Hello again! It’s yet another rainy
weekend up here in Portland. I’ve been busy basically non-stop this week, so I
decided to take some time to myself this afternoon. My friends Charlie, Jasper,
Zoe, and I all took blankets and hot chocolate into the lounge and watched
Monty Python on the big-screen TV there. It felt like the first time I’d had
two hours to do nothing in a while. It was really nice to just get cozy and
laugh with my friends and listen to the rain outside.
We’re starting our final scenes in acting
class, and last class we turned in an analysis of the character we’re playing. My partner Trevor and I are going to be Doug and Kayleen from Gruesome Playground Injuries.
I enjoyed that exercise a lot because learning about characters is sort of my thing. As
an English major, I feel like most of my time is spent studying people. I comb
through plays and short stories and novels to find the contradictions and
idiosyncrasies in characters that make them human. There’s so many moments
during my Shakespeare class lectures when we’re talking about Cleopatra and I’m
just like: “Hey! I do that!” Everything I learn about a character helps me
understand them both more and less. I know something more than I did before, but I also end up asking
more questions about what I’ve learned, questions that can't be answered. And in my fiction class, I get to do the
reverse and actually create characters from the ground up. I feel like my
education really gives me a sense of how complex and beautiful the world is. I
love that.
So, we’re working on our final
scenes in Acting. We’re moving on from Macbeth
to The Winter’s Tale in Shakespeare. We’re
continuing to workshop our short stories in Introduction to Fiction. And in
Theatre and Society, we’re finishing the first drafts of our final papers and
starting our final creative projects. The latter can be done as a solo artistic
project, but my professor highly recommended that we collaborate. So, my friend
Alisa and I are going to co-write a short play where the female protagonists of
Greek plays talk back to the male playwrights about how they’ve been
represented. So, Clytemnestra will try to explain to Aeschylus who she really
is in an effort to be written as less of a caricature. Then, Alisa is going to
direct it with a few more people from my class as actors. Hopefully we can make
it happen with some help from our professor along the way!
Anyway, I have a lot to do before tonight, so I'd better sign off. After dinner, I’m going to my friends’ house to celebrate my friend Zoey’s and my 20th
birthday! We’re one day apart so we’re going to have a joint party. Here's a photo of us from when I got to visit her over the summer. She lives about a three hours' drive from me.
That’s all for now. If you have questions
about life at LC, don’t hesitate to email me at jessicakostka@lclark.edu!
Jess