Party hacks!

Recording a couple of party food prep hacks for my future reference –

1. Have a theme.  In this case –  Summery.
2. Choose ingredients that can be used in a variety of dishes.
3. Salt and cracked black pepper works wonders.
4. White clams are a surprisingly cheap and easy to prepare dish.
5. I love white sangria.  The ginger ale turns it around.  Yum!
6. Salads are a lot easier to prepare than mains.
7. Some effort in planning actually helps in cutting down cooking/preparation time.
8. Jamie Oliver is my best friend.
9. Seared beef sliced is also surprisingly simple/effective.
10. People seem to like feta, tomatoes and rocket.

I love you baby

Today, thankful

1. Yoga pants and a tank top.  Warm and comfy.
2. Giant Scarf.  Doubles up as a blanket, eye mask etc.
3. Meeting new people at the 24h playwriting competition.  It turns out that other people are just as random as I am.
4. Funny messages from friends through the night and the wee hours of the morning.
5. My first play!  Terrible but the only way from here is up.  I think overall, I’m pretty proud of the effort.  There are some things you will never learn until you give it a go.
6. Being young (and crazy) enough to sleep on the floor.
7. My red neck pillow from Sydney.  A godsend when trying to get comfortable enough to sleep on the floor, in a really uncomfortable chair etc.
8. My bed.  Oh how I missed you.
9. Morning kite flying at Marina Barrage.
10. The view over the city at 3.30am in the morning.

Halfway point

I am almost ½ way though the 24h playwriting competition.  ½ the room has fallen asleep in various permutations of sleeping bags, blankets, sweaters and pillows.  Some just find a bit of floor, take off their shoes and curl up into a fetal position.  I’m still hanging tough.  Not bad considering that my last couple of coffee was about 10h ago.  (Although I might need a nap in a bit.)

My play is progressing.  Slowly.  So far, I have 4 characters, 8 pages of dialogue and a streetlight (which I’m starting to think is superfluous and non-value-adding.).  I’m trying to prevent my play from being about dysfunctional relationships and degenerating into melodrama.  To which my friend’s response was – Why deny Van Gogh his sunflowers?  Oh dear.

But as amusingly as this is going, there is some satisfaction in writing your first play.  It’s really more an exercise in the process rather than the content of the play.  This is no Tony Award, that’s for sure.  But as with most things in life, you don’t know till you try.  And I figure that having written a really bad play is better than having written no play at all.

(BTW, I was the only (crazy?) person looking out at the view towards the city at 3.30am in the morning.  Something wonderful about that.  We saw the fireworks from the National Day Parade earlier this evening too!  And the kites!!!  So much fun.)

A play in 24h

I’m at the 24h playwriting competition.  It’s about 2h in and I have just realized with horror that my ipod is down to its last bar, I didn’t bring the charger and there is a grand total of 2 songs on my netbook.  I thought I had music on my thumbdrive.  I was wrong.  It’s going to be a long night… 

This is what I have so far.  A first line, provided by the organizers, and a blank word document.  Haha.

Everyone else seems to be working hard.  It’s a façade.  (For the benefit of the paparazzi-like crazy photographers who keep taking pictures?)  The girl next to me is really drawing eyes, complete with eyelashes and eyebrows.  Another guy at the next table was watching a Tom Cruise movie but now he’s playing some computer game with a lot of shooting.   And I am sitting here, wrapped in a scarf because it is so damn cold, and blogging.  The creative process is in full swing clearly.

Okay.  Enough procrastinating from me.  I should really try to write a play.

Poker face

Totally random but I thought I’d post something to break the silence.