School/theRoar

It's been much much too long... I'm back to the grind again, school started on the 5th and it's been non stop ever since. I'm in the fifth and final year of my civil engineering degree. People always ask what a person who is so inclined to the arts is doing in engineering. Truth is, I don't even know. The closer I get to this degree the more I'm begining to think that maybe I chose the wrong path. But I figure I've come this far, so I might as well finish. Then there's the issue of disappointment. Disappointment. It's like there's nothing worse in the world than someone you care about being "disappointed". I mean they could be angry, upset, sad whatever! but disappointment just has this mysterious quality, like you don't know exactly what they're thinking. Scary really. Other than that, I actually love being back at school, I love the community of it.

What about in poetry world? well i've really been making strides. My last post was about my appearance in the poetree, soon after that I sent an email to one of the organizers of a spoken word festival called "The Roar". I basically asked to be in it, and to my surprise he said I was in. The Roar is basically like a poetry pub crawl. They have poets in different time blocks performing at different locations in the downtown area. My set was called the "Java Sevens" seven poets at a Java Express. So I walk in and there are these poets who have been published in 50 different books, who've read at the roar 500 times lol. And then there's me...
Spoken word performances to date: 1.5
Publications: 0
Yeah I was scared. I brought a lot of friends and family with me though, I definitely needed the moral support. They wanted me to do a 10 minute set, 10 minutes!! I'm thinking to myself, who wants to hear me ramble for 10 minutes!! oh the horror! So I took 3 poems with me @ about 2mins each, and I figured I would ramble through the remaining 4mins and maybe I'd be so wildy entertaining that they wouldn't notice that I was stalling. Well they called me up, and as one of the other poets later said I went "into my poems" I did the "Pandemic" poem followed by "Darfur" and then finished with "African-ness".

People actually liked it! The other poets came up to me after the show to tell me how beautiful it was, and that I should keep performing. It was more than I could've EVER expected. I'm so happy!! I feel like this was such an important thing for me to do. If i could do this then i'm capable of anything. I'm in one of those I can conquer the world moods today. So yeah, that's all for now. I like to pretend that people actually read my blog haha! It's therapeutic in a way. More later!