New

I'm now 23 years and 2 days old.

I've been told that this is a great year and that 23 is a wonderful, fun age to be. I don't know much about being 23, so I asked why:

"Because it's a year that will have a lot of change for you."

Well, I'm typically not a big fan of a lot of change. But, I've been told that it's good, so I'm just going to gear up, take a deep breath, put a smile on my face, and say, "bring it."

Thoughts during a much needed break (last night)

Here's a mental ramble for you:

So, I've been reading scripts from about 3pm-9:30pm today. (That's a complete guess - I was looking at pages, not the clock.) And during my entire time doing so I've been listening to the Christmas Music station I created on Pandora. That's a lot of Christmas music. (But it's provided a better background sound than my neighbors' driving bass line to the hip-hop that they were listening to.)

At any rate, this song just came up:
"Hark the Herold Angels Sing" by the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra on their album entitled, "Christmas Choral Classics."

My first thought when I finally noticed hearing it was to skip the song. It's not quite "my style." I love classical music but this is/was a bit - how shall I say it - "heavy" for me.

And yet, as I held my finger poised, lightly scratching the button to skip the song, I made a little mental connection:

A friend of mine and I were talking last night about how this holiday season is a time of Spiritual Warfare. I mean, real spiritual War. The evil one knew that his defeat was imminent. The first Christmas wasn't nice, it wasn't gift wrapped, and somehow I kind of doubt that it was "peaceful" or "quiet" in the sense that we think about. This was no Hallmark image.

Evil raged against Good. Choirs and armies of angels filled the sky. Their appearance was glorious and terrifying.

Bring it back to this song, sung in this manner, by this choir, in this orchestra... "Heavy."



"'Hark!' The Herold Angels sing, 'Glory to the newborn king!'"



The style carries strength. And that's something to consider. The divine combination of absolute strength with absolute vulnerability.
It's beautiful.


It's Christmas.

Thankful

Okay, this is about two weeks belated, but I just wanted to run a quick recap on my Thanksgiving:

The Day of:
~ woke up at 4AM
~ drove to Modesto with my mom - girls' roadie! (drive time = 6hours)
~ sorted and hulled pecans while waiting for Thanksgiving lunch/dinner to be ready
~ recruited cousin to join in the work/fun
~ ate a lot of good food. had a lot of good conversation.
~ observed family
~ went on a walk down the canal for about 4 miles with Grandma and Cousin Christie
~ came back and ate pie
~ finished hulling pecans (helped out Uncle Nick a LOT by getting this chore done for him)
~ recruited cousin and aunts to help out this time
~ listened to Uncle Nick play flamenco guitar while we hulled
~ admired the newest member of "The Miller Clan" little Joshua Crooker
~ spent time with family

The Day after:
~ woke up at 4:25AM to go on a Black Friday Adventure with my Cousin Christie
~ went to Walmart and bought myself a camera - got lost getting there
~ went back to my aunt's house and went back to sleep - got lost getting back
~ woke up and spent more time with family
~ explored new camera
~ went on another walk down the canal with Mom
~ drove back home with Mom - picked persimmons before we left and also got a bag of pecans to shell

And there's a whole lotta love.

*Photos edited by Matt Vargo

Fall Retreat (revisited)

Jill let me grab her nifty camera and take a shot of this amazing tree up at Ponderosa Pines.
Here's the caption she wrote when she posted it for me on facebook:

"Becca thought this tree was spectacular, so she took a picture."



How true.

Today I...

~ Woke up early...6:30AM
~ Carpooled with those involved with the "Life Without Parole" production up to the Women's Prison in Chino
~ Made it there in about 30 minutes after getting Starbucks
~ Got cleared for security
~ Performed the thus said play for around 400 inmates
~ Cried a lot
~ Had a Q&A/response time with the inmates, several of whom were domestic violence survivors and had their stories directly represented in the dialogue of the play
~ Cried even more.
~ Left the prison and got lunch...starting the road home around 1:30pm.
~ Found out that my hometown is on fire. Thank God, my parents are safe right now
~ Made it back to Vanguard around 6:30pm (yes, that's a 5 hour drive).

~ am completely exhausted.

Yeah, clearly it's been one of those boring, typical days in my life...

And so she dances...

"Common sense" tells me to give up. But I have this really stupid annoying thing called a heart and it keeps getting in the way and disrupting my decision making process.

Quite clearly, I have commitments and obligations and those must be honored and kept. Yes, agreed. And to take on those dreams (however so small and insignificant to others) is making my life so much more complicated, stressful, and difficult than I should like it to be. The rational, obvious choice then is to let those dreams go and follow the path that I have set out for me now. I should sit this one out and hope for the ability to dance with my dreams in the future...the far off, unknown "someday."

But if we did not dare to follow our dreams, so many of the wonderful adventures, inventions, and some of the best moments in history would not have come to fruition.

I have the charge set before me that I was not born to play it safe, no matter how much I'd like to do so.
And so, I choose to risk. I am not content to give up so easily...I will fight and try until I have exhausted every resource and the answer is a resounding, "no."

I fall down again and again in the hopes that one day, I will finally learn how to fly. And then...oh my, how I shall soar...

Superchic[k] put it this way, "To fall is not to fail, you fail when you don't try."

Something of Substance...

On Thursday we drove down to Cal State San Marcos to perform "Life Without Parole." That's right - we are officially and technically on tour now. Neat.

Anyway, I grabbed a Snickers bar for our drive down and noticed a nifty little word and definition in the wrapper:


Substantialiscious \sub-'stan(t)-shu-'ll-shus\
(noun). The weight of something when you weigh it with your tongue.


Alright, aside from the misclassification of the word (it has been brought to my attention lately that the word should be an adjective, not a noun - true), I have a question (or a few) mulling around in my mind.

Who is weighing things with their tongues!?
Going off of that - what, exactly, are they weighing? Why are they weighing things with their tongues? (How did they get the idea to weigh things with their tongues in the first place?) And how are they doing it? (My imagination is running free and wild by this point.)

Of course, all answers I might come up with are only silly conjecture because "substantialiscious" isn't really a word. But at least I can point to a candy bar for something tasty to munch on and for a few moments (okay, maybe more than a few) of entertained musings.