Dreams

I've been having some strange dreams the last few nights. First, Friday night, when I got up around midnight to come sleep in the recliner, I dreamed that I couldn't sleep, and was tossing and turning and decided to try to sleep on the floor instead. Then I woke up still in the chair.
I'm sure I had an odd dream on Saturday night as well, but I don't remember it at the moment.
Last night, I dreamed that I was taking the bar exam again, and having a tough time of it. I recall having a lot of trouble with the first question, and being concerned immediately about running into time trouble. Sure enough, I remember having trouble finding the exam questions as I paged back and forth between the questions and the answer sheet (which is not, in fact, how the bar exam is arranged) and ended up completing only 48 of the 100 questions. I recall being in quite a rage afterwards at the book, and I think the people around me. Thankfully I woke up.
I wonder if the bad dreams have something to do with the pain in my back? Have I been tense while I sleep? Is the pain causing the dreams? Who knows.

Comics

For whatever reason, while I was studying for the bar, I was hit with a desire to get out my old comic book cards and look at them. Probably because they were hidden away in a box in the storage space nearby where I spent much of my time studying. I got them out, as well as a bunch of actual comics, and then started wanting to read a few epic old storylines (e.g. Days of Future Past, the Infinity Saga, etc..) I didn't have time to do that during the bar, but I did download a few of them so that I could read them without having to disturb the boxes in the storage space too much. I've now set up my laptop on its side in order to get optimal viewing capability, and am reading away while I bike. It's not pretty, but it works, and it allows me to keep my mind off of the actual exercising while I keep myself from playing video games.

One thing I noticed, though: the older comics have a LOT more text in them. It took me much less time to read the more recent comics than the older storylines that I have. There is a lot more character development, exposition, etc. involved in the older stories than the new ones. I at first thought that this might be because the backstory of a lot of the characters was now established, but I don't think that the writers are really assuming that today's readers are familiar with what happened in 1985. I think it's more likely that they no longer care, and assume that if you want to know, you'll figure it out somewhere else. The newer comics are all about pretty art, scantily-clad (or skin-tight-clothing-wearing) women, and action sequences. Dialogue and exposition are mere afterthoughts. Maybe in some of the larger, more epic series.

There are other differences. The art is "better" quality, in that the printing is better, and on better paper, but the style of the new stuff just doesn't feel the same to me. The newer stuff tends to be a lot darker. The distopian stuff like Days of Future Past was edgy before because it was unusual. Newer storylines seem to be darker as a rule, and while that might reflect current culture and current events, I am going to these comics for a refuge from all that. I don't want to go and see a depressing world where even super heroes cannot help us; I go to comics to see a world where superheroes can solve our problems and do!
So I guess I'll be more interested in the longer, sometimes tedious and always harder to find older comics. I'm okay with that.

Spent much of the day figuring out my new phone. I got a number of apps installed (and haven't yet figured out how to uninstall the bad ones.) I got a good twitter app, a satisfactory Facebook app, and a number of others. The keyboard took some getting used to, but once I figured out that the phone came with the Swype keyboard installed, it got a lot faster and easier.

I tried out google goggles this evening at dance practice, taking a shot of Matthew's Houses of Holy T-shirt and was suitable impressed by the fact that the phone was able to find me the Led Zeppelin album, and compare prices at Amazon, iTunes and other places. Pretty neat. The barcode scanner and other google services also seem quite useful. I'm going to have to see what FourSquare is all about, as it didn't seem to have much to offer from my location at the Klub Haus.

My back has been hurting in the mornings--to the point that I wake up at 1:00 AM and have difficulty moving, so tomorrow I have a doctors appointment to have it checked out. The appointment is at 3:45 and so I am hoping that it will be useful--usually by that late in the day the pain has mostly subsided. I will have to mark out where the pain is coming from in the morning in order to have some useful information to give the doctor.

Nathaniel took two really good naps today. His morning nap was even better than usual, nearly two hours long, and then a good hour plus nap in the afternoon as well. I hope that this means that he will sleep a little better at night, since he was also eating relatively well. He had a really good day, sleeping well and spending his time awake happy and talking a lot. It's days like today which make me glad to have 300 more days that I will be able to spend with him before starting to work full time.

New phone

After much research, I've finally gotten a new phone. I looked into switching to AT&T, possibly getting an iPhone, although my theological differences with Apple made that uncertain, compared phones, looked at subsidized and unsubsidized options with T-Mobile and finally ended up with a MyTouch 3G. So far, I think it's going to be good; I'm still finding apps to put on it, and figuring out how to navigate, but it is at least as intuitive as I found the iPod touch, and although the keyboard isn't quite as responsive yet, I'm betting part of that is being used to the iPod keyboard. At any rate, I'll be checking out alternatives as well.

I tried out google goggles and the barcode scanner both of which were quite impressive, downloaded a facebook client and looked into a twitter client (but want to figure out which to use) and am going to see about a blogger app as well. The 3.2 Megapixel camera will also let me upload pictures to Blogger more easily than carrying around my regular camera, and having to sync it to my laptop every night, although I'm sure I'll still do a fair amount of that as well.

Some people call me the space cowboy

Pictures from Nathaniel and Piper's play date while Calder and I were at T.O.R.T. Friday night. Sounds like they had a good time, and Nathaniel was very interested in both Piper and her toys.

Yesterday was my grandparents-in-law's (Oma and Opa's) 60th Anniversary party, held at the Germanic American Institute (Volksfest House). There were a lot of Q-tips there, a lot of friendly people, all interested in seeing Nathaniel as well as catch up with their friends. Probably a good 75 people showed up and they were treated to schnitzel, spaetzel and rotkraut. My favorite was actually the cabbage, but the schnitzel was also pretty good. Cake from Sam's Club and beer and wine abounded, with a ton of wine left over, and plenty of cake as well for when we all convened later at Oma and Opa's. We debuted Stephanie and Diana's 10 minute video of photos, and it went over well. Opa was clearly very emotional in giving his speech at the end of it, as was only right after 60 years. "Quite an accomplishment" he said, typical understatement.

After the party and packing up we went to Oma and Opa's and watched the video again. Isaac, Nik and I talked baseball for some time, and had more cake. Seriously, I think I had four cupcakes and two slices of cake.

No post tonight

Or rather nothing substantive. Too tired and in a bad mood. Tomorrow: good, probably long post about my in-law's 60th anniversary party.

Why is no one wearing pants?

Or: My T.O.R.T. review 2010.

Bottom line: Cameron Wood is funny. Cameron was terrific as Puck. In fact, for the first half hour or so, before many of the other actors managed to calm down enough to cease being too self-conscious, he single-handedly saved the play.

The problem with TORT last year was that it was too long. The principal reason for this was the length and number of songs. While the thing is called the "Law School Musical," there were 25 songs this year. What this year's writing team managed to do well, though was to shorten many of the songs down to a single verse. This allowed the length to remain shorter while getting in all the songs. I'm pretty sure that most musicals have only about 10-15 songs in them, so when you have 25, you have to make them shorter to keep length down. If I had had the chance, I might have actually removed some of the songs and kept longer verses for the ones that stayed in, but it's hard to say without knowing all of the behind the scenes stuff.

I was expecting to see a tortured version of Shakespeare with bizarre word-plays and wooden acting to get A Midsummer Night's Dream to be a legal story. What I got was in some ways even more tortured than I expected, with the Oberon and Titania storyline seeming totally removed from the whole thing. I don't know if portions of the script were removed to shorten the play, but the whole of their story seemed tacked-on. (Granted, it has now been a good ten years since I saw/read the original, so I can't definitively say it wasn't down to the original story.) One thing that was well done with this crew, was that most of their songs were relatively short, which moved the story back to the more central action quickly.

The program did not specify who was the sound technician, but whoever they were seemed to have needed another rehearsal at the actual theatre, as they had difficulty switching to the right mics at times, resulting in lost verses to some of the songs early in the play. Overall, though the show was slow to start, but picked up very well and the second act was actually quite good.

Aside from Wood being terrific, Chris Luehr was excellent at overacting his role, perfectly portraying Peter Quince, leader of the Mechanicals to comedic affect, with numerous random Latin phrases thrown in. The rest of the TORT-within-a-TORT crew also was impressive. Evan Palenschat as Brock clearly needed a scene or two to settle into his role in front of the audience, but really did a terrific job in the end, and his number at the end of the first act was perfect.

My friend David Couillard, cast as the pompous Paul was clearly placed in the role because he needed to do no acting to pull it off. His bio proclaims that he prepared for the role by hushing people in the library, correcting people's misuse of "nauseous" and "literally," audibly sighing a lot" and other similarly pompous behavior. The only thing lacking from the bio was the last sentence "and otherwise being himself." David set a high bar for himself last year with the Thriller dance, but he didn't live up to it this year. His choreography was a little stiff; he knew exactly what to do, but wasn't fluid in his motions. Partly this was the character, but since I focused on him, it was noticeable. On the other hand, while the impressive Holly Overgaard, draped herself over him during her song, he was absolutely terrific, and he and Palenschat's number "500 Briefs" was probably the highlight of the second act.

I remember talking to Holly Overgaard about T.O.R.T. during an admitted student weekend, on the bus from the law school to downtown for a dinner, and she seemed enthused. I'm not taking credit for finding a lead for the last two years, but I'm sure glad that she has taken part.

A special mention must go to John Fink, who absolutely stole the final scene of Act I as "creepy 1L."

The choreography was well put together, and impressive with the "Elite Dancers" pulling off some amazing displays. I was particularly impressed by Joe Cappola, who managed to learn some difficult moves while also studying for the bar and working.

My final thought is that the show should have ended with Cameron's perfect delivery of Puck's final lines. The show is a musical, of course, but I think it would have been better to use the final musical reprise as a curtain call, instead of throwing it in after his lines. The finale of the play really was Puck's farewell, and having delivered it so well, it deserved to be the last thing before bows.

All in all, a memorable evening, more fun that It's a Wonderful Law School, and about the right length as well.