24 hour theatre

Tonight at 10 p.m., auditions will begin. By midnight four (currently non-existent) plays will be cast.

Twelve Malone College Students will be locked into Founders Hall all night writing:

FOUR BRAND NEW PLAYS

Which will be directed and rehearsed all day Saturday by students.

So then tomorrow night, At TEN P.M., this Saturday Night --

The curtain goes up, and the show MUST go on.

If you're a local reader -- come to the show...in any case, pity me, the midwife of these four labor & deliveries...

i haven't tried to stay up all *all* night for...8? 10? years?

may you all sleep in

peace~

A Tedious Discovery Very Late Before I Went To Sleep Last Week

You should know before you try to imagine the frame of mind that I was in when my discovery revealed itself to me that I had just been thinking through the logistics of our bathroom light.

The lightbulb has burned out and its really not a big deal at all. Just an annoying deal to reach behind the lovely glass cover where there's not really enough room to make a screwing motion with your hand, so you can only screw so very carefully and incrementally.

And really the lightbulb wouldn't bother me at all if it didn't also remind me of the unpainted bit of drywall immediately behind the lamp which is unpainted it because i sanded away the wrinkled paint from the drywall, and then plastered and sanded it, when the skylight leaked but couldn't repaint perfectly without taking the lamp itself off.

And as I'm brushing my teeth I'm thinking: That's the last thing that I want to do. Repair that wall and replace that lightbulb.

So the frame of mind that I was in when I laid down in bed was:

---> Ahh the angst of being an inefficient suburbanite homeowner! You know that you're inadequate, but you have a great deal of trouble caring.

ALSO: weighing down in the back of my mind was my missing cell phone.

I hadn't been able to find it all day, even though I KNEW that it was in the chest pocket of my black sport coat, WHICH improbably I had managed to lose yesterday after wearing it under "my regalia"

(i'm not even going to get into why the quotation marks are around "my regalia" that would be a chronicle far longer than this or any blog should contain)

which was actually not my PRIMARY regalia BECAUSE i couldn't find my genuine PhD robe the morning before I had to walk in the processional as (for the first time) a department chair -- and therefore, a front-row-sitter.

So its like I'm going to sleep in a great big theoretical nest of my abstract deficiencies. None of which really prepared me for the ensuing revelation.

I was sort of drifting into a dream. My children were running wildly around a structure in the woods which I remember from my own childhood -- at Bethel Christian Camp where Perry Baptist Church sometimes had their Sunday Evening Service in the summertime, and part of me thought that the structure could, at any moment, become ROS -- our favorite Ice Cream place *or* more menacingly could be the home of angry heroine junkies.

This was the moment where I, fully awake, realized that the first week of school, complete with my new administrative duties, had, possibly been one of the most effective weeks off my academic career.

Oh no! I panicked. What if it turns out I'm BEST at being a department chair at a little evangelical college in the Heartland of Ohio? I was planning on being a novelist or a playwright or a director. And it turns out that maybe I was MADE FOR:

this?

This work which I find tedious, Kafka-esque & proof-positive of the weberian thesis (regarding rationality and the iron cages of bueracracy)...this is what I'm meant for?

You know that moment in the tent in the Lord of the Rings movie when Aragorn finally owns up to his true identity. Is named by his true name? Takes up his True Sword? His Destiny....?

And then I imagine to myself that this probably happens to people all the time. They discover that they're remarkable file clerks. That they were made to be quality control engineers in foundries. Regardless of how connected or disconnected that was to their impressions about who they were, what the world was, and what they might get to achieve.

I guess I could suck it up and get used to it and give in to my destiny....

But that's about as likely as my getting that light bulb changed any time this week....

Knock on Formica...

but things are going extremely well. I'm listening to some sweet new music...



well. new to me anyway. but just about perfect in a lot of ways.

(sample fantastic lyric: "our grandma bought us a new vcr. we watched it all night. we grew up inside of it.")

i kind of hope you're not reading, Joe Schanderson, because i'm in deep trouble if you found out that I bought this album before I even bought Andy Stochansky. (and I should insert here that Joe has the kind of perfect taste that makes me go -- if he tells me I should, I buy them.) But I'd been planning on it for a while if its okay. And the convergence of various people with great taste eventually led me to give in...

and boy am i glad.

and speaking of how great things are:

the insurance adjustor came to our house this afternoon and said, Yes. The hail damage is legit. (which we, frankly, didn't expect. As much as I'd feel dumb if *Joe* reads this entry, imagine how I'd feel if our insurance adjustor just happens to read that we didn't expect a payout. but hey, i'm just representing our nonprofessional perspective. Ultimately, mr. Insurance Adjustor, I trust you.) so we get a new roof. Seriously. I've never loved a hailstorm more.

And Jaelyn learned the days of the week. And Addison and I built the greatest lego house today. And Lynn (not officially, but unofficially) got her new job. And my dad gave me TONS of money for travelling expenses. That's right, David, Daniel & Angela, TONS. And he whispered: Let this money be a token of my favoritism. I know you must be feeling a bit skeptical about this claim, but let me legitimize it further by pointing out that at the moment that he whispered this blessing, my attention was distracted by a chipmunk apparently crawling into the a bent corner of the red aluminum siding outside of the Bob Evans Restaurant.

So everythings rosy. Just like on the alumni surveys that are pouring into our department just-pre-reunion.

And I'd say knock on Wood. But that would mean that I really thought things were through-and-through good. But I don't. ANd they're not. Behind all these particular events and feelings is a stew of disturbing darkness...wood shavings pressed together with glue and with a plasticky surface atop it...

But I'm still knocking on the formica anyway...

son of a preacher man

we're back from michigan where we celebrated my father's 20 years at the same church.

on sunday morning i sat in the front row of the mega church far below the towering stage and the theatrical lighting. It's the first time I've sat in the front row of a big church in a long time. its been even longer since i've been there in the official role of the preacher's kid.

i felt like the stares of all the people were like the weight of a million millstones pressing against my back. Their weight would either propel me forward into a running leap into the altar and the altar call...or right through the floor and maybe down to Hades.

it turned out that neither happened. my uncle terry told a masterful story that transformed my great grandfather Albert Riihiniemi into Jonah on the run from the prophetic call. It really was an amazing mythologizing story which integrated the life stories of my grandmother, her father and her two sons into this arch of fate and destiny. I think though, that if you take the metaphor very far, though, that it turns out that my dad & uncle's church congregations end up being Nineveh...

So I'm back into the routine of responding to papers this morning and all the great conversations with my siblings are fading like photographic images moving backward through the developing process.

My brother David has employed his fandom of *Trading Spaces* (et.al.) and designed these _sick_ spaces where he works with teenagers. And when I say _sick_, I'm trying to use relatively new slang to say -- really cool.

My sister was going to go hear G.W., despite her disagreement with him. She was dressed like Sydney Bristow's alias of the German Computer Programmer. She's so goth.

My brother Daniel was trying to convince me that pacifism as a way of life is defeated by some scifi vision of the world he invented where a madman shoots gas down a pipeline and i can reroute the gas from a promise keepers stadium to a small fast food restaurant. If I don't reroute, he suggests, I'm killing all those people.

It was a good time.

Back to grading...