i've been feeling kind of crummy lately but WHO CARES! PUPPETS BE UPON YE

i love being taking theater classes because sometimes you get assigned to make puppets. all the stem motherfuckers wish they were me. miss emo girl is named onyx shadow and the wizard is mopalus and i love them they are my children

sooooooo in other news into the woods ended on sunday and i was in an awful mood. the story is too long and nuanced and a little too personal about other people that i won't explain everything but basically the lead sound was out sick and my co sound assistant ditched me for a hair appointment so i had to do everything alone, and my co came up with a solution for their absence that was extremely unhelpful and i explicitly told them to their face i would rather we didn't do it and they did anyway. i was just feeling very weird tension all weekend with my co that's been stressing me out :/

but now that the show is over and i never have to touch that sound board ever again i'm feeling a little sad :') BUT it might not be my last show!! this semester my club is putting on a 24 hour musical, where (shockingly) we are given 24 hours to fully produce a complete musical. i think i'm gonna audition, i haven't acted in about 6 years but i want to do it once before i graduate, and this is gonna be so fun and unserious. the musical is supposed to be a secret but i know because i guessed correctly and no one bothered to lie to me about it. i have a role i want in mind and i think i'm gonna sing the phineas and ferb theme song for my audition lmao

your favorite theater kid is once again working on a project (it never ends). i am currently working sound for my LAST mainstage show with my theater club before i graduate and i'm a little devastated not gonna lie. i've been a member of this longer than anyone else currently, i'm the last survivor from my freshman year (graduating late gang) and it's hard to think that i'm just going to be gone and never work in my beloved basement again.

i'm getting prematurely emotional typing this even though i have not graduated yet and still have performances lol. i came here to tell you about INTO THE WOODS!!

this weekend was our first weekend of shows and it was a mixed bag for sure!!! friday was opening and also probably the most disastrous show i've ever witnessed. FOUR mics stopped working, including Cinderella's in act 2 which broke so bad we thought we had to spend hundreds of dollars to replace it, but it turned out i hit some stupid secret button on the sound board by accident that's not the mute but turns it off in the mains while keeping signal or something?? yay for that at least, it's working again. also the batteries in Jack's mic have a bad habit of popping out whenever the actor moves too suddenly and unfortunately that boy has the behavioral tendencies of a squirrel, so on friday both jack and cindy were unmic'd during Your Fault (crying emoji). THEN the Baker's batteries fell out (this has never happened before. fate just hated us) and they were completely unmicd for No More. BUT i think i'm in love with this actor bc they realized and belted like i've never heard anyone belt before. sounded louded than they do on the mic. i want to marry them. friday also had the deadest audience i've seen, NO laughs MINIMAL cheering, lame. the vibes were really getting to the actors and there were so many flubs that were pretty comical tbh but i felt bad for them. BAD day all around

BUT saturday. SATURDAY. i have been a part of this club for 5 years. this is the 15th mainstage show i've seen/worked on, and this saturday's performance was the BEST i've ever seen from us. it was electric. only one mic issue (jack's batteries, of course) during a scene of dialogue only so it was easily fixed and unnoticed. FLAWLESS performances, EXCELLENT audience that loved every minute. i think we all knew what rock bottom was and were ready to just go for it, and it really payed off. i don't think i ever felt as good as after redeeming my audio skills with that performance. only downside is that we're never reaching those heights again lmao.

also silly goofy thing that happened on saturday is that our former managing director who was sooo controversial was there??? and she talked to me for the longest time so enthusiastically because she likes me?? she remembered my hometown and told her friend who moved there about me???? odd day for real. actually all of saturday was odd but i fear that that story will make this diary entry waaaay longer than it needs to be (i got to snoop around the house that the school marching band owns??? why do they own a house).

but after this weekend i'm feeling very fortunate and loved and i'm happy. if anybody ever wants to take advice from olliveen.neocities.org i give you this: you should do basement theater. that can mean whatever that is for you, but find a community of low budget basement weirdo nerd artists and make your low budget basememnt weirdo nerd art and prosper.

i've had the very odd realization that in both the thesis i'm writing and in almost every fictional story i've come up with, the themes i obsess over are stuff that, in my every day life, i actually don't really like.

i'm not quite explaining it right and it doesn't sound very earth-shattering but i can't stop thinking about it. like my thesis, for example. i'm writing on found document horror even though i'm a total scaredy cat and am fighting for my life to make it through these movies and stories with my sanity intact. my argument is that horror is pleasurable even though i do not really enjoy it personally. i've also realized that a large part of my paper has become dedicated to arguing that capitalism is ok sometimes??? (like, i'm arguing that it's not really a negative thing to oversaturate the market with found document horror because it serves a pleasurable purpose with fans and is also healthy for imaginative exercise and catharsis? does that make sense??) who am i. why is this happening to me.

and don't even get me started on fiction stuff. i have to read a zombie novel for my sci-fi class. i have a well-documented phobia of zombies. i am not enjoying myself. then mid lecture when we're talking about the allegorical power of the zombie i have the sudden realization that out of the like the oc stories i have, 5 of them have zombies/ a zombie allegory. what is happening in my brain. why didn't i realize this before now.

i am actively writing this during my alloted thesis-working time as an act of procrastination

holy shit the 1 year anni of this diary page came and went happy 1 year of ollie yapping time.

just got home from spring break!! went home to hang out with my parents and kitty cat and dog. it snowed a lot and i got to go skiing which is always so much fun, i grew up in a ski village and since my mom works at the mountain i get to ski for free!! yippee!!

only downside of spring break is that my housemates were supposed to meet me in my hometown to hang out - they were doing a cross-state road trip and were going to pass through on their way to their final desination so they were SUPPOSED to meet me on friday to hang out and get a private tour (i was gonna buy them pizza and everything) BUT those dweebs can't plan ahead for shit and ended up a whole day late. i TOLD them that i was getting on a plane to fly home on saturday at 2:30 so, since they were already late, if they wanted to hang out at all they needed to arrive BEFORE i had to be at the airport and what did those assholes do???? arrive AN HOUR after the plane LANDED. THEY GOT TO MY HOMETOWN AND I WASN'T THERE. WHAT THE HELL GUYS. i still love them and i'm only moderately irritated but like come on.

but i went to see a production of RENT with my friend last night and it was fantastic!! i got to dance to seasons of love at the bus stop while another audience memeber blasted it from their car speakers while driving home. great times i love theater people

i planned a whole diary entry over a week ago (this was supposed to be written tuesday march 5) and i've been nonstop go go go no breaks all work all the time for so many days that i have genuinely not had time and sit to make a new spring page and type this out until now. my housemate told me that i have the most interesting life out of anybody he knows and i promise you it is against my will.

the play i am working on (this time for school credit instead of for free like the one i did last semester) opened tonight, i am so eepy and lowkey just want it to be OVER. the play is called the river bride and its about brazilian folklore where men are secretly dolphins (spoiler sorry). its fun but i wanna have FREE TIME AGAIN

other life updates from the guy with the most interesting life out of anybody my housemate knows: i worked on a student film as gaffer and lighting designer and it was the longest day of my LIFE. 16 hours straight class then film then river bride tech rehearsal then film. but it was worth it because i love being involved with making cool art with my friends and having a silly goofy time. this was also my first time on a film set ever and they just trusted me with all of their lighting equipment without question, very fun for me. a known fact about me is that i love touching lighting fixtures. as a treat you get this photo of me being beamed in the face by an LED lighting panel

i also got to light props on fire for this film project to make them look more medieval and weathered so that was also very fun for me. i should not be trusted around fire probably but i am inventory manager of my theater club so if they're gonna trust me with the closet full of props that can and do make fire sometimes what did they expect really.

i think i am at the point where i'm getting delirious from my exhaustion and it's showing so i should probably stop. i'm fighting for my life so hard right now to not ramble on about how stressed i am about school and job/fellowship apps that are due iminently but i haven't done because i am so busy (AAAAAA) but that can be a private ollie crisis today. bye bye love you mwah