Author: Brendan

February 19, 2002 / Brendan

So I’m going to Alabama from the 6th to the 10th for my first ever SETC. This is normally where drama majors go to audition for summer stock or apply for tech jobs and stuff; I thought about it, but since I wasn’t ready for the qualifier auditions back in fall I didn’t try out. I wouldn’t be going at all, actually, except I signed up for this new thing and somehow got in. I’m going to be an overnight ten-minute playwright.

I would be nervous about that, but when I think about it, I actually wrote all my scripts for playwriting class the night before they were due anyway. This will probably be the same thing, only with snacks.

Standard update for the dozen or so people who ask me every day if anything new has happened with a certain someone: no. But it is terribly thoughtful of you to ask!

now if there’s a cure for this
we don’t want it; we run from it

February 14, 2002 / Brendan

Update 0757 hrs: In response to any questions you may have about the show, the answer is “yes.” Whoo.

Three entries in three days is almost unprecedented. Maybe I’m trying to make up for the fact that I’m heading home for the weekend–again–and when I get back I’ll commence trying hastily to ink this week’s toon. Ah, the jet-setting life of an unpaid cartoonist! Ha ha! See you Sunday.

Update 1353 hrs: But before I go, I feel I should mention that my roommate has purchased his very first professional team from Yahoo! Shopping. I mean, with prices like these, who can refuse?

February 11, 2002 / Brendan

I am a seamster, which does not, as you might expect, refer to my actively seaming, so much as it does to my cosmic, astonishing ability to sew. I can sew things. I am in fact “the man” at sewing things. I sew like the proverbial Stygian bat.

Actually I’m fairly awful at it by anyone’s standards but my own, but the fact remains that not only did I successfully fix up three years-old rips in my favorite coat, I also made repairs on another shirt entirely. That’s four (count ’em) different seams in two articles of clothing, for an average of two seams per article. At least three of those consisted of itsy bitsy stitches, and two of those I actually did inside out for that nifty hidden-seam effect.

Too many italics. Next topic. My roommates got me a pirate monkey! Or possibly a monkey pirate! Either way I’m going to marry them. Also, go hang loose in the new forums right now. They taste of delicate butters.

one look in her eyes
and I feel undressed

February 9, 2002 / Brendan

Less than a week until Anne makes her presence known on the Centre campus. It’s an event we’ve been looking forward to all year. Ken stuck a little portrait of Ms. Murray on our markerboard in August, and it’s been saying horrible and profane things daily ever since; now that the countdown has begun, she’s taken on positively demonic aspects. It’s only a matter of time until we see her in concert, and I fully expect some kind of pyrotechnic battle between good and evil when the curtain opens. Ph34r!

Heading home for the weekend. This has disadvantages, such as the fact that I won’t be able to hang out or play videogames; it also has advantages, in that I will miss at least a day and a half of Rush Week. Ah, those crazy fraternity boys!

and if I had a gun
there’d be no tomorrow

January 17, 2002 / Brendan

I quit running around finals last term, and I just got back from my first attempt at it since then. It’s been at least a month, and it shows, and the cold air is unkind to my raspy secondhand lungs–but I feel better, and I haven’t slipped as much as I thought. Then again, I also have new shoes, so that could be part of it.

Part of KERA (Kentucky Education Reform Act, which went into effect around seventh grade for me) meant that we wrote a lot more in school. I think that’s a good thing. What’s stupid about it, though, is that we were doing the work for nothing. As we got older we started to realize it. I have no doubt that the low scores for our junior KIRIS tests were due not to a lack of ability, but to a lack of caring.

My tracery of KERA results:

Students began to write more.
Because this writing was intended to judge teacher ability levels, teachers made students spend time on these pieces instead of regular course work. At the same time, students were not graded for said pieces because they were portfolio-bound. This had two direct results.
1. Students were not taught as much useful material.
2. Students were taught that it was more important to write more than to write well.
Students did a great deal of work for which they were not held accountable. They got a wishy-washy level like “apprentice” or “distinguished” for it, but they couldn’t put it on a college application.
Because it was stressed that students have a wide variety of work available for portfolio assembly, no piece could be thrown away–which, as most teachers translated, meant no criticism.

And that’s what really gets to me about the whole damn thing. We as a generation have not been taught to separate critiques of work from personal criticism, a desperately important distinction that most of us are forced to learn on our own. I think it hurts a lot of people when they get to college, and it’s not their fault.

December 21, 2001 / Brendan

I’m trying to figure out how to do some sort of Xorph special, since Tuesday (ie Newcomicday) is also, um, Christmas.It’s going to be difficult without the ability to draw anything. Maybe I should do it in ASCII art.

You can’t buy real Christmas lights anymore. You go to Wal-Mart, you find the seasonal aisle in the back corner by the gardening supplies, you expect massive stacks of light boxes. Not so! You can, technically, still buy the traditional tiny-white-bulb strings–but that’s about it. No C9s or 7.5s, not even multicolored small bulbs. Instead we have–yes!–the stupid light extravanganza!

You have your net lights, which are a cheap and stupid way to get out of wading into the bushes. You have your rope lights, which are not only ugly but unwieldy. You have your bubble lights, which are fine, in limited qualities, indoors. And you have truckloads of curtain / icicle lights, which are–I firmly believe this–the will of Satan manifest on Earth.

All of this is meant, essentially, to explain the slightly odd configuration of this year’s Second House on the Left light display. We had a nice multi-colored theme going on, up until I ran out of working colored strings and still had three trees (the big ones, naturally) to go. The aforementioned trip to Wal-Mart produced the aforementioned results, and only by scavenging the clearance rack at Big Lots did we come up with five strings of C9s. Unfortunately, all of them were entirely white.

I got two of the big trees with said white lights, which at least makes for a symmetrical design. The problem was this: the enormously fat tree by the basketball goal (which I have privately nicknamed “Brendan’s Self-Image”) was mostly strung with colored lights already, and needed maybe one more string to top it off. A white string would have to be distributed evenly or look like whipped cream atop a cherry-and-lime jello mold.

This is why I sat on the driveway for twenty minutes today, unscrewing and switching bulbs between one white string and six colored ones.

Experts estimate that I have spent at least six months of my life doing menial, pointless work like that.

in through my veins
without brains

December 20, 2001 / Brendan

Reconciliation service tonight–aka drive-through confession.

Until I was about eight, I lived in a very Catholic community–I went to the same Catholic elementary school as most of my friends, lived down the street from the church, CCD, prayer at dinner and bedtime, the works. After we moved to Richmond, and especially when I started going to Model in seventh grade, that world got bumped around a little. I started realizing that not only were most people not Catholic, but that a few of them believed some pretty absurd things about what I’d grown up with.

So I’ve been explaining (or trying to explain) stuff like reconciliation and communion for what seems like a long time. I think I let my own self-deprecation bleed into it too much, actually, so it’s kind of a surprise how good I feel after something like this. It wasn’t a real confession, talking straight to the priest (no, you don’t have to have a screen) and getting stuff out in the air… but it was something.

Before we got started, everybody in church (sixtysomething sinners and a couple of priests) got together in the middle of the pews, held hands and said the Our Father. There was something about the sound and the timbre of all those people saying the same thing, so close together–I could feel it humming, reverberating in my lungs. It was palpable. I forget sometimes how much simple human power and trust there is in ritual.

Explanations aside, I don’t talk about my beliefs much. But the fact is that I take a very deep and quiet joy in being Catholic.

November 30, 2001 / Brendan

Running on three hours of sleep. Presentations are done, but Hell Week (-and-a-half) ain’t over yet.

November 20, 2001 / Brendan

The answer is, of course, that I be me on some Thanksgiving Break. This is one of those “breaks” that doesn’t actually involve me getting a break or anything–before and after stuffing myself with free-range turkey, I will be putting together Theatre History and Comp Sci presentations (sans all my resources) and writing comix like a demon. I hope. If Ian brings the magic home, it’s likely all out the window.

Speaking of my brother, he and some friends have finally managed to get together a Kentucky chapterof the SCL–of which, he informs me, he is suddenly president. Meanwhile, my sister has conquered the competition to complete the Adkins dynasty and become freaking president of the Kentucky JCL. My siblings rule.

mic check one two

November 6, 2001 / Brendan

I am my mother’s son. Cleaning isn’t something I do often–my work area is a complex system (or lack thereof) of piles, bins and bags. But I’m starting to realize that when I do it, it’s a way of centering myself, restoring emotional balance.

It was a good day. Shouldn’t have been, really, as I’ve spent it running, being tired and thinking about the impending doom of tomorrow’s Calc and Theatre History tests. I’m getting nowhere with my novel and Jon’s finally made the decision to take the semester off from Short Story. And of course there’s a dead end at… well, nevermind.

But I wrote my play. It’s hasty, overdone and generally awful with a near-complete lack of plot. I’m proud of it all the same.

I want to cast Will and Melinda in it, but grapevine says they won’t work together. Actors! Ishould boil the whole lot of them.

the drummer from Def Leppard’s only got one arm!
the drummer from Def Leppard’s only got one arm!