i spilled some milk on the table... OH MY GOD

So here's why the cat is amazing. She getting weally good at teaching. Can I just tell you that the other day, the master lecturer led a watered-down discussion of "what a director does" in theatre, so in my breakout I led my students on a spirited romp through the 18th and 19th and 20th centuries talking about how the rise of the bourgeoisie in Western culture necessitated the creation of the role of "director"and how method of developing a theatrical collaboration is now changing even more because feminists and ethnic theatre artists are questioning the patriarchal (I did, I said patriarchal!) format and coming up with new ways to collaborate and communicate. I talked about gender/class issues in society and how theatre always reflects them with my students and they totally followed me and seemed to really like it (the students in this class are totally underestimated by the master lecturer this Fall). So I've been giving them all kinds of cool stuff to think about. What I can't figure out is, why wasn't that the master lecture??? Shouldn't the breakout be simpler than the master lecture?

For example, on Monday, we talked about scenic design and costumes and he brought up the term "signifier" and then didn't say anything else about it. I thought the master lecturer was going to talk about semiotics, and he totally blue-balled me, so I decided to teach it in breakout! So I talked about Saussure's linguistic theory and how it's applied to everything now, and how conceptual thinking is the only thing that separates us from the apes anymore as far as we know (since baboons totally use tools now), and what a sign is, and then the difference between the sign and the signified, and then what a code is, and then how that relates to the collaborative process in theatre, and then we listened to Moscow is in the Telephone and freewrote about it, and the compared our ideas of what that music evoked for each of us, and how there were similarities and differences in how everyone understood what that music was telling, and we drew on the board (collaborating, of course) two different ways of staging what we saw in the music, and then related it back to "how scenic designers and costume designers work."

These students are all really sharp! I have some AMAZING thinkers in my class. We don't have to talk down to them (they totally encourage us not to do anything "too challenging" in breakout. I'm like, fuck you, they're too old to be coloring. ENGAGE THEM! THEY WILL RISE TO MEET YOU!). I can totally ask them who Saussure is and tell me the difference between signifier and signified, and what is a code, and they'll know something cool because they were in this class. Why is that not the goal from the start?!

BAH!

Also, I got my hair cut. It's really short. Well, it's shoulder-length, but after years of having long, and if I may say so, luxurious hair, it's weird and I feel bald (they insisted that I get my hair cut for Arcadia, though no one could explain to me why Hannah has to have short hair... *sigh*). I feel like I sheep that has just been sheared. You know how they always look sort of dazed and confused by the experience? And it's difficult to understand when you see a newly-sheared sheep, it's like, "What the hell is that thing? Oh, a sheep." That's what I feel like.