2015! Hello!

2014 wasn't the terrible ordeal for me that it seems to have been for a lot of people. I took a year-long class I adored at a Proper Fancy Drama School, made a small amount of actual money doing actual theatre things, and then spent three months being driven across the United States, sleeping in tents and having encounters with wild animals. We saw herds of wild bison at Yellowstone, a family of wild moose in Glacier National Park, baby bears in Sequoia (and a few other places!) and, traumatically, tarantulas.  During TARANTULA MATING SEASON. When our tent zip was malfunctioning and wouldn't zip properly. 

Of course now it's 2015, I'm unemployed and back in Scotland and about to move flats.  We'll be living in the Mean Streets of Glasgow, something I am very excited about since we will no longer have stupidly long commutes into work and/or to see shows, or both, since L continues to get free tickets to the students' performances from her work. 

So, in my attempts to become someone who actually acts like a human being sometimes (instead of sitting up until 5am reading whatshouldwecallme and Sex Diaries, I did my bank-related chores and turned up to Amadeus rehearsals half an hour early to prepare.

I sat in the cafe of the Arts Centre we were rehearsing in, ordered an apple juice (because I am a grown-up) and made notes. When nobody had turned up five minutes before we were set to begin, I started to wonder what was going on.

ME: Hi, have the Amadeus cast gone through to the studio already?
RECEPTION LADY: Amadeus cast? Not that I know - we actually don't have anyone booked in the studio at all today...
ME: *heart stops*

The problem is, this happens to me. Frequently. Like the time I brought L to see a friend's production of The Hired Man a week before it went up. Or the time *cough*last Sunday*cough* I mistook 'rehearsals run until half four' with 'rehearsals start at half four. I started having palpitations about the possibility of having to run to the closest useful bus stop (15 minutes away) to our other rehearsal venue, all the while babbling to the director --

-- when she stepped through the front door. THANK GOODNESS.

I'm writing up a new copy of the book for Amadeus (so that there's actually a separate one, rather than all the blocking, the lighting and the sound cues all jumbled into the same script) and I've consistently been writing 'exists' instead of 'exits'. So, lots of 'Salieri exists upright,' etc. It eventually starts to sound a little defensive. Mozart exists, dammit! Stop trying to get him to leave the stage!

Sleep patterns are utterly destroyed. I also think I have shamed my grandad with my inability to drink hard liquor from before noon onwards, even on Christmas.

So I'm making a film* for the 60 Hour Film Blitz.

Ten minutes ago, I just got footage of our Association President applauding the university's commitment to equality, as shown by their decision to allow dinosaurs to matriculate.

*When I say 'film', well, the rules say it can't be any longer than three minutes. And we're supplied with dinky little cameras just a tiny bit bigger than cameraphones. And I've never done anything like this before omg. Mostly I'm enjoying the opportunity to interview people about dinosaurs at university. Diplodocus in social anthropology! T-Rex in IR! Triceratops in english lit!

So I plucked up my courage and went to my exam review session and it was TOTALLY worth it. Since I don't know whether I'll have the opportunity to attend review sessions for my very last exams in May I'm also going to count this as my first success in my 101 Things list. \o/

My only taught class last semester was Gender and Terrorism, and the one-on-one review sessions were yesterday. After umming and ahhing about it for a while, I plucked up my courage and went in, to be greeted with this conversation:

PROF: So someone, at the end of their exam script, wrote me a little note saying 'sorry this is so bad, but I really enjoyed the class'...
ME: *CRINGE*
PROF: ... which is strange because that person got the highest exam result in the whole class.

AAAHHHH. :D :D :D :D

Now obviously this isn't the greatest news in the world; my essay marks were good-but-not-great and dragged the overall mark down a bit. BUT STILL. There were some scarily clever and well-read people in that class; every tutorial was like in Mona Lisa Smile or something, with people putting up their hands and saying 'ah well yes but in V. Spike Peterson's 1993 response to Pape's rational-suicide-tactics thesis with particular emphasis to the blah blah blah'.

She also asked if I was going into academia and told me that I should. And then she recommended me some books and told me I was welcome to sit into her critical approaches to counter-terrorism class.

YAY A TEACHER LIKES ME :D :D :D :D

So I genuinely hate my university. I don't hate the town, and I don't hate studying or whatever, but as an institution? Urgh.

Yesterday they made the decision to charge Rest-Of-UK students (ie, non-Scottish Brits) the full £9,000. That's right, they've jumped from £1820 to LITERALLY NINE THOUSAND. For four-year courses. At one of the most expensive towns in the country outside London. L and I plan on moving to London after university, and we are not at all shocked by the price of rent there because that's what we're already paying.

I'm Scottish and I'm graduating at the end of the year anyway, but it just makes me feel really embarrassed to be at this university. Which I should be used to! I wish I could write up some massive WARNING: DO NOT GO TO ST ANDREWS pamphlet and distribute it amongst school-leavers. The people are lovely and the theatre scene is brilliant but it's actively elitest and ridiculously money-grabbing. They have no idea how to deal with students in unusual circumstances and I honestly think their attempts at 'accessibility' border on breaking the law. (There is one hall of residence that's fully wheelchair accessible. It is one of the most expensive. It's also self-catered.)

In terms of teaching? Your average contact hours at honours level, for arts subjects, are about FOUR HOURS A WEEK. This summer they literally shut down the library and two of the computer labs - they still aren't open - who knows what the grad students whose dissertations were due LAST WEEK have been doing. Of course, for my dissertation I'll probably be getting most of my books in Edinburgh, since none of the ones I search for on the database are even owned by our university.

I just can't stand this place sometimes. At least I only have one year left. And thank goodness a St Andrews year only works out to about 22 weeks, thanks to our five-month summer holiday.

Oh man. It's been a while.

We started rehearsing for a show - Godspell - last Monday. A week of 10am-10pm rehearsals later and we have the whole thing down, songs, instruments, and dances included. It goes up a week tomorrow, at the Edinburgh Fringe, for almost a month.

If L wasn't spending the summer travelling and having Foreign Adventures, I could easily say that I've never been happier. I get to sing! and act! and even dance! aaaaall day long. The people in my cast are lovely. I spend the snatches of free time I have writing letters and reading and learning Hebrew.

When I'm not going over dances, that is. I'm NOT a natural dancer - but it turns out I enjoy it quite a bit anyway! We have several cast members who are actual dancers, so the non-dancers haven't been put in to that many songs; but of all the songs I have been put into, I haven't had to be culled from any of them! And many people have. So I'm not as completely hopeless as I thought. :D?

It's a slightly strange experience for me in some ways. I did Godspell once before, when I was fifteen and my mum was getting into the last stages of her illness. It led to one of my periodic but brief attempts to become a Good Catholic Girl. This time... the parts that provoked that *___* reaction that had me dipping my toe in Mass again still affect me, but the rest of the show is now quite alienating. (Which works quite well I guess since I'm playing Judas. SO CLOSE TO MY LIFE'S DREAM OF PLAYING JUDAS IN JCSS, SO DAMN CLOSE YOU GUYS.) It reminds me of something L once said: she asked me to come with her to church, since 'at least they talk about God SOME of the time'.

Also, somehow I did not anticipate that playing a dude who betrays someone important to him, in front of a group of his horrified closest friends, would be a little - upsetting.

My university has the most ridiculous exam period IN THE WORLD but, finally, it is all done. Has been for over a week now. And I have been having an awesome week.

Most of this week has been spent in rehearsals. A friend is doing his dissertation on theatre of the oppressed/the distinction between academic and non-academic work/other things that let him devise a show as part of his dissertation. I wish that IR was as cool as that.

We only have a month to get the show together so this week has been 10am-5pm workshops every day. So far things have been a little... well. Artsy is a good word for it, maybe, except that makes it sound not-very-fun when in fact it's been brilliant. We had slow-motion relay races in order to 'understand and feel the mechanics of movements you take for granted'. We played improvisation games to 'open ourselves up to the world of imagination'. We played tag in order to - well, mostly to play tag I think. The writing group for the show sit in the corner and scribble things that come to mind as we work and post it on the communal blog, which we then discuss the next day. It makes me want to run off and join some kind of super-childish artists commune.

Today things got slightly more serious. The 'theme' of the play is environmental politics. The challenge is to create something that isn't preachy OR a disaster movie, which seem to be the two options available for ~environmental messages~. We sat and had a long discussion about environmental racism, diffusion of responsibility, the equating of nature = 'natives' and/or women, etc. We also did a really cool workshop via Skype with a professor at the university of Missouri on the ~rainbow of desire~ - a theatre of the oppressed technique devised specifically for western practitioners.

The professor then told us a bit about her work: she does a lot of 'difficult dialogues' stuff, getting people with opposing views to sit down and have a dialogue with one another. (Being from the west of Scotland, I immediately thought more of anti-sectarian workshops than 'so you believe in science, I believe in the rapture: hey, who's to judge?' scenarios. I have no idea which is more accurate.) Interestingly, apparently the topic with the most resistance - more controversial than all the race and class and religion stuff - is the thought that there might (*gasp*) be a gender imbalance in the field of science and technology.

I've also been exercising! Having been for my asthma review, it turns out that my sudden plunge into wheezy unfit ickishness is probably just due to mould or something environmental that I can't really change (until I move out of here). Until then daily gentle exercise should help ease off the pressure a bit. I already feel better; but then, that could just be the lack of exams and the doing-things-I-love-and-find-engaging-and-challenging-all-day thing. Funny that.

Tonight is Kings Speech with L and her BFF who is visiting from the States! \o/

... so I got into all the shows I auditioned for.

Which is lovely! And a great ego-boost! (As long as I don't think too hard about how few people probably auditioned...) But what this means is that I'm going to be in four shows in eleven weeks. On top of that, L and I want to put on The Skin of Our Teeth. Either I drop Yeoman of the Guard (I'm only in chorus, there are plenty more altos, and I'm not very good at that kind of singing anyway) or I have a very busy second semester in store.

I'm also waiting anxiously to hear about the results of the anti-cuts meeting we had last night. I was only able to go for half an hour or so - long enough to be impressed by how many people turned up (about a hundred, a good mix of lecturers, students and other staff) and to get riled up by people's accounts of their frustrations and fears, but not long enough to hear anything approaching a concrete plan of action. Still, there was a social anthropology professor at the front taking minutes, so hopefully he'll be sending something around soon.

The meeting started with one student and one lecturer giving brief speeches on what had brought them to the meeting. The lecturer was one of my biggest Academic Crushes and tonight she reminded me why. She gave an amazing speech about inevitability: that we need to stop conceding to this idea that cuts are inevitable, job losses inevitable, tuition increases inevitable. Another tutor stood up and said, 'I'm sick of being made to feel like I'm running a corporation'.

I wish I could have stayed. I always thought of meetings like this as being a case of preaching to the choir. But while I was sitting perched on a windowsill because there weren't any seats in the hall left it became obvious that the point was to rev one another up so that we all felt confident enough and supported enough to do something, and to feel like we can do something that will have some kind of effect.

It was a nice change. I went to so many marches and protests when I was younger, over Iraq, and the result just made me feel helpless. I remember going with my mum to cold, empty halls for socialist party meetings and feeling the same. Even in the occupation last week I felt like I was making an empty gesture. This time, I feel like we might be able to Get Shit Done.

Spent the night in occupation of some university property in protest of the education cuts. L. and I were two of about three people in the 'broadly speaking we're cool with the state/capitalism but not the devastating cuts to education' camp.

Next Tuesday is a broader meeting for the ~anti-cuts movement~. I'm looking forward to it! And hoping to bring along a few more moderate-types along.

but right now all I want to do is sleeeeep