Bandwagon

Well, might as well hop on the wagon too. Seems like most everyone abroad has gotten ill or sustained some bodily injury. While for a while the only injury I'd sustained was to my ego, and perhaps my id - research is, well, hard, paradoxically having the ability to excite and sustain you and make you feel impossibly thick and crush you; it can enlighten and baffle (in a way that makes you wonder whether your professors are right to give you As and commend your hard work); but then again life does the same thing to me - well anyway, now I'm burning through a wearying cold, and for about three to four weeks now I've been trying different ways to deal with a hurt ankle. Happened while standing at a Globe performance; had stood before - over three hours for Lear - but something this night made me keep rocking on my feet, stretching my calves and ankles, and well, at some point, something cracked, loudly. Hasn't been the same since - my new super-villain name is the Hobbler, behold as I limp slowly by you, that grimace on my face? pure menace. IB Profin helped for a few days and now an ankle brace is basically keeping my foot attached to the rest of me. When I'm off it for a while it starts to get better but I'm never off it for long enough: mounting St. Paul's earlier this week really did a number on it too. But I'll take a couple days - perhaps while I'm teaching myself Power Point - when I'm home and stay off it.

Reviewed everyone else's blogs a little while ago and very jealous of the pictures: very hard to get a good photo here, for me. I think it's a matter of timing, a few hours each day when it's beautiful and I'm in the British Library. Usually there's a gray overcast - always on the weekends lately - well, clouding the photos, but the biggest problem is the cramped nature of the city: hard to capture a building without getting the corner of another building, a streetlamp, phone booth, passing bus or something; hard to get a statue without a bunch of tourist perched on it like pigeons; and there do seem to be fewer wilder, 'freer' sites like the beaches and bonfires that seem to be on everyone's blog but mine. But I'm slowly accumulating my own good 'slideshow' and hope to really flesh it out when I go to Greenwich tomorrow. Also, oddly, lots of the photos I want to take I can't: insides of buildings like St. Paul's, inside Art Galleries, and the like; or, oddly, of the things that really grip/ disturb/ terrify or enrage me - street performers in the tube, beggars, tourists acting like tourists (they're like random pinballs compelled to smash into each other and the city), the potentially dangerous and irreverant youth, and lunatics (lots of the last two here - run across more waiting for or on the bus at night). But it's a bit awkward taking photos of strangers. Also most of my explorations are alone and I find it hard to hand over my camera to strangers, but - a few days planned with friends - I should get more photos with me - and maybe my bowler hat - in them soon.

Also, while wrapping up research - this phase of it, later thesis paper will require more - will be preparing somewhat for the fall semester, starting my schedule/ planner, doing that whole short list of personal goals (usually do this three times a year - the start of the two semesters and the summer - and usually accomplish about 75% at about 75% capacity, or as well as I would have liked), preparing monologues to audition for the fall shows, getting back into vocal warm ups and such (sadly slacked on those a bit but I can actually feel my body missing them and sometimes still incorporating them - as should be done always - into daily activity, speech: in fact every once in a while when I feel the void pressing in around me, erasing me - or just sad or depressed, though sometimes the sheer mass of people and encountering a sufficient number of angries or crazies here leads to that specific sense of erasure - I often serendipitously find myself humming at first and then maybe singing a little - Sinatra helps - to remind myself that I am here, now; it helps).

Be well, all.