Ahem.

So I didn’t blog yesterday. My bad. In my defense, however, this is what my weekend looked like:

Friday Night:

After my solitary class, Advanced Creative Nonfiction at 1pm, my roommates and I went to Red Robin as a celebration after our first week together. It was a truly jolly occasion, and though many pictures were taken, I’m at work (writing tutor, what what) and forgot to bring my camera. Guess I wouldn’t have had much use for it, but still. It would have been useful in this instance. Anyways.

After Red Robin, which was a lot of fun, we all went back to the dorm to have a game night. Originally it was just going to be with Dakota, who you probably remember from a good majority of our Cooking with Gandalf videos, but then Dion, surprising everyone with his social moxy, invited Michael (he was in the Thanksgiving CWG and he was also prominently featured playing Wii golf and bowling at the end of my freshmen year videos) and two freshmen girls, one of which he knew from high school and one of which was her friend. Though this particular grouping of people had never been together before, we all had a good time and, if you saw my most recent TheseFolk video, you know that it took a lot out of me. Ahem. I finally went to bed sometime around 1am.

Saturday:

My first break since I moved back up to college I spent doing a couple things. First, I dragged myself out of bed and did my laundry, in between watching episodes of the animated Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 8. For the record, it isn’t great, but I missed that universe, even though none of the original actors voice characters and that’s a little jarring. After laundry I tried to let myself breathe for a bit, so I watched some Suits and How I Met Your Mother in between Buffy episodes and fretted about my busy weekend ahead. Around 5 or 6 Ellen and I went to Safeway to pick up some stuff for my first Cooking with Gandalf episode for season 3, and then around 8:30 we were craving ice cream so we dragged Dion to a nearby cafe and we enjoyed some very loud live music and ice cream that had not perished in an unfortunate freezer accident earlier in the day. That was about it for Saturday, though.

Sunday:

Sunday was the big day for me. I’ve been consistently getting up around nine am (when I’m not up at, for instance, 6 or 7am for class or Boxercast), so most of the morning I got things ready for filming, wait for it, our first episode of Cooking with Gandalf season three! You know how I get, so I was cleaning and organizing and arranging and making angry signs for my tripod threatening death if anyone moved it in the course of filming and trying on my new apron, etc. Then I watched some Suits to calm myself down. Then, around 2, we all (Dion, Colton, Ellen, and I) started filming. I’m not gonna reveal the recipe just yet, but trust me, it was delicious. Then Dakota came over while we were waiting for the… thing we made….. to chill. By this time it was about 3:15, and I had to leave for what I will reveal momentarily by 4, so I was naturally a little on edge. Around 3:35 I finally gave in and we filmed our outro and I went to meet Matt.

Matt you’ll remember from my Rome vlogs as well as my DC video from last year. He’s the skinny one with the fancy clothes and the effeminate mannerisms. You see, every Sunday night, Matt goes into Portland for the Portland Poetry Slam, which is unalike any other poetry slam in the country. And since I’ve become increasingly enamored by slam poetry, I decided to tag along.

I’m not going to go into lengthy details for the whole night, but I’m going to sum it up in a series of bullet points:

-Holy God it takes forever to ride the bus into central Portland from Forest Grove

-Poetry slam attendees are mostly people in their late twenties, early thirties with lots of tattoos and smoking habits that are also very lovely (the people, not the smoking habits)

-Poetry slams are run with single elimination brackets

-I got paired against the guy who went on to win

-I performed my “Nerdz with a Z” poem (which you haven’t heard yet but for context includes the line, in reference to hipsters, “and what’s with all the plaid? Not that I have anything against plaid, per se, but go to any location largely populated by people under the age of thirty and it looks like a gay lumberjack convention”) in front of more than one hundred 20-something hipsters and I killed.

-I’m sorry, did you read that last bit? I killed it with my first poem at my first real poetry slam.

-The guy that, obviously, beat me (even though I totally killed it) because he went on to beat everyone, however, was so impressed by me and my performance that after the whole shindig was over, he made sure to personally tell me how impressed he was and then gave me one of his prizes for winning, a plastic princess tiara. It was the nicest thing anyone has ever given me. At least in that moment.

-The guy that runs the whole slam personally told me that if I didn’t come back next [this] Sunday, he would personally badger the crap out of me until I did return.

-We didn’t get home until around 1am but I don’t care because it was the most bizarre and rewarding nights of my life

Monday:

Since Sunday was such a draining day (for good reasons, though, not for bad), it was really a blessing that Monday was a day off classes. I got up around 11 (can youblame me??) and after breakfast and an hour of reading for my poetry class and for my nonfiction class, I went and took some pictures to round out my Labor Day Weekend photography project. I stayed out until my battery died, then went back to my dorm to download the pictures and sort that whole mess out. Then I finished editing the CWG we’d filmed the day before and around 2:30 Colton, Ellen, and I went to Safeway to pick up the final ingredients for Colton’s first host episode of CWG. We started filming around 3:30, with Michael acting as the studio audience, and finished up around 5, at which time I finished my most pressing homework assignments and checked on some of my Fiverr orders (more on that later, though). Then I watched a show or two on my computer before remembering that I had to get up at 6:15am in order to get to Boxercast. So I went to sleep, exhausted but fulfilled from my three-day weekend.

Uh, so there. That’s why I didn’t write a blog yesterday. Deal with it.

Also, screw everyone who didn’t vote for Batman in my poll. HE IS A HERO THAT NONE OF YOU DESERVE.