Time flies ... ?

Alright, I know its been awhile but I have what I would consider to be a valid excuse. I'm currenetly attending rehearsals for 11 acts. Yes, eleven. Now the rule is that we're only allowed to be in 5. I was in 9, but was told I had to drop some so now I'm only in seven. However, I got the assistant choreographer job that I had been wanting so terribly, so I attend the rehearsals so four other acts to help them with their expression, steps, staging, etc. It's really a lot of fun.

Hmm ... so an update on my life since the last update. How about we try point form.

1. We had another special topics day. This one was about religion. It was actually really interesting. We did our best to ensure that it didn't end up as a comparison between different religions, but more an evaluation of how each different person lives out their faith and the roles that religion plays in society, or should play in society. The day actually went really well. We had a big opening assembly where Drama with a Purpose (one of the campus activities) ran a really neat exercise type thinger where people from teh audience could come up and replace one of the characters in the play and thereby change their attitude or opinions to bring up a new discussion point. Sort of hard to explain, but it turned out well. After that I went to two workshops, one on freedom of religious expression and another on leadership within religion. It was pretty neat, they were both discussion based workshops, so a lot of ideas came up. Anyways I sort of forget teh section between lunch and teh final activity, but the day ended off with Speed Dating. Not normal speed dating though, religious speed dating. Okey, so perhaps speed dating was the wrong word for it, but thats what we called it. Basically you had 8 minutes with five different people, whom you chose for yourself, to talk about your beliefs and stuff. It was meant to be uncomfortable, it was meant to be confrontational. Personally, I found it more interesting, but I do know that it was hard for some people. There were questions on the main screen that we could refer to if conversation ran dry. Our views on abortion, homosexuality, religious teachings in school, our childhood influences, what role religion played in our culture. Interesting stuff.

2. I've completed my first official assignment for the IB. While this may sounds bizarre and not mean a lot to most of you out there, it's a huge deal for me. Basically its the first thing that will go towards my official final mark. And its done. It was my Theory of Knowledge presentation. I am really happy about how it went to be honest. I was persuasive and clear and I combined youtube clips with my talking and quotes to create a varied presentation. Andnow I'm probably boring you all ... but please applaud me, this is a BIG DEAL!

3. So I realize I haven't really updated at all since before auditions ... that was awhile ago. So ... my dance got in. The Red River Jig. We didn't expect it to get in. We did terribly at auditions. In fact, Dana never even bothered checking the final list of acts she was so sure we weren't in. But we are. And we've had to work like crazy to get even close to the standard we need to be at. But we're getting there. As for the other acts I'm dancing/participating in:
- Dai Peacock Dance: Siyu's traditional chinese dance, really gentle and the closest thing to ballet I'm in
- Stomp (which has been renamed Street Beatz for copyright reasons): you get the idea, its a rip off of stomp. We dance around drumming on ladders and garbage cans, sweeping the floor vigorously with big brooms. The guy who is leading it is a phenomenal drummer and has done a really excellent job. I'm really excited to do that one.
- Red River Jig : enough said
- Vellia Pookal: This is Rhubini's Tamil song ... we did it for Middle Eastern and Indian Subcontinent day ... a few guitars, a few singers, we've added harmony this time.
- Choir: duh. I'm playing bass in one of the songs.
- Fijian Stick Dance: This one is really cool. I love it to be honest. The guys walk around beating themselves being warriors while the girls dance all gentle and smily.
- Gumboot: This one should need no explanation for those of us who knew Lauren. We wear gumboots (rubber boots, wellingtons, whatever) and slap them and dance. It's traditionally from South Africa. The school does this every year, its sort of a big deal. Lots and lots of people, lots of fun.
So that's One World for me in a nutshell. The dances I'm helping out with are Ugandan, Indian, Peruvian and Swing. Yes, Swing got in and I had to drop it. I was so disappointed, but I had already done it and I get to work on it anyways with the choreography thinger so life is still butterflies and flowers (I'm on a tad bit of lack of sleep ...)

4. Project week is coming up. Let me tell you, it took sometime to get this one organized. Finally it has ended up, Tawab, Etta, Sherdina and I. We will be travelling by bus at a ridiculously early hour to Mount Washington, its a ski resort a few hours up the island. We looked and looked and looked for cheap accomadations, but by the time we got our acts together everyone else already had a project adn didn't want to join us so renting a house was just going to be too expensive. But it turns out that Etta has a family seh knows from Fiji who live in a town not far from the hill. So we're staying there. The plan is that by staying there we will save enough money that we can ski all three days instead of only skiing one or two. I'm really exicted for this trip, fun people, despite the fact that they're all going to snowboard rather than ski, living in a real house, even if its only for a week, eating home cooked Fijian food. That means that it will have flavour! Anyways, on Thursday we will leave and travel all the way to Vancouver to participate in the mini One World show there. That show will be on Saturday and then we head back to school. It's going to be a really great week. Though somehow I don't think its going to be as relaxing or productive as I had planned. But meh, why not live life to its fullest right. We all know how little it takes before Claire gets bored, which reminds me ...

5. Clare and I have planned a Cla(i)re day for March 21st. That's right. We're going to celebrate being Cla(i)re by being obnoxious and forcing everyone else to celebrate it too! Basically we're going to be happy all day (not that we're usually unhappy) and use our names as frequently as we can and put up posteres about famous people whose names were Cla(i)re. Maybe we'll even sing Cla(i)re songs and eat Cla(i)re food ... though I'm not entirely sure what that would be .

6. Today was crazy hair day. I mean, I could have won without ever doing anything to my hair, but thats just not my style. And so, despite the fact that I slept in a missed breakfast for the first time all week (congratulations to Claire ... thats probably her best breakfast attendance in teh history of her time at Pearson), I still managed to do something crazy. Soem of y'all mioght remember when Mum used to take lots and lots of hair ties and tie them up in our hair so tight that it stood out straight? Well that's what I did basically. Except that I didn't have enough hair elastics and so I had to decorate the ends with Sponge-Bob bandaids. But it was good. A lot of people couldn't take me seriously. The only difficulty came when I tried to take a nap during lunch hour and had trouble lying down because my hair was so tight and so awkward. But all in all the day was good.

7. So a few weeks back now the second years had their traditional ski day. Which meant that the first years were left alone on campus to do as they pleased with one whole day. So we arranged a bunch of events, had a guest speaker come in and such. Unfortunately we also had a mornign full of presentations, not fun presentations either mind you, streeful ones like Sumemr service projects, university applications and the dreaded EE (extended essay .... trust me, if you lived here you would understand ... its like the balck plague to the rest of the world). But after those passed (a lot of people just slept through tem to be honest), we had a fun day planned. There were several student run workshops. Bread baking, music exchange, class exchange, improvisation clinics. Then in the afternoon we had this speaker come in. I won't bother critiquing him, its a waste of breath, he didn't run a very good workshop and he was entirely masking his true identity, but some of the stuff he did was really good. What he is is sort of a motivational speaker. We invited him in to help us build community through a bunch of exercises and stuff. Some of the really neat ones I'll outline to you here. So everyone got a chair and we made two lines of chairs facing each other about four feet apart. And then everyone stood up infornt of their chair. You were supposed to face the person in front of you and tell them to "sit down". You were only allowed to use those two words. However, the catch was that the person across from you was only allowed to sit down when they felt that they had truly been invited to sit down, rather than commanded or pleaded iwth or anythign else, they had to be invited. It was interesting. And the langauge barriers didn't matter at all. Then the big finale persay was thig exercise where everyone found a partner and then made two circles, one inside the other, with both people dacing each other. We were meant to look in the eyes of the person across from us for five minutes while the dude running the workshop talked. We were supposed to try and get to know them. He was saying things like, " This person has cried. This person had laughed. This person has done great things. This person has fears. This person wants to be loved." All the while we were looking them in the eye. It was hard. But it was good. Personally, I feel a lot closer to the people I stood across from (we did it with three different people). Oh yeah, it was all done in silence (apart from the speaker dude), which perhaps made it that much harder and more uncomfortable. But all in all a good experience.

8. I haven't worn shoes for three weeks. The weather here is nice. It hasn't rained in three weeks (well ... until this afternoon that is). I went to My Chosen Cafe without shoes. I went to church (twice) without shoes. I only wear shoes during Outdoor fitness activity because it's somewhat necessary. And during gumboot rehearsals ... because gumbooting without gumboots just doesn't make sense.

9. Outdoor fitness random activities. I don't know why, but I am always pleased with my outdorr fitness activity. Well, perhaps not always but I always come out of it with impressive sounding stories. So one day, we did hill runs. Now this may not sound like anything special, but we have a very big hill here at the college. Carolyn, you'll know what I'm talking about. The one that leads up into the college, no the one that goes down. Mum and Dad, you'll see it, its hard to miss. Anyways, we had to run up that hill as fast as we could six times. Now, I can run. I can run for quite some time. But I'm from the Prairies. I really didn't even know what a real hill was till I got here. These are real hills. They are really long and lead to a big lack of breath and an even bigger cramp in your calfs, sides and major shin splints. But you feel accomplished when you make it up. After that, becuase it really only took abotu 45 minutes, which is short for an Outdorr Fitness session, Astrid and I decided to go for a run and climb some trees. So we did. We followed the Goose (a trail) down to the soccer field and then climbed one of the really good hills over there. Then we started back to campus on our soccer field trail, but we decided that we really hadn't climbed enough trees since that was what we had originally intended to do. So we saw a tree over by teh water, and it was hanging over the water, but the tide was out so it was accessible and the water under it wasn't all that deep. So we crashed through the bush (which was actually hard due to the extreme growth and, once again, the hill factot. But we reached the tree. It was an arbutus, nice and tough, really really slippery. And completely without hold to climb on. But beign the crazy Pearson students we are we simply took this as a challenge and climbed that tree. In the process, Astrid ripped herself open something good and had blood pouring down her leg. But we both made it off the tree. Then there was a dead falled tree that acually extended some ways into the water, so we shimmied along it until it starting bouncing adn then realized that we didn't actually want to fall into the water and so we shimied on back to shore. Then we decided to run along shore all the way back to campus. So we did. In the meantime, plowing through streams of freezing cold ocean water, aquiring mud masks and army crawling under the roots of a tree where the soil had eroded due to the waves. It was good. The we rock climbed along the bottom of campus and came up under the docks. From there, we climbed up and booked it all teh way up campus (we're on a hill) to the theatre for gumboot rehearsal. It turned out that rehearsal was starting late, so we went out behind the theatre and rolled down a hill. From when Astrid starting bleeding onwards, we realized that I needed to get soem blood too ... so our chant throughout the whole expedition was something along the lines of "blood, blood" when I did finally cut my leg open on a barnackle we celebrated.

Anyways, I would have loved to make it to ten interesting sotires, but I have to write an internal assessment and complete a lab report for Monday, and the rest of the week is pretty well full of rehearsals. So I shall mosey on off.