Going to Florence
May 25, 2010
I REALLY NEED TO GET MY THOUGHTS TOGETHER
Today I told my boss that I will be going to Florence this fall. My plane ticket is a round trip ticket for Sat, Aug 28 - Mon, Dec 13. I helped my sister pack up to move to Creighton where she will enroll in pharmacy school. I’m going to miss her tremendously. At first she applied last year to the University of Iowa and wasn’t accepted. This year she re-applied and was accepted to both Creighton and the University of Iowa. It was a tremendously difficult decision but she decided to attend Creighton. Throwing herself into the winds of change and challenges I think she chose the most daunting option. But she will rise to the challenge, I see the persistence, dedication and ambition in her every step and really believe in her. Creighton seems to see these same qualities and she was accepted into their pre-matriculation program. She is in the running for an honorable partial to full tuition remition scholarship.
Study Abroad
I have never flown anywhere. I have taken the Grayhound and driven across the country but have never flown. There’s absolutely no turning back now. I received a scholarship and cannot return this phenomenal support. I also really do not want to regret anything. I don’t want to be forty and say, “Geesh I wish I would have spent five wonderfully daunting months in Florence when I was in college.”
95 Days Away Is my Departure Date
This is here to help me organize my thoughts and prepare for my departure. This Saturday is my sisters going away barbeque. It is going to be a sad happy celebration. She will be embarking on a four year endeavor and pursue her life-long dream of becoming a certified pharmacist.
Last semester Leads to this Next Step
The theatre department at Coe College has tremendously influenced the person I am today. I remember being extremely anxious, timid, quiet and reserved. It took taking movement, theatre history, voice and diction and Tim Miller’s workshop in order to really workshop myself entirely shaping, contorting, experimenting, exercising and manipulating myself into strange positions that frightened me and pushed me into uncomfortable situations and positions. Every course was extremely challenging. Steven and Dennis are both individuals that expect their students to meet their challenges. Extremely difficult challenges that not only require collegiate academic requirements but really workshop you as a human being. I was incessantly criticized and every attack was constructive helping me to become the strong person that I am. My first experience with the theatre department was listening to Dennis Barnett perform during our freshman year for Martin Luther King Jr. Day he said, ” If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well. If you can’t be a pine at the top of the hill, be a shrub in the valley. Be be the best little shrub on the side of the hill. Be a bush if you can’t be a tree. If you can’t be a highway, just be a trail. If you can’t be a sun, be a star. For it isn’t by size that you win or fail. Be the best of whatever you are.” (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/special/mlk/king/words/blueprint.html)
With dignity, with honour, with respect and I realized that I needed to find my voice. I needed to hold it tight like a rope, let it be rinsed away in the ocean like a red silk sheet dissolving like dye, let it rise smokey like burnt tissue paper flickering red hot above flames and indeed gather courage collected like shells.
My first step was joining movement class. Someone used to holding myself within myself like a hermit crab I was pushed to be like a neon light dragged over time in front of a shutter colored light streaks, tight frozen stuck in resistance mud, water, bricks, sticks and I was liberated. I clamored through a map to the beats of a drum liberated by experiencing broken social expectations allowed to bathe in creativity. Theatre history let me understand the entire collision of history crashing fireworks of cultural expression over time. Voice and Diction made me memorise. From memorization my sister explained, “I sing a song I really enjoy and the memorized words radiate into a powerful unexpected shape; ephemeral.” There’s a structure in memorizing and it was a task that I did repeatedly. The second step liberating that structure from its constructs let color, tone and variation seep into its seems.
I haven’t written solely for myself in a tremendously long time. Here is an exploration of these thoughts that are circulating like colored balloons in my brain. I’m nervous, excited, anxious and just grasping at the straws of this summer trying to explain these varied sensations.
