Free Write Every Day: Day #2

Wednesday February 22 11:00pm

So today ended up being much busier than I initially planned but I am using my “free day” this weekend when I visit my sister for her birthday, so I gotta write something today.  It was just a rough start, I was a couple minutes late to teach yoga this morning, the first time it happened this semester, but I had to make sure I had my yoga gear (outfit and mat), classwork, shorts to wear for pilates, my work uniform and a business casual outfit for the GRIPLA (Greater Richmond Intellectual Property Law Association) event (where I tried my best to inform attorneys about the Global symposium, and found out my co-editor was sick and therefore not going about 2 hours before the event) and of course after a nonstop day (the only respite was lunch with an old friend after ash Wednesday service, and another brief meet-up at night with another friend) I realized I forgot something rather important.  

After teaching two exercise classes I went to shower and change in the locker room.  Emerging clean but slightly rushed from the shower I went to put on my nice clothing.  Unfortunately, I realized at that moment that I had not packed a regular bra.  I spent the rest of the day in my still-slightly-sweaty exercise top with the built-in sports bra under my dress.  I did my best to forget about it while surrounded by some of the best-connected trademark lawyers in the Richmond area.  Luckily my accessory was a large and sparkly purple scarf I used to strategically cover the spot where the v-neck dress showed the neckline of the exercise top.  

On a completely different note, the Symposium for Global has me pretty stressed out, I will be very glad to wake up March 16, when all of it is behind me.  I have started to seriously space out while riding this, I think that I will take it as a cue to go to bed and make up for lost sleep from last night.  Tomorrow will be busy as well and I have plenty of work left to so before making the drive up to northern Virginia.

Free Write Everyday: Day #1

For one of my more alternative classes in law school, I had to write 300-500 words a day, I figured since I shared them with my professor, I might as well share them with you all.  Also, this allowsme to post something since I have not written anything here for awhile.

First entry:

"Tuesday February 21 11:00pm
Where does my resistance to put pen to paper (or in this case, letter to keyboard) come from? I have always seemed to have trouble filling a word limit.  I had a tendency in high school to check the word count with each passing sentence to constantly update myself on exectly how many words I had left to write.  I do not know why this is because I have no trouble filling up any available silence with spoken communication, and I actually like the intention behind the words I chose to put down to paper.  I guess I like that I can sound more put together or intelligent on a  written document without the “likes” “ahs” and “ums” that occur, often against my best effort while speaking.
I struggle to write thank-you notes, I rarely wrote the observation portions of the labs in science class, and in my eighth grade “weekly journal” for English class I spent the lunch break before the last class of each quarter frantically putting pencil to notebook to write all nine entries I had not yet written.  In all of these cases, I thought about what I wanted to write a lot... a lot! I wanted each “thank-you” to be sincere and heartfelt, I wanted to pick the right adjective to describe the experiment and I think I wanted my journal entries to be a good quality.  What is so surprising is with amount of time I spent reflecting on the possibilities of what I could write, I never left myself enough time to actually write what I wanted.
I put extra pressure on myself when writing because I am a harsh critic of my work.  If I say something it can fade away into memory (where we so easily edit things to see them the way we want to) but when I write I know I will be looking at it later and judging what I wrote.
I also think my aversion to writing comes from a compelling desire to be active and to truly write, I have to disengage from whatever activity I am doing and stop, sit and write.  My monkey-mind and my restless body have a hard time staying still to focus and write, especially when it comes to the preparation it can take to write something well.  In this way, I allow my other activities or work take over my attention and I become so easily distracted from actually writing."

Music Video Acapella Tribute!

This is an attempt to cover the song "Save Me" by Gotye off of his new album "Making Mirrors."

This song resonated with me in such a way I just had to create some sort of tribute.

It was definitely a challenge to combine all the audio and video and keep it within the correct rhythm.  This took a solid amount of time but this was one of my personal goals to do for 2012 so 2 months in I get to check something off this list (this totally ranks up there on a list including: graduate law school, pass the bar, become gainfully employed)

There are totally things I would do different if I had to do it again.  For example I's make sure to have a better quality microphone, better lighting and start with a drumbeat (turns out that even listening to the original song in one ear there were still times I got off beat which meant I couldn't insert the beat in later.  However, this is how it came out and I'm really quite proud of it!

I cannot wait to see him in concert March 22 at the 9:30 club w/ Kimbra and see him perform this live! Here's a version of the real song (I couldn't whistle to keep up with the fun high-pitched melody so that's one of the things my video is missing as well):