"And so she changes seasons . . ."

". . . it's Mother Earth's routine. Green to brown, brown to white, white back into green, she changes clothes and puts on something clean." *continues humming and bobbing head*

Tom Chapin's children's songs? Anyone? Anyone? No? Okay.

Christina! Fantastic to hear from you! I think we can be lenient given the circumstances. :)

Hey girls! It’s Monday!

So, seasons! This won’t be long, because I have a crew assignment sheet, list of house manager guidelines, and program to finish before noon, but here we go! (I have a show going into tech today, yay!!!)

Winter: God, I hate winter. I hate it. I like to look at it; it’s beautiful, but I’d just as soon not experience it if it’s all the same to you. Especially Bowling Green winter. Bone-chilling wind? Frequent sub-zero temperatures? Tons of snow? Yeah, screw that. I like snow for nine days: Christmas Eve to New Years’ Day. After that, winter can get directly out of my seasonal periphery, thank you very much.

Summer: I enjoy summer, for the most part. Again, it’s this Midwest thing I hate. I will take a dry 95 degrees over a humid 80 any day, though I’d be lying if I said 75 degrees wasn’t my first choice either way. But I love cookouts and swimming and being able to hang around outside and getting sunburnt and feeling the grass beneath my feet. It’s when I feel like I’m breathing through a wet towel when I do all those things that I start to wish for fall.

Spring: My favorite seasons are definitely spring and fall, the transitioning seasons. Sadly, Ohio barely gets a spring. It’s winter until about mid April, spring for maybe a week, and then, bam! Welcome to Ohio humidity! But while it lasts, I love it. Spring symbolism (rebirth, new life, etc) and spring thunderstorms are wonderful things. I used to hate spring because it meant tornadoes when I lived in Illinois, but it’s grown on me since we moved to Ohio.

Fall: Probably my favorite season. I love the changing colors, the cooling days, the smell of September, and having an excuse to eat pumpkin-flavored everything! Again, we don’t get much of it in Ohio, but my favorite day of the year is probably the day I walk outside and know that fall has arrived. Now if I could only get all that without the ragweed allergies, we’d be all set!

And speaking of sets, I’ve got work to do, so Monday out!

Friday briefly has internet access!

*slinks into frame* Helloooooo

I'm writing this very quickly in between observing classes at the school I'm teaching at. I don't have reliable internet where I'm living yet (at a student residence for the engineering university here... French dorms are different, you can live in them even if you don't go to school there), so I finally got access to the computer room and work and found some time to give you guys a quick update! Anyway, the internet at my new home is really restricted and is limited to about 2 hours a day (I know... what??), so I haven't been able to blog yet, I hope you all will understand and be nice...! *puppy face* As soon as I pay my rent (today!) I'm going to start working on getting my own internet connection in my room so that I can have as much internet as I want and go to all the sites that I want (I'm dreadfully behind on all my shows). I'll also be able to buy supplies to do the challenge! It's not that I don't have enough money to get them now, it's that I can only withdraw so much money per day from my American account and all that money has to go towards my rent for now, and my French account isn't ready yet. As soon as I pay that rent today I can use the leftovers to buy things elementary things like scissors and paint and get all crafty. It feels very weird to actually need to go out and buy such simples things like scissors and glue.

My first two weeks of work are classroom observations and I'm in my second week as of today. I'm observing another class in half an hour, so I should be going to get ready for that! Also, French keyboards are confusing and hard to get used to- typing this took a lot longer than it normally would have. That last sentence alone took about five tries to get right.

Week 31 - Season!

From Carlyn this week:

Topic: Seasons. Which do you love, which do you hate, and why? Tell us stories of seasons!

Wednesday has few words, but much (little?) belief

Casey: Come back to us!

Christina: Hope you’re doing ok!

Cassie: No shenanigans! I came up with the idea all by myself : )

I believe it is entirely possible that aliens exist, potentially even sentient ones. We’ll find them sometime.

In terms of ghosts and the paranormal, we see what we want to see. And right now, we know little enough about the world that there are unexplainable things that manifest as paranormal. I’m not sure we’ll ever get to the point in our society’s knowledge that we understand enough to disprove all the things that we currently comprehend best as superstition. But we might. I think, given enough time, we will be able to find material explanations for every single thing that happens in our universe.

I have had paranormal experiences that, at the time, I promised myself I would never doubt the authenticity of. Once, when I was at a several-dozen-thousand-person conference, I felt a hand on my shoulder and didn’t see anyone’s hand there when I turned around. It was quite eerie, and it was a spiritual conference, so I attributed it at the time to the hand of God. I have since doubted the authenticity of this experience. I no longer believe in God or souls, really, and I’m pretty sure someone just moved their hand.

Also, and importantly, I am prepared to be completely wrong in everything I have ever thought and believed. So that’s fun.

Tuesday Imagines You Could've Guessed This

I do not believe in ghosts. I'm pretty firmly placed in the sceptical side of things, and it takes a great deal of mystery for me to even begin to conjure up possibilities. I don't believe in a soul, I don't believe in God, and I don't believe there is anything supernatural or metaphysical to be found on Earth, or as far as Earth can perceive it (that includes astrology, which happens to be my sceptical area of expertise - my username, Ophiucha, comes from one of my favourite inconsistencies in astrology).

To give me something to say, though, I will say that I accept the possibility of alien lifeforms. No, I don't think crop circles are the work of aliens, and anyone who has a cow and probing story to tell is a lunatic (a fitting word indeed; lunatic). But I know that the universe is vast and that the conditions for life are not exclusive to Earth. Though we have not found life, we've barely had a chance to leave our solar system. I don't know if, or even think that, there is a species out there which is sapient. We may well find life in the form of amoeba or plants or some bloody awesome terrifying dinosaur planet. Perhaps that barely even counts as 'aliens' to many people, we think of little grey men and two-mouthed, acid-for-blood killers, but in the strictest 'living thing of another earth' definition, I don't think it'd be absurd to find a flower out there, light years away.

I don't think I'll ever know of it, of course. I imagine I'll be dead long before  the technology to explore the depths of space are perfected. I wouldn't be surprised if we all, all of humankind, are dead before that technology is with us. It's a far more daunting task than I think most people realize, and I wouldn't think it odd if it took us less time to blow ourselves up in a nuclear war or drown the planet with melted, glacial ice than it took us to truly explore the Milky Way. Still years and years out, after I'm dead. But still, I don't know if we'll ever know.

Anyway, I maintain scepticism in regards to any matter bound to Earth, and even a bit beyond. Particularly if they've been proven wrong. I will never understand how homoeopathy is still around. Or astrology, as I said. There are so very many things that prove astrology wrong that it's invasiveness is all the more frustrating. Can't pick up a newspaper or magazine without being told my horoscope. Which is, without a doubt, completely different from my horoscope in the next one I pick up. Truly outstanding how these things manage to persist.

I suppose it is part of our culture, in a way. Not in the same way religion is, but these superstitions and attachments to the paranormal and the otherworldly. I think it's engrained in us. Maybe it's just a desire for something less mundane, maybe it's a desire for their to be an unknown (as every day, another mystery is solved, or at least proved not very mysterious at all). I don't understand it, but I was raised away from it. I've had spiritual beliefs before, and even those were so far away that I could justify them. Matters of the soul, mostly. I've lost that belief as I grew older and felt how the world changed, and could put these things into words. That might be it, really. All flights of fancy I have are put into writing fantasy. And I like it that way.


Oh, and as a kid, I was only ever told one ghost story. You probably know it. Amityville Horror. I grew up not a twenty minute drive from Amityville, so it was really the only one that was ever talked about in my part of Long Island. As it is, though, I'd already seen the movie by the time I heard the story, so I could never quite get into it. I'd probably have to say my favourite 'ghost story' was The Ring. I loved that movie when it came out; bought the manga and the Japanese DVD and everything.

Monday will not tempt the wrath of Alice

Hello, girls! It's Monday!

Alexandra - Your dragon was wonderful. Congrats on a well-completed challenge.

Carlyn - I'm still tempted to call shenanigans . . .

Christina - I hope France is wonderful and everything you were expecting, and I hope you're settling in very nicely! I look forward to hearing all about it in weeks to come.

And now for the theme of the week!

Do I believe in ghosts? . . . That's a difficult question. And yes, I know, I asked it, but still. The simplest answer is, I suppose, yes, but there are qualifiers.

First, I think humans see and sense the paranormal a little too easily. Alone in a room or a building and we hear a noise we can't explain, we get spooked, and we start to imagine all sorts of things lurking in the unknown. When we visit a place supposedly haunted, any unexplained voice will immediately have us screaming, "GHOST!" rather than, say, a grate that leads to the street, through which perfectly normal human voices are filtering.

That being said, though, I also believe in the scientific idea that nothing can be created or destroyed, it can only change form. Something has to happen to our life force and energy and essence once we die. If I believe that a person's soul can go to heaven, I also have to believe that it can choose to linger on the earth as well.

Thirdly, I believe that energy collects in a place, and I don't think it's a coincidence that often the most haunted places are prisons and the like, places where there has been a great deal of suffering. That energy lingers, in the same way that a home can be welcoming or feel cold before we ever meet the people who live there. The energy of a place lingers and resonates even when the people who once inhabited it are gone.

And finally, I believe in Alice.

This will be one of those points where my desire to keep an open mind and not shut any possibility out gets thrown out the window for the sake of theatre tradition. So, for instance, I will say that it is possible to be haunted, but not necessarily by ghosts, and that what we think of as ghosts may just be a residual spiritual energy, but I will also say without a shadow of a doubt that Alice is real and I believe in her whole-heartedly.

So, who is Alice, you may ask? I hesitate to say, because she doesn't like to be talked about, and I wouldn't anger her for the world. But I'm not in U Hall or even on campus, and there isn't a show coming up any time soon, so I think I'm safe. And Alice, you know from our dealings together that I hold you and have always held you in the highest respect.

Alice is the theatre ghost of BGSU. She haunts the Eva Marie Saint and Joe E Brown theatres. The legend goes that she was a theatre student here who was killed in a car accident on her way to accept an award back in the 1920s, I believe. So now, she haunts the theatres, and she's generally on pretty good terms with the theatre students, but there are a few things that will get her angry. One, talking about her in the theatre. Two, breaking theatre traditions (like saying "Macbeth" in the theatre). And three, failing to ask for her blessing or to invite her to the show. You can say what you want about the Macbeth superstition, that people psych themselves out and that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy and we bring the bad luck on ourselves, but offer a possible explanation for the fact that the last time Alice wasn't invited to a show, the main actor's throat started swelling shut for no reason in the middle of the afternoon on opening night. He had to be hospitalized, and the doctor's couldn't find any reason for the reaction.

So yeah, I believe in Alice. It also helps that I've had an Alice experience, which I won't go into here, but I know what I saw.

So, yeah. I think I've equivocated enough. I look forward to hearing what you think!

Week 30: Paranormal Activity

Hello girls! In honor of October and eventual Halloween, let's talk this week about the paranormal. Do you believe in ghosts? Spirits? Sasquatch? Have you ever had any paranormal experiences? What was your favorite ghost story as a child?

Enjoy!