out of my winder, looking in the night

What goes with snow

When I got home to my Read 2nd room today the snow was softly falling down. I didn't have any desire to unpack my 4 days worth of clothing so I sat on my bed and watched the snow fall. It is strange to me that each flake is absolutely different from the next with an infinite number of possibilities.

When we are young and we hear the storied about elfs whose job it is to cut snowflakes all year long we are mesmerized. Now that I am older and I understand the process of crystallization that occurs way up in the stratosphere I am still in awe to think that our earth, our environment can create something as delicate as snow. The process that causes them to break and crystallize is beautiful in itself, even if it leaves out the elfs with their magic scissors and creativity.

When it is cold and the snow is falling, what else would one want in the world than hot chocolate. I recently realized that I can make homemade vegan hot chocolate in my room. It takes a bit of innovative thinking, but it works.

The process: I took one chunk of 100% coco baking square and dropped it into a glass jar. Mean while I have put water into my hot water cooker and turned it on. About a week ago I made homemade rice milk (for another post) so I poured rice milk into the jar over the still solid baking square.


Then I put this jar into the middle of my hot water cooker. It looked liked this.
After it began to heat up I stirred it some. Then I let it heat all the way through before stirring it again and taking it out of the hot water. The water around the jar was boiling but because I don't like to wait for things to cool down, I didn't bring the contents of the jar to a boil.

and bam! I had vegan hot chocolate in my dorm room in a matter of minutes with out a huge amount of clean up. Just one jar!
Time to enjoy winter

Hair dye and turkey

A cousin of mine, who has always be interested in Art has recently decided that she never wants to do art again and instead wants to do hair and nails. This is fine and even welcomed by my family. I didn't even mind really until she told me that I needed to add some color to my hair, and then went on about how pale my cheeks are. I was shocked by how little she knew me, and by the thought of adding color to my cheeks. I made a comment about there not being any vegan products on the market that are reliable, and she left me alone for a while. I am sure when I left she was talking to one of my aunts about how flat and lifeless her hair was. I won't be surprised if she gave her a list of suggestions.
My deal is really that my family will support 100% the pursuit of beauty school, but my private liberal arts school is on the black list of family topics. Meaning we just don't talk about it.
I was explaining my major to an Aunt who I knew would never understand, but I didn't stop telling her because she kept pretending to be interested. I think we lead each other on, my family and my education. They talk about a cousin of mine who is 4 years older, and has been going to school for 6 years. Not doing anything. But that is alright, because she is going to a school that they know the name of.

I don't know why I even try anymore.
Thank you Grinnell for understanding me when they don't!

We still have a lot to learn

There is something to the music that children bring to our lives.
I am from a large family of 4 girls and 2 boys.
I am the 2nd oldest in this line of 6.
When I go home there is always someone to play with.
My 5 (nearly 6) year old sister is such a light into my world.

I want to show her so much about life, but also know that she needs to discover it alone.
How do you show someone how to love with all of there heart, when you know it is so easy to break. How do you teach someone how to grow flowers when you know the frost kills them every year. How do you teach someone to dance in the rain and bath in the sun when you know the toxins that both carry.
I want my sister to grow up in this world, but I also want to save her from it.

It is so very hard for me to see how excited she is about each turn of the book. I am excited but not as boundlessly hopeful anymore. Reality has begun to set in, no matter how hard I don't want it to.
Someday I will live in the green mountains, and I will grow everything that I eat. and I will save seeds, and write journals. and ride my bike to town. I will be known and unknown at the same time. I will preform poetry in a coffee house and slip out silently after. I will be in love with one person, and all people at the same time. And my sister will know, the world as well as I do.

Moments like this

I have always loved bodies in motion and dancers.
When I saw this picture it was something I knew I needed to share. The movement and colour in this art is what I needed to see in this moment exactly

windowsill fridge

As the weather gets cold, and snow begins to fall on the ground. The Windowsills of college dorm rooms around the country become unusable tundras. Until some brilliant individuals realize that instead of using your dorm room mini fridge you can save the energy by using that tundra of a windowsill for your refrigeration needs.

My school may not invest in better insulation for our old dorm windows, but at least the conscious number of us can fit the system in our own green way.

Assistant Stage Managers

I have been working on the North American premier of Testing the Echo, a British play by David Edgar. Tomorrow after an 8 week process it finally opens at Grinnell College. I am the Assistant Stage manager, and in charge of all the backstage business. Today after a bit too much stress I broke down and the actors saw me cry. I am embarrassed about it now, but I don't think any of them will say anything about it.

During this whole process I have been reading quite a bit of Theatre theory. Frances Harding has an article titled Presenting and Re-presenting the Self: From not-acting to acting in African Performance. I have been reading about African performance lately on my own accord because I think that I want to spend the rest of my life working with it. Re-Presenting the Self resonates with me especially now because it talks about the stage-hand as a performer who is support of the central character/charters. This performance role is a fully functional balance between acting and not acting. As the assistant stage manager I am performer the role of backstage mom, making sure that the actors do not worry about timing, costume, or other technical aspects of the performance. This is a very necessary role to have performed during any show, yet is the least recognized.

I have come to terms with the fact that an assistant stage manager's duties are invisible yet valuable. Harding say it better than I when he writes about stagehands, "in spite of the deliberate absence of visual signals (costuming, behavior, etc.) the stagehand is drawn into the "informational structure" of the performance. It is because they are invisible that the show is able to be experienced in its entirety. I wish I could thank all the invisible assistant stage managers of the world for the hidden magic they bring to the stage.