Obsession

Maybe all the sleep went to my head. I slept my new-usual 6-7 hours last night, waking up at 6:45, a reasonable hour, even on a Saturday, for me.

But around 9, I was feeling surprisingly sleepy, so I decided to see if I could take a nap. Walt says he pulled Lizzie off of me twice in the three hours that I slept! My goodness. I don't know when was the last time I slept that long. I guess I needed it.

When I finally woke up, I started working on a project that I started a couple of weeks ago, and managed to lose myself in the obsession.

I started reviewing shows (I hesitate to say "became a critic because I don't think I have the qualifications to be a high fallutin' "critic") in 2000. I think the first show I ever reviewed was Chess, at the Davis Musical Theatre Company.

Since then I have reviewed countless shows all over the area here. I have kept the original typed copies of all my reviews, but it wasn't until late 2005 that I got the idea to put them on line and created "In My Opinion," a blog for my reviews. And it wasn't until even later that Blogger changed its format and you became able to add "tags" to your entries, where you indicate various categories that a particular entry would fit under. For example, Chess is something I would tag as: "Chess", DMTC, Davis, musical.

In the right column of my review blog, you would then be able to find all the times I've reviewed Chess, or all the shows at DMTC that I've reviewed, or how many shows I've reviewed in Davis, or how many musicals I've reviewed.

Cool way to keep a record.

But, of course, all the reviews I had already posted did not have tags, and all the shows for the five years before I started putting them on line were not there. So I decided I wanted to remedy that situation.

I finally finished tagging all of the reviews that were already on line and then got the crazy notion that I wanted ALL of my reviews on line. I fully realize that probably not one person in the world is going to go back looking for a review I wrote in 2001, but it bothered me that the statistics were off. (There were, for example, two reviews of Joe's Coat, but I'd actually reviewed the show four times.)

I have to admit that as the record is growing, I'm kind of surprised to see the number and variety of shows I've reviewed. So far, for example, there are 8 Shakespeares and 8 dance shows...and I don't really like either. But I've learned a lot doing these shows. I've gotten better through the years.

It's going to take me some time to get all of the reviews transferred over -- where nobody will ever read them -- but this is the sort of mindless work I've been doing all day and it will be an accomplishment, of sorts, when I finally get it all finished.

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Boy...you want to get depressed about education in this day and age, read this web site. An internet friend of mine has a five year old son named Zac and the boy has been getting letters from adolescents who think he's Zac Ephron (star of High School Musical). Here's a depressing sample:

I hop the is your e-mail address and if it is can you right back to me and why did you break up with Vanessa Hudgens and are you go to get back to gater with vanessa

No wonder teachers are leaving the profession!