100 posts in this blog already! (I know, some of you are like, "What do you mean, already? It's been four years!" Suck it, bloggers; I have a life.) I feel like I should do something special ala Strong Bad e-mails, but I don't have any flash animation skills or quirky catch phrases, so, alas, you'll just have to read my post instead.

It's 1:01 am, and I just got home from work. I started serving at Magnolia, a local restaurant here in Lincoln. It's awesome--I can't believe I never served before. It combines my favorite things--food, people, and a fast-paced, always-varying work environment. Tonight, as we were lighting candles, folding napkins, and straightening chairs, I felt a little bit like I used to feel before a show . . . back in the green room, helping actors with hair and makeup, setting up the soundtrack and lights, and making sure everything was right so that when the audience came through the doors, they had the experience we wanted to create for them. It's such a great mix of detail work and big-picture prioritization; with both jobs, you have to know when the little things count, and when to let them go and get on with what's important.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about performance. The past two or three years of my life I thought for sure that I would get my Ph.D. in medieval studies, and the past six months, just the thought of limiting myself to such a narrow field makes me feel claustrophobic. I mean, if you get a Ph.D. in chemistry, you can do chemistry--make longer-lasting lipstick, or better-tasting margarine, or bombs. If you get a Ph.D in medieval lit, you can't exactly DO medieval lit. You study it. You teach it. You write about it in journals that have such small distribution that I might conceivably be able to finance them with a year's salary. You speak to other academics in a dizzying, incestuous circle about it.

And that's it.

Performance, on the other hand, is something you DO. It involves action. And I love me some action. And what I realized tonight is that there's really an element of performativity to everything, which is kind of what the field of performance studies is about; everything we do is, in some sense, playing a role.

Not that I'm going to drop everything and take performance studies. But I am going to try to combine some element of medieval literature with drama/theater, so that I can not only teach, write, and participate in the very important conversations going on about "others and othering" in Marie de France, but also create experiences for average people (i.e. non-academics) that bring them in touch with a part of the world they didn't know about before. This last part I want to accomplish through theater--acting, directing, and "dramaturging".

Speaking of really liking my job, I really like the people there, too. And this is hard for me, because I know I'm leaving in exactly 3 months from today. Sometimes, at this point in my experience somewhere, making new friends feels a bit pointless and sad. I'll just miss them when I go, and wish that we'd had more time to get to know each other, but it won't have been quite enough time for me to really keep in touch with them on a regular basis. And then I just feel like I'm missing out on something really great.

But as I was biking home tonight, under a sky full of stars, taking it easy when I was alone on the road and pedaling hard when cars were behind me, I realized . . . maybe this is what life is about: loving something even though you know you'll lose it. I know that someday Dwight will die, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't love him now. When I'm in love, I don't know if my love will be returned, or, if it is, if that love will last, but that doesn't mean I should hold back. Everything and everyone I love will someday change, go away, or die. I'll lose these new, cool work friends in about three months, but I want to have fun with them in the three months we have together. I want to live like I'll be in Lincoln forever . . . and then, when I'm not, give thanks for the blessings I had here, and look forward to the blessings to come.

Sometimes I think my thoughts are so profound--and then when I write them here, they seem like every other cliche about life I've ever read on someone's blog and said, "You just now figured that out?" Oh well--at least I figured it out sometime.

I have a new fascination with Wales. I've always had a thing for Britain in general, but now I'm very into Wales. Here are some reasons why.

1. Welsh Men are beautiful and talented and I would like to marry one. Um, whoa . . forget I said that last part. But seriously, Anthony Hopkins, Ioan Gruffudd, Michael Sheen, Matthew Rhys. If you don't know who the last three are, please look them up. If you don't know who the first one is, please get yourself a Netflix subscription. Aside from their considerable personal attractions (they all have amazing eyes!), they are great actors. Some other great actors from Wales who are not all that hot are John Rhys Davies (a dwarf named Gimli, anyone? though, granted, not a dwarf in real life) and Rhys Ifans (Spike from Notting Hill).

2. The best stories come from Wales. Ever heard of the poet Taliesin? How about the Mabinogion? If you haven't heard of these, you've probably heard of C.S. Lewis and Roald Dahl. And one of the most magical books I read as a kid, Susan Coopers "The Grey King" is set in Wales and deals a lot with Welsh folklore. It's because of reading this book that I know (sort of) how to pronounce the 'll' and the 'dd' in Welsh. Also, speaking of the best stories, everybody is familiar with one of the most famous Welsh characters--Myrddin Emrys. We know him as Merlin, the wizard who advised King Arthur.

3. One of their national symbols is the leek. According to legend, Welsh soldiers were ordered to wear the vegetable on their helmets to identify themselves in an ancient battle that took place on a leek field.

4. The Welsh language is beautiful; it sounds like rushing waters. I want to learn to speak it. Also, the Welsh language created one of the world's longest place names: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyll-llantysiliogogogoch, which translates to "The church of St. Mary in the hollow of white hazel trees near the rapid whirlpool by St. Tysilio's of the red cave." How cool is that?

5. And the fifth reason I like Wales is that pop balladeers Tom Jones ("It's Not Unusual," "What's New, Pussycat") and Bonnie Tyler ("Total Eclipse of the Heart"), and fun indie group Los Campesinos are from there. Less attractive: the ubiquitous and annoying Charlotte Church. Bleh.

So go look up Wales, and fall in love like I did (well, maybe not exactly like I did . .. my love affair started with Michael Sheen in Underworld). Cymru am byth!

When I was in Chicago for New Years, I visited Gary, Indiana, one of the country's saddest cities. I was with a bunch of architecture and urban planning nerds, and as we drove up and down streets, they explained the city's pattern of economic growth and death. The most surprising thing were blocks of apartment buildings with boarded-up doors, broken windows, and graffitied brick facades, directly across the street from brand new condos with well-tended lawns and freshly poured driveways. I saw a beautiful old stone cathedral surrounded by fencing, with the broken doors chained together and a tree growing out of the roof. I've never been to Sarajevo, but Gary looked like a war zone. I'd never had such an instant negative reaction to a place.

It was an odd contrast with New Orleans, which I visited a couple of weeks ago, and had an overwhelming (and unexpected) positive feeling. Gary's war has been an economic one; a diminished steel industry brought on a wave of unemployment, poverty, and homelessness that has led to a rise in crime. New Orleans, while it has its share of problems with crime, has fought a different war over the past few years--one against the destruction left behind by Hurricane Katrina. And yet, as things stand now, it looks like problems created by humankind are even harder to get over than those created by the seemingly inexorable forces of nature, because New Orleans seems to be thriving.

For a city renowned for their massive annual celebration, it was interesting to see death given such a central position in the city. Whereever we drove, we saw cemeteries, with raised graves and mausoleums dominating their walled-in landscapes. Since the water table is so high, they have to bury their dead above ground. I've never seen a cooler grave than one I saw in New Orleans; right at the end of Canal Street stands a huge mound covered in grass, with a door in the side of the hill, like a hobbit house, topped by a giant statue of a 10-point buck. Being surrounded by death like that is, in some ways, almost an affirmation of life. It's like New Orleans says, "This is where we're all going, folks. Let's enjoy it while we can."

This sense of balance, of New Orleans dancing on the edge of death and life, is also evident in their relationship to the encroaching gulf. The city is built on a delta, which by its very nature is ephemeral and ever-changing. It's kind of a precipitous place to build a city. And once I got away from downtown, I could see the marks of that relationship to the Gulf and its storms. Beautiful houses stand abandoned next to inhabited homes; the watermark on these structures is about as high as my head. As I sit here, I look around my dining room at everything that would be underwater right now. My dining room table, my bookshelves, the painting my grandma gave me, all the appliances in my kitchen--the only thing that the water wouldn't touch is a copper plate shaped like a sun that is hanging above the kitchen sink, near the ceiling. I would have lost everything else to water, dirt, and mold.

But when I was downtown, on the Riverwalk, I was overcome by the rawness and richness, the vibrance, of the place. Music seems to be on every street corner, in the form of some dude playing jazz on his saxophone or a small blues band doing Stevie Ray Vaughn covers. Men wear hats in New Orleans, and don't look like they're trying too hard; I saw several guys walking around in fedoras like it was the most natural thing in the world. And the smiles . . . I saw one of the world's greatest smiles on a streetcar driver as I crossed in front of her at a stop.

It was raining most of the time I was there, but the weather was still great. It was warm and wet, the perfect subtropical climate for cypress trees, bougainvillea, water lilies. The sun came out once; I was at Jackson Square, calling some friends, and the clouds parted and the sunset lit up St. Louis Cathedral like a castle in a fairytale. I had just had beignets and hot chocolate at the legendary Cafe du Monde, and even though I hadn't showered for two days, I felt radiant myself.

Friends have asked me about the French Quarter. Is it still there? Has all the cast iron railing been taken down? Is it still beautiful? I don't know what it looked like before Katrina, but I saw no traces of a hurricane, just a beautiful, exotic, upper-class yet homey neighborhood. I hate being a cliche, but I felt like I was in Europe (which is probably the point). New Orleans combines so many cultures--Spanish, French, Native American, African, German, Greek--that the resulting gumbo seeps into every part of the local atmosphere, from the food to the architecture, to the street names to the "yat" accent which sounds like a cross between New Jersey and Dixie.

Natives call it NOLA; my melodramatic self now wants to name a daughter that. I want my daughter to be full of fierceness, light, music, heat, and emotion; I want her to be radiant, beautiful, and comfortable in her own skin; I want her to embrace tragedy and death while celebrating life, like the city itself.

I've always been a bit geographically-inclined. Once I've been somewhere, I rarely forget how to get there. I remember being in Toronto my sophomore year in high school, on a choir trip. A bunch of us set off from our hotel, walking around the city aimlessly. We visited an old cathedral, and passed several construction sites. I had never been to Toronto before, but I had no problem leading us back to where we started from.

Places and spaces stick in my mind, and define my world--especially roads and houses. Sometimes when I'm trying to fall asleep, I'll flash upon a street in Korea, the road in front of the Wal-Mart-uh we used to go to, and I'll walk "home" to my apartment in Jungsan-ship-danjee in my head. Or, strangely, when I'm kissing someone, I often find myself mentally driving down Dietz Rd. in Ft. Oglethorpe, GA--the road my family took to get to the interstate, which wound by an old cemetery, a couple of ponds, a gas station, and my elementary-school principal's house, as well as intersected a street called Cinderella. I have to wonder what childhood experience formed that odd mental connection.

And I dream, most often, of being in houses I know. It could be the old house of my childhood friend Tiffany, on Pursley Rd.; or my family's basement when we lived on Country Ln.; or the Bishop's huge house on top of Lookout Mountain, that I used to clean for Merry Maids. For some reason, my memories of all the places I've cleaned seem especially clear to me, and they cycle through my dreams.

Over Christmas I made my aunt take me to my grandparent's old house--not the one in Collegedale, the one in Sequatchie Valley. I had spent a lot of time there as a kid, and it lived on in my mind as the most beautiful, amazing place--a smallish house with several tiny bedrooms, cluttered with plants and books, on a few acres of land bounded by a creek. There was a barn, filled with fascinating junk, and a swimming hole where I almost lost an eye running straight into a barbed wire fence.

After my grandparents' divorce, the house was left vacant for years, and sometime during its vacancy, pipes had burst. My aunt recalls the scene like something from a horror movie--mold and moss everywhere, rotting floorboards, and even dead vermin in the house. They almost had to gut the place when they remodeled it.

I visited it in December, halfway remodeled. It was strange. I could see the places where new boards had been put in, new light fixtures, paint jobs, etc. But overlaid on what I was seeing was my memory. I could see my grandma's paintings on the wall, and her embroidery of some phrase in Norwegian; I could see the organ in the corner, the dinner table, the ubiquitous doilies and house plants.

Walking back to the guest room I had slept in so many summers ago, I remembered it as a kind of haven; sleeping with the fan on, windows open, hearing crickets and frogs outside, warm under Grandma's afghan. One night I got up in the middle of the night, sneaked down the hall, outside through the front door, and met my cousins for some hijinks. I think we climbed trees and threw crabapples at passing cars. The guest room now was full of junk--books and pictures, waterstained, curling at the edges, stiffened and warped; broken furniture; old clothing and photo equipment. My sister and I found a driver's license of my grandma's from the 80's.

I decided after this experience that, when I have money, I want to invest in real estate. I'm sure it's a chore, fraught with hassles I haven't thought of yet, but I really love creating spaces. I want to buy my grandparent's old place and fix it up, turn it into an organic hobby farm, maybe, and live there someday. I want to buy Todd's house and rent it out to responsible college students, and have it be my summer home. Someday, when I'm really well off, I'll buy my Aunt Linda's house on Old Alabama Highway, the place with the pond and the courtyard, and live there, too! For now, I love too many places and am too poor, so I guess instead of buying them all and rotating through them during the year, I'll just dream about them, and write about them. I've already thought of a name for a book of short stories I want to write--Other People's Houses.

Jobs I have wanted, in chronological order:

Ballerina.
Astronaut.
Veterinarian.
Doctor.
Nurse.
Safari doctor.
Safari nurse.
Actress.
Painter.
Novelist.
Singer.
Spy.
Hair stylist.
Bookshop owner.
Flower shop owner.
Photojournalist for National Geographic.
4th grade teacher.
6th grade teacher.
Middle school enrichment teacher.
High-school English teacher.
College professor.
Travel writer.
Chef.
Server.
Model.
Farmer.

Jobs I have had:
Cashier/Ice cream maker at Dairy Queen.
Janitor.
Grocery store clerk.
School recruiter's secretary.
Cutco salesperson.
Nature director.
Merry Maid.
Grader.
Tutor.
ESL teacher.
College writing instructor at a small private religious institution.

Jobs I will never want:
Any kind of sales on commission.
President of the US.
Tax professional.
Navy SEAL.
Doctor.
Nurse.
Pastor.
Residence Hall Dean.

Today, after rehearsal for The Tempest, Mark and I and a few students taped the set, which is kind of like taping up a box before you send it post overseas. All the seams, edges and joints between flats have to be covered with gaffers tape so that the set is "waterproofed" and can be painted. Taping also cuts down on the instance of an entering or exiting actor catching a toe on a stray edge of masonite. It was a good feeling to be done with that; as I stood back, looking at the neat pattern of boxes and rectangles on the stage, I felt very satisfied. All the edges were straight, all the tape ends pressed down.

Edges are helpful to me. When I can see an edge of something, I know where to go next, like filling in a puzzle after you've got the border pieced together. But I'm kind of compulsive; I can't handle rough edges. They make me feel unsettled and confused about where to go next. I painted my bathroom last week--bright red. I love the color, and I think it makes our bathroom a warmer and friendlier place than the former beigey-white did. But all I can see are the edges where I messed up, the blobs, blotches, and streaks of stray paint that made their way around the corner of a wall, or onto the ceiling or baseboard.

Directing this play is a lot like that. I have an image in my brain of what I want the play to "be" in its final form, but I don't know all the steps to get there. I wish I had an outline of "things to do"--that would feel like a nice edge for me. But all I can do now is complete the next task. When a scene feels good, I move to the next one, and as the play takes shape, I might go back to the scenes that we thought we had "good," and rework them. It's a fun, messy process--and sometimes it's scary, and sometimes it's exhilarating.

Last week I talked to my life-coach, Janice. She said my expectations of myself and of everyone around me are too high, and that I need to practice throwing all my expectations out the window. I think she's right. Those rough edges in life are getting to me, and just like the play, when I don't have something outlined from the beginning, instead of trying to think it through and make all the edges in my mind straight before I start, I just need to throw myself at it, and start "doing." Sometimes taking the next step is the only way to get to the end.

I also need to take a few breaths, hang a picture or two, and enjoy my nice red wall.

I think I'm, by nature, a fan. I haven't talked to my boss Tanya, who studies fans and fandom, about this, but it's my guess, because when I decide to love something, I stick to it long after anyone else gives it up. I was a loyal MySpacer for several months after all my other friends had gone to Facebook. I banked with Wells Fargo for two years at Andrews when there wasn't a Wells Fargo to be found in the state of Michigan, and my closest bank was a 35-minute drive away. Even though most of the people I hang out with call Taco Bell "Taco Hell" or "Taco Smell" or some other cheesy derogatory name, I still adore Taco Bell. And even though, as internet phenomena, Homestarrunner is probably as old as the Star Wars kid, I still check it Monday after Monday for a new Strong Bad e-mail.

My fan-loves from the year 2008:

Kristin Wiig (and, by extension, all of Saturday Night Live): I've started watching SNL kind of religiously, and found it such a wonderful addition to my life. I like almost anything they do about politics, I "Really!" enjoy Seth and Amy at the Newsdesk, and the Digital Shorts are usually pretty re-watchable. But I effing love Kristin Wiig. She is the funniest person on television right now, Steve Carell notwithstanding. Wiig pulls off the most awkward, quirky, unbelievable characters I've ever seen, and always leaves me cackling helplessly, falling sideways out of my chair. Check out her Penelope, Judy Grimes, Bjork, and her Sue the surprise lady. Also a favorite: her impersonation of a sweepstakes reporter at the scene with a big winner.

Girl Talk: I'm a postmodernist in that I really enjoy the pastiche. The Simpsons, Quentin Tarantino, "Bohemian Rhapsody,": I love it all. But Girl Talk is the best example of the pastiche that I can think of, and I love this guy! His music is not only exciting, organic, and moving, but I think (can I say this without being a cliche? No? Well, I'm gonna say it anyways.) he represents, in music, the experience of an entire generation. And it's awesome music to dance to if you're like me and you are a crazy dancin' fool.

Cookbooks/Books about food: So many good books have come out this year about food (or maybe they haven't all come out this year, but I've read them this year) and I love books about food! "Eat, Pray, Love," "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral," "In Defense of Food," and "Julie/Julia" are just some of the food books I've read this year and died over, to use a Buffy-ism (Turner, not Slayer).

And, speaking of food, my favorite ingredients of 2008 are: ginger, Simply Organic's salt mix, and wine. Ginger is kind of a no-brainer--it can go in desserts or entrees or even tea. I used some fresh ginger today in some kimchi fried rice; I also dice some up when I make lemongrass tea 'cause it adds a kick I like (and that I think might be good for me). The salt mix is incredible. Aside from salt, it has mustard seeds, celery seed, garlic, onion, chili, and black pepper in it--in the perfect grindable mix that is so good with roasted vegetables, soup, meat, or scrambled eggs! And wine . . . well, I know that's a touchy subject, but really, folks--if you don't drink it, try cooking with it! You'll have no idea until you try it with some pasta sauces. I just made a sauce for gnocchi last week by sauteing some garlic and mushrooms in white wine, and then mixing that with a simple bechamel, and it was the best sauce I've ever made in my life.

Finally, another celebrity: Alec Baldwin. I used to hate this guy, used to think he was smarmy and overweight, but now I think he's sexy and powerful. Watching 30 Rock changed my Alec-perspective, I think. The character he plays, Jack Donaghy, is so confident, so sarcastic, kind of chauvinistic (but in a hot way! if I can say that and still be at all a credible feminist!) and has very sensual lips. Now if only he and Kristin Wiig could have babies . . .