Ka Lai's Weblog

I went to the rehearsal and the actual performance. I thought I was too much of a hassle at first, but I later found it very beneficial to the mind and body.

One of the reasons I didn’t like it at first was because I need  to depend on someone else to give me a ride. I don’t drive (because I live on UMBC campus), and the UMBC transit bus does not go there on the weekend due to schedule change this year. So I ended up getting a ride from my professor, Steve Bradley, on rehearsal day and from my friend, Jessica on the actual performance day. I don’t really like it when I need to depend on people, I feel like I owe them a favor.

Second of all, I missed my parents and home food. It’s just something that I look forward to at the end of the week. I didn’t get to go home for those two weekends because of this. Having dinning hall food for 2 weeks straight TWICE was painful, especially when I hate the new food provider, called Chartwell, at my school so much. They are having this monopoly thing going on and the food is just WAAYYY over priced with low quality and quantity food (very unhealthy too), ripping me, and a lot of other poor college students off (if you’ve ever been to the commons, you’ll know what I mean). Also, The meal allowance doesn’t cover the cost of a meal at all. They only give you $5, but an average meal at the commons costs about $7, not to mention they buy food in bulk. So all of my flex(ible) money is gone by the third week of school. And there’s NO WAY I’m paying cash for the extra charge since I had already paid one thousand something dollars for my semester-worth of meals. Recently, they have problems with the card machines that tells everybody they have no meals left, which pisses my off ’cause I am not happy when I’m hungry. How can our school do this to us?

Without knowing what I was doing, i didn’t know what to expect (it got me curious). I actually did everything as told, which is kind of weird. The performance actually required a lot more energy than I thought. The performers, including me, had run up and down the Federal Hill (which is very steep), with my shoes which are not meant for exercising. I slipped a couple of times, and I’m glad I was not hurt. But I was glad I had my exercise of the day.

On the actual performance day, finding a parking spot is almost impossible along with the Raven game going on at the same time. So Jessica, along with others ended up parking at a parking garage that cost us $20 at the end of the day, not to mention all the gas money wasted going around looking for a parking spot. That’s worth “a week of gas money” there, pointed out by Neeta. I believe the people from the Shua group should organize it better, maybe providing a bus or something, or reserve parking spaces somehow, or just not doing it the same day when there’s a game.

At the end, I think it’s worth participating in the movement. It’s a once in a lifetime experience after all. I probably would do more of these kind of activities later on when I’m less busy with school, because it created a sense of community for me, knowing who’s out there doing what. It was funny the way strangers gave me different reactions within the same performance, some accepted the handshake with a smile on their faces, some refused to. Some of the classmates I never talked to, I interacted with them directly and indirectly! The way that so many people showed up was exciting for me, that motivated me to move my lazy body. It was a nice day and that’s a good reason to come out and enjoy the sun, good weather, and fun physical experience.

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