Day 44

February 12, 2010

 

Day 44:

 

            Today was a very unexpectedly eventful day. I woke up and made up the quiz for my kids. It was a straight forward quiz. The extra credit was hard but the standard stuff was easy. I took questions from each of their worksheets and compiled selected questions into one page and that was the quiz. These kids just can’t follow directions. I had to repeat the directions about five times and that’s on top of the fact that they were written on the board and written on the quiz itself. I started grading third period’s quizzes during third period and got pretty frustrated with their scores. I made sure my directions were even clearer with fourth period. I guess I should have written be quiet on theirs because they just couldn’t shut up. I ended up threatening two points off for the next person I heard talking I ende dup taking off 2 points of about half of the class. I then came back to the trailer and fixed some lunch before napping and heading to basketball practice. Yet again, as expected, practice was cancelled for one reason or another. I don’t know what the reason was this time, I frankly don’t even care anymore. So after that I went to play rehearsal and watched most of Act 3. After play rehearsal we had a cast party outside Tide Table. So we headed over there and ate. Of course Ben brought his Ukulele with him which we were all opposed to initially but it ended up working out. The food was pizza but I ended up not getting any nor did Eric. We decided we would eat at Tide Table after the party.

            Well when the Ukulele got brought out, Nitten, Polonious in the play, got a hold of it and was just playing random tunes. Before the night was over, Nitten was playing Ukulele, Eric and I were “drumming” on the table and everyone else was harmonizing to the song. It’s amazing how musically inclined this culture is. Nitten would start a song that only like three people knew so those three would sing the melody and everyone else, like 12 other Marshallese people, would pick up on the melody and harmonize with it after only hearing it for like 20 seconds. It was amazing. We ended up singing about 20 songs along the shore outside Tide Table. Nitten, Paul, Darryl and some other kid also had a quartet and they sang two Marshallese songs in perfect four part harmony before it was all over. It was simply amazing. I loved it so much just because it was such a relaxed setting and we were all having a good time.

            After that Eric and I headed to Tide Table to get some food. I ordered some chicken wings and fries. We were pretty hungry. Sarah, a Dartmouth ’09 teaching on Laura, was there and spoke and talked to us for a while. After waiting for our food for about 45 minutes Laura asked us, “How long have you guys been waiting.” We answered about 45 minutes. So then the guy at the bar next to Sarah turned around and said, “45 Minutes? Really. Hold on.” So this guy gets up and walks over towards the kitchen and starts talking. Eric went over to talk to him, meanwhile Sarah was telling me about how much of a big shot this guy is. So about four minutes later our food was out and before we finished talking with this guy, Kurt, he invited us on his boat Sunday to go out to Enamanit one of the outer islands.

            So after we made the deal with Kurt to go to his island, we saw someone we recognized walking around Tide Table. Eric identified him as Clenny. For those of you who don’t remember, Clenny was the main musical attraction for the Defender condom launch earlier on in the stay. During warmup for the condom launch, Clenny was playing one of his songs, and Eric and I decided to play our drums along with him. So he came over and after some small talk said that we should all jam sometime. We said we wanted a CD to take back to the states so we could get him a record deal or get him on MTV or something. So Eric and Clenny exchanged numbers and we are waiting for the jam session text from the “Island sensation musical artist” Clenny.

            So when we finally got back to the trailer we told everyone about our networking escapades and then I watched Love and Basketball before going to bed.