My First Real Wave

I finally went to Sunset Beach today after being encouraged by several people and it was amazing! Low tide was at around 2p so Wendy and I got there around 1p and paddled out. It is so peaceful just sitting outside of the break and there's this amazing sense of community as you look around at all the other surfers. I had already decided that my goal for today was to stand up and ride a wave just once since I had yet to do so. I had been out in the water for about 45 minutes or so just getting the rhythm of the waves and occasionally trying to catch one with no success when a stranger paddled by and told me to try catching one a little closer in. Just as he was paddling away, I saw an incoming wave and paddled a little closer into the shoreline, lined myself up for the wave, and paddled. Before I knew it, the wave was coming up behind me and then it happened-I caught it, felt the energy of my board cruising along, and pushed up! I half expected to fall pretty quickly but, to my surprise, I didn't. I rode the wave in until I could see some rocks that I preferred not to surf into and jumped off my board into the water. The feeling was so incredible that if I was on land I definitely would have been jumping up and down. Instead, I paddled back out, beaming, ready to do it again. I caught three more waves and rode them in standing up over the course of the next hour and a half and I could not have asked for anymore. If I wasn't hooked before, I definitely am now.

Acting Class

I have a decently long list of things that I have been saying for a quite a while now that I would like to do and I am slowly but surely working my way through the list. One of these agenda items was to take an acting class. I have been saying that I was going to do this for the past year now, and for various reasons such as work-schedule inconsistency and my general fear of looking stupid, I had not enrolled in a class until this week. I got my work schedule for November a little over a week ago and realized that, every Tuesday evening, I have a perfect block of time open that coincides nicely with an acting class I had been interested in so I took the leap and signed up. Tonight was my first class and it was so much fun! Going in, I was really nervous and thought I was going to feel really awkward and out of place but my classmates are a really fun, easy-going group of people who more or less just want to have fun playing characters every week.

I am especially excited about starting this class right now because they are just moving into a section on character study/ development which is my favorite part of acting. There is just something so enthralling about trying to figure out the psychology of a character and why they do the things they do or how they would react to different situations. We also got homework assignments tonight for next week. The first assignment is to pick a person to study over the next week so we can come in and do an impersonation for our next class. I am still deciding who I should study--maybe someone at work?

The second assignment is to pick a dialect to start studying so we can expand the range of characters we can play. I think I can do a pretty decent British accent and I know the Southern accent well enough to be able to pull that off, so I decided to go with something I have never had much experience with before and chose the Midwestern accent. Now I have to go online and try to find videos of Midwesterners (I think I want to focus on the more northern dialect that you hear in people from Minnesota and North Dakota) so I can listen and practice. Maybe next time you see me I'll be able speak like I am from Fargo :)