NaNoWrinKle and tech week doubts

So they don't have the handy-dandy status bars this year, at least not that I've seen. If you click on the link in the sidebar, though, it'll tell you that I have a paltry 1300 words completed after four days of NaNo.

Sadly, even this is an overstatement. They are once again the wrong set of words. My guess is that I'll start getting words on paper for real on probably the sixth, which is more or less when I started last year.

*****

Tech week on the show started today. For non-theatre folk, this is the week before a show opens, when you typically work the show on the actual stage and figure out the lighting and sound cues, adjust the blocking to fit the space, and begin running the entire show, in order, in the costumes or clothing you'll be wearing for the actual performances, with props in hand. These rehearsals are often long, arduous affairs, and tech week is also commonly called "hell week."

Usually, a show is already on its feet by the time this process begins. We run it again and again to iron out any last glitches or to make a choice stronger, more realized. For this show, however, there are still pieces we have to run with scripts in our hands, still blocking issues across the board. The show has been plagued with bad luck and problems from the start, but I feel a panic right now that I am not used to feeling this close to an opening.

Perhaps I will elaborate on some of the bad luck at another time.

And still, I think we can pull this off. Crushingly optimistic, perhaps, but it may also be that I have no choice but to believe that the show will open and that people will like it. No choice but to believe that we will know our lines and move when and where we are supposed to and deliver the lines with all the spontaneity, high stakes, and realism we need to carry the pieces across. And I try to remind myself that I am frequently told that I am an incredibly harsh critic when it comes to something I am involved in. Just ask anyone from my former band.

I myself am in six different short pieces. Trying to assess things objectively, I'd say three or possibly four of them are where they need to be, or are close enough that polishing over the next five nights could get them there. One of these is a monologue, and entirely on my shoulders. Two have been worked enough, and the other actor talented enough, that I think they can play correctly (in spite of how they might have played tonight). Of the ones I still feel unsure about, one is designed to be presented as a cold reading, so that's more or less ready to go, too, such as it is. Which really only leaves one gigantic question mark in the mix: the full ensemble piece which features all six actors and closes the evening.

Right now, my gut says to throw my weight, energy and time into the five that are closest to being ready. Those are all scenes which feature only one other actor each, so I can afford much less to slip up or let the other performer down. We'll be on our own up there, and whether it's the scene that involves kissing a fair maiden or the one where I nearly get into a fistfight with a man over a game we are playing, I want to make sure that I give the other actor what they need to make the scene seem true.

*****

Wow. I had no intention of writing about all of this tonight. I guess it's a difficult thing to wipe away a nine-hour rehearsal.

Still, I could have sworn I sat down to write about my lack of progress on NaNo. I'm sure I intended to try to say something positive to any of my readers and fellow NaNo-ers who are also feeling discouraged by their current word counts.

Because thirty days is really a good chunk of time. So is the twenty-five days which remain. Anything can happen. So long as we are setting aside the time and trying to push through the difficult parts, we can still find ourselves later in the month crossing the finish line, exhausted and flushed from our labors, with a tiny curl at the corners of our lips that says we have been victorious.

Advice, I suppose, I should also try to take to heart where the play is concerned. Even though the window is smaller, there is still a lot that can still happen to make this show special.

*****

Moon Topples, Advice Columnist is still waiting to help you with all the problems you might have in this world (or others*). Send your queries and quandaries using the email address in the left sidebar (rather than leaving them in the comments) and I will ponder your difficulties as if they were my own, solving them so easily that you will feel a little silly for considering it a "problem" in the first place, but not in such a way as to make you feel bad. I would never do that to you, Blogadviceseeker.

I plan to begin answering the questions I have already received later this week.

*Offer excludes Jupiter. Jupiter knows why.

Puerto Rican Day Parade

Today is easily the loudest day of the year on my street. I happen to live on the route of an annual parade celebrating Puerto Rican culture. It's my own fault that I didn't get enough sleep before the noise started. I thought they'd wait a bit longer than 9:30 am.

Well, it isn't really a parade, and unless Puerto Rican culture revolves around ear-splitting engines and burning tires, they probably aren't hewing too close to the other part of the name either. Plus it goes well into the night. So maybe none of the words are quite accurate. Lots of Puerto Rican flags of all sizes, though.


Each year for the last few, it's been a quieter and smaller affair than the previous one. This afternoon, the police kept shutting down my street entirely, to punish the rowdy, I suppose.

My first year in the neighborhood, I had no idea such a thing existed. It took me three hours to get home from band rehearsal, most of the time spent within a mile of my house. The rule since then has been not to go anywhere by car. Way less angry-making for me. I either go somewhere on foot or hang out on the front stoop and enjoy the insanity. I opted for the latter this year, armed with my handy camera.


I like the ordinary, festive family portion of the day. There are picnics and barbeques and families gathered all along both sides of the street. The puzzler is the thing with the tires. Kids rush out to any car that stops and douse the rear wheels with water, which helps to keep the car from moving forward immediately and also prevents actual fire from breaking out. The driver slams down the accelerator and the kids sort of rock the car back and forth until it takes off noisily down the street. The point is to produce as much smoke as possible, which is often quite a lot of smoke. Completely obscured vision, instant headache amounts of smoke. Also, the amount of smoke is apparently focus-fooling. I lost a lot more shots than normal.


Makes me miss the days when I was mostly irritated by the noise.

Anyway, I got some shots from the brief intervals when the police were not around to dampen the shrieks and squeals and rumbles of an orgy of internal combustion.

I did not stop anyone to ask about their carbon footprint, as they tooled around and around all afternoon. It just didn't seem like a good time to do that.

A few more pics on the Flickr page. Thank you for your time. Now excuse me, please, as I go get some sleep.

Oh, look, she creeping over

a pome on my one (1) female cat

Oh, look, she creeping over
with husky, noisy throat
no red but still she ginger
no dense and so she float.

My frowny sounds astound her
of tossy, turny bed
she skitter out of earshot
to eat a book instead.

. . .

I apologize for my lack of attention and proper posts, Blogreader. It is one-thirty in the morning again, and I am just arriving home from work. The last week of a project of this magnitude can either be like a warm spring breeze or like walking through a field hip-deep in mud. This one is skewing towards the mud. They almost always do.

I have been reading your blogs (those of you with blogs, anyway), although I'm sadly not commenting much right now. To soothe your wounded feelings (should you be thinking I no longer like your blog), I have not even really been able to keep up on my emails lately. I have dropped off the radar even in my private life, is my point. These days an email from me is like a Golden Ticket, provided being my friend is somehow analogous to a tour of a magical and wonderful chocolate factory where all but one of you are certain to perish.

Just a couple of days remain until I am at last unshackled once more, and free to pursue my, uh, pursuits.

Driving home tonight, I saw three men standing on a corner, waiting for a bus. This was very near the building in which I work, which is not the best of neighborhoods. It was a little after one, and a persistent cold rain had started to fall. I sat in my car and vacillated between suspicion of the three men standing in the dark in the middle of the night, and sympathy for the three men stuck in the rain, standing in the dark in the middle of the night.

Sympathy won out. I felt terrible for them long before the light turned green and allowed me to roar once again towards home.

The expressway is strangely beautiful when it is empty. So wide and seemingly clean. The lights which run along the sides played off the wet surface and I sort of wish I had pulled over to photograph it for you. I never remember that even such places can hold a beauty. I saw only six cars in the approximately three miles I was on it. The highway was mine.

I will post more properly tomorrow. At the very least, I should be able to cobble together another fiction excerpt to amuse you. But if I am very lucky, I may have time to share some pictures I took recently, and perhaps recount the Peep Jousting Tournament we conducted in between other things today at work.

Saturday night

I was awakened in the dead of night by a shout from a pubescent male. I was not, strictly speaking, asleep, but the shout awakened me nonetheless. My ears had stopped scanning the neighborhood for sounds and were resting. If they monitored anything, it was the peaceful snoring of my cat.

But then came this shout, and suddenly I was paying attention again. The sound split the night in two: the relative silence which came before, and then the period after the sound, when the camouflaged sounds I had apparently been ignoring came into relief. I heard the shushing sound of cars passing by. I heard the cry of a police car off in the distance, off to right some wrong or just cruise through all of the intersections without having to stop. My street is a popular one for both such behaviors.

The boy was attempting to sound like a man, so whatever had excited or agitated him seemed to make him feel that he would be better served if his voice would just change already and stop playing games with his life. I wondered if he was in the period where it is not uncommon for a boy to be mistaken for his own mother on the telephone. This is not exactly a high point in life. Still, his attempt at disguise was detectable through the windows and walls of my building, and I have no doubt that it was transparent to his intended listener as well, who made no audible reply.

I looked at the clock on my computer, and saw that there was still an hour left until the bars closed. Saturday-night drunks were due shortly thereafter to festoon the street with shouts of their own, wearing their disregard for the rest of us like badges. Their shouts, curses and fights would echo off the buildings and intrude upon apartments all across the city. Sometimes I am overwhelmed by the lack of respect for one another that city life seems to foster. The sirens will continue at all hours, and the shouting as well. Only yesterday a car that had parked outside of my apartment was showing off its grotesque new speakers for a gathering of onlookers. The bass notes shook my building so much that a picture fell off of the wall.

What is the purpose of such speakers? They do not accurately reproduce the music their owners would have us believe they love so much. They merely produce a more palpable sensation, and transfer the act of listening to music into an experience that can be more readily seen in the vibration of things, and felt through the skin. "Here is your new heartbeat," the rhythm section says, and the body has no choice but to follow along. This is understandable in a club or at a concert, perhaps, but not outside my home on a beautiful spring afternoon.

Within moments of the boy's shout in the street, and the passing of the siren, my brain was already trying to convince me that neither sound had actually happened, even though it could accurately reproduce either one when I asked it to. The silence they suddenly left behind had a shape like sound itself, and my brain was telling me that this was the sum of sound.

I am sleepless again tonight, but so far nothing so exciting as a boy's shout has come along to pull me out of me and into life. I am just lying here in the dark, illuminated by the face of my laptop. In a moment, I will smoke another cigarette and stare jealously at the foot of my bed, where my cat is sleeping peacefully once more.