This is Samantha, with my last blogpost for the year. I know, I know, about four weeks from now you're going to start feeling a little lost and as if something is missing without a blogpost from me. It's okay! I recommend turning to the vlogbrothers youtube channel for a blogging experience way cooler and funnier than mine, if you don't already.
For my final post, I'm going to give you a list of three stereotype defying things I genuinely think will make your weekend great.
1: Come hang out with us, Defying Gravity! We're leaving from Highland at 5:30 on Friday to grab some Satay. After that, it's chocolate Scrabble time. Yes, my dears, competition, lexical adventure, and chocolate all in one. For those of you who haven't got a clue, some how I'll make a word master out of you! :)
2: Grab a few friends and see W;t It's a touching play about a professor who receives a cancer diagnosis and has to say goodbye to those who knew her. It won a Pulitzer in '99 and one of her peers literally shaved her head for her role. You can see this masterpiece at Neely Auditorium on Friday and Saturday night at 8pm!
3: Play with a puppy. You deserve it, okay? School is demanding. A demanding life is stressful. And stress is dissolved by puppies. This is just science, y'all. Masala-SACE and Vandy PAWS are hosting a puppy play day on Saturday. If you're doing anything else from 3-6 - pack up, you're through. Central Library lawn is the place to be!
Regardless of what you do this weekend, I hope that you have a renewing 48 hours. As finals approach, I hope you find a way to be tranquil as a forest, but on fire within. Once you find your center, you are sure to win. As we face demanding times, we must be swift as a coursing river, with all the strength of a great typhoon. And if you do that, you will have saved us all...I mean, you'll have overcome a fierce obstacle. :D
And isn't that what Defying Gravity is all about?
Love and farewell,
Sam
PS: Mulan makes the best inspirational study music. :D
Hey everybody. John here with another weekend report. This week was pretty unusual, because my band didn't have any shows to play. We haven't had a week off since February, so I have to admit that it was nice to just hang out and do normal college kid stuff. That said though, I'm starting to miss doing things like this every weekend:
Fortunately, we start playing again on the 20th, and we'll have a minimum of three shows before school lets out.
Instead of playing songs about eating people, as I'm accustomed to doing most Friday nights, I attended Juggleville 008: Gravity Protocol, which featured Mayfield 2's own Jacob Lamberth. It was the first time I've ever attended Juggleville, and I have to admit it was pretty entertaining. The show featured 007 and his trusty sidekick, whose name I have completely forgotten, as they attempt to stop a madman from doing something nefarious involving gravity. There's no dialogue, so I can't be very specific about the details. The combination of juggling and a doomsday device reminded me of a great Far Side cartoon where an audience member heckles a juggler for using nuclear warheads that have clearly been defused. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find this cartoon on the internet, so here's Calvin and Hobbes instead.
Later that night, I decided to return to Bioshock, a game I had started about a month ago but had stopped playing due to large amounts of schoolwork. Hardcore gamers will probably find me pathetically behind the times, given that the third installment of this series just came out a few days ago, but I tend to only play games once they've been out long enough to be considered nostalgic and, more importantly, dirt cheap. For those that haven't played it, Bioshock really is one of the best games ever made, and I highly recommend it as long as you can stomach some of the more gruesome elements of the game. The visuals are amazing, the story is well-developed, and the enemies of the game are incredible. The game really manages to affect the player on a psychological level, making for an unsettling but very compelling playing experience. If you're interested, here's a clip that really demonstrates how well-designed the enemies are. Not only can they be difficult to kill, but they're specifically designed to play off the paranoia of the player, making them some of the best enemies I've ever encountered in a game.
This weekend I ended up watching quite a few movies, beginning on Saturday with Jurassic Park. For those of you who weren't aware, there has been a recent trend where older films are reformatted for 3D, seemingly in an attempt to make more money without making more movies. In the case of Jurassic Park, however, I feel that it was actually worthwhile to see the 3D version, even if it meant paying good money to see a film I already own. Jurassic Park was already a very visually appealing movie, and it looked even better in 3D on an IMAX screen. I mean, who doesn't want to see this in 3D?
The second film I watched was The Room, a movie I've seen about four times now. It is widely considered to be one of the worst films ever made, but it fails so completely at everything it attempts that the result is much funnier than the majority of today's comedies. The music is bad, the stock footage is placed at strange moments, there's an overabundance of spoons for some reason, characters were played by more than one actor, and protagonist/director/producer/writer Tommy Wiseau is the single strangest person to ever be captured on film. Here's a scene where our hero Johnny goes to buy some flowers, resulting in some of the most awkwardly paced dialogue I've ever heard.
The third movie I saw this weekend was Memento, a film directed by Christopher Nolan. I won't say much about this movie other than that it's very good and worth your time if you have two hours to kill.
Finally, on Sunday night I ended up going to Kay Bob's, a restaurant on 21st avenue a couple of blocks away from the Commons. There I met with a few friends to have dinner and participate in the restaurant's weekly Trivia Night. This was our first time attempting to compete in a trivia night, as an employee creepily pointed out when they promised to take our trivia virginity. Our team name was the Shiny Maracas, and we actually did pretty well for our first time. We didn't place, but all of the teams' scores were fairly close, so I feel fairly confident that if we took another stab at it we'd eventually win something.
Anyway, that about covers my weekend. Here's an amazing video for a song called "Eat Randy."
If you haven’t noticed, the Pub is one of our favorite places to eat as a Mayfield. We started off our weekend there on Friday night with some dinner and lively, varied discussion that ranged from fond remembrance Harry Potter to heated controversy about the ethics of using drones in the US and plenty of things in between!
What Enjolras actually thought about Marius and Cosette
After, Linda and I went to see Les Miserables, presented by our beloved VSG. It’s a stunning movie, and VSG always does a great job supplying theater food! My favorites were the gummy fruit snacks. I swear I could live on those. Though it’s a heart-breaking story, pieces of humor can be found. :) See the left, courtesy of the user tainteh on deviantart:
After that, I enjoyed some well deserved sleep. Saturday wasn’t anything unusual - I worked with some pretty cool amigos in the Call Center, and then studied and cleaned the day away! I would post a picture of my “clean” room here...but it’s already untidy again.
Sunday was more eventful. I went to church in the morning, and in Relief Society (the hour of church when women meet together) we discussed encouraging quote by an old LDS prophet, Lorenzo Snow: “Do not expect to become perfect at once. If you do, you will be disappointed. Be better today than you were yesterday, and better tomorrow than you were today.” Sometimes, I think Vandy students obsess over constant perfection in our schoolwork, relationships, and life, when maybe constant improvement would be a more realistic and still valuable goal. :)
Then, I came home, and planned to have a super focused afternoon and evening but nope! DINOTOPIA.
So this is Nell’s favorite movie. Basically,two half brothers who hate each other wash up on the shores of an undiscovered land after a plane crash. Oh, and this undiscovered land has a whole society of human and dinosaurs. It’s a 4 hour long epic that includes all kinds of cool ideas: importance of tradition versus innovation, love triangles, scary dinosaurs, life philosophy, family relationships, peaceful dinosaurs, treasure hunting, flying dinosaurs, personal destiny, and my very favorite, baby dinosaurs. Spoiler Alert: The very best part of the film is when one of the brothers - Carl -wins best essay in an important examination by simply writing the lyrics of Bohemian Rhapsody, sine no one in this isolated culture has heard it before. "Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality. open you eyes, look up to the skies, and see."
And with this picture of the movie's adorable baby dino, I bid you goodbye and hope that you have a lovely week, dear readers!
