Another busy weekend has passed, and–surprise!–I recently realized that I’ll be flying back to Hawai’i in exactly one month from today. Of course, I really can’t think about that fact for too long, because as much as I long to return to my ‘aina, going home = the end of the first semester = I’m almost halfway done with sophomore year = I’m almost done with college = I’m GETTING OLD.

Anyway, I’ll just go straight into my recap to distract myself from that disturbing equation above. The past few days marked the first time in months that I didn’t go to work at the Johnson on the weekend: weird, right?  Still, I somehow managed to keep busy without help from my internship.

Thanks to the sponsorship of one of Risley’s Faculty Fellows, I was able to see a production of Sartre’s No Exit at the Schwartz for free on Friday night.

Tonight's guest star, my roommate Johann Sebastian Bear, proudly presents the No Exit program. (He went on Saturday night without me and said I should've stayed for the director's talk-back.)

Though the play was written for a cast of four (with three main characters and a valet who only appears in the first scene) Juliana Kleist-Mendez ’12′s No Exit also featured a group of three demonic dancers that shadowed the protagonists in silence throughout the entire piece. These wide-eyed performers both reflected and influenced the actions of their speaking counterparts (and, in my opinion, were most effective while doing the latter). Since I’ve recently added “the portrayal of doubles in literature” to the grand Things About Which Keely Might Write Her Honors Thesis list, I found this directorial decision fascinating. In case you’re not so much of a fetch fan, let me explain a little. The double is a European cross-cultural phenomenon: for example, the British Isles have the fetch, the Germans the doppelganger and the Norse (my favorite, as any longtime reader knows) the vardøgr. Whether sinister or just a little weird, accounts of bilocation or double encounters are still floating around today (and I promise I’ve read about them from sources more reputable than my beloved paranormal podcasts!) in fiction and reality alike.

(Um, before I get too carried away, I’ll just wrap this up right here. No Exit was a good show.)

Since it’s getting late and I don’t feel like writing any more pseudo-intellectual blabbing, I’ll move on to another less-thesis-related weekend highlight. A little backstory first: last year, my friend and I celebrated autumn by making pumpkin bread, and, fortunately, this baking extravaganza has become our new tradition. Though we had to use applesauce for eggs and my rice cooker’s inner lining for a mixing bowl, we still created a great loaf that was far superior to our previous results. Yum!

As Loki or Þórr would say, "Klefna ek sá hleif" (I have cleaved this loaf of bread). (Incidentally, that's one of my first English --> Old Norse translations ever: hope it's not hideously wrong!)