Sevens

Seven Things To Do Before I Die
1. Go to Hawaii
2. Stay at a healthy weight for longer than three months.
3. Ride my bike around the Skagit tulip festival
4. Go to Ghana (?)
5. Write a book
6. Let my hair go to its natural color
7. Unpack my china and crystal

Seven Things I Cannot Do
1. Climb a rope
2. Kayak
3. Snow Ski without face plowing
4. Sing with a vibrato
5. Sign when I am nervous
6. Program in HTML (I'm faking it right now...)
7. Sleep through the night

Seven Things That Attract Me to... (a Man)
1. Sense of humor
2. quick wit
3. eyes
4. smile/teeth
5. smell (only good smells and in proportions not to offend, please)
6. voice
7. build

Seven Things I Say, Perhaps Excessively
1. Cool
2. Literally
3. Really
4. No Way
5. Holy Shit
6. Good Grief
7. Fuck

Seven Good Books
1. Ladder of Years
2. Memoirs of a Geisha
3. Good In Bed
4. Gracedland
5. Wuthering Heights
6. It
7. Insomnia

Seven Good Movies
1. Ishtar (duh)
2. Sliding Doors
3. Connie and Carla
4. Unconditional Love
5. Three faces of Eve
6. Sylvia
7. The Shining


Seven Blogs To Tag
They’ve all been tagged already…

Pure Nerd

I'm not so sure this is a good thing...

65 % Nerd, 30% Geek, 30% Dork

For The Record:

A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.
A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.
A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.
You scored better than half in Nerd, earning you the title of: Pure Nerd.

The times, they are a-changing. It used to be that being exceptionally smart led to being unpopular, which would ultimately lead to picking up all of the traits and tendences associated with the "dork." No-longer. Being smart isn't as socially crippling as it once was, and even more so as you get older: eventually being a Pure Nerd will likely be replaced with the following label: Purely Successful.

THE NERD? GEEK? OR DORK? TEST

BOAT Festival

I don't know why/how this happened to me again, but I wrote a one-act for the local One Act Theatre festival which starts on Monday. We (of course) are ready in spite of minimal rehearsals, and in spite of the fact that this play was supposed to have been a result of a series of meetings over the course of 4 weeks, with survivors of loss, which never happened. Instead, I met individually with moms who lost children, moms of young children who lost husbands and my own personal experience of losing a childhood friend. The play touches on losses due to cancer, the pipeline explosion, and random accidents. My favorite part is that I incorporate the positive power of MySpace, as the kids use their blogs to tell their personal stories.

(Just an aside to this, when I log out of Blogspot, I sometimes watch the Blogs scroll as they are updated. Last week, I happened upon a blog of a family who are still reeling from the suicide of their 20 year old daughter/sister/cousin/aunt the year before. And they all react differently. Just like in the play. Coincidence? I think not.)

All in all, "Good Grief" is not a slap-happy show, but I expect it to be powerful. Another one of my "Weepy Shows" I know, but I feel that teen grief is an issue that is swept under the carpet because no one wants to deal, and if they do, they don't know how.

I have a great cast of nine males and females, ages 14-65. It's good to work with talented friends, and equally talented actors I have never met before.

I just found out a non-profit group in town is finally having a workshop to talk about this issue. I tried to get my old place of employment to do a group on grief last fall, and my supervisor said to "wait." OK, I'm done waiting now....

I'm inviting theatre and school district acquaintances to come and see the show, with the hope that they will invite us to tour at their school. Of course, I'm expecting this will prompt lots of desire for a grief group, and I'm hoping the void is filled quickly, before someone lives to regret their procrastination....