Ballets and other such nonsense

So, I went to my first live ballet performance.  I went with three of my speech-path friends to see the St. Petersburg Ballet Company perform Swan Lake.  It was nice and all, and I would go see it again, but I think they put too much emphasis on the court scenes.  In case you aren't familiar with Swan Lake, there are 3 acts and 4 scenes.  Act 1, Scene 1 presents the audience with a lively array of dancing: the prince is coming of age and it is time for him to find a wife, but he doesn't like any of the women.  So there's a lot of fal-da-ral and fiddle-y-dee (did you like my reference to Roger and Hammerstien's Cinderella?), and ho-hum dancing.  Then, in Act 1 Scene 2, the prince goes out hunt with the arbalest his mother conveniently gave him in Scene 1.  Now, Act 1, scene 2 - this is where most of the stereotypic ballet representations of Swan Lake come from - you know the "Little Swans" where there are three women with arms linked in connected circles, dancing on their tip-toes.  Well, scene 1 was considerably longer than scene 2 (but scene 2 was considerably better than scene 1).  

Then Act 2, Scene 3 (I don't know why they even label the scene - there is only one scene in the act).  We're back at the court - more dancing stuff.  Meanwhile, I'm thinking - bring back the swans, at least they had good choice in costumes (the courts costumes were rancid).

Act 3, Scene 4.  Back to the swans.  I was excited - I like the swan scenes more than the court scenes.  Well, my elation was to be short lived.  The scene was entirely too short, and the final fight scene between the prince and the evil magician, Robart, bland and short.  I realize that it's ballet, and they can't do massive amounts of stage combat, but I had hoped that the fight scene would be more than the prince leaping past Robart.  But, what made the fight scene even worse was Robart's grandiose, long drawn out death scene.  He took twice as long to die as it took the prince (Sigfreid - I just remembered his name) to kill him.  

Apparently, some of my forays into high culture have left something to be desired.

In other news, I will be submitting the introduction, literature review and methods sections of my thesis to me comity next week.  (hugh sigh of relief).  It's not finished, but I have been working incessantly on it, and I'm glad to have some measure of accomplishment.  If anyone wants and incredibly boring read I can send it to you.  It's all about chest wall adjustments prior to speech initiation, and tongue blade speed movements, and spectrograms and acoustic signals.  At another time I might enjoy reading it, but right now I'm sick of it.  Deciding what measures to take was an incredibly arduous process.  We're looking at the coordination of speech, and so to get a closer look at the coordination of speech we have to take measures from the articulatory system and the respiratory system, and would it be better to measure from the onset of tongue blade movement into constriction until the onset of /sh/ or would it better to measure to the first sign of air release.  Just stuff like that.  I've got some minor edits to do tonight, and then we're having another meeting, and then I get to take a break for a bit - I might celebrate by reading fiction!  Or, maybe I'll watch a movie.

Anyway, not much else is new here.  100 days left until graduation.  I've begun a countdown on my facebook page.  Oh, graduation, how I can't wait until you are here.  I might begin a countdown on my computer too - one can never have too many countdowns when graduation is involved.  I remember that back in high school my friends and I started a countdown the very first day of school.  My friend, Frank, had a magnetic dry erase board in his locker, and so we would draw a new picture featuring the new number of school days left.  It was great fun.  The drawings become more ornate as the remaining number of days grew smaller.

I begin my internship, at Southwest Michigan Rehabilitation Center, in February, so I'll let you know how that goes.