Hieronymus Bosch in a Hot Air Balloon

At the beginning of the semester, Oberlin has Add/Drop, when students can make changes to their schedules. If you're not sure if you'd like to take Human Origins, History of Medicine, or Epigenetics, you can attend all of those classes to check them out. During Add/Drop, Obies overcommit. This is inevitable. There's the Exco Fair, overwhelming and marvelous. There's a community service fair. New plays start auditioning, new ensembles grow into a niche.

For the first time, I'm going to try not to overcommit. Really.


Schedule:
Writing Project II: The Final Project (Sylvia Watanabe)
Grant Writing (Jan Cooper)
Western Architectural History (John Harwood)
Neurophysiology (Michael Loose)
Storytelling Exco (Me and Amanda "Tigerkiller" Lozada)

Independent Writing Project II
Sylvia taught Novella. Sylvia is my advisor. Sylvia is amazing. After you finish the workshop component of creative writing, you take independent projects where you meet one on one with your project sponsor. My goal: I want to put on a really exciting, new senior recital. More on that front soon.


Grant Writing
During Winter Term, I met with one of the performers and the tech director for Circus Contraption, a raunchy circus. One of the things I'm super interested and curious about is art management, so it was a good time to ask weird little questions...

Terry, Tech Doctor: Right now, we make about 80% of our income through tickets and sales.
Aries: That's awesome!
Terry: No, not really. We're just lousy at grant writing.

And then, a little lightbulb flickered on top of my head. I could take a whole *class* on Grant Writing! I would have a useful skill!

After two classes, Grant Writing does seem to be super-useful. We're doing it in a hands-on manner. First, we get in touch with an organization, either personal, or a community group... then, we learn all about them, learn how to write grants, and go try to earn money. Instead of Friday class, we have private meetings with the prof, Jan Cooper, who's really sweet.


Approaches to Western Architectural History
This class is so, so good. Yesterday, we talked about the merger between classical and Christian styles, as well as the mythos of Architecture, and the oddity of a thing invented and practiced before it was named.

Quotes:
[On the linguistic origins] "We pull the thread, and, as the Weezer song goes, the sweater unravels."
"There was no TV in Sodom and Gomorrah."
"I have opposable thumbs. I'm the boss here."

John Harwood is also a dreamboat, rather like Professor Indiana Jones in the classroom scene of Temple of Doom. No matter what gender you're attracted to, there's something nice about listening to someone handsome early in the morning.


Neurophysiology
When I don't take science classes, I can feel parts of my brain start to... rot. If I were to take a lateral slice, various parts of my cerebrum would be the consistency of cottage cheese. Or Ricotta. Something creamy that you eat with melon or salted ham.

I went through the science library the other day and nearly imploded. I needed a science, like peanut butter needs jelly. So, I looked through the course catalog on Wednesday, researched open Bio/Chem/Neuro/Physics/Geology classes and saw Neurophysiology.
I really like neuroscience, and the combination of Physics and Neuro seems lovely. I've only taken one day, so I'm withholding judgment, but it seems hard and really, really good. Prof. Loose has a really clear style of teaching -- he's going over membrane potentials until they feel intuitive.

In high school, I rather disliked most sciences, excluding Biology. When the teacher started drawing equations and models on the board, I fought to stay awake. I didn't really see the applications of it; I didn't think they could apply to me. I worked hard at my classes, but my heart wasn't in it (only my pig-headed need to do well). These days, I like the mathematical component of the sciences. I enjoy learning mechanisms, messenger systems, and all the little details. I like working on my problem sets.

Dammit, Oberlin. Dammit.

Storytelling Exco (Me and Amanda "Tigerkiller" Lozada)
If you missed this entry, here's a recap on Storytelling:
I took the Exco my freshman year, taught it my junior and senior years. My co-teacher is Amanda, one of my good friends, who I got close to when she took the class her freshman year. She is coincidentally one of the coolest people in the world. We're making the course our own.

Storytelling is an interesting practice, because the narrative is clear, but audience-speaker relations can be muddied. Unlike traditional theater, we encourage a lot more improvising, more fresh, experimental jokes and uses of scenery. So, to improve that aspect, we're leading more group and theater activities. Over Winter Term, Amanda worked on "In the Blood" as tech director, but also took some improv workshops, including a week-long course on Theater of the Oppressed. Together, we've got lots of ideas.


Amanda and I:


For the first class, we did "Yes, And," a storytelling game that improv groups use a lot to teach listening and innovation. Our three groups told stories...
1. Hieronymus Bosch in a Hot Air Balloon, poisoning children with evil candy.
2. Small Woodland Creatures start an earthquake that nearly destroys them all.
3. The Knights Templar drown in a Nerf Ball Pit, after ripping a hole in the sky.

It's going to be a great semester.

Woman who fell from the sky

Letter from Ms. C, teacher at Prospect Elementary School:

Aries,
You were the hit of the day! As you could tell from their behavior, my students were enthralled, and your creation story fit perfectly with our studies.

Thank you so much,
C


On Friday, Liz and I went down to two fourth grade classes and told Native American creation myths, to finish up one of their social studies units. I came a tad early and saw them in reading lab. Watching twelve children reading novels made all my sappy places get a bit more gooey.

Once class started, I told the "Woman Who Fell From the Sky," an Iroquois story about how the earth was built off of a Turtle's back. The kids really liked it: the boss fight with Mosquito, any form of domestic violence, happy cows being butchered.... I forgot how amazingly morbid children are. Liz and I had worried about the distracted nature of children and the fairly static form of tale-telling (one person, talking, go). But they seemed to get into it, to understand the brother's fight and the mother's frustration. At the end, they asked for another ("Encore! Encore means more!" one of them shouted), so I told them the Ash Lad story. It was nice to always have something ready, off-the-cuff. It makes me feel all... professional.

Storytelling has been the pillar of my college experience. I took the Storytelling ExCo my first semester, and it opened me up. I told things to my peers- not strangers, but not friends (at least, not yet) - that I didn't tell anyone else. Club was outer performance and inner therapy; it was comedy and tragedy. In a tiny room in Wilder, always too warm, we told scary, cultural and personal stories.

When Liz and I taught the Exco, it made us into very close friends. We were only aquaintances at the start- Liz was the girl who baked amazing brownies and laughed like a giant. We had had possibly one real conversation, tops. Then, we saw each other at our best- doing the thing we cared about most. I know I'd be missing something if I hadn't taught with her.

-

For Sunday's Storytelling Club, Liz gathered information about professional storytellers. Apparently, you can live on it. I would love that. I would so, so love that. The national conference is this weekend, so no go for now, but maybe next year. This is a perfomance style I really adore, that works in all of the things I focus on: stories! theatre! public speaking! improv! fancy word play! rhetoric! And it gives me a community; it makes me real friends -- Liz, Amanda, Adam, Mog, Jenny, Brett, Andrew...

I transmuted part of my budding novella into story, which worked pretty well. It furthered my plan of not doing a Senior Reading, but a Senior Recital- an hour of stories.

Probably love stories.


"You're gonna be damn tired at the end," Liz said, who loved long-form epics. "But it'll be great."

Diagnosis: Ridiculous, amazing day

Tuesday did not feel like a Tuesday.

Classes were grand. Discussing the play “Saved” in my British and Irish Drama class was excellent. In “Saved,” a crowd of men stone a baby to death… because they can. The ensuing talk about the relative merits of violent satire was pretty heated. Normally, discussion classes take about a week to get brewing- we spend the first two meetings being polite and wearing some kid gloves, just to get used to each other out. Not this one. It was refreshing to hear “I disagree completely,” followed by some interesting, evocative point… on the second class. We talked about everything from the duty of theatre, censorship, how graphic cruelty fits in and when it’s alright to laugh.

Immediately after class, I ran to the Storytelling meeting. Teaching an Exco Class isn’t difficult; figuring out logistics, like meeting times, that's hard. Liz told her “pirate story,” with the killer line: “What’ya do with 40 pirates... Get funding!” It's so fun to teach the Storytelling Exco to first years, having taken it as a freshman myself. The students seemed to get how it worked, automatically sitting in a circle and chatting, but getting really quiet once the stories started. Storytelling Exco is a workshop class, based around improving spoken performance. We meet once a week, tell 10 minute stories to each other, and give constructive criticism. And people really listen, because for 10 minutes- listening is their job. Not taking notes. Listening.

-

From there, I sped to the Tumbling Club, met some new gymnasts, and worked on flexibility. Carey taught me how to do funny things in a bridge; Zwasi pulled my limbs around. We watched the freshmen do some amazing things. One of the first years, James, is ridiculous. He can do a series of 10 flips in a row, in socks on wet grass, without warming up.

Carey: So, how did you learn that?
James: Well, I saw the gymastic floor competitions on TV and just... did what they did.
Zwasi: WHAT?! You didn't train?
James: Not really, no. It looked cool.
Zwasi: You just saw it on tv.
James: Some things on youtube.

-

The real Tuesday-buster was GZA, a founder of Wu-Tang, playing at the ‘Sco. I was in the front row, when the crowd of 350 started shouting “Wu-Tang, Wu-tang.” There was a girl who had a Wu-Tang tattoo dancing on the other part of the stage. There was so much energy in the crowd. I had slept little the previous night and started to feel a bit woozy, which quickly passed away after I got some water.

By the fountain, I ran into one of the members of “Teengirl Fantasy,” an Oberlin electronica band and gushed about how cool he was. Teengirl Fantasy had opened for the show and had gotten the crowd to a screaming, rocking peak. Given the audience was more a hip-hop crew than electronica, that's not so easy.

The concert continued, becoming a giant wave of arm-waving and dancing. I left at about 12:40, covered in sweat. A good Tuesday.