Monday, January 9, 2017

Panem Et Circenses

It’s been a while, my dear readers. I feel like that is a recurring theme of this blog, but you know what, sometimes I go out and do interesting stuff and other times, I watch teenage comedies in my bedroom wearing my mermaid tail blanket for hours at a time. This blog has become a sort of bi-weekly experience, but the great part about my use of the term bi-weekly is that it can mean every other week, but it could also mean twice a week and you have no way of knowing what I’m up to and you can’t get mad because I’m technically right.

Semantics aside (but seriously, who came up with that bi-weekly thing? There were some serious flaws in that plan), 2017 has been good to me. Yes, it is a new year and this is technically my first post of said new year. I said it’s been a good one, but that does not necessarily equal exciting.
New Years itself was blah. I’m not a big fan of that holiday. I mean, imagine if we celebrated the passage of everyday in the same over-the-top fashion – that would be a lot of champagne. Speaking of champagne, we had a performance on Tony N Tina’s and an after party that the audience was invited to. Several members of the audience decided that spraying champagne all over the dance floor was totally appropriate. I did not appreciate this. I left the theatre around 2am, which was later than I would have liked, but not as late as other people.

Now, the only thing I’ve really done that has truly been blog-worthy was the very busy Tuesday I had last week. It involved a job interview, a farewell lunch, a doctor’s appointment, a dinner date with myself and an improv show. My feet were very sore at the end of the day. Spoiler alert: I got the job, which isn’t really a job so much as an unpaid teaching artist assistant gig with a really good company. But don’t worry, it could eventually turn into a paying job and I get a $30 stipend for travel expenses, which is really just $30 for me since the school I’ll be working at is walking distance from my apartment.

The farewell lunch was actually farewell drinks at Starbucks with my bosses at Lookingglass. It was fancy networking business-y stuff with a snowman cookie (yeah, I networked, so corporate of my little frees-spirit self).

Thanks to HIPAA, I get to keep all of the information about my doctor’s appointment top secret. (Ok, yeah, I know that isn’t technically what HIPAA is for but don’t tell me that that wasn’t a good turn of phrase).

After that, I had four hours to kill and since the improv show was a six minute walk away from where my doctor’s appointment was and my apartment was 46 minutes away, I couldn’t exactly justify going home. (I also knew that if I went home, it would be nearly impossible to get me back out again but I’d already spent $5 on a ticket to this thing and told my friends that I would be there).
This brought me to the Bread Café. I went to the Bread Café a few months ago and honestly, I was within walking distance of several other tasty looking places, but this past Tuesday, January 3rd was the 25th birthday of one extraordinary woman, Ellen Kristen Kuhl, best friend and college suitemate. Ellen’s favorite food is bread. I once bought her a loaf of French bread as a gag gift and she ate the entire thing before the night was over. My previous experience at the Bread Café was promising enough that I told her I would take her there whenever she comes to visit, but I realized that this was the perfect little way to celebrate her birth, even though we were separated by several states and time zones. (This is the Panem part of the post).

I got the Veggie Cabra sandwich. The menu said it was spinach, yellow squash, goat cheese, mushrooms and Mediterranean dressing. It was a decent sandwich (the bread was really good, obviously) but not as good as what I got the first time I went there. Next time (and I’m sure there will be a next time), I think I will try one of their pizzas or pasta dishes, even though those aren’t bread.
I stayed at the restaurant long after I’d finished my sandwich, but the place was pretty empty so that wasn’t an issue. I debated getting a dessert but no one was at the counter when I went back up so that saved me some money and calories. After that, I was left to walk around until show time. The show was at 10, which is distinctly past my bedtime, but my friend, Claire was performing with her improv troupe (yup, I know someone who made her own improv troupe) and I’d missed their first performance and had promised not to miss the next one.

The show was at the Playground Theatre, which I’d walked past several times in my Chicagoan adventures and was very curious about. I got there an hour early, which gave me plenty of time to look around… the one room. It’s a one room theatre.

Anyway, Claire and her group were the last to go and they totally killed it. (As marvelous as they were, this wasn't a talent based thing as you might expect. It was because the girls in the troupe all had class before the show and requested to go last to insure that they were able to get there for their set). It was actually a fun night and I ended up sharing an Uber home with a guy who’d also been at the show and knew Claire through their improv class. (And that was the circenses part).

The rest of the week was mainly work stuff and boring stuff and apartment stuff. I made a new recipe of soup which yielded more leftovers than I had plastic containers for but it was delicious and I was able to grab some Tupperware from my roommates to put the rest in the freezer. Oh, and I watched Hercules on Hulu while I did it. I wouldn’t want you to miss out on that detail.

On Sunday I went to the movies by myself to see Hidden Figures which was pretty interesting and then I got Golden Globes updates through the internet because I don’t have cable.

I was supposed to work today at my Adventure Stage internship, but my boss’s son had different plans and I woke up to a text saying that her son was sick and she was working from home so I had the day off. Exciting news, except that that left me without anything to do except drag my laundry down the street to the laundromat. (No, I didn’t actually drag it, that would be disgusting).


I’m going to the Adler Planetarium tomorrow, so that should be worthy of my writing time and your reading energy. I will keep you posted with my bi-weekly posts and maybe my next blog post won't have a pretentious Latin title that only I think is clever.

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