No sleep in Heaven or Bethlehem

So now that I have your attention...(cause that picture does nothing if not grab attention! Holy hell it's HOT, right?) I've been staring at that one for days -- since Roman put it on his Myspace page. He's got plenty of new hot pictures from going out to clubs in LA too and I'm seriously feeling like I'm on the wrong side of the country.

I'm going to do something unusual in this post, I'm going to tell you when I slept and for how long each night. Take careful note, and I wonder if anyone can tell me exactly how sleep deprived I am right now.

So, Thursday night was our school's male beauty pageant (I don't really know how else to describe it). No, I wasn't in it this year. (My friend Mike beat me in the vote so he was in it, not me) Before it started there was blog-worthy stuff going on. My friend Olga was palling around with this cute guy who was obviously gay. She introduced me (I might have encouraged that) and he and I got to talking, he gave me his phone number and encouraged me to text him. Note that this was his idea completely.
So I did text him. And he replied. And so on and so forth throughout the course of the show.

The show was PHENOMENAL! I have to take a moment to say, however, that for a competition that is meant to reward creativity, originality, and dance skills it utterly failed this year. My friend Matt, after imitating Gollum and creating his own Lord of the Rings/Michael Jackson mix for his lip sync portion should have at the very least placed and he didn't. It was the most disappointed I have been in my school since I got here -- and that's really saying something.
I was extremely pleased, however, that my friend Mike (who beat me in the vote, and that's the only reaosn I wasn't competing myself) won. He was probably the most consistently awesome, and plus his escort was his mother (and he danced with her when they came out), so he had it in the bag. But I'm ridiculously pleased that he won, because what shame is there in my losing out in the vote to the guy who won? None. Nadah. I'm still almost the most amazing guy at our school.

Once the show ended, however? The guy I'd been talking to, Josh, suddenly stopped texting back. I saw him at our campus' little eatery where everyone went after the show, said "hi" and got a look and a cold shoulder. Obviously not worth it, but my friend Ty who was with me was mildly outraged, and stole my phone and then texted Josh from his own. "Hey, you know Graham?"
"Yeah, why?"
"No reason."
"Who is this?"
Ty gave his name from the show that had just happened, which ps Ty was in and it was kind of a train wreck (no offense Ty!). No response. A while later, I'm back at home and Ty and I are texting, since I'm a little peeved with him for doing that (cause now I look like I just gave out Josh's number) when suddenly Ty says "he wants to hang out with me". Obviously, Ty didn't because he's got moral standards and loyalty to his friends and also that's like a red flag that this kid is either far sluttier than either of us want out of a guy or that he's just a douche.

So I went to bed, and I slept for six hours.

Then there was Friday. Went through classes mindlessly and drone-like as always, with one exception: my advising appointment. Where we worked out my schedule so that I will be finished with classes one semester early. I am finishing up school in December! I'll still walk with my class in May, but it gives me a whole semester to figure out how to land on my feet following graduation. That is, if everything goes according to plan and we know how improbable that is in my life. :P

Then I took Katie to her latest doctor's appointment with her newest doctor. They hadn't gotten her x-rays, so they've scheduled her for a bone scan on Friday. Now, while she was making phone calls to let everyone involved know the latest, she got one from the government temp agency that she works for. And she was asked to resign her position, because she's missed so much work. Apparently, they're also including the two weeks she took off between assignments, although no one ever so much as implied that that actually counted against her time off. More than that, they're counting all of her excused medical absences because of this foot thing. She put in her resignation on Monday.

The scariest part? I haven't had a chance to try to find a roomie once she moves out in May. I don't know when I will get that chance. I don't even have time to stop by the rental office to go over my finances so I can make sure I can keep the apartment. Well, maybe Thursday I will. I better. I mean, seriously? I haven't had time to look at all of my e-mail (and it's taken me DAYS to write this), so the classifieds sitting in my inbox? I have 663 unread e-mails, and most of that? Isn't junk mail (though a lot of it, by now I'm sure, is old enough that I no longer need to read it). I go through about 30 a day, and get somewhere between 40 to a 100 the following -- this is a losing battle.

Friday night, the theater department took a trip to see Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht. It was phenomonal! Our professor Terri was in it, playing Mother Courage herself, and she was GREAT.

We got back from the show at midnight, and I began to work on my Monday morning presentation. Then I went to sleep for seven hours.

I woke up bright and early and went to get my haircut for the show, because it's coming up and coming up quickly! And we -- or at least I -- am so not ready. There's so much going on, and I just want to be able to focus on the show but it's really, truly difficult right now to focus on anything.

So after that, I met up with Allies and we went on our trip to Philadelphia. I handed my car keys to my friend Lindsey to give to my friend Natasha who needed my car for the day (I trust Natasha with my Pretty, she's driven her before.) We went to the zoo (I love that the signs all say Phila Zoo), which was a BLAST. Of course, Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence is WAY better, but that's beside the point. Then we went to the gayborhood and we just sort of hung out. Amanda and I went to this restaurant called "More Than Just Ice Cream" and it was SO GOOD!
Soon, we all met up and headed over to 12th Air Command. We made a LOT of friends, and I met another boy. (Actually, all the gay guys there did...kinda.) His name is Beau, he's cute, and he's coming to visit this weekend. Why is it that I'm apparently at my hottest when I'm stressed beyond belief and can't really enjoy it? :P

We left Philly and went home. We got back at 4:19 am. I chilled around campus -- car-less. With my phone, dead. I walked to Giant and bought a breakfast of dried fruits. I walked back to campus and saw in Natasha's driveway -- my car! So I chillaxed there til she came out at 6:30 am (I know, I'm a creeper) and she and I headed over to meet the theater club for the New York trip!
The bus driver was AJ, who I go waaaaaaaayyyyy back with (I'm pretty sure I've mentioned him on here, probably ages ago when I first started dancing at XS), but I won't lie, he makes me kind of really uncomfortable. And he charmed the socks off everyone on the trip.
We wandered around New York City, and eventually settled on lunch at a fabulous little place called, if I recall correctly, the Playwright's Tavern?
After lunch we headed over to the Eugene O'Neil Theater and watched Spring Awakening. I am not lying or exaggerating at all when I say it is the best thing I have ever seen on Broadway. If you have the chance, you MUST see this show!!! It's still mostly the original cast, which was fantastic.
We also stood at the stage door and got autographs! YAY! :)

We got back at 11:30 pm. I finished working on my presentation for Monday morning and slept for six hours. I woke up, did my presentation, and left class for my own doctor's appointment for my elbow. The doctor pulled up my x-rays and then asked "Did you have x-rays taken?" He was confused by how my elbow looks like it belongs to an old man. The problem? Colitical arthritis from my Crohn's disease. The remedy? Surgery on April 22nd.
And somehow, the jokes that everyone and their mother keeps making about elbow injuries just aren't making me feel the love. They are making me feel like my friends are retarded and that they'd probably have a hernia if they had an original thought though. (I know, that was mean, but after twelve nearly identical masturbation jokes about my elbow in under an hour and a half, I think they've earned it.)

Last night, I went to bed at two thirty am, but I couldn't fall asleep for several hours. When I did get to sleep, I didn't stay asleep much. So even though there was a good ten to twelve hours dedicated to sleep, I don't think it helped much.

And, ps, that paycheck that went missing? STILL MISSING. I'm calling work today and trust me, there's gonna be words. I have not ever worked for ONLY two hours, and yet that's all I've been paid for at all this entire month. I need to go look for a job. But that costs gas that I can't really afford. Huh, another losing battle, imagine that.

Hey, finally finished! And just think...I started writing this Thursday night. It didn't quite take a week!

Across the Wires

Warning: Parts of this post are probably going to be super emotional. I might even cry...but keep that on the down-low for me. :-P
Also, I'm really Attention Deficit today.

Today, and yesterday, there was a rumble going on in this particular niche of the blog-o-sphere that I seem to have placed myself in. It's a very comfortable niche, I have to say. If it were a room, we'd have expensive, cushy leather couches, I think.
Anyways, the point is...there was a rumble. That's my word for -- no, not for a gang fight, that's West Side Story -- for an event everyone talks about. You know how when everyone is whispering to each other in one place and you don't know what they're saying (yet) it's kind of this rumbling noise caused by the voices? That's why I call it a "rumble".

I've lived through a lot of rumbles. Oddly enough, I usually have a feeling that a rumbling is going on before I hear anything about it. I mean, just for instance, the night of Station Nightclub Fire -- probably the biggest tragedy to happen in Rhode Island in...well, possibly ever, was a definite rumble for months afterwards. The night it happened I couldn't sleep, so I went downstairs to get a drink and discovered my dad had turned on the news. It was about 11:00. He and I watched the news for another 10 minutes, discussing our mutual inability to sleep even though we both had to be up at 6 the next morning (I can't for the life of me remember why). At about 11:10 the news switched to live coverage of the fire.
"Oh," I said, "I wonder if that's why we couldn't sleep."
As it turns out, we weren't unique. From the people I talked to about it, it seems like most of Rhode Island couldn't sleep that night.

Anyways, enough of my off-topic story telling. The blog-o-sphere has had a rumble. And when I logged onto Blogger yesterday, before I opened anyone's blogs, I had that sort of feeling. I've had it before, you know. When someone you know isn't totally alright and you know you're about to find out. You've had that nagging feeling all day, and you know you're about to find out because the feeling just jumped from the back of your mind to the point where you can't think of anything else.
So I went down my blogroll. It didn't take long before I found out who it was. Everybody who's reading this, please keep Spider in your thoughts and prayers.
(I particularly like this spider in this picture because, yes, it's still a spider, but it's actually not ugly.)
Anyways, I've read about this event in Spider's life on, I think, four blogs (five counting this one...) and each one has had tons of comments from other bloggers, many of whom I can only assume are talking about it on their blogs which I haven't read.

It reminds of me of something. I bet Muse is already thinking of it. The episode I'm about to tell you of probably had an even bigger effect on her than it did me. It's a lot more serious than what happened to Spider (not that I'm minimalizing what Spider's going through, I'm really not!)
See, the moral of this event I'm about to describe is that the people we talk to online, even though we've never met them, have a profound effect on our lives. And we, in turn, have a profound effect on them. Even though we've never seen each other face-to-face, we are friends, acquaintences, and in some cases enemies in a very real sense.
And much like the real world, it can sometimes take something unfortunate to prove that. The number of people pulling for Spider right now seems to support this idea too.

Anyways, this story will bring together everything that I've talk about in this post. I promise.
See, the online community Utopia Skye (which used to be much more active, and which I used to be much more active in when I had more free times) began in the world of Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games (MMORPGs). And, as sort of silly as a ton of people think it is, our starting point was in the game The Sims Online (TSO).
As an aside, I'd like to point out that when I played the most was during my Crohn's flare ups and I couldn't move and stress made the pain worse, so I'm forgiven from the extreme dorkiness of playing a MMORPG where you don't kill things. :-P
Back to the story though...one of the members of the Utopia Skye community, and a fellow player of TSO went by the name of Jessee (or Jessi). She was terrible at typing and, at first, annoyed the hell out of me because she just couldn't type anything right sometimes. She grew on me though, and she was always giving me advice and words of wisdom and so on and so forth. She was also always a lot of fun...like in this picture where our friend Tony trapped Jessee on the toilet? Or the one below, where Jessee is cheating at pool? Yeah, amazing. Good times, good times.
So one Thursday I had that nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I was talking about earlier. I went through the whole day without hearing anything. I got home from school, hopped online and found out immediately what was going on.
Jessee, as it turned out, had only told a few of us (not including myself, unfortunately) that she had cancer. That day she had gone into a coma. I was told that the doctors weren't sure whether or not she'd come out of it. (And here come the tears...geez.)
Her fiancee came online from her hospital room and let Utopia Skye know. At the time, Utopia Skye also had an Internet radio station so we did a two day long radio broadcast in honor of Jessee, and her fiancee played the whole thing in her room. Her family was there too. We all listened, we all posted our well-wishes.
She was back to us by the end of the weekend. Later she told me that she could hear the whole thing, although it sounded like it was underwater.

There's so many more stories about Jessee and so much more to say buttt, we'll save those for other days.
The point is, the way everyone is pulling for Spider in his time of need right now, despite the fact that most of us have never met him, reminded me of that. I mean, like I said, it's not as serious. Spider's still awake, and cheery from what I've been hearing (which is great!) and if we were to do a radio broadcast for him* (and he had a computer with him in his hospital room) he'd hear it like everyone else would.

*Hi, that's not a bad idea. Anybody or able to afford a radio station?

Okay, so Wicked late...

I had to throw that pun in there.

I'm finally going to share with you my amazing experience from last Saturday. There is back story to explain first...

I have more than seen Wicked. I was backstage, I was on the stage, I was in the costumes. I was all but in the show. Needless to say, I'm slightly in love with the show now. Moreso, since I was in love with it before that.
You see, my Crohn's disease, for all how much of a pain in the ass it can be, is loaded with perks. And I am never one to keep the door shut when opportunity is knocking...so when I was told I could have a wish granted by A Wish Come True Inc. of Rhode Island, I leapt at the chance and the end of July 2005 and the beginning of August 2005 saw my family in New York City, staying in the fanciest hotel, loaded with cash, and with a backstage tour of Wicked. (And Rent, but that is neither here nor there at the moment...)

Now, it just so happens that Wicked has come to Providence, RI, the hometown of Eugene Lee, the award-winning set designer for the show. In fact, he still lives there. It also so happens that my family is well connected in the theater industry (dear Lord, we are lucky devils sometimes :-P).
So we got tickets. Amazing tickets.
Now, knowing that the set is usually cut back and things often just aren't as good in the touring shows as the Broadway show, we were all a little prepared for it to be not as good as the Broadway show. We weren't going to be disappointed, because we had lower expectations for this performance.
It did not meet our expectations.
It wildly exceeded them. The show was the best touring production I have ever seen. The set was nearly exactly the same as the Broadway set (which makes sense, because you know Eugene Lee came to see it and you know he'd throw a diva-fit if his set was wrong :-P), and everything else....it was spectacular. Everything about this touring production was Broadway level.
If you have the chance to see this production while it is in Providence (which means you already bought the tickets :-P) you MUST SEE IT.

Thank yous!!!

I've got some thank yous to give out (and a happy update on yesterday's uncharacteristically downbeat entry.)

First of all, thanks to Google for our random image of the week....It's not funny like these sometimes are, but it got me thinking...what if our world really was donut shaped? How incredibly strange would that be?

Secondly, major thanks to Kendall for asking me his 10 Questions and posting them today!

Also, thanks for everyone's supportiveness concerning yesterday's dilemma.

Fortunately, brain storming and talking to people -- most of whom I hadn't planned to talk to -- really helped me regain my usual perky optomism. I have a plan of action now, and have defiantly decided: I will finish school here. Without taking out student loans.

I was reminded of someone I met way back in eigth grade. He was just graduating high school at the time and had received a scholarship for being a left-handed red-head. That got me thinking...I'm unique in lots of ways. I'm ambidextrous, that's a 2% of the population I fit into. I can almost guarantee there's a scholarship for that. And I bet I could get some kind of LGBT scholarship. And, undoubtedly, the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of America has some kind of scholarship, or more than one.
Abercrombie does indeed sponsor some scholarships, as I found out through Googling it because neither of our managers were there today, but in doing so I discovered that some of the companies my grandfather bought me stock in also sponsor scholarships.
And as Johnna pointed out, if you spend time in Rhode Island malls (which I do, frequently :-P) it's hard to avoid discovering some scholarships there.

I'm going to scholarship my way through tuition, live off-campus and work my way through books and rent.
That's the plan right now anyways. I'm going to be fine. :)

"The 50,000 dollars you stole from her!"

I have a secret now.

Okay, technically, there's a few. Not one person knows them all, but they've all been shared with my confidants. This one I've only told a couple people out of that select few.

But this one is big, and scary, so I'm gonna write about it here.

To start with, I should not have called my mother yesterday. I love her to death, and she used to be great when I was sick (I had an awful cold yesterday) -- but she used to be taking care of me, not just talking. When mom just talks, it's usually a mood-killer because as much as she professes that she is a realist...she's a pessimist. Particularly when finances are concerned.

Now, I'd also like to point out that my doctors have told her on numerous occassions not to discuss finances with me unless the news is good, because they noted (correctly) that I will always feel guilty (because it's my medical problems that cost our family the most), and will always worry, and will always stress myself out over them, which then increases my chances of having my Crohn's disease flare up again.
Does my mother listen? No.

So, now, after talking to mom yesterday, not only am I trying to think of when I could fit in doing the modeling offers I've received...but I'm concerned that I may be heading for a Crohn's flare up. I've not been taking care of myself as much as I should -- I've been too busy making money and trying not to fail classes.
Despite that, mom says it looks like I'm going to need to transfer somewhere closer to home and cheaper -- in other words, the school I desperately did not want to go to that is a mile away from the house I grew up in.

And I can't help hold this against my brother somehow. He's got to go to the school he chose, without hospitalizations and fate stepping in, for all four years -- and I'm stuck in Bumfuck, PA making a great turn out of settling for less. But I don't even get the chance to settle for less for four years -- I have to settle for less for two and then settle for even less for two more!
And that tour of Europe mom and dad sent him on for graduation and promised I would also get? Yeah, that's not happening.
And I probably wouldn't be so pissed at him about this if he wasn't wasting his degree and, as far as I'm concerned, his life. Whereas, I have every intention of using my degree and actually being an actor. I've even planned out (tentatively, of course) with some friends a post-graduation move to NYC. Of course, that did involve borrowing some parental money to get us started so that probably won't happen either.

I've never known a more frightening set of letters than the abbreviation for that God damned school in Rhode Island. The only thing I can think to do to make more money is to try to fit the skeevy offers I occassionally get on sites like MySpace for modeling...and porn. Nothing against porn, but it's not something I think I could or should do. I've seen the controversy when reality TV stars turn out to have been porn stars -- imagine trying to be a movie star or a Broadway performer with that history. I don't think the media circus would be a pretty sight.
And did I mention that the offers usually seem really skeevy?

I could take out more in student loans, but that's just putting off the immense amounts of debt until I'm struggling to make it in the real world.
Moving off campus next year might help, and Cody, David, Josh, and I had all been discussing getting an apartment together.
Perhaps I can get some help from Brendan, although I'd rather not...maybe the club would be able to help me out somehow too.
I bet if I talk to Jason he'll have some ideas too.
When I go home, I can investigate...I had heard from my boss's rich friend (who was going to help next year but now that he's gone missing or whatever) that Rhode Island offers a lot of little-known-about financial help for education and that it's not something you need to pay back. I don't know how reliable he was, but we'll find out.