Sunday, March 16, 2014

Words I Hope to Never Hear Again

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The Poetry Out Loud competition was really good last Saturday. All of the high school participants were well prepared and performed excellent recitations. I was glad I was "only" one of the interpreters and not a judge; high quality work from all of them. And I congratulate all of the students who went on to Oregon state finals and am looking forward to hearing who will be representing Oregon in the National Poetry Out Loud competition later this year.

The student from Oregon School for the Deaf did an outstanding job and she was a pleasure to watch. (We don't interpret the OSD students' poems; they sign for themselves and their poems are projected onto a large screen so the non-signers know what they are signing.) She did not score as one of the top three at the regional level last weekend, meaning she did not advance to the state level. She represented her school well and I hope to see more of her in the literary and performing arts areas!

This also meant that we did not interpret the state finals held on March 15th (we would have if there was a request from audience members, but there was not). I had many hours blocked out in my schedule for poetry interpreting preparation which I no longer needed. I was looking forward to a slower week, with some unexpected down time.

A little bit of that time was taken up with a meeting and an unscheduled special event. But even with the early in the week occurrence which resulted in words I hope to never hear again, we did manage to have our date night on Saturday. We went to a staged reading of "Hungry" by Amy Claussen at Profile Theatre on Saturday and stayed for the festivities and announcement of the 2015 season playwright; it was a fun night.

And writing? Yes, even some of that happened this week. I worked on the radio script and submitted that to my Friday night writing group for feedback. And I went to my Tuesday morning writing space - even though my writing buddy was unable to make it - where I wrote a blog post for Portland Center Stage. And then on Wednesday I started a new short story which is a kind of character study at this point; I'm not sure where it's headed but I like it so far.

Oh, and the words I hope to never hear again? The words which ended up consuming a significant portion of the hours I thought would be low key down time? The words which grew in severity, day by day, creating new tasks and phone calls and "must do it now" calls to action? "Data breach." That's all I'm going to say for now. "Data breach."
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