Newsies

Some stuff of note that I might as well mention now all at once:

1) Going to be on the East Coast from the 8th to the 18th of June! 3 days in Jersey, D.C. and Atlantic City, a week in New York. After discovering, to my supreme delight, that the British theatre company Punchdrunk is doing a production of Sleep No More at the McKittrick Hotel while we’re in New York (oh. my. god.), I strongarmed my family into buying tickets. We’re going on my birthday! I am so fecking excited. I’ve been trying to keep my hopes down, but I can’t help but anticipate this being the theatrical experience of my lifetime. I mean - read that article - I get to rummage through Macbeth's letters? I get to eat part of the set? Mind already blown.

2) Last week I was awarded the UCLA Dashew Center for International Students award for Outstanding International Student of 2011. I was surprised and highly gratified to be thought well of by somebody out there. I attended a ceremony and got to have a little Oscar moment when I went up on stage to deliver my thank-you speech (mostly thanked them for being so easily impressed - there was an interesting staggered-laughing effect, as the international student audience, with their varying degrees of English proficiency, got the joke in turns). There was a good dinner and Irish dancing as well, which was pretty sweet.

3) I have finished 10 hours worth of driving lessons in Los Angeles and will take my driving test in Culver City on Friday the 24th of June. I feel (very, very cautiously) optimistic. But the test is only $6 to take so if I fail a bunch of times, I’ll only lose a few bucks.

4) I bought tickets to see a big concert at the Hollywood Bowl this September – The National + Neko Case + Sharon van Etten. I like the latter two artists as well but they could be a pair of yowling cats for all I care - the National, and at the Bowl, too! In my joy, I have compiled a brief list of my top 10 National songs (besides the obvious Bloodbuzz & Fake Empire):

• Gospel (“My angel face is falling, feathers are falling on my feet”)

• Guest Room (gah, the whole transcendent second half of the song - "Just tie your woman to your wrist")

• Terrible Love (“And I can’t fall asleep without a little help”)

• Sorrow (“I live in a city sorrow built, it’s in my honey, it’s in my milk”)

• Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks (“All the very best of us string ourselves up for love”)

• Conversation 16 (“You’re the only thing I ever want anymore”)

• Cardinal Song (“Do everything she’d never do”)

• Karen (“Well whatever you do, listen, you better wait for me”)

• Apartment Story (“We’re so disarming, darling, everything we did believe”)

• So Far Around the Bend (“There is no leaving New York”)

Man those lyrics are a downer. Every single line. But it’s a rare band whose music I only love more with every listen. No matter how many listens. That’s true love, that is.

5) When I get back to LA from NY on the 18th, I’m going to come home to my lovely new apartment in Westwood! I am so proud of it, I love it. Have been spending the past few months poring over the Selby for interior design inspiration. Gonna be hitting the flea market/thrift store/estate sale circuit hard this summer. Yesterday, for example, I went to a sale in a beautiful mansion in Brentwood, full of fancy, antique rich people junk. Rich people’s possessions are so fascinating.

6) A while ago I got an internship for the summer! After being tragically rejected from Michel Gondry’s company (damn it, Michel - I still love you), I was enormously relieved to have been accepted as a development intern at Lionsgate (the good people who have brought you American Psycho, Mad Men, and Hard Candy, to name some gems). I am incredibly stoked for this: the headquarters are perfectly located for me, the job sounds like really wonderful experience, and a studio with the prestige and international renown of Lionsgate was way more than I was expecting for my first internship!

So that’s what’s up with me, for the most part. You can fill in the gaps of the next 3 months by picturing me teaching myself to cook, playing badminton and picnicking, throwing warm summer dinner parties on my new patio (candles, Cat Power, wine, brie, cherries), exploring the city with my new driver’s license, reading David Mitchell, James Salter, Suzanne Collins & Shakespeare, painting hundreds of still-lifes, taking a summer class on experimental film, going to Disneyland (one of my future roommate gets free passes because her parents work there! Can I pick ‘em or what), and working on my latest project: a 5-minute stop-motion animation horror film, which I will promptly enter in my school’s student festival in October. It’s going to be a momentous summer, and looking forward to all of that makes me feel better about my decision not to go home at all, a decision which comes with no regret but not without sadness.

How’re you guys’s summers looking? I miss everyone.