Now that I am understanding the full gravity of all of the events that have occurred, and I've had a full eight hours sleep, I can finally explain how the universe shifted. I must note, though, that these stories seem long because they are long. I had four twenty-three hour days in a row with little sleep, so on top of the mysticism, the time-space continuum did some interesting things to all of us.
Story #1: My great-grandfather's cane. Friday afternoon, after the Play Analysis final, I discovered that the pain from straining a muscle in my foot the night before proved too much and I needed to pull a cane from props. I got to the Techionery, with the leaning assistance of Dallas, and I could only find one regular wooden cane, so I decided to pimp it up a bit. When I got back to Tucker and started to wrap it up with black duct tape, I got a closer look and discovered that it was the cane I had brought over from my grandparents' house. My great-grandfather had carved it out of a tree branch, and I could tell where other branches and twigs had been cut off and smoothed down. I made a quick decision and decided that it was mine now and I could decorate it as I so chose, so I continued to wrap and paint the cane until it became amazing in its violet swirled awesomeness. Then Ian showed up, and as he does, started pestering me. At one point he reached over and was going to poke or playfully slap me, or something like that, and he touched my great-grandfather's cane. It shocked him. He pulled his hand back, and said "whoa, what just happened?". I could only reply "my great-grandfather's ghost doesnt' like you". And kept going at the task at hand. Then that night while we were working on icicles for the collaborative project, Ian picked up my cane and started messing around with it. He was going to fake-hit Nevin with the cane, but instead brought it down hard on his left testicle. Ouch. He set the cane down next to me, in the midst of Nevin's groans of agony, and said "Yeah, I guess your great-grandfather's ghost really doesn't like me".
Story #2: Angelic Changing of The Guard: *Previously unmentioned development: last weekend I found out that Ian neither remembers being raped nor telling me that he was raped. I just happened to mention it when we were talking together about what he would be like in a relationship, and he didn't deny that it happened, he just figures I either dreamed it or he's repressing some memory. He currently doubts both of our sanities. This holiday break he gets the unpleasant task of asking his parents if he was ever taken to an emergency room when he was 12. As it is, I declare Mission Ian Hiatt temporarily suspended.*
After the icicle meeting, the three people that were left at my apartment were Dallas, Ian and me. I finished getting ready for the party quickly, and we set out into the night. While I was locking the apartment, Ian mentioned something about the incident from last weekend and doubting his own sanity. Dallas looked confused, and Ian turned to me and said "Do you want to tell him, or can I?" And I asked Dallas "Do you really want to know? It's kind of disturbing." He nodded yes, so I told him the whole thing about what Ian told me, but about halfway through he looked confused again and said "Wait, so who was it that got raped? A friend?" And I replied "No, it was him", and pointed at Ian. A look of stark terror flooded Dallas's face, and he just stared at both of us as I finished my story. He looked concernedly at both of us, and just said "Wow, I'm sorry.". We three parted ways, Ian to his dorm room, Dallas and I to his car. While we were making our way across campus, Dallas expressed sympathy, and then in almost the same breath, started telling me about his problems. His are nothing compared to Ian's, he's a sensitive, intellectual, deeply and fervently spiritual guy in the midst of a rough cajun family, but the walls he has up are kind of complex, and on top of that he uses humor as a mask. His family fights a lot but yet they're kind of independently wealthy so he was given money instead of affection, he's contemplated suicide a couple of times in his youth but never really wanted to die, he believes that no one in his life has ever truly loved him, blah blah blah standard procedure. We pick Kolten up, and all heart-to-heart conversation ceases, but over the course of the party he says things and does things like hand over the keys to his car so that I can get my purse and journey to Blackwell with Lisha, then says "You know, Rachel, you're the only person I would trust with something like this..." and somewhere over the course of the night I realize that I have just picked up a new charge.
Story #3: Muscadine Wine. This is not as much of a story as a statement: if my life ran like a video game, muscadine wine would be my restore potion. It treated my very gently, never getting me very far off of tipsy, although I finished most of the bottle, it sustained the euphoria very well, and after only three hours of sleep, I felt energized and ready to go. I let Dallas have a swig of the wine, and he confirmed what he knew before: he doesn't like the taste of alcohol. This makes my job that much easier. I also let Kolten finish off the bottle, as he was feeling kind of blue over some girl, and we wound up talking about the properties of the wine. Muscadines natively grow in the mountains, so it's like putting back the wild soil of your homeland in your body.
Story #4: Dallas gets "Poison"ed: Saturday night I had my first Dallas intervention. (Oddly enough, I have the feeling that besides helping Dallas heal I will have to keep chasing away unwanted advances from girls, as he is a mix of rugged mountainmanishness and kind soft facial features that will probably get him the same squealing girlfandom that Chris Bates sort of enjoyed.) We took a break from working, the core group of us that were there, and invited a few friends over to watch movies. When the movie was over, Ian suggested that we go dancing near the new construction, as the night before he noticed that with the lights on over the frames it kind of looked like an open-air dancefloor. I was game, so was Dallas, but no one else seemed interested, until we headed for the door and Poison (the third Rachel in the department, I get the feeling that she is the product of what happens when you take the very intricate design (me) and try to run it through a xerox on super-dark. She's very nice, good worker, and fun, but she's very desperate and whiney, simple-minded, young-spirited, and there is no spark of passion or creativity within her at all) jumps up and decides to follow, even though she hasn't gone through dance training with us and would probably find it kind of boring. We start walking that way, I link arms with Poison and Dallas offers his arm on my other side, and I hear Poison whisper something in my ear. I can't decipher the words because they are in fangirlspeak, but I pick up the basic meaning and soon I let go of both arms and just walk with Ian, discussing the ethical calculations of breaking into a construction site for the sake of art. Turned out that the gate was locked and the lights turned off, so we decided to take a stroll around campus. (Poison keeps ahold of Dallas's arm at this point, as she thinks this is a date now.) This led us to looking at the beautifully lit grayish purple overcast sky, which led us to the field on the other side of the University Commons. I am the first to lay back and watch the sky, consumed in the poetics of the night, and everyone else follows. Ian and I are laying about five feet away from each other, just kind of basking in the beautiful painting of the atmosphere, and then we notice where Poison and Dallas are. They are about fifteen feet away, Dallas trying with all his might to enjoy the sky, but Poison is turned on her stomach, leaning on her hands, almost hovering over the top half of his torso, just talking fangirly gibberish about some game she played at a slumber party once. Ian and I kind of just look at each other and say "Aw, that's cute" and return to our previous conversation. We stand up, not about to leave yet, but just making plans of where to go first. The wind picks up and I get a little cold. Ian offers to hold me and shield me from the wind, but as I was moving my face down to his shoulder to keep the cold out, apparently I did something that seemed too close to a neck-nuzzle and it kind of freaked him out. I quietly told him that someday he'll be able to be physically close to someone and it not be awkward, and then stepped away. I turned around and Dallas was on the phone with our collaboration group leader making plans for tomorrow, Poison still attatched to his arm. I walked up to the couple and said "Hey, Dallas, I'm cold, will you hold me?" I was expecting Poison to claim property, or for Dallas to just look at me funny and keep on with the conversation, but he motioned for me to come closer, opened his jacket, detatched himself from Poison and put his arm around me. When the conversation was over, we started back on our journey. Dallas, by the way, came up with a great idea for a scene of running through a parking lot with each light behind the character exploding one by one, and then everything is dark, which I am going to use fore "Hallowed". When we got back to Tucker, Both Dallas and Poison said their goodbyes, but went in separate directions. The next morning Dallas revealed that Poison had revealed her feelings to him, and he kind of had to say "I know", and let her down easy. She showed up while we were getting ready to break the glass to mosaic the cover of the project. In my own way I think I made things more awkward, getting a little defensive of Dallas in my own feminine way, fake flirting with him with cleaning products tucked under one arm on my way outside. Poison maybe stayed thirty minutes and then disappeared.
Story #5 Ice Ceremony: All of the core crew project members I talked to so far agree that we kind of made it sleet with the completion of the project, but I'm probably the only one that understands how and why. Our project, if I didn't already tell you, was based on the poem "Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird" by Wallace Stevens. The poem was about finding the beauty in things that most people find macabre and dreary. We made a wooden tomb-stone shaped shuttered window case, stained glass mosaic on the front, and inside was fall becoming winter from right to left, a twilight scene, the shadow of a man and a woman parting ways, a tree, a mountain, huge icicles, and, of course, thirteen blackbirds, all of those things the same symbolism encased in the poem. The stained glass proved most problematic, grouting the tiny safety glass pieces with caulk. Keshia, Cassandra, and I both bled into the piece, maybe a teaspoon of blood each. Saturday and Sunday the sky was gray overcast, blotting out the sun, and we kept saying " It was evening all afternoon", which is a line from the poem. Sunday night, after we finished the project at about 2 in the morning, I helped Ian with the cover of his journal, which was a scene at the crossroads with a voodoo symbol for a ceremony of "opening the way". I drew the symbol on the front, and copied a poem onto the back with my calligraphy skills. Right after we finished the project it went from being unseasonably warm to very cold and rainy. The next morning, not ten minutes after we presented our project to Kate, we noticed that it had been sleeting and icing for a while, and that we were on the second floor and would have to come down concrete, free-standing steps to get outside. A bunch of us went to the cafeteria to get nourishment, and saw icicles hanging everywhere. We joked "Oh, hey we could put those in the project..."

Blogging drunk. Wow. It's been forever. But, that's what wine does to you. You think you're going to be fine, but then it hits you in stages.
I hate that I drink as part of the mask, as something I do to hide myself, to let me forget who I am. Wait, what am I saying, the mask always exists, drunk or sober. I try to do it to escape myself, but it never works that way, so I keep running. The only difference now, is that I can see beyond myself far enough to see the masks of others and try to take them down without compromising my own mask. Damn it all to hell.
Watching guitar hero being played for the eighth straight hour in a row makes me understand how much I hate that genre of game. There will be an entire generation of musicians who see music as linear, as some logical puzzle go figure out if you keep hitting buttons.
Also fitgured out why I flirt so much. Keeps me from facing any kind of feelings. Feelings are dangerous. Screw love, give me the promise of sex on a regular basis!
Hmmm.... I have a meeting in five hours about a final collaborative project for design class. Perhaps... perhaps, I should get some sleep.

Apparently follows the law of Murphy. Put it in a mold to test, takes forever to harden. Mix it to actually use, sets up like someone lit it on fire. Graaaaahhhhhhhhh!!
New word to add to the lexicon, thanks to Cassandra Andrus: Orate, or the intransitive verb form of Irate, when used in the context of expressing anger audibly.
And, I have to do a bit of bragging on here. I made more than 100% on a final. A theatre history final, no less. Of course, this is under two conditions: one that Ardith set a curve with Dallas's score at 100% before she graded mine, and two, that if she had put the points possible at where they should have been, I would have only made about a 94%. But, the curve was Dallas's score, and I did rock out loud on my test, so I'm saying that I achieved the impossible.

"Success comes in a can," proclaimed the fortune cookie insert my friend Kim read yesterday at the house o' Nevin, "Not in a cannot". While I believe wholeheartedly with the proverb, I think it could have been easily followed by just intellectually dwelling on the first clause of the saying. Success does come in a can. Cans are metallic and shiny. Can-can is a dance that should only be performed by girls in frilly skirts who are united in hivemind. And think of the other things that come in cans:
 - Beer
 - Soup
 - Whoop-Ass
 - Tennis Balls
 - Hairspray
 - Potato Chips
 - Fuel mix for chainsaws
 - Cherry Pie Filling

... I think I've made my point..

An old friend called me that today. There are some people in this world that just know how to lift others up. And he is one of those people.
Getting ingredients for vegetarian Italian meal, successful. Getting ingredients back to campus, successful. Going back to pick up Nevin, successful. Leaving, not so much. It appears that an entire block section of Parkway is some sort of automobile Bermuda Triangle or something, blowing up Nevin's tire and messing with the alternator in Kim's car. So, instead we walked back to campus. Pedestrian mafia, emergency Asian style, awesomely successful.
With finals approaching, in, like, 28 & 1/2 hours, I have understood something profound: this time around, I don't have to worry so much about me, but I am indirectly responsible for the grades of 30 or so students, in one way or another, be it through assistant teaching, or just being the only one who knows what the hell is going on in the class. And this task, I must say, is daunting.
Question: is it odd that since it will be storming soon and the transformers here at the apartments are not worth the metal they were carved out of, that I'm charging my cell phone just in case the power goes out? Am I that dependent on technology? Flashlight, alarm clock, emergency contact to the outside world. Yup, I'd say so.

Thoughts:
I will soon inherit the original vinyl soundtrack to this movie from my parents. I found this record among the stash of Rolling Stones and Chuck Barry. This is how deep my nerd roots go.
Why oh why oh why is Richard Dreyfus in the midst of all the worst cinematic science fiction attacks of the late 1970's? Why? Does Spielberg know something we don't?
Close encounter of the third kind = abduction. Close encounter of the fourth kind = watching this movie and understanding the plot. Honestly, the entire film is kind of like a bad acid trip, just without all the pretty colors. Or maybe you have to be on acid to fully appreciate all the insanity.
Even after Roy goes nuts, I still kind of find myself severely wanting to bitch-slap his wife.
The numbers 104: 44: 30, 40: 36: 10 will forever have a significance in my brain that I will never fully comprehend. Even though they got it wrong and if real scientists tried to follow the coordinates, they would have landed in Colorado instead of Wyoming (fun trivia I looked up).
Is it okay that the part where Roy and Gillian were trying to get to Devil's Mountain and the government people were talking about how they were going to keep people off the mountain, it kind of makes me slightly paranoid. Then again, lots of things make me feel paranoid.
Oh, and given the choice between goofy golf and watching aliens, even after watching this movie... eh... I still choose watching aliens.

Best. Celebrity. Burn. Of. The. Week: While flipping through channels and landing on Star Wars: Episode II, this short dialogue resulted.
R: Hmmm... Why is Natalie Portman crying?
T: Because she can't act.
R: Wow, now this movie makes PERFECT sense!

People watching has become a bad habit for me. I can't turn it off, even if I wanted to, and if the people I watched had any idea the judgments I placed on them, I'd probably get beaten up almost daily. These have been some of the random thoughts flooding my mind lately:
 - To a guy in line at the Metallica concert, who was obviously wearing a long black wig under his hat: "Aw, he wants to pretend he's hardcore. That's so cute... Too bad he doesn't understand that this is M-E-T-A-L-L-I-C-A and no one's hardcore here anymore."
 - To two guys buying groceries today: "Eight pies?!? Seriously? Do I want to know? Is this one of those scenarios where one guy's dressed as a pilgrim and the other guy has a drum stick...?"

And speaking of, did anyone figure out what we're supposed to be thankful for? I can understand Thanksgiving, the end of a good harvest and being giving thanks to God for His blessings and such, but it kind of pisses me off when they put a political slant to it, as if it's Fourth of July, the sequel. Are we supposed to be glad that we're not British? Eh. Never saw much to that propaganda shtick. I blame Oliver Cromwell. Damn him and his... puritanical ways. There. I said it.

Rae Rae the Magnificent
Knows fifteen different uses for stuffing... all of them lethal.

Leave a bottle of really good wine in the freezer thinking it will magically not freeze like bad whiskey.
Tell someone you're in a fight with that you're sorry that they're an asshole.
Climb into the middle upslope of a rope ladder.
Make fake blood and apply it with a fake knife on a teenager in front of a school administrator.
Get into an argument with a student of a fine art about whether or not his degree will actually find him employment.
Misspell a word in your rebuttal message during the aforementioned argument.
Squirm in your seat during a movie in a crowded theater, no matter how long it is or how numb your ass is.
Do a ballet leap in jeans and cold muscles. STILL paying for that one.

In other words, it chafes my ass.

Q: How does an elephant camouflage itself?
A: By painting the soles of his feet yellow and floating upside-down in a bowl of custard.

Fun word games I want to try someday:
 - What kind of _____ am I?: One player asks the question using one three-letter, or one-syllable simple word that can easily be part of another word (for instance, "key" will produce answers like "don-key?" "tur-key?" "key-per of secrets?") and the others answer the question until someone figures out what kind of whatever they are.
 - Teapot: one person who is "it" goes away and counts, kind of like hide-and-go-seek, and the players make up a noun or adjective to replace a verb. The person who is "it" is given the replacement word and asks a series of questions to the other players and they answer based on the verb the word replaced.
 - Railway Carriage: Two players are given a sentence each based on a topic, and try to guess the theme and get the "conversation" to a point where they can say their sentences.
 - Yessir, Nosir: One player asks another player closed-ended questions and the other player has to avoid saying the words "yes" or "no", even though they can answer using words that mean "yes" or "no".
 - Hypochondriac: (not really fond of this game as it is, I would probably just play it to make others around me REALLY uncomfortable) players go around the room and go through the alphabet in diseases saying the phrase " I went to the hospital because I had..." and each person adds to the list until one person gives up (this would also be a delightfully morbid drinking game).
 - Tennis-Elbow-Foot: players say a word that associates with the word that was said before it.
 - Telegrams: random word given, telegram written for each letter in the word by each player.
 - Headlines: kind of like a mad-lib, but each person creates a headline by using random words in each fo these categories: Personal description, type of person, transative verb in present tense, object of verb, place of occurance.

Just took these off of my camcorder, you know, the one I'm supposed to be using to make movies with. Found out when I first got the blasted thing that it takes decent still shots also, at least when you consider that photography is not the original use of the gadget. So I trained it on the collages I made a few years ago, back when I was an ardent tree-hugging hippie and would watch CNN at all hours of the night waiting for some sort of omen.