I listened to the BBC news on the radio on my way home from work. It comes on at 7 pm here, and the BBC person says it's 2 o'clock GMT. BBC interviewed Richard Peck, a former US ambassador to Iraq. The man sounded like a total idiot. I can't believe they interviewed him. He kept saying that all we wanted to do in the US was to kill Sadam Hussein, and that the government was looking for any excuse to do it. Who is this guy? I can't believe he said on the BBC news. No wonder the rest of the world has bad opinions of the US, when the BBC digs up freaks like this guy to interview. Then he said that he didn't think that Iraq was capable of making biological or chemical weapons. How does this guy know?
They interviewed Richard Butler earlier, the Aussie who used to head the UN inspections team, and he said even when they were doing the inspections earlier the Iraqi government made it difficult for them to do "unfettered" inspections. I remember watching videotape on the news a few years ago, showing Iraqi trucks leaving just as the inspectors were arriving. What a farce!!!
I think that despite this new move by Iraq to allow the UN inspectors back in, that we will go to war with Iraq. This new concession by the Iraqis just moves the time table back. I don't want to the country to go to war. I just don't see the Shrubmeister backing down on this one. I don't trust the Iraqis either. I think we are watching a "wait and see" game by both sides. And what I fear is the american public will be caught in the middle, and we will be an unwilling pawn in this very dangerous game.
Monday, September 16, 2002
I'm taking this bible class starting Wednesday from a real bible scholar, the new minister at church, and already I have homework. I received an email, saying that the class should have memorized in order the 66 books of the bible by the second class September 25. I'm like, what did I sign up for? This is just like college. HELP!!! I vowed to myself in college, after I got repeatedly dinged on tests and papers for not knowing the biblical references in literature or in plays, that I would take a bible study class when the opportunity came up. Sometimes, you get what you ask you for, and it totally freaks you out when you get it.
I wonder if he'll test us. God, I hate tests and I've been a straight A student most of my learning life. I bet my class will be full of lawyers. Many of the people in my church are laywers. And half the people who attend my church, have the equivalent if not the equivalent of a divinity degree. I wonder if I'll feel like the village idiot in class, because I'll probably be the only one who isn't a laywer and doesn't have a divinity degree. I can just see arguments in class erupting over bible minutia.
If you really want to study the bible right, you'd probably have to read hebrew (my friend from Paris Francois reads and write hebrew even though he's not jewish) and greek, so you can read the bible in the original text. Maybe even Latin too. This is when I wish I went to an old fashioned private high school, and learned to read greek and latin like my ex-husband.
I'm watching the Redskins/Eagles game, and there was something sprayed on the Philadelphia side, something that felt like burning in your lungs someone said. How scary! In this post 9/11 world, the first thing I thought of was some kind of chemical or biological weapon was unleashed on Monday Night Football. This is so scary!
I wonder if he'll test us. God, I hate tests and I've been a straight A student most of my learning life. I bet my class will be full of lawyers. Many of the people in my church are laywers. And half the people who attend my church, have the equivalent if not the equivalent of a divinity degree. I wonder if I'll feel like the village idiot in class, because I'll probably be the only one who isn't a laywer and doesn't have a divinity degree. I can just see arguments in class erupting over bible minutia.
If you really want to study the bible right, you'd probably have to read hebrew (my friend from Paris Francois reads and write hebrew even though he's not jewish) and greek, so you can read the bible in the original text. Maybe even Latin too. This is when I wish I went to an old fashioned private high school, and learned to read greek and latin like my ex-husband.
I'm watching the Redskins/Eagles game, and there was something sprayed on the Philadelphia side, something that felt like burning in your lungs someone said. How scary! In this post 9/11 world, the first thing I thought of was some kind of chemical or biological weapon was unleashed on Monday Night Football. This is so scary!
My friend at Hooray for Anything is right. Sometimes writing in my blog is such a distraction, that it takes time away from my fiction writing. I'm telling myself it's okay, because out of my blog writing came my writeup about my 9/11 experience. And even though I think of myself as a poor personal essay writer, my 9/11 experience writeup was published on The SF Chronicle's website, SFGATE. What seemed like a terrible month long vacation from writing stories, turned into a publishing experience. So I guess the blog writing can't be that bad for me.
It's weird keeping a public blog, which is online diary for people to read, and also keeping my own private diary. Sometimes the entries are the same. Sometimes they are radically different. I say things in my private diary, that I would never say on my blog. I write things in my blog, that I wouldn't necessarily write in my journal.
In acting, teachers talked about the audience as "the fourth wall". As an actor, you have to on the one hand, ignore that the audience is there, but on the other hand, you have to be aware that your audience is there because if you're generating laughs, you might want to pause and wait just a little for the audience to stop laughing so you don't lose your lines in the laughter. In a storytelling performance I participated in, during my story the audience was reacting and laughing and I was feeding off of their energy and laughter. I found myself doing things in the performance that I didn't rehearse, but which seemed right to do because the audience was reacting the way they did.
In the beginning, hearing the audience laugh disturbed me. I couldn't help but think that I was really doing something really awful, and they were laughing at me and making fun of me. Any experience I'd had of being laughed at in my life, flashed before my eyes in what seemed like an excruciating slow few seconds. I could feel myself freaking out, and had to really think about what was going on with not only what I was saying, but with how the audience was reacting.
When I surmised that they weren't laughing at me, but reacting to my character's story with laughter, I relaxed. When I felt relaxed, I felt the audience's energy hitting me, and it felt like a drug high. There were only about 30 people who saw my performance. I wondered what it must be like for rock stars, who have a stadium full of people reacting to them. Afterwards, I realized why performance for some people is so addictive. There is nothing quite like having people pay that much attention to you. For me, it was exciting but at the same time scary somehow. There's a certain power in commanding that kind of audience attention, a power I didn't want and certainly didn't crave.
It's weird keeping a public blog, which is online diary for people to read, and also keeping my own private diary. Sometimes the entries are the same. Sometimes they are radically different. I say things in my private diary, that I would never say on my blog. I write things in my blog, that I wouldn't necessarily write in my journal.
In acting, teachers talked about the audience as "the fourth wall". As an actor, you have to on the one hand, ignore that the audience is there, but on the other hand, you have to be aware that your audience is there because if you're generating laughs, you might want to pause and wait just a little for the audience to stop laughing so you don't lose your lines in the laughter. In a storytelling performance I participated in, during my story the audience was reacting and laughing and I was feeding off of their energy and laughter. I found myself doing things in the performance that I didn't rehearse, but which seemed right to do because the audience was reacting the way they did.
In the beginning, hearing the audience laugh disturbed me. I couldn't help but think that I was really doing something really awful, and they were laughing at me and making fun of me. Any experience I'd had of being laughed at in my life, flashed before my eyes in what seemed like an excruciating slow few seconds. I could feel myself freaking out, and had to really think about what was going on with not only what I was saying, but with how the audience was reacting.
When I surmised that they weren't laughing at me, but reacting to my character's story with laughter, I relaxed. When I felt relaxed, I felt the audience's energy hitting me, and it felt like a drug high. There were only about 30 people who saw my performance. I wondered what it must be like for rock stars, who have a stadium full of people reacting to them. Afterwards, I realized why performance for some people is so addictive. There is nothing quite like having people pay that much attention to you. For me, it was exciting but at the same time scary somehow. There's a certain power in commanding that kind of audience attention, a power I didn't want and certainly didn't crave.
Speaking of acting roles ... I performed a speech from the play "Steaming" by Nell Dunn, where I played a cockney East End stripper. What a funny role! She was a great character too. And since I studied how to speak in a proper Brit RP and Brit cockney dialect the summer before, I said my speech in cockney. Someone came up to me after the performance and asked me if I grew up in England, since my accent sounded so authentic. What a scream!!! I told my acting coach, and he laughed.
When I was taking singing lesson, one of my singing coaches was english. I told him I could do a pretty good cockney accent, and he dared me to sing my peformance song in cockney for him. After I finished, he fell down on the floor laughing and told me I sounded like his auntie. Scary!!!
When I was taking singing lesson, one of my singing coaches was english. I told him I could do a pretty good cockney accent, and he dared me to sing my peformance song in cockney for him. After I finished, he fell down on the floor laughing and told me I sounded like his auntie. Scary!!!
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