Tech Week: Why I hate it and Why I love it

So, as some of you who read this blog may already know, this past week at the academy has been the Drama Guild's crunch time.  The opening night of our production, Zink: The Myth, The Legend, The Zebra is tonight.  We have been practicing after school until 6:30 PM every day this week.  It has been HELL trying to get in all my homework and study for tests/quizzes while simultaneously trying to eat dinner, shower, do chores, and get enough sleep.  Basically this shirt was my life this past week:

  I pretty much hated every minute of Tech Week and I wondered why I ever considered joining the Drama Guild again.  But then I realized something...


Why I hate Tech Week:
As you've just heard, the main reason I hate Tech Week is because of how much time it takes up.  We stay at school until 6:30 and it takes me about 20-25 minutes to get home so by then it's almost 7 PM.  On average, I get about 3 hours of homework a night so by the time I finish it's nearly 10 PM. I still have to eat dinner, shower, and do my chores.  As teenagers, we're supposed to be getting about nine and a half hours of sleep a night, but I only ended up getting about 6 a night this week since I finally got to bed around 11:45 PM. I had no time to do anything.


Why I love Tech Week:
Our director really did not want our rehearsals to conflict with Fall sports this year so she scheduled all of our rehearsals on Saturday afternoons.  This was actually pretty nice except for the fact that we only had seven run-throughs before Tech Week.  Our director had us rank Saturday's rehearsal on a scale of 1-10, 10 being the best.  We ranked it a -3.  People still didn't know their lines or their entrances.  We absolutely needed to spend the amount of time we did because at our last rehearsal, our director ranked us again. She gave our performance a 9.  That's when I realized just how important Tech Week was.  Although it took up so much of my time, Tech Week really helped us improve.  We figured out all of our lines (or the gist of them at least), all of our entrances, and all of our costume changes.  I was amazed by how good our last rehearsal turned out.

I feel like Tech Week is like cramming for a test.  You spend time during class hearing the material over and over again and then the teacher speaks up saying that you have a test tomorrow.  First, you freak out and hate yourself for every moment you decided you didn't have to take notes. Next, you just kind of suck it up and pull an all-nighter, reading the material over and over.  Then, when you actually take the test, you're surprised at how much you actually know. 

I hope that actually made sense but anyway, if you are free around 6:30 - 9 PM today or tomorrow night you should definitely come to see the play! It will be awesome!

Cosplay List

I don't know how other cosplayers do it.  I mean, it's just so hard trying to pick out a character that you like and sticking with that character while working on their costume.  Maybe I just have to many characters that I want to cosplay but narrowing down my cosplay list always seems to go like this:

I guess at least one person understands.

Anyway, there are two conventions that I am going to next year.  There's Queen City Kamikaze (QCK) in March and Anime Boston (AB) in April. I have plenty of time to work on and change my cosplays but as of today here's my list:

QCK - fem!Cecil (Cecilia) from Welcome to Night Vale:

Now, I would put a picture here to show you what Cecil or Cecilia looks like but there's one problem with that.  No one knows what Cecil actually looks like.  I mean we know what his voice actor looks like but that's not Cecil.  In fact the only description of Cecil we've gottn is that he is "not tall or short, not thin or fat." Welcome to Night Vale is a podcast so it's all audio and the writers really seem to like to leave a lot of stuff up to fan interpretation.  So pretty much everyone has their own vision of what Cecil and all the other Night Vale characters look.  Taking fan interpretation one step further, I decided that I want to cosplay Cecil's female version, Cecilia.  

I am really excited for this one since I think I only need to buy a purple long sleeved button-up shirt and gray or back vest.  I plan on wearing the shirt and vest with a black pencil skirt, galaxy print leggings, and purple converse.  I decided that I will use my actual hair for Cecilia.  I haven't seen any strawberry blond Cecil or Cecilia interpretations but I guess that just makes the costume more unique.

AB - Shima Renzou from Blue Exorcist:

Shima's probably one of my favorite characters from Blue Exorcist so I'm definitely excited.  I already found a really nice wig for him but I still have to look around for his school uniform jacket and his headphones.  His shirt, pants and shoes should't cause too much difficulty, but his staff on the other hand will.  I'm not sure whether I should just give in and order the staff on ebay or try to make it.  I have made something similar to it before but it was much smaller and way less elaborate.  I need to think on him a lot more but I have plenty of time to do that.

AB - Trip from DMMD:

                                                                     Or his younger self (the red head):

My cosplay buddy plans on cosplaying Virus (the one with the glasses) with me and neither of us are certain which version we want to cosplay.  If we cosplay as older Trip and Virus, people will recognize us quickly and we won't get mistaken for other characters.  But if we cosplay younger Trip and Virus, we won't have to spend as much on their costumes.  It's a hard decision and I think we're probably leaning more towards the younger versions, but we still have time left to figure out what we're going to do.

Alternate - Asahi Azumane from Haikyuu!!

Asahi reminds me a lot of myself because we're both tall and scary-looking when we're really just small on the inside and are unsure of how to talk to people.  I'm getting his uniform as a Christmas present so if it so happens that my cosplay buddy and I decide to drop a character from our list, Asahi will most definitely fill that spot. All I would need to buy is a knee pad and maybe some sneakers (mine are getting worn out anyway).  I really like him and if I don't get to cosplay him at QCK or AB, I'll definitely cosplay him at next year's Another Anime Convention.

-Rene