Oh Yeah, I Do This Too

1. I don't like to write Notes

2. I love the way coffee smells, but cant stand the taste

3. The last dream I remember happened 5 years ago

4. History is my favorite subject.

5. I blog. Don't judge

6. I'm Catholic

7. My middle name in Joseph

8. I have an Israeli flag on my desk

9. I love to make videos

10. I'm taking AP Calc

11. I can write you a poem in Latin. Just give me a few minutes

12. There are always at least 3 books in my backpack

13. I'm dating Kaitlin

14. I'm a nerd. And damn proud of it.

15. I can drive stick

16. I wear black everyday

17. I'm not emo

18. I'm just a techie

19. I bet you've stopped reading at this point

20. I <3>

21. Enjoy challenges? I do

22. One of these facts isn't true

23. I won't say which though

24. But I think you can figure it out

25. I want to live on a mountain

26. I want to teach history or be stage manager. Not sure yet.

27. I have a hackintosh. Coolest thing ever.

28. I'm listening to Into the Woods right now

29. I love photography.

30. This message will self-destruct in 5....4...3...2...1...

Sum Quod Eris

Sum Quod Eris
I am what you will be.

Life is full of cycles. Today, I visited a Latin II class. It brought memories flooding back. Those kids were learning the same things I had learned, almost three years ago. Later, I listened to people discuss casting decisions. This is something universal. No one is ever happy with everyone who gets a role. In a deeper sense, there are patterns of interaction that characterize relationships, interactions, and lives across the world. The one pattern that trumps all is best summed up in that Roman grave inscription, Sum Quod Eris. It says, everyone dies.

My life revolves in cycles of sleep, school, work, and friends. Cycles provide me with a sense of balance and order that helps to sustain me through the school year. Habits begin to form. Some of these habits are healthy and make my life easier. Some...aren't so helpful. In the end, it's what school is really about. Not about knowing that one grammatical construct, or how to calculate limits approaching infinity, or who wrote Common Sense. School is about establishing life-long learning habits and cycles that will serve us for the rest of our lives.

I'm sorry this has been so deep. I felt like I needed to do something special for my 100th post. That bit up there had been sitting around for a while. Not really sure where it was going, but I figured it couldn't hurt. Well, it's been 100. Looking back on it, I feel like I can look back on this blog and trace the progression of my life. It's an interesting thing to be able to do. Anyway, I feel like this should be a longer post then usual, so I'll throw some more stuff out here. We are reading Song of Myself by Walt Whitman for history, and I found one of my favorite passages from all of American poetry:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Everybody Take A Breath

Well I have some time in Latin (we just finish Daedalus and Icarus and don't want to start anything new on a Friday), so I though I'd write a bit. Sorry for being gone for so long, I've been incredibly busy working on the school show and trying to get homework done. We open tonight at 7:30 (COME SEE IT!), and so I've been spending 15 or 16 hours a day at school trying to finish the set and make sure everybody knows what they're supposed to be doing. Tech Week, or Hell Week, depending on who you talk to, is always a stressful week for all involved. The worst part of Tech Week is the late nights. Around the middle of Act 1, everyone starts to get a little...weird. Some people last night just began to fall asleep, others started to sing everything they said, and still others lost their mental filter and say whatever comes to mind. Which can get a little awkward when your director is standing right behind you.
The best part of show weekend is getting to see everything come together. There is definitely a sense of magic with live theater. The idea is to give the audience an experience of something beyond the stage. Being behind the scenes, however, can ruin that magic for you. Well...not ruin, but it destroys your "theatrical innocence." It's almost funny to see the reaction people have when they find out how something happens back-stage. "Wow, a shoe falls from the sky! That's awesome!" "Yeah, we used some high-tension twine and part of a door hinge to get that to fall." "Oh...thats cool, I guess."