A little less conversation, a little more action please.

[jackshoegazer]

I've recently started working Saturdays, during the UW Badger football games which, for lack of a better word, or rather, for lack of a more perfect word, are insane.  People come in from all over the state, and out-of-state for these games - not to mention a majority of the 40,000 UW students who all descend upon the area surrounding the stadium and clog the streets and parking lots with red and rowdy drunken antics.

Driving them around is great.  Trying to not run them over when they drunkenly cross the street against the light, yeah, not so fun.  The tips are great (I usually make three times the tips I make on a regular weekday) and the energy of a massive celebration is infectious.  I wish there was a home game every Saturday.  Ok, almost.

Yesterday, after work, Jacquelyn and I went to the Great Dane and quickly devoured some three-alarm buffalo wings and the Bard's Sampler, which consisted of skewers of marinated and grilled jumbo shrimp around homemade chorizo sausage, served with an assortment of fresh mozzarella and vegetables.  We drank quite a bit of their crop-circle wheat beer, which is probably my favorite beer of all time.  We had to hurry because we had to be at  The Bartell to see Art at 8:00.

It is a required performance for my Drama class and tomorrow I have to write a critique of the play.  My teacher was the director for this show and I have to say it was really well done.  The play, from what the interwebz tell me, is widely accepted as excellent, and the actors were intense and genuine.  The theatre was small, only 72 seats, so it was hard to be disconnected and objective, being so close to the actors.  This works to its advantage because the play revolves around three friends, discussing an all-white painting.  The setting is primarily one character's apartment, so there isn't a lot of action or scene changes to grab your attention.  The actors really needed you to be close and involved as an audience member.

Afterwards, we grabbed a piece of cake and a latte at Michaelangelo's just before catching the last bus home.  Almost every person we saw on the way home was arguing or ranting into a cell phone.  We decided there must be something in the air, or in the stars and when we got off the bus, there were something like five or six police cars at the house just down the street from us.  It was hard to tell what was going on because no one seemed to be out.  Odd indeed.

After four months of bicycling at the very least, thirteen miles a day, four days a week, plus whatever I do on my days off, I have finally started to lose weight.  Ten pounds so far.  I haven't really altered my diet at all ( not that my diet is really bad or anything), so this all seems to be stemming purely from an increase in physical activity.  Another advantage is that I've also stopped getting as many headaches and it's a lot easier to get up in the morning.  I actually feel kind of odd, like I'm forgetting something, if I don't get out and bicycle at least once a day.  The best advantage, methinks, is that I now have zero transportation costs.  I get a free bus pass through school and I bike, so I actually spend nothing to get around.  My mobility is a little limited, but I think it's definitely worth it to not know what the gas price is.  Oh yes, I've been car-free for over a year now.

I was feeling good and skinny today and snapped a photo this morning:

Okay, I'm off to bed, dear reader.  Tomorrow is a long day or reading, writing, cleaning, and procrastinating.

Comments

[anubis75.livejournal.com]

The way you described Madison reminds me of Saturdays in the Fall in College Station, only A&M is a wayy more conservative campus. (at least my professors weren't)

[jackshoegazer.livejournal.com]

I've heard that quite a lot of the southern colleges get this into the football games as Madison does, but from what other people tell me, a lot of the Midwest and eastern colleges aren't as fervent.

[sujet.livejournal.com]

Aww there you are!

You do live with someone - perhaps she can take a picture of you now and then ;)

[antarcticlust.livejournal.com]

I do - he never likes them! :P

[sujet.livejournal.com]

He's just vain ;)

[jackshoegazer.livejournal.com]

Too true!

[jackshoegazer.livejournal.com]

(I probably think this comment is about me!)

[sujet.livejournal.com]

Vain and perspicacious!

[jackshoegazer.livejournal.com]

Probably my two best qualities.

[jackshoegazer.livejournal.com]

Other people never seem to get my more flattering angles :P Plus, I'm not a fan of posed photos, so if I am going to pose for a photo, I'd rather do it myself.

[sujet.livejournal.com]

A little vanity never hurt anyone. I just avoid photographs - the honesty is brutal!

[lipsoflove.livejournal.com]

Oh how I love days of procrastinating.

[jackshoegazer.livejournal.com]

Me too! Today I watched LotR:tTT before finally succumbing to doing laundry :P

[brdgt.livejournal.com]

On our field trip this weekend we were all the way out in Mazomane (or some such weirdly named Wisconsin town) and the had football traffic!

[jackshoegazer.livejournal.com]

Ok, now that's scary. I could understand, maybe, if it was near Lambeau in Green Bay for a Packer game, but that far for a Badger game? That's some state pride right there :P

[antarcticlust.livejournal.com]

I think we could make a few dietary changes that we wouldn't even notice very much, and then with a little extra activity, we'll be golden! When you get your finaid, I want to go to REI and invest in good rain pants and jackets, so we can think about riding in inclement weather. I don't want to just stop when the winter comes! :(

So, you gonna do Couch-to-5k with me? :P

[jackshoegazer.livejournal.com]

A few dietary changes huh? Like not eating Falbos?!

[antarcticlust.livejournal.com]

If I had my choice, we definitely wouldn't be eating delivery so much - at least not Falbos.

[schmecky.livejournal.com]

What's Falbos?

[antarcticlust.livejournal.com]

It's a local Chicago-style pizza place that, because of where our neighborhood is located within the city, is one of the only places we can get delivery from.

[schmecky.livejournal.com]

You look positively svelte!

I LOVE Art. Saw it (twice) in LA with Alan Alda, Victor Garber, and Alfred Molina. I lot of what I loved was to do with the production, but the script is undeniably wonderful. I keep meaning to cut a monologue from it. And I'd love to do a version with women, even just a reading, just to see what happens. It might totally not work, because so much of the play is about men in close relationships with other men. Then again, reading it with women might make other parts of the play light up.

Mostly, I want to be in it. I want to be every character. I just love it to pieces.

[jackshoegazer.livejournal.com]

In my drama class, a lot of the discussion centered around the argument of whether men really talk like that, especially the more revelatory and emotional speech. Oddly, that never even crossed my mind because my male friends and I do talk like that, about both intellectual and emotional things, and the emotional things, only when brought to the surface by something seemingly unrelated :P The discussion made me think of your comments and I could easily see this as between women as well. I think some of the language and context would have to change, but it wouldn't be much trouble to do so.

[schmecky.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I kind of didn't care about the 'do men really talk like that' question, because it's heightened, you know? Even just by virtue of it being a play... Having a magnifying glass put to it. And as you say, different people talk in different ways. These men are educated, even slightly effite. I think it's totally believable that they talk that way - or said better, the playwright has done such a good job developing the characters that one can simply say 'these men talk that way because the playwright has chosen that they talk that way.'

In fact, I would argue that the big 'incident' happens precisely because the characters cannot communicate - cannot express their feelings. Or maybe, cannot understand each others' attempts to communicate. That's where it feels male-specific to me. They are all emotionally/comunicationally stopped, in varying ways and to varying degrees. Part of the brilliance of the play for me is that the audience understands exactly what each is trying to say, but the characters themselves do not - yet the characters don't seem stupid for it. Stubborn, for sure. But they still feel intelligent, despite being in the dark about what is so clear to us. And no one is clearly in the right (or wrong), and each wages equally compelling arguments in his favor. That's really hard to do as a writer.

[blissfulvanilla.livejournal.com]

Ahahahaha! Cute picture! I like that!

:D

[jackshoegazer.livejournal.com]

Thanks!