Category: Recaps

2016 Reflection

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Everybody lived their year this year and as always I have reflected a lot on the past 12 months. In fact, I’ve been reflecting since Thanksgiving. I’ve spent the last six weeks thinking about 2016 and gearing up for 2017. Pondering the lessons I’ve had this year and wondering what lessons the new year will bring. I think I am setting high expectations for myself to be organized and successful next year.. but when you really think about it, it’s just another loop around the sun like any other loop.

Anyway, 2016 was a year of endings (college, childhood, living at home) and beginnings (adulting, moving into my own place, first job outta school). It was a year of lessons. Learning about how to adult, learning about myself… I hope that I can take what I’ve learned so far and apply it to the next chapter.

I don’t want to dwell too much on 2016, mostly because I feel like I summed it up in the previous paragraph. I really feel like maybe this year wasn’t that spectacular aside from graduating. Graduating opened up the floodgates to so many new opportunities and they are gradually flowing into my life now. So I’ll focus on 2017 now and how to make it one of my best years yet.

For more life tidbits, please follow me on Twitter @marissamaym or check out one of my Instagrams @marmaym (personal), @sadwalletshappytummies (food), and @paperstonehearts (writing, journaling).

Turning 22

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21 was an amazing year. This was the year I would reach a handful of feats; including staging my original play, stage managing for the first time, going on an international service trip for the first time, and graduating from college. There were many lessons in personal tribulations, academic foes, and social happenings. I faced a lot of adversity this year in the form of micro aggressions, self-confidence, and emotional turmoil. In the last 12 months, I think I have learned so much about myself and my capacities. I always have to remind myself that I don’t have to be as social or as successful as others (similarly, everyone else doesn’t have to be my kind of social and successful). I’m the kind of person that needs to stop and breathe when there’s too much happening at one time. Once I take that breathe, I find the strength to move forward.

22 is the year I move forward. 🙂 This is the year I will reach a few more feats, learn a few more lessons, and face a little more adversity. 🙂 This is the year I become a little more of who I’m meant to be. I can’t wait. 🙂

Here are some things I’d like to do before I turn 23:

  1. Plan an international trip
  2. Visit a new city
  3. Bake more cookies
  4. Read more!
  5. Take better conscious care of my body
  6. Write plays (3)

Lessons Learned from SCU, a poem

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In Spring Quarter 2016, I stepped onto the Love Jones stage for the second and last time in front of my peers and potential SCU first-years. I was extremely excited and extremely nervous… and I wrote my poem two days before the performance and barely finished it hours before. AND… I memorized it! I was so pleased with myself because that was the first time I had memorized it and it was probably the biggest crowd I had ever performed for. Here’s the piece for you to read:

  1. Don’t waste time on magical wishes. You know the drill, rubbing your golden lamp for good grades, good food, good friends, and no embarrassing trips down the stairs of your freshman dorm. You’ll wish and wish and wish, but maybe tripping on the stairs is better than tripping over your first college kiss–because he won’t answer your wishes or even your text messages.
  2. I don’t need those wishes–I have all the wit in the world right here. From growing up in East Side San Jose, walking home from Quimby Oak Middle School, and learning how to college almost completely on my own, a magic genie has nothing on me.
  3. That being said… college will kick your butt all the way back to your public/private/boarding/what-have-you school. So WORK HARD. Shoulder your backpack with notebooks and pens, social anxieties and career aspirations–wake up for your 8am and do all the reading. It pays off.
  4. Be patient. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither was Palm Drive or McLaughlin-Walsh or the new art building. If you wait long enough for anything, something beautiful might just happen.
  5. While I try to be as nice as I can… some people just aren’t nice. Some people intend well, but they tend to their feelings more–they end up dropping prejudice about your race, your gender, your major–they tend to drop and shatter your optimistic worldview. So I keep my guard up.
  6. I am a woman and women are looked at a little bit differently… I am strong and confident and all of that jazz, but do not try to jazz me up. Just because I’m smiling–I love to smile, but it’s also a social expectation–just because I’m smiling does not mean I want your body pressed against mine, hold on sorry, my roommate’s calling me, she’s telling me to PRESS NO for do not mistake a woman’s “niceness” for her consent.
  7. Remember when I said to be patient? I meant in regards to your sophomore year crush –he’ll come around and around and around and around 8 months, he’ll hold your heart in his hands and you will have never felt safer.
  8. My major is not my end-all, be-all
  9. And neither is the color of my skin. Because as much as I am PRIVILEGED to be studying English, to communicate my thoughts clearly, and to be studying THEATRE, to create art with a purpose–Because as much as I am PROUD to be brown-skinned and brown-eyed, to be MEXICAN and FILIPINO in one body–I would hope that you pay attention to not what I look like, but what I do– I hope you will not pay attention to what my degree will say but what I say. And what I say is:
  10. Don’t give up. You DESERVE to be here. I believe in you and you and you and you and I made it this far for a reason and that reason is making our parents proud, making our grandmas proud, making our aunties proud, making way for our 11-year-old cousins so that they too can see what they are made of.

Tips From a First Time Stage Manager

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Over the Winter Quarter 2016, I was lucky to have stage managed SCU’s production of The Good Doctor. This was the first time I had stage managed since… high school. I was really nervous, but even though there were some bumps, everything smoothed out in the end. Here are some things I learned over the last 9 weeks:

In order to stage manage a theatrical production, there are three essential things that you need: patience, patience, and more patience. (A sense of humor is also helpful). In complete seriousness, you need a lot of things to stage manage, but patience is a huge component of it all. Here are some things I learned over the course of rehearsal and performance of The Good Doctor:

  1. Organization – At any given point during a rehearsal or performance, there could be at least three or four things happening at the same time. You have to know when to call Go for the lights, sound, set, and curtain and being organized REALLY helps. Pencils, erasers, highlighters help. But setting up your workspace thirty minutes before call/go time is probably the biggest hand you could ever give yourself. Stay on top of your stuff.
  2. Flexibility – Someone in your cast and/or crew will be late one day. And on another day, someone else will be late. Or someone will be sick and will have to leave early. You gotta be flexible! Additionally, sometimes you don’t know how things are gonna go, so you just gotta go with the flow and facilitate as best as you can.
  3. Confidence – This is so important. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing–fake it til you make it. Or, alternatively, ask questions. Stick to your word and know that one or another, it will work out.

It was an absolute joy to have worked on such a fun and funny show with such amazing, talented individuals. I learned a lot about being a stage manager, but I also learned a lot about theatre and story and listening. As a creative writer and playwright, this experience was invaluable. I loved witnessing discoveries within the script and looking at it from different perspective. The possibilities are endless with theatre and a great group of people. 🙂

I staged my play and now I’m a third of the way done with the school year: a fall quarter recap

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Holy cow. My first quarter of my last year of college is over. Holy cow.

It’s weird saying those types of things now. Like, it’s my last year of college. I was here last year… and the year before that… and the year before that. Three years ago, I finished my first quarter of my first year in college. TIME. TIME is a strange phenomenon. I never thought I’d actually ever get to this point, but here we are. About 7 months away from graduation.

…

But I’m going to try to not think about that. For now.

For now, I will be content. Content and happy and pleased and relieved with what the past 10 weeks have given me. From moving into a new apartment to taking a Communications class I didn’t need to take to finishing my play to staging my play to rallying for social and racial justice to taking naps – it was a jammed quarter to say the least. That’s the way I like it. Or maybe I’ve just trained myself to like it after three years of busying myself. Or maybe I’m in denial.

Whatever way you spin it, I’m not sure I’ve been more grateful in my entire four years at SCU. Or maybe even my life. Never have I been so grateful, reflective, and proud. It’s one thing to write something and it’s one thing for people to read it and it’s a completely other thing for people to see it and connect with it. Some people might not understand this, but – writers are really self-conscious. We write what’s in our heads… and then get really nervous when people read it or hear it and it’s like the be all end all. That’s what it feels like for me.

Hapa Cup of Sugar was a piece of me. And I have the honor and privilege to share that with hundreds (hundreds) of people. I still can’t believe it. It’s so hard to put my thoughts and feelings about the entire project into words. (I’ll have to because I’ve got about three final reports to do on it, oh geez.)
Aside from that lil thing, this quarter treated me just about the same as any other quarter. I took a class in the COMM department called Media and Social Movements. We learned about the Anti-Nike campaign, the revolution in Egypt, and consumer citizenship. It was nice to take a class purely because I was interested in it. My favorite class this quarter.

I also got heated about student apathy and diversity at SCU, but that seems like a norm now. Which is awful. We’re working on it. By “we,” I mean a small group of students. Sigh.

That’s pretty much it for a recap of the quarter. I’ll write a 2016 goals (fears??) post soon, too.
In the meantime, I hope you also reflect on your quarter. I hope it treated you well – or that you dominated finals, at least!