Meditation & Famine

Why hello.  40 Hour Famine is over!  Turns out there was a bit of a snag in the 52-hour count Keith and I had made earlier this week...famine started at 8pm on Friday, not 8am.  Well gosh, that's where all those extra hours came from!  So he and I ended ours after forty hours, which was at 6pm yesterday.  I was really, really hungry.  Yesterday was not a very productive day either...but dinner was GREAT.

I think I wrote last on Wednesday.  Here goes.  Wednesday night was volleyball night with the Sustainability team - we ended up just playing against ourselves (there were a ton of us), but it was heaps of fun.  Thursday I worked at the Sustainability Team table at the market in the morning, doing my best to get others to sign up or to sign our petitions or just inform them of what we were doing on campus (which is, at this point, not a whole lot more than playing volleyball every Wednesday night...but we're getting there).  I went to a Deep Ecology lecture later on - so cool, it's all about reconnecting back to the earth, this guy named John Seed (how appropriate) travels around the world giving workshops; this was just a lecture, but it was very enlightening.  He also performed two poem/song-things he had written, and gave us free Tim Tams.  I have zero to complain about.  THEN I went to a meditation class, so, so worth it.  Meditation is HARD, but I'm going to try to practice whenever I can.  You're supposed to do it as soon as you wake up; now I don't know how well that will work if Lauren gets up with me, but I'll figure it out.  Our instructor (I honestly have no idea if this person was male or female) also tried to teach us walking meditation, which theoretically you can do anywhere, but that's much harder, I don't know about that one.

I hung out at the tavern with some of the Sustainability team for awhile - Keith and I needed to rehearse for the open mic that night - then we competed in a club competition against a group called the Queers (the GLBT society on campus) for $200 for our club.  The competition was trivia, song identification, and then a few nail-biting rounds of pictionary - SO CLOSE, but we lost by one point.  However, the Queers were nice enough to give us half the money, because it was so close.  What champs.  Then OPEN MIC NIGHT!!!  At Moondyne Joe's - Keith went up and played three songs by himself, then I sang Sweetest Girl with him to close.  The video is posted along with my pictures if anyone's interested - I had such a good time; I think we'll do it again later this week?  Keith and I headed back to his flat to have some ceviche as our "last supper," until his flatmate Jess forced some tasty pasta on us as well...she was concerned that we would starve, you see.

Friday Friday Friday...well the famine supposedly started at 8am, so off we were.  I had class at 8:30, then a meeting at 10 with the director of the show I'm stage managing.  I thought the meeting would take about an hour...well, I was wrong.  By about 100%.  Two hours later, I was off to the library to get a headstart on some paperwork for the show, then off the rehearsal at 1:30.  Don't look now, but I actually think I can handle this job.  Now that I've said that, I'll probably crash and burn...but I'm staying above water so far, how much harder will it get?  Ha.  Right.  The director reminds me of Jim Radgowski a little bit, not totally...I'm not sure who reads this so I won't say anything else on THAT comparison...

Friday night I watched Fight Club for the first time, check that one off the list.  Saturday was the opposite of productive because I was so dang hungry.  I did a lot of reading (some for class, some not), got a call from Keith deciding that we should end the famine after 40 hours instead of 52, agreed, and ate a delicious dinner of pasta and chicken.  Mm mm mm.  Today I've been trying to get work done, but mostly failing...mostly due to slam poetry on youtube.  I'm an addict.  I've actually started writing some myself now; I wrote a bit this summer, but never really finished anything...I think I'm going to try to get a few done here so that when I get back to Boston I can actually go to some slams and maybe perform.  I love watching slam though - Marty McConnell, Sarah Kay, and Rachel McKibbens are my favorites if anyone wants some brain food - and I think it's good for you.  A poem a day, at least.  They've got important things to say, and they say them in some fantastically creative ways.  Sarah Kay is especially impressive, she's only 20 or 21, and she's got some videos of when she was 18...the lyrics she writes are so beautiful and so relevant.  I've probably watched about 3 hours worth of poetry this weekend, eeks.  Ah well.  Good for the mind, good for the soul.

So what are you guys up to?

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