I Won a Major Award!

I recently won a major award.

Oh wait, not that.  This:

The above is an award currently circulating among bloggers, and Magic Cookie decided I was an interesting enough person that she would bestow it upon me.  Although I like her blog 50% less since she got rid of the dinosaur in her header, I’m so chuffed to be given an award, I’ll link to her regardless.

(JUST KIDDING HA HA HA I READ YOU IN GOOGLE READER ANYWAY I DON’T EVEN MISS HIM – >sob<)

The rules of the award are as follows:

1. Thank the person who gave you this award.

2. List seven things people may not know about you.

3. Pass it on to 15 (or so) other bloggers

So, without further ado, onto the list:

1. The first is kind of cheating, but I’ve had lots of questions from various parties about this, so it’s clearly something other people don’t know about me.  I’m going to Brazil.  On Tuesday!  Til the following Tuesday!  So for a week!  Our school co-sponsors a pretty cool international moot court competition – we share hosting responsibilities with a school in Rio de Janeiro and one in Bogota.  The competition’s in its second year and involves foreigners competing against one another in their own languages.  We have simultaneous translation services arranged, so the competitors and judges will wear headphones and hear the arguments in their own languages, whatever they may be.  Pretty cool.  Pretty darned complicated also.  I’m stressed.  Mildly wigging.  Tip: don’t ever agree to arrange a complicated organizational tasks in a city that’s 4762 miles away and is full of people who are known for being very fun but also kind of laissez fare about time and organization and also who speak another language from you and also who have never done this sort of thing before and don’t know how it works and also where both you and the foreign country celebrate this thing called Mardi Gras/Carnaval just a few days before the thing begins.  Taking on such a chore will make you very stressed, and you had better hope that the cool visit to an awesome country you’ve always wanted to see is worth it.  Because DIOS MIO.

2. I have played dozens of roles in dozens of plays in my life, but my weirdest was no doubt the dual role of Roberta I and Roberta II in a play by Eugene Ionesco (Jack, or the Submission).  Roberta/I was a bride in this absurd play, and there was something wrong with the first Roberta, so they trotted her/me in the back and then trotted Roberta II/me back onto stage (same as Roberta I, except with two extra noses, at which point she/I was acceptable).  Then, three-nosed as I was (we used glasses and beige makeup applicators to create my two extras), I had climb onto a rocking chair and fake an orgasm while whinnying like a horse.  So, yes.  I’ve done that.  Bet you haven’t.

3. I moved to Australia on my own when I was 21.  You can see the “Life in Australia” tag to read a few stories about it.  I lived there for a year, working as a waitress in a coffee bar filled with Italian-Australians who cursed at us in Italian and regularly fought loudly in front of the customers.  The manager gave me a $500 travel bonus when I quit.  I saw some of the Olympics in Sydney (it was, as you can probably discern from google, the year 2000), I took a terrible and unreliable car to the center of the country and back, and I toured rainforests, beaches, banana plantations and the bush.  I slept in the back of the terrible car, and it was often very cold, and I’m so glad I did it, even if it made my parents FURIOUS and very worried about me.

4. I moved to England on my own when I was 24.  I studied for, and received, my Masters degree in Shakespeare and Renaissance history.  See “Stratford-upon-Avon” if you’d like to read about that.  (I should have entitled that tag “My Very Expensive Folly of a Useless Degree.”)  If there’s one thing I’d change in my life, it would be that I had started this blog (if that was even possible) back before I did these travels.  I hand-wrote some things about my two year long trips in tiny notebooks that I carried with me everywhere (Oh. So. Pretentious.), but a lot of it was in pencil and it’s fading.  In any case, I never seem to find the time to transcribe my observations from that medium to this.  One day I hope to, before the pencil marks and memories are completely obliterated by time.  In any case, for this year I shared a four story Victorian house with an Australian, an American, and a German.  We lived within blocks of ancient Trinity Church by the banks of the River Avon.  I worked in a pub mere meters from the Royal Shakespeare Company theaters, pulling pints for all manner and type of real-life characters, and I even got to do some acting workshops with RSC folk.  I saw a First Folio.  I saw an actual Quarto – of what play I can’t recall, though probably Hamlet since there are so many of them.  I took a class on Shakespeare in the very classroom in which Shakespeare likely sat 450 or so years before.  Folly it may have been, but it was amazing also.

5. In Australia, I had an English boyfriend, and in England my boyfriend was Australian.  I ended up  marrying a good old American boy, though, bless the day I met him.

6. I learned Latin at the age of 12, and studied it from 12-22.  I can still read basic phrases, and remember all of the grammar stuff.  Polish me up on vocab and I could be good to go on reading anything you care for me to read.  As part of my college senior thesis, I wrote a translation of a piece of Ovid’s Metamorphosis.  I just read it the other day, actually, and it was DARN GOOD, if I say so myself.  Ted Hughes, eat your heart out.

7. I went to China for two weeks in high school, as part of a marching band excursion. My old marching band teacher took the band on international trips every other year, and he always tried to pick somewhere unusual (Vietnam, Russia, Singapore).  No tours of Western Europe for him!  I vividly recall assembling to march on the Great Wall of China – which we had received a permit to do – and being shooed off the wall by guards with guns.  We assembled below the wall instead, and played in a half circle, and crowds of people walked up to us and asked us to hold their babies while they took pictures.  I ate virtually nothing while there – Chinese people like their food much more sour than we Americans do.

That’s moi!  Now I pass it on . . . to . . . Attorney Work Product!!