, which she didn't really study as hard as she could have for. She thinks, "I'll pass the class, so I'll graduate."

She wonders how many chapel credits she has, and if she'll have enough... "maybe I'll graduate." She'll graduate if she doesn't, she'll just have to write a paper about how NWC chapel has impacted her life. "Chapel has changed my life--I learned how to sing the Doxology in 4 part harmony!"

Thinking about leaving makes her feel a bit like the rat she dissected on thursday in Bio lab... fresh and frozen and cut and changed and so very uncertain of what's inside and outside of her.

She had to write her part of the senior girls' "advice to underclass-women" letter last night. What can she say about 4 years of college? She doesn't really remember what life was like before she came here--of course she still remembers some, but she has willingly forgotten most of it. "Take care of yourselves, each other, and this place." "Love each other well, do good work." "To the King."

God, do I have to leave?
God, I want to leave, I'm ready.
I don't want to leave.
I'm excited about the future.
I am so scared of what comes next.

What does a senior in college do 14 days before she graduates?
Prays. Cries. Rejoices. Trusts God.

"We are always in a rhetoric"

A response to my history and theory of rhetoric homework. I really like the self-definiton of myself as a rhetor--and the rhetoric I carry with me--at the bottom.

We’re always standing somewhere as we speak, already inventing in the ways that we can, already in an ideology that is already constructing a rhetoric that is already constructing an ideology, already serving imperatives that generate the ways in which we will invent, dispose, and state. –Corder, page 99

Corder makes me think of a baby’s first word. My mother isn’t sure of my first word, but I did speak before my older brother, Brett. Mom thinks my first word was “Brett.” I remember the celebration when my youngest cousin said something like his first word—“ball.” I watch home movies and see my sister and I interacting, I am dancing around in a pink tutu singing “The Yellow Rose of Texas” while my sister wears a red dress and crawls around on the floor being my pet lion. From this, my mother decided to put me in dance classes and voice lessons and found opportunities for my sister to job shadow anyone that had anything to do with animals. We can’t help being in rhetoric—it’s as natural and involuntary as breathing. People learn to communicate even before we can even speak—baby’s crying for example. When we learn speech, our communications grow from basic needs to complex emotions and ideas. Even in our play, we communicate what type of person we are and our parents can choose a route of nurturing from our cues.
What rhetorics do I carry around with me? I carry the South Dakota farm girl rhetoric, where I wear a t-shirt, jeans, no shoes and ponytail everyday—dressing up is a pair of jeans with no holes, my hair down, a “nice” t-shirt and non-tennis shoes. I carry around the rhetoric of an academic: using words automatically in everyday speech that my family members don’t understand and having conversations with roommates about post-modernity and how to relate to a post-modern generation within the church. I carry around the rhetoric of a thespian, devoting much time and energy to studying all aspects of story and different ways to present stories to others, how to get them from the page to the stage. I carry around the rhetoric of a Christian, praying out loud when I’m nervous or scared or worried, not carrying who hears me. I carry around the rhetoric of a college student, always having a book with me and scheduling every second of my day for optimum efficiency, then procrastinating it all. I carry around the rhetoric of a close friend, dealing with the tough stuff of life—family members moving, breaking up, wondering what God wants—alongside my friends, supporting each other. I carry around the rhetoric of a caregiver, always making sure other’s basic needs are met before I consider my own. I carry around the rhetoric of a writer and reader of books, communicating best through written word. I carry around the rhetoric of an artist, communicating pictures of costumes in my head to a director through drawings.

The Highest Calling?

The show opens with preview on Thursday. "The Highest Calling?" is it's title, an original piece by Jeff Taylor--a prof at NWC. I'm the costume designer. I have put in so much work that I am intimately connected with these costumes. I'm emotionally involved with them, I love the costumes and have enjoyed this process so much. I hope that others have enjoyed it, or at least not hated the process--especially my team that I've worked so closely with.
I'm sorry if I make you mad, but I just want this show to be so beautiful! I want it to be what we've all dreamed about and worked so hard to achieve. I want it to have the result that Mr. T has been yearning for since he birthed the idea of writing this play. Strengths and weaknesses have been made aparent, mine and others. But where is the love? Are we not to show Christ to each other? What about grace? I'm not saying that I deserve any of it. I've been trying hard to show that in working with my crew. I've been doing my best to be a good leader and let other people take care of their responsibilities and offer help and encouragement if they need it. But I can't do it all, that's why I decided to have a team--that's why you all are necessary. Theatre is collaborative. I just want you all to look good, that's all I've ever wanted. My job is to make others look good, to be comfortable in their character's skin, and to help tell this story. That's what I want to do with my life. I'm sorry if you don't, but please, don't make me cry. Don't make me feel bad, like I've let you down, like I'm the villian here, because I am not. Please, lets just put on a beautiful show.
In Christ's Love. To the King.

Evolution?

Biology homework response again, I guess creation issues inspire prose poetry from me... It's inspired by this quote: “If you rewound the clock several hundred million years, and then allowed evolution to proceed forward again, you might end up with a very different outcome” (Collins, 204-5).

Evolution?
Rather than a flood this time, God decides to completely redo the entirety of creation. No more humans and animals to repopulate, no more land and water, earth and sky, night and day. But being that it’s the seventh day, God is resting. To save himself some trouble of the thunderbolt throwing and lightning cloud formulating, he takes out his large pocket watch and winds it up into fourth and fifth dimensions. The watch clicks, pops, jumps like a wingless penguin soaring high across the sky, and emits a sweetly foul smell. The time hand whizzes to liquid white-black, the space hand dissolves and reappears in a translucent form while the light hand dances across the face and sings an eerie aharmonic song. The stars roar and the ocean blinks, the land floats and the sky falls. Animals begin falling apart, pieces breaking off with every step, stroke and flutter. Swirls form, mini Tasmanian devils who soak continents into their pores as they mate and multiply through wind whispers. After the light hand strikes Nothing, the full funnel of emptiness is sucked into the clock, and God begins again.

"The Creation"

I sent "The Big Bang Theory" to Jeff Barker. He said it reminded him of "The Creation" and sent it to me. I think this is one of my favorite poems now. I really enjoy how there is oral residue within the poem--starting with "And..." quite frequently is an example of that. In this year's Drama Ministries Ensemble, all my lines in "Pottage" and most of them in "Jars of Oil" started with the same oral residue. I love how my liberal arts education is now starting to finally show itself to be true, overlapping liberal arts. Also, I love how Johnson copied the bible in his poem, starting with "AND." Horray for memorizing the KJV for an entire school year!

The Creation
James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938)
(A Negro Sermon)

AND God stepped out on space,
And He looked around and said,
“I’m lonely—
I’ll make me a world.”

And far as the eye of God could see
Darkness covered everything,
Blacker than a hundred midnights
Down in a cypress swamp.

Then God smiled,
And the light broke,
And the darkness rolled up on one side,
And the light stood shining on the other,
And God said, “That’s good!”

Then God reached out and took the light in His hands,
And God rolled the light around in His hands
Until He made the sun;
And He set that sun a-blazing in the heavens.
And the light that was left from making the sun
God gathered it up in a shining ball
And flung it against the darkness,
Spangling the night with the moon and stars.

Then down between
The darkness and the light
He hurled the world;
And God said, “That’s good!”

Then God himself stepped down—
And the sun was on His right hand,
And the moon was on His left;
The stars were clustered about His head,
And the earth was under His feet.
And God walked, and where He trod
His footsteps hollowed the valleys out
And bulged the mountains up.

Then He stopped and looked and saw
That the earth was hot and barren.
So God stepped over to the edge of the world
And He spat out the seven seas;
He batted His eyes, and the lightnings flashed;
He clapped His hands, and the thunders rolled;
And the waters above the earth came down,
The cooling waters came down.

Then the green grass sprouted,
And the little red flowers blossomed,
The pine tree pointed his finger to the sky,
And the oak spread out his arms,
The lakes cuddled down in the hollows of the ground,
And the rivers ran down to the sea;
And God smiled again,
And the rainbow appeared,
And curled itself around His shoulder.

Then God raised His arm and He waved His hand
Over the sea and over the land,
And He said, “Bring forth! Bring forth!”
And quicker than God could drop His hand.
Fishes and fowls
And beasts and birds
Swam the rivers and the seas,
Roamed the forests and the woods,
And split the air with their wings.
And God said, “That’s good!”

Then God walked around,
And God looked around
On all that He had made.
He looked at His sun,
And He looked at His moon,
And He looked at His little stars;
He looked on His world
With all its living things,
And God said, “I’m lonely still.”

Then God sat down
On the side of a hill where He could think;
By a deep, wide river He sat down;
With His head in His hands,
God thought and thought,
Till He thought, “I’ll make me a man!”

Up from the bed of the river
God scooped the clay;
And by the bank of the river
He kneeled Him down;
And there the great God Almighty
Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,
Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,
Who rounded the earth in the middle of His hand;
This Great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till He shaped it in His own image;

Then into it He blew the breath of life,
And man became a living soul.
Amen. Amen.

The Big Bang Theory

A response to my Biology homework when we're studying The Big Bang Theory: prose poetry.

God’s seated on a cloud in a celestial garden scribbling away on a chalk board then copying the perfect equations into His Book of Life, scattering bits of iridescent, multi-colored chalk on the floor, blowing eraser dust from his book, and banging out the erasers sending out an atmosphere of dust. Then, the bits of chalk and dust began to skitter about, as they have been God breathed, and swirl about God and interact with each other, sending off tiny shocks and sparks and giggly, tickly sounds. The dust bits tickle God's ears and nose, causing a colossal sneeze! This excites the dust particles into sending out squeals if delight! And God laughs from enjoyment. He begins to dance and hum as He scratches away within His Book. And with one divinely astounding punctuation mark, He deems "it is good" and slams the book closed. The energy from this big bang of the Book scatters the lively particles, creating a great force of light, and they are then formed and shaped by a loving, paternal God according to His good instruction manual that they were born of. When He was finished, He kissed His creation with the dust of stars and signs it "with everlasting and unconditional love."

Secrets of a Running Stream...

This blog is created in order to help others keep up with what I'm up to as I leave northwest Iowa for the great unknown. I feel a bit like I'm trying to lasso a black hole, but I'm excited none-the-less. I am not sure what will appear in this blog, but it will be more or less amusing as I tend to write about the funny things happening in my life. Expect a lot of theatre talk as I'm moving to Tuscaloosa, Alabama to pursue my Masters of Fine Arts degree in Costume Design at the University of Alabama there. I am excited and frightened! God is guiding me.