More Fun With Formatting

Hello loves!

It is that time of year again. . . time to play with the look and feel of this blog.  It's the change of another season in my life: not the annual season of Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter (or as we call them in New England, Still Winter, Road Construction, Almost Winter, and Winter).  The seasons for me seem to correspond more with what is happening in my world.

For instance, today marks the beginning of what is officially summer for, since I had my last final (a voice jury I am proud to say I did really well on).  It is more than another summer though: it means moving out of this apartment soon, and away from a beloved roommate who I adore and who is soon headed to NYC with others of our friends to pursue her dreams of being a professional dancer.

It means juggling work - my jobs over the summer are always changing - family, and time with Boyfriend.  Like work, Boyfriend-and-Me time is always be renegotiated and reworked around the various demands on our time. It means working on boosting my resume, digging into my New Year's Resolutions.

It means more time for blogging with less time spend studying (although I fear sometime must yet be devoted to it).

It means saying goodbye to not only my Junior year, with all of it's ups, downs, ins, outs, and sudden left turn but saying goodbye to the first semester of my senior year in college.

I only have one more semester let, guys.  15 more weeks of schooling before the rest of my life in the rest of the world begins.  Oh dear.  Oh joy! Oh God.  Oh no.  Oh yes!  Oh. . . I don't know.

And so, as the seasons change within and around me, the blog gets fine tuned.  A face lift, a nip & tuck, a new form to transition into to match the ever changing pace of my life and truly reflect what is inspiring me now.

So if you are a faithful (and beloved!) followed, please pardon the appearance as we renovate.  If you're new to the blog or just stopping by during your internet wanderings, Welcome!  Please pardon anything strange looking, it's probably not done being added.  Do feel free to poke around, explore, and hopefully stay awhile.

Love always,

Lela

Words To Stir the Soul.

"Your epitaph will begin: 'She redefined what it meant to be a good woman.' It will say 'She scaled mountains, in hiking boots and in heels.  She started in her own backyard and then went all the way around the world.  She accepted challenges with curiosity and determination.  She emerged victorious regardless of outcome, knowing both the pleasure of success and the grace of failure.  She tasted long hot days and cool still nights, at home wherever she found herself.  She wasn't always popular, but she was always true.  She wasn't always comfortable, but no one can say she didn't enjoy her life.  She explored her edges, increased her capacity, and lived as big as she could dream.  Moved equally by bliss and pain, she played her heart out one moment at a time.  She was dialed in.  She was courageous. She was turned on.' "
                                 - The Turned On Woman's Manifesto

Things That Make Me Feel Better (Even When The-World-Is-Ending-BooHoo-Poor-Me)

Sometimes things get messy.  They go wrong.  Sometimes it is when everything is moving along smoothly, your life is humming at an almost industrial pace and the sun is warm and the future is roses.  Sometimes - most times - it is when things are all ready pretty bad.

Too much to do.  No time.  So many needs.  No money.  Every ounce of me parceled out, weighed and measured and carefully divided, poured lovingly and hectically into the various people/places/things/goals that cry out for my attention.

That, for me, is almost always when the storm comes rolling in.  The last crack of lightning to an already fragile structure that stands no chance and simply bursts into flame.  In case you were wondering which you clearly weren't because I am so dramatic  last night was a lightning-strike kind of moment.  Why it was and the details don't matter.

Because less face it. . .  when shit hits the fan, it hits the fan.  The clean up is what matters.  I am still in the defecation-spreading-all-over-the-walls-in-blatant-disregard-of-my-orderly-life phase. . . but even still I realized as I sat here, stomach in more knots than a badly done cat's cradle, I have comfort.

In a Boyfriend who stops his entire world every time my silly fragile world comes unraveled.

A friend who knows from a three word text that something is wrong.  And quietly shows up in my kitchen, arms open to catch my crazy in a bear hug so tight I couldn't squirm away, forcing me to actually let go and . . . cry.

Comfort in jamming my headphones in to study the rest of the night away (no sleep was forseen) and being unable to ignore the ding of Facebook as another friend firmly instigated a totally asinine conversation.  I don't think I was supposed to know I was being checked up on, so. . . sshhhhh, ok?

A roomie who looked me in the eye and informed me of how strong and brave I am in her eyes, and demanded that I try seeing myself that way for a few seconds. I'm trying.

Opening my mailbox, where I have been collecting soft white envelope after soft white envelope, some traced with silver, others tied with dark ribbon, each containing a message of condolence for yet another friend who has lost a parent.  Everyday for two weeks I have gone down and placed my key in the lock, listening to the cool metal click open and expose the sadness neatly packaged in the gaping maw of a metal mouth my mailbox becomes.  Everyday I place my hand inside and offer a silent prayer thanking God for such a supportive community. I place donations in a small envelope and stack the sympathy on the edge of my counter, trying not to let my fingers linger on someone else's sorrow.  Today when I opened the mailbox, a bright yellow envelope greeted me, with cheerful, looping hand writing.  A note from a friend, who thought my mailbox (and heart) might need some cheer.

I find peace in the gently prying questions of my pseudo brother, who is maybe the only person alive who has found the right tone between soothing, insistent, and compassionate that will instantly make me open up.  Sometimes a lot of crazy comes out when I do.

There is the friend who saw me walking and knew from the set of my shoulders that my smile was lying.  There is such a strength in being transparent - the strength of being an Us and not an I.

Finding myself, instead of running my scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream, being squeezed in the papa-bear hug of one of my favorite faculty.  60 seconds - no more, no less - of being hugged and being me and breathing, were required before I was allowed to say a single line.

Joy in the sly smile shared when the last ballet class of the semester holds a mini-rebellion in ballet and the accompanist is a willing cohort!

A sense of hope when I round the corner from work and see beautiful lilacs (my favorite flowers) blooming in the rain, their perfume all the sweeter in the cool damp air.

The pure exhilaration only dancers and athletes know when your body suddenly obeys you.  We're talking a triple pirouette here people!  To the left.  In jeans!


Perhaps most excitingly, my big source of comfort is finding out I have a Cassie Care Package on the way!  I wish there was a way to convey to you the excitement this encompasses for me.  Imagine a a beautiful and female Mad Hatter.  Now imagine her as a former competitive diver.  Now set this imagining loose in SoHo.  This is who is creating my care package.

And that, ladies and gents, is a beautiful thing.

Thoughts Instead of Studying.

I am sitting here, my mind heavy with knowledge it can't quite absorb and reeling from pressure and stress that accompanies an academic lifestyle.  I click through old pictures, and your face appears, leading me down a new thread of thought.

My how things have changed.

My how we have grown.

There are miles and miles behind me from the person I was when we met - awkward and untamed and fighting blindly just to survive in a world I was unsure of.  There are years, so many more years than I'd realized, between you and these images.  Skinnier, younger, less secure. I forgot about the cowlick you had, right on the top of your head, that made your hair go crazy.  Why do we notice these things?  Or rather, why do I?  After all, I can't speak for what anyone else sees. . .

There is so much I'm not prepared for on this test.  I need to not procrastinate, the night won't get any younger. . .

Both of us smile, frozen in time as megapixels and data.  These pictures exist nowhere else but on our computers, drifting in an endless sea of binary code, our younger selves reduced to less than photostock.  We're a blur, only a simple digital blur. The soft blush color of my cheeks isn't the glow of early teenage years, but the careful combination of zeros and ones and dots until an image forms; the same is true of your disheveled hair and laughing face.

A click and we're gone again.

There are forty more slides still to go.  Why must the powerpoints be so long?  I hate spending my time locked to this screen.

I wonder who we'll be ten years from now.  Will there be a baby on someone's hip?  A new city beneath their feet?  Will we still find a way, somehow, to each other through the impossibilities that life brings to our friendship?  Will you be happy, then?  Will I?  And where will these current selves be - stored digitally thanks to social media, somewhere in the great Other where neither of us can truly erase the file?

Stored as memories shuffled carefully away with our younger selves?

Will this version of me as I am now eventually become nothing more than a digital echo and the vague impression that you once held someone's warm hand against your own cupped palm?

I am so tired.  My eyelids are heavy and my heart feels funny, as it always does when these strange reflective moods come over me.  I don't think I am old enough to think this way.  Am I?

When I am honest I realize I don't miss the old us - not the younger, less secure, more difficult you.  Not the frightened, breakable, naive me.  I am much happier with the confidence we've both managed to find though we both know it is sometimes hollow.  Hollow is good - hollow can be filled.  I think of it less as a shell and more as an outline, where the potential can still be reached.  We now have lines to color in.  And what lines they are.  The line of your shoulder is thicker, broader.  The spread of your stance more confident, taking up more floor when you enter a room.  You've learned to own your space.  Quiet confidence suits you.

I on the other hand am still a smudge: a smudge of emotions and thoughts and ideas and colors, a moving blur like a photograph not properly exposed, that person in the back who didn't quite stay still when the photographer said "three."  My energy and motion have a direction, now, a goal other than "Away.  Run away."  This is growth, though it is not the solidifying you've done - if anything I am blurrier and busier than ever.  But I think my colors are richer, too.

I really have to tear myself away.  There is nothing in these pictures that will help you learn what you need to know, girl.  Stop looking at them as though they'll help.


So many things have changed.  Why am I noticing them now?  How disjointed and jumbled all these thoughts will seem in the morning.  How silly I feel even now thinking them to myself.  I wonder if I will have the courage to hit the little orange "publish" button in the top corner of this snow white page, the courage to commit this image of myself too.  To press it, like a dried flower in the pages of a scrapbook, into the time capsule of myself the internet provides.

I think I will.  After all, it's just binary code and digital dreams, right?

Back to the books I go. . . 

Exciting. Scary. Overwhelming. Wonderful.

Hello dear friends!

I have an announcement to make, and some news to share: I hope upon reading it you will be understanding of my lapses in blogposts, or how rarely I've emailed you, or perhaps that long gap between phone calls.  As long as I can remember, I have been Busy.

Yes, with a capital B.  Working several jobs (even as a young teen, helping to keep the family business afloat) and studying dance and this and that and so on and so forth.  Coming to college hasn't been any different: I work somewhere between 2 and 4 jobs depending on the season, and take 8-11 classes at a time, and perform in shows and the shows I don't perform in, I work to gain tech experience.  Then there is my never ending parade of injuries (possibly made worse by my rampant business and utter disregard for my body's need of sleep).

And now. . . now I am in a position to see it all pay off.  Last week I went into a mandatory group advising session, where my advisor oversees all of her students as we select our course load for the upcoming semester.  I was excited to be heading in to select my classes for senior year - and my head was full of all the usual thoughts.  Where had the last three years gone?  Was I already about to be a senior?  How much would I have to work extra to start saving up for moving/loans/etc?  Would all the classes I wanted to take fit in my schedule?  What about the ones I had to take because they're required your senior year and you simply must do it?  And maybe most importantly would I finally have a semester without daily 8am classes?

As I started flipping through the course booklets and filling in my academic classes around my dance levels, I noticed how easy it was. . . how much time and room.  Filling in my theatre classes and the schedule started to look more crowded.  Thats when my advisor cheerfully asked if I still intended to graduate early?  As in, December?

Well ladies and gentlemen, that had never been my plan.  I've spent every course registration frantically jamming as many classes into my schedule as I possibly could so that I could graduate as my school's first double major in Dance and Theatre.  I didn't know - and neither did the faculty or the department heads - if it could be done at all, let alone in only four years.  And here I was in the middle of a group advising session with a little box in front of me to check off.  A single smudge of graphite across carbon paper would be enough - all it takes to confirm. Yes, it could be done.  Yes, I'd done it.  And a semester early, too.  Three college degrees in 3 1/2 years.  I'd have to take a massive number of credits, of course, and pay the credit overages.  And I'd need special clearance from the Dean of the Dance Department and the head of the Theatre Department and the President of Academic Affairs and probably Moses himself was going to have to come down and sign my damn transcript.  But it could be done.

And you know what?  I'm doing it.  I pressed the soft silvery tip of the pencil into the page with a hand I was surprised wasn't shaking.  I texted my mother and called Boyfriend and texted my big brother, and I honestly don't remember a word of what anyone said. What I do remember is walking out into the hallway and turning the corner, my huge messenger bag slung over my shoulder, a stunned smile painted over my lips, and almost smacking into my friend Jake.  I nearly burst into tears at that moment.

See, Jake is the first friend I made on this campus.  We met at 8am in our first college class, a miserably boring 100 level english class with a teacher we loathed (charming kids right?).  We're sort of an odd pair: ambitious, hardworking, good grades.  Make our advisor crazy because we take more classes than we're supposed to and bend the rules to suit academic visions only the two of us see.  We've done everything short of using an actual time turner to accomplish everything on our To Do Lists.  And this semester we had our final class together - another English class, with the same professor, in the same classroom.  The only difference this time is he was leaving early - graduating in December.  I was still going to be here . . . but not anymore.  I didn't even have to tell him what had happened.  He asked if I'd come from my Advising session and I nodded my head, willing my lead tongue to work, to not just stare like a mute - and then his face lit up in a grin and he opened his arms and I barreled head long into a bear hug that crushed my ribs and lifted my feet off the floor and finally pried a joyful laugh out of my stunned self.  We had done it.

We were leaving in December - heading into a world wider than my smalltown mind can conceive, more brilliant than I understand, harder, colder, crueler than I'll know what to do with.  But it's our world - the doers and the dreamers and the ones who push and stick just one toe over the edge to see if maybe there is something on the other side.

Spring Break Adventures: The Introduction.

One of my favorite things to do is travel.  Anywhere, anytime, with an assortment of traveling companions or on my own, short trips or voyages.  I always knew I wanted to explore - chalk it up to the seafaring blood that pumps hearty through my veins from Portugese, Italian, British, and Swedish ancestors.  Last year's Spring Break was my first chance to really explore beyond my limited range: I boarded a plane (with the help of family and knowing there were friends waiting when I landed) for my first international adventure, to Trinidad and Tobago.  For Carnival.  It was 9 of the best, most incredible, eye-opening days of my life.

So I think it's understandable when I say I was exicted for this Spring Break but not expecting to be blown away.  After all there would be no red eye flights, no international exploration, no Soca music, no fnacy costumes and exuberent holidays. But I was offered a chnace to explore - a friend of mine's family has a summer home in New Jersey, on the coast.  A group of us were invited to spend part of break there - someplace new.  Someplace I hadn't been - which was exciting, and I jumped at the chance.  Jersey also put me closer than I'd been before to a City I'd never seen, Philidelphia.  One of my childhood friends goes to school there, majoring in filmamking.  And just outside of the city, I have an older (pseduo) brother who I love seeing but rarely see.  It was the perfect chance to have a great Spring Break.

So naturally, I hesitated.  Would I be able to afford the various buses, trains, and subways involved?  And if I could, would I have enough money to buy grocerries with after, when I was back in my small collegetown supporting myself?  And what abuot spending time with immediate family - shouldn't that always be a priority?  Back and forth, with a hundred reasons why it was just so impractical to go, why I'd be better served to stay at home and spend time with Boyfriend and Mum and the Kid.  The funny thing is, it was Mum and Boyfriend who most disapproved of my hesitation.  Mum reminded me that even if I ended up totally broke "It's ok to be poor when you're 21 - it's not ok when you're in your 40s.  You're in college, so take advantage of your one shot at being broke and traveling."  Boyfriend reminded me of how much I like to travel and how much I've always wanted to see Philly and generally miss my brother.  Their gentle prodding and the prospect of seeing my friends was enough to send me on my way - and off onto adventure.

Getting Lucky

"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity."

Today was my first day off in ages and ages and ages.  As usual, it's been a busy semester full of classes, work (I got some extra hours this week!  Woo hoo!), and rehearsals which I love!  However it can sometimes be a little exhausting.  For example, here is my typical Monday:

7:00 am, I drag myself out of bed and into clean clothes, etc.  Grab my bags and books and stumble off to. . .

8:00 am Pedagogy class which goes until

9:30 am at which point I go to job #1 in Advising.  I file, make appointments, take messages, and otherwise hold down the front desk until

10:50 when my voice lesson starts.  Voice ends just in time for me to get to 

11:30 Modern 6

1:00 lunch with my roommate

1:30 twenty minutes at the gym before

1:50 Dramatic Literature, which is only an hour long so I get out by 2:50 giving me exactly enough time to go to

3:00 Physical Therapy for an hour and fifteen minutes, getting me out at 4:15 so by

4:40 I'm in Jazz 6 which ends at 6:10, which is convenient since

6:15 is when Hairspray rehearsal starts, which runs until 10:30

10:45 back in my room to start homework which takes me until 12:30ish to complete and call Boyfriend.

Then it's off to bed by 1ish, so I can get up, rinse, and repeat.  The classes change, the length of time at the gym changes (someday I get in almost an hour!) but thats about it.  It's a busy and fulfilling life, to be sure.  I love it.  Which is why today, on my first day off, I spent it making sure I could continue living almost the exact same way.  I edited my resume and started sending off copies of my headshot, (adjusted) resume, and contact information to local theaters/playhouses/summer stock companies.  I researched different performance venues and internships - all of which is work I should have done ages ago, but couldn't because of this stupid hip injury.  I didn't know when or if I'd be ok enough to rehearse/perform this summer.  If I'm lucky, though, I'll get some performances and some additional work to go along with my day job!

Cross you fingers, blogging world - I'm looking for my lucky break, so I'm trying to be prepared.  How do you spend your days off?