Thanksgiving!

Hey girls!

I have a quick little announcement:

The Time Has Come!

Every year the student body is asked to put in nominations and votes towards the
Stephens' Distinguished Teacher Award

You can fill out a ballot at the PRSSA table in the Pit today through Thursday from 11 AM to 2 PM to nominate a teacher. You will receive leadership points for submitting nominations (which I though was pretty rad).

The person you nominate should be one that you believe

1) Is awesome
2) Has done a really great job creating an effective learning environment for their students
3) Encouraged intellectual growth in you and your classmates
4) Does their job unbelievably well
5) Is super special in the eyes of you and your classmates
6) Deserves a little eye candy for their office in the form of a fancy Distinguished Teacher Award
7) Is awesome

I know you have someone in mind! Give that wonderful teacher a gift almost as valuable as the gifts they give you-
they certainly deserve it!

This is probably what my ultimate teacher would look like:

And he would bake and be very witty and make me laugh all the time. Plus he would have a mustache sometimes, and a beard other times and smoke a pipe in class and tell ridiculous stories about him in ridiculous situations that end in hilarity and nonsense, but end up resulting in poetically worded and poignant life lessons.

I think I just described my dream man instead...

...he turned out awesome.

Anyway, the point is:

Go nominate that favorite teacher of yours
so you can be their favorite student.

love, rudi

Hey guys!

I've got a few little tidbits to share with you.

My favorite news of the day: Remember my last post, when I talked about those awesome girls who totally rocked my world the other night? I hung out with them again today! We shoved ourselves into a booth at Kaldi's, a [really] great coffeehouse downtown, and played the let's-say-we'll-do-homework-but-get-nothing-done-because-we-talk-too-much game for a couple of hours.
I'm starting to seriously love this place! I hate that I experienced such a sour taste of it before, but now I'm becoming quite the optimist.

So, point two.
This morning my pretty friend Hannah and I
(here's Hannah)

went to Stephens Lake Park and participated in "A Walk in their Shoes", a fundraiser for The Hunger Project set up by my mentor Erin Hansen, Rhea Amos, and Gillian West for one of their classes.

It was pretty neat. We went on a mini-walk around the trail doing little activities designed to help us empathize with people in third world countries. We walked barefoot, I walked one section blindfolded, and we carried heavy buckets of water around. It was cold, it was fun, it was for a good cause, and my friend Lia won a raffle.

Sound like a good day to you? It sounded like a good day to me, too.

love, rudi

So I've got really great news.

I can't really recall if I mentioned this in full to you all, but I've had piles of heavy metaphorical boxes overflowing with gritty problems crushing down on my brain since I've arrived here. After speaking with many special people in my world, I've come to discover that things get crazy for everyone the first year of college, for better or for worse, and no matter how sane you were previously you will reach the craziest depth of your psyche within the first semester.

Well I've reached that scary dark corner of my mind, and now I'm enjoying the steady climb back up to the lighter part of life.

I've been having fun!

I told you all that tech week (for you non-theater folk, 'tech week' = 'pure chaos, everyone's tired') began for our show Collected Stories. We have our final performance tonight! I'm so proud of everyone!

I didn't tell you that on the last night of tech, before opening night, I went along with the costume/design gang to a midnight tryst at Ihop! And it was Pokemon/My Little Pony themed (Yaaay costume department!)!

This is Ryan, the design director at Stephens. Note his "Little Pony

I had a blast! For that two hours I felt myself really slip back into the old Rudi- I forgot I was ever in a bad mood in my life, and just had fun sharing stories, harassing the waiter, and laughing until my cheeks burned. Plus I had Pumpkin pancakes. I love pumpkin pancakes.

And then last night, after a long day of classes and running backstage at the show, I wearily collapsed here in front of my computer, fully expecting to blog a little and then go to bed early. Instead I was surprised by a crew of really, really amazing girls that I regretfully don't get to see as often as I'd like to. They invited themselves over, plopped on my floor, and didn't leave until two in the morning after a night of gentle heart-to-hearts, cheerfully denting my supply of sea salt caramels, and making me see hope in what I had determined as a hopeless situation. In my life I don't think I've been so openly, sincerely supported and loved by genuine friends.

This past week I've done a lot of personal healing, figuring myself out and becoming comfortable in my own head again, but last night I began getting comfortable with others. I've been very worried, not about making friends but creating friendships- real friendships that are healthy and trustworthy, where I can be silly or solemn. I was beginning to think that those types of friendships don't exist. Now I know they do, and even if these particular girls who visited me aren't those true, diehard friends I'm searching for, I know that I am capable of having a friendship like theirs.

The beauty of everything is how random it all was, it's convinced me that I should never keep my chin down for too long.

Here's Audra, one of those great girls, in the headband I ( really randomly) decided to make her while we all gabbed on my floor.

If you ladies are reading this, consider yourself heavily, heartily thanked.

love, rudi

Collected Stories

Hey everybody!

I can't remember if I told you, but for the past few weeks I've been assistant stage managing a show in the Warehouse Theater called Collected Stories.

We open tonight! Everyone should come! The show starts at 7:30 and we run through Saturday night. If you're a Stephens girl, tickets are $6, and if you're not one of those lucky few they cost $8.

I'm super proud of this show! No promises on pictures of the set until after the show- you'll just have to come and see it yourself!

Here's the set of our last show, All My Sons, just to feed your theater hungry eyes!

Gorgeous, ain't she? One of our apprentices, Brandon P.T. Davis, did the set design and Emily Swanson designed the lights. I think they both did a marvelous job!

I hope you all get a chance to come see Collected Stories! I'm very proud of the cast and crew- I can honestly say I'm a big fan of the show.

See you there!

love, rudi

God it's such a beautiful day today.

I'm wearing one of my favorite vintage sundresses with a sweater, and I like the way my hair looks.
The breeze is cool and the sun is warm, and hot tea is on the menu.
My classes were severely thought provoking and left me with a head full of poetry and a notebook full of knowledge, and I'm in the mood for taking pictures of the trees.
I can literally hear children laughing from my open window, and my room is clean.

I'm starting to think of myself as nothing but a common hippie, guys. It's a glorious feeling.

Check out the trees around campus these days.

love, rudi

Here's a little snippet of something that's got almost nothing to do with college.

I found that my last post stirred up the most reaction from you readers than any of my other posts have. The reason for that, I have deduced, is because of the almost raw honesty with which I spoke to you.

And what a great thing! Being honest is always a good quality, and it's a great feeling to know that someone is connecting with you without holding back- when they connect with you with trust.

It is this sort of honesty that I've been thinking about a lot lately. I find myself describing people I really like as "true" people, without any masks or false faces to hide the real person underneath. Whenever I study actors and watch plays or movies I search for honesty in emotion- if I can spot them being dishonest for even a minute

Halloween

Some of you more dedicated readers may have noticed that I haven't been around lately,

and there's a reason for that.

On Friday I had this big awesome post prepared with pictures and a full description of my life, but my mom called me with the terrible news that my great grandma was, well, dying. I threw some sweaters, way too many socks, and (For some reason) lots and lots of peanut butter crackers, cereal, and tea bags into a suitcase, hopped into the car, and started driving.

My grandma died the morning after I saw her, but I'm just very thankful I was able to see her at all.

As you all can imagine I've not really able to cheerily document all the fun stuff going on in my life, and I don't think you all want to see pictures of my not-smiling family, so instead I'll just talk about how things aren't always cheery.

I've been wanting to mention this for a while, because it's important to me personally that you, whether you're a prospective student, a parent, or a fellow Stephens woman- know that college life is kind of nothing like I thought it would be. During my last year or two of high school I remained sane by always telling myself "College will be better," but in many ways it's not. I've found myself dealing with many issues I somehow managed to avoid during high school- 'boy' problems (At a women's school- how ironic!), dealing with loads of homework, dealing with catty girls, being a catty girl, and having, for one of the few times in my life, trouble being self-confident.

But don't panic! For all of you new-to-collegers you should know that I seem to be a semi-rare case. Whenever I look around me I see smiling, laughing girls chatting merrily with their friends, loving life and enjoying college to its fullest. And of course, often I am also one of those girls, but it's been the biggest surprise that I'm not always like that. I have bad days- I have really bad days- but they're always laced with great moments.

Maybe that's what I'm trying to say to all of you. Even though college may not be what you expect, and even if you have terrible experiences and you're stressed out and don't hardly recognize yourself anymore and your grandma dies- even if all that crazy stuff happens- you'll still survive.

I, away from my parent's house and away from my hometown, have somehow grown this freakish backbone of steel that allows me to breeze through my problems and tribulations in life with a certain amount of grace. I may not be completely comfortable with the events going on around me (forgive me for being so vague) with friends or classmates or my family, but I've reached a point where I'm always comfortable with myself. The world can be haywire, but I live quite comfortably in my own head- and that's a state of mind that I've been working towards my entire teenagedom.

All this drama has maybe resulted in me "finding myself" a little. And that's what college is supposed to do, right?

And since there's absolutely no picture that will match the content of this post, I'll relieve you all of the tragedy my life has become with this:

I hope you all had a better Halloween Weekend than I did.

love, rudi