May 18th - 23rd

May 18th - 23rd

40 days and 40 nights.  If Moses did it, so can I?

Monday

Ah, that's a new one.  Starting my week on a Monday.  How very British of me.  To get the bad news out of the way: someone broke into my email account for school and sent bizarre emails.  I just spent the last 15 minutes clearing all the cache and cookies, resetting the browser and changing all of my passwords - to everything.  I feel violated.  On top of that, I still don't have a phone and my watch broke, so this was the last thing I needed.   What's worse - I didn't get the scholarship.  They gave it to a guy from Montana who's already got a job at a university, and who is also presenting at the ATHE conference in NYC.  Understandable.  I have 3.5 years to reapply for this scholarship, so I'm not going to let it get me down.  

I got an email from one of my professors from MMC who I'd sought some advice about finding a job when I get home.  She said that it is not likely for me to get a job right out of school.  (This is not very comforting.)  If this is the case, I'll be coming back to at least get some teaching experience at Trinity if they hire me.  

Good news - my mom said she would have my favorite meal waiting for me when I get home on July 1st.  My mother makes the best chicken casserole in the whole world and nothing will satisfy my craving for a home-cooked American meal better than that.  Ah, if only I could have my Grandma's peanut butter pie, I'd be set for the next ten months :)  I'll have to wait til August when I drive the 8 hours to visit.  Speaking of food (when am I not speaking of food?) - Tim promised to make me homemade mac and cheese that would - and I quote "be so good I'd be at the gym for weeks working it off."  Anything that good is worth the weight.  I honestly meant to write "wait" instead of "weight", but I think my subconscious knows best.  Haha.  (Or I'm dyslexic like the other 95% of my course).  

I tried to go to school late, after feeling really ill all morning - but the second Colin and Lizzie saw me they were like, "Whoa, Miss - you look awful.  You should go home and go back to bed."  I wasn't really happy with this, but I figured if I looked bad enough to get that kind of response, there was something wrong.  I picked up something for lunch, took a 3 hour nap and watched the best sequel in the entire world (The Godfather II) in order to cheer me up.  I tried to be productive later on, quite unsuccessfully.  I just hate being sick with no one around to take care of me.  I just wanted to go home.  

Tuesday

Still recovering from yesterday.  I went in for Text with Alex Bingley.  It was all right.  He got on his high horse about pedagogy and in my mind - wasted our time for about 25 minutes...going on about teaching instead of doing his job.  I don't know if this is a status thing and he feels like he needs to prove something to us or what, but I just wanted to do the damn Text class.  That's what he's getting paid to do.

Then we had about five hours of IPP, where Katerina wanted us to work out practical exercises during this unstructured class.  Colin joined Kate and I to work on our similar topic.  Katerina came over to Kate and I to ask about our projects.  After she talked to Kate she turned to me and said, "Miss, you look different.  Is the anxiety getting the best of you?"  I just lost it.  Did she have to put it like that?  I'd at least kept a lid on it all morning.  I told her I didn't want this project to be a huge friggen therapy session and that I'd been working on dealing with it for over six years now, and I didn't know where to go from here.  I'm feeling less and less capable of doing this.  All of this.  I knew this wasn't going to be easy, I just wish I could've prepared myself a little better for such a huge blow to my sanity.  

If there was a better way to go then it would find me.

I can't help it - the road just rolls out behind me.

Be kind to me, or treat me mean.  I'll make the most of it - I'm an extraordinary machine.

Wednesday

I've been really positive about the course and my experience here, so I realize what a Debbie Downer I must seem like lately.  But it's been feeling pretty steadily horrible as of late.  I think I'm just so homesick at this point that it's become very hard to cheer myself up.  There are moments during the day where I feel fine, like I could work here and make a life here.  Then I'm overwhelmed with doubt, feeling as though I just got here and still have no idea what I'm doing.  

So the first half of the day went well.  I got up and went to the gym for an hour.  I ran some errands like picking up my Father's Day card (it's so good!) and getting a healthy lunch.  But when I got back I just couldn't bring myself to do any work.  I laid down for a while, but I think that made it worse.  I got some ridiculous emails out of the blue which put me off a bit, but other than that I think I was just worried about my nonexistent career as a voice teacher.  Adrianne was a champ in keeping me from despairing too much about not getting a job.  I can't expect it to be easy, and yes I am young and yes I have plenty of time to figure it all out.  I'm not very patient when it comes to these things though - I'd just like to know.    

Thursday

I skipped class today.  There's no guilt there though.  We were learning a Glaswegian accent that I'll never use in Accents & Dialects, then we were doing IPP work - that to be honest, I need to work on by myself at the moment.  I emailed Katerina and told her that I was sorry but I needed to take a day so that I would be able to move forward.  I caught up on lesson plans, did 60 minutes on the elliptical, showered and ran some errands.  I mailed Adrianne's Happy Un-Germany things and my Father's Day card for Pops, then got a new phone (shakes fist), picked up a healthy lunch and more vitamin supplements from Holland & Barrett as suggested by my mother.  

Granted, after I did some work I watched some episodes of Weeds, then went to dinner (which I didn't eat much of because this catering company should stop kidding themselves and instead stay far away from any attempts at ethnic food).  I don't know why I thought tonight would be any different, but my options were unidentifiable beef mush, fish casserole or vegetable biryani that they misspelled on the board.  That should've said something, but I just wrote it off as them also being completely illiterate on top of incapable of making a decent meal.  I don't know why I even show up for dinner.  Trying to save some money, but I've only got one body and I don't want to put that into it.  Three bites into biryani from hell and I gave up.  I went to Waitrose, got some hummus with wheat pita and fruit for dessert and came back.  

Totally unrelated but disappointing news: Earth, Wind & Fire are coming to MGM in June.  Why am I so far away??  This is a travesty.  However, they'll be in Allentown, PA in September so this may be remedied.  Pops would definitely drive to Allentown to see them.  

I've got to teach 21 British musical theatre students how to speak with an American accent tomorrow from 1pm to 5pm!

Friday

If I have learned anything from this course - it is how truly resilient I am.  And thank God for it.  I had a good time teaching my students today.  This morning I went to school for a bit to print off the contemporary scenes I wanted them to work with (Tony Kushner and David Hare) for the American accent class.  I had talked to my dad for a bit last night on Skype (trying to get this VASTA conference thing all settled through Pay Pal) and I told him I had to teach today for four hours.  Seeing my dad's reaction made me feel like it wasn't going to be as hard as I thought.  Hell, it's my home accent.  And I love these kids too; they work so hard and are such good students.  We all had a good time, breaking down the accent and then doing scenes and monologues.  They picked it up quick and it was actually a lot of fun.  I'm become quite proud of my accent since I've been here.  More proud of who I am, even.  

In the morning after hitting up the library to print things off I went to Bank (oh so corporate) where I had to meet Thomas to take the DLR to Greenwich.  I found a Starbucks to park myself in and review my lesson plans.  This particular Starbucks was great because it was small and there weren't many people coming in and out.  They also chose this particular day to play the best David Bowie compilation in existence (rah rah Bowie haters) Sound + Vision, for an hour.  It makes me feel very ready for summer - and honestly - hearing the song "Young Americans" before I had to go teach an American accent in London to a bunch of Brits definitely made me feel better.  Also, I've taken all my sad bastard music off my iPod as not encourage any anxiety in the next 38 days.  So far, so good.  

Other good news: my professor from MMC emailed again and offered for me to join the mentoring program through VASTA which would allow me to assistant teach her classes, while maybe working at AMDA or AADA or NYU (where ever I could get hired).  She seemed pretty optimistic about the likelihood of me getting a job at one of NYU's acting schools because there's apparently a high turnover rate.  I emailed Tony to see if the rumor about there being a position open in the fall is true.  Fingers crossed.  

So this morning I was in the atrium and I saw myself on the "big screen" at school - which they've got all over school running constantly.  I have to admit, I was pretty damn excited to see that I'd made it to said big screen:  

But first, the Grandmama of Voice - Miss Cis Berry.

That's me in the middle in the back and my course leader in all her fierceness in the front - we're at the Roy Hart workshop running around.  

Workshop in action.  

This is me sitting on the panel at Catherine Fitzmaurice's lecture.  I felt so damn cool.  Left to right is me, Betsy Allen, Tara McAllister-Viel, Catherine and Roger Smart.

This is Thomas and me at Trinity College of Music where we go every Friday for teaching placement.  They're filming Wolfman (with Johnny Depp and Antony Hopkins) but unfortunately we didn't get to see them :(

Thomas really wanted to get a "Where's Johnny Depp?" picture.  Haha.

Production crew!  They had cameras suspended that dropped down as that stunt guy flew down, in sync with him.  Thomas and I were such tourists.

There's one of those night-time light things.  I might work on one of these kinds of sets one day :)

More carriages.

It's a period piece, I'm assuming, hence the carriages and such.

Stunt man!

Saturday  

I felt good today, after having a turn-around yesterday with the lessons and with my optimism peaking again.  I don't know if resilient is the word, but that's how I feel.  Or persevering.  Regardless - I am feeling much better than I have in the last week.  I actually ate breakfast today for the first time in over a week.  No sign of James still since he disappeared last Sunday.  Surprisingly though, I'm not really missing him.  I think I'm actually feeling better because there's no moaning going on, and he loves to moan.  He can be very dramatic.  Then an hour on the elliptical.  Lunch from EAT. and dinner from Pret.  Tim would be so jealous.  Back to read a bit and relax.  I did what I'm sure in a year I'll only be able to daydream about doing: napping during the middle of the day.  I took advantage of this and then went out later after having conserved some energy.  Now I'm back and can't sleep of course, but it's fine.  I have Sunday to get work done and then Monday to relax - yes obscure bank holidays aka U.S.'s Memorial Day.  38 days left.