I relaxed a little today. Yes, there was that whole end-of-semester Senior Design report due this afternoon. No, it wasn't done. It still isn't done. It's not even nearly done. I'm once again taking a late, and that's fine with me.

The past couple of weeks has been fairly difficult. I did the entirety of my semester project in a networks class yesterday morning. I'm frankly a little surprised that I finished it on time. There was a network security final last night that didn't kill me. And so forth. I'm still sick of school, and of course you already knew that.

Also in the past fourteen days came my second rejection at a theatrical audition, both in a row and ever. I don't feel especially awful about this one, because it's a musical with only six parts, and there was a large swarm of people auditioning, most of which are far more polished singers than I am. So I don't feel terrible. But I'm hoping this couple of rejections doesn't evolve into a huge streak. My ego is fragile.

Of course, those two rejections have a little silent victory in between. After my awful audition for Metamorphoses, and before my audition for Songs for a New World which was merely imperfect, I was recruited into a production of Guys and Dolls.

I didn't audition for the show because it and Rocky Horror would go on two weeks apart, and that's more work than either of the directors would want their cast members to take on. At the first Forbidden Planet Productions meeting of the year, Roxy, the director of Guys and Dolls, practically begged me to be Big Jule in her show, but, there being no way in Hell I would have given up the opportunity I got to play Riff Raff, I stuck with Rocky.

A day or two after the last performance, Roxy told me that the guy she'd cast as Big Jule had walked out, never to return, and that I was the only one she'd trust with the part. I, not eager to give up my acting addiction just yet, responded to the affirmative—resoundingly and with plenty of unnecessary profanity for emphasis.

I thus had about two weeks to learn the ins and outs of this character. So, as I learned my lines and fumbled through the choreography, I got to know some of the people in the show, and got around to asking about this guy I replaced. I was a little curious whether Roxy had just gotten rid of the guy so I could be in her show; ego-stroking aside, that would have just made me feel weird. No, they said, this guy Zeke for whom I'd stepped in was a big slacker who never came to rehearsals regularly. They all seemed at least somewhat glad that I was there in his stead.

I have a tried-and-true method for memorizing lines and music which I've used ever since before my days with Delta Troupers back in high school. At that point, I realized that I knew the lyrics to many songs simply by having listened to them repeatedly, incessantly. Back then, I could probably recite a good eighty percent of the lyrics from the main albums of They Might Be Giants between the eponymous pink album through Factory Showroom without error. I've applied this method to lines by recording myself, but I've long since forgotten how to read music, so lyrics are better done with a cast recording. Thanks to my recent iPod purchase, both were trivial. I'm sure I listened to the song "The Oldest Established" fifty times in a row. Anyway, this sort of crash-course method has now gotten me literate on my parts in at least five shows, over the course of two or three nights each.

As Big Jule, I also got the privilege of holding the show's biggest, most open-ended ad lib—what to call Nicely-Nicely Johnson when I told him to stand up and testify at the mission. In my copy of the script, the line was "Get up, you fat water buffalo!", but the "fat water buffalo" was crossed out and replaced with something like "sleek turkey". I don't know how in Hell a turkey can be sleek, but I said it that way the first read-through. Afterward, I started to get creative with it, mostly in an effort to get the ensemble to crack up. I called Nicely many things; among them were "greasy badger", "oily mallard", "pug-nosed hoya", and, for the last show, "sleazy, beady-eyed squirrel". It had gotten to the point where members of the cast and the band were pushing their own suggestions. This was awesome.

I feel like the show went on largely as if I'd been around for all the rehearsals. It was very concentrated; when it occurred to me a little after the end that only two weeks previous I wasn't even on the cast of this show, I was a bit dumbfounded at the notion that such a complete experience could be crammed into thirteen or fourteen days.

I'm proud of what we put on. I'm certainly proud of my part in it—I would have to say that picking up the entirety of a speaking and singing role over the course of a week and a half is probably the most professional thing I've ever done as an actor. (Now I'm waiting for someone to pull me in as the lead of a show with only five days' notice.) It's the first time in a long, long while that I've been in a show with such a huge cast, and there were certain elements of it that I hadn't experienced since performing at Muncie Civic. It was a fantastic experience.

At this point, I'm still convinced that I'd rather do stage acting and voice acting for a living than computer security, but I have a commitment to fulfill, and, well, my acting could use quite a bit of work yet. So, yes, I'll have a day job, maybe wear a suit and tie, and fix stuff. But you can count on a significant proportion of my own time being spent in community theatre.

After significant efforts on my part to deconfuse the site for Googlebot, Radio Sprawling is finally listed on Google. This has changed the landscape of RS-related searches for the better. Searches on Radio Sprawling, "Radio Sprawling", and WasteCast all turn out top links related to my fledgling podcast network. I'm ecstatic about this. For a long time, the setup of the site, with its redirect-based navigation, duplicate-seeming pages, and improper robots.txt, was causing Google to automatically dismiss it as sketchy. My re-engineering efforts appear to have been successful.

My work's not done yet, though. Now that I've gotten a listing on the site to which all people go when they have a semi-complete idea of what they want, I've got some housekeeping to do. For example, wastecast.log, my installation of WordPress, is something that has to go at some point. WordPress is kinda messy and ugly in my opinion (not that I have any room to talk), and because of special customizations I've made, WordPress is a little broken anyway. So I'd like to put together a cleaner, more minimalistic RSS publishing mechanism, perhaps something like what I did for the YayaCast but more full-featured.

I've been trying to come up with some ways to get more unique content into The WasteCast. Its beginnings were idealistic and structured enough, but it's kind of settled into a format that resembles what my journals would look like without the countless edits I make before publishing. There's no comparison between my journals and my *odcasts—even though neither is quite pro-grade, the journals are far closer to what I would consider a publishable product. And I'm okay with the idea that I'm a much better writer than I am a radio personality.

But that leaves me with a show that's like a journal, only not as good. What I'd like to do is make it more of a variety deal. The WasteCast isn't necessarily meant to be comedy, but more food for thought; still, I think such a notion could benefit from multiple writers and/or creators of content. Certainly something like Late Night with Conan O'Brien—or even Pacific Coast Hellway—wouldn't be as palatable with only one guy behind the wheel. (That really wasn't supposed to be a pun.)

I know people who create good content on a regular basis. I'm even aware of at least one or two who don't exploit digital distribution channels. Now, I've heard at least three people complain that the podcasts they've heard are too self-aware, that they contain too much discussion of the medium itself. Well, wouldn't it be a Hell of a crux to get people who aren't even directly involved with the medium at all to create content for it?

I'm interested in the idea of Radio Sprawling meaning something to people. Maybe someday more than the dozen who already know what it is.

All the immediately available thoughts are now out. There you are, ladies and gentlemen... a journal.