Friday/Saturday – Day 106/107
November 18, 2012
The march of stress continues. I didn’t manage algorithms today and my singing lesson was cut short due to complete exhaustion. Though I’m equally as tired today while writing this, it’s for entirely separate reasons that I’ll get to later. Friday’s show ran well, nothing special there, and managed to get to shul and dinner as well.
Shabbat itself was somewhat more tiring with a Glee Club alumni reception alongside the shows. At least my now I was close to a few cast and crew members. I hardly managed to eat all day as too much was happening, and I know it wasn’t wise but in this case there were just too many issues. After the show finished late motzei Shabbat we began load-out/strike, clearing the set and packing up. This took a great many hours, and we were called from around eight PM to three AM. At three we had the cast party, however with all the work I was behind on from the last two weeks I couldn’t really partake part in it very fully and only stayed for a short while before heading to bed for what I hoped would be a good while.
Wednesday – Day 68
October 5, 2012
It’s rather exciting to be almost caught up on the blog. It means I can almost remember things that have happened. One of the most amazing things about studying abroad is the sheer number of experiences that get packed into such a limited period of time!
For example today was my first ever ‘midterm’; in algorithms. I knew the material relatively solidly going in however as soon as the test started I panicked a bit and stress overcame me. As a result I don’t think I did too well, thankfully all my subjects here transfer back as pass fail, even though I am assigned grades by Penn.
I wasted much of the rest of the day, not caring too much, as I was too put off by the exam.
The evening was a PGC rehearsal combined with our band, and involved us attempting to dance and sing both at the same time. Whilst combined, it was something of a failure, the individual elements worked well and I’m sure that with practice, we’ll improve greatly.
After rehearsal I had a quick dinner at Hillel in the Sukkah, followed by a walk to the Penn Arts Shop. Shop in this case being shorthand for workshop, where all the performing arts groups at Penn construct their sets, build their props and, design their costumes. I was quickly set to work by Sarah Tomberlin, the stage manager for Legally Blonde, scraping paint off chairs that had been painted on, layer over layer, for years. The paint was thick and hard to remove, and the scraper blunt and ineffective. I was also working by myself, in my own corner of the room. Another dud job, but one that had to be done. About one hour in it hit 9PM when I knew the presidential debate was going to be started, and I and a lovely but highly partisan ‘democrat’ girl petitioned for the laptop playing the music to be switched to a live stream of the debate. After around fifteen minutes of fumbling around the stream came on and we set to analyzing the debate, or in her case ripping Romney to shreds. I neglected to mention to her that though I didn’t necessarily support him, I thought Romney had better presented himself. Finally, after a second hour of scraping, this time with her, I finally set back off to Rodin where I worked for a few hours and then headed off to sleep.