may, 2000

May 2, 2000

Behold my new photo gallery, now up! It is yet sparse, but I will make it not-so once I don't have a jury in the morning. I pray to Calliope, my muse ...

Up until about two seconds ago, I was clad entirely in black. I tend to dress in a style you might call bipolar -- either bright orange or entirely [concert] black. Today I wore jeans and an old batiked MCC t-shirt with my hair in a ponytail, and Nadav did several doubletakes before he recognized me without my usual hues. Tonight was the second performance of Jamboree, the biannual concert of all the a cappella groups on campus. Claire Weiss IS the Matrix: 'I know kung fu!' Cantatrix performed, and it is traditional in this group of eight women who sing early music ranging from chant to motets to 20th-century stuff based on the above to wear as much vynil, velvet, and leather as possible. Dog collars have been seen. Emily Shu, this rockin' senior with a great photo show up at the List Gallery right now (go see it!) gave me these fabulous shiny black pants (not vynil, but still enough to kick some Gregorian ass), and I wore them with a small black shirt, my roommate's dark brown lipstick, and eyemakeup. I love eyemakeup. Maquillage. So much fun. (My feet were bare, though. My toenails are now free of their angsty Kandinskian blottings and are now the ritual spring neon green, which they will stay until summer, when they become gold. Autumn and winter are indeterminate.)

We had a great concert except for the fact that I was sick as a dog (I have been sick for all three Cantatrix concerts this year!). My voice is a sexy fifth lower, but that somehow doesn't carry over to singing -- I couldn't hit the low G's as usual, and I topped out around a C or D. So there was minor lip-synch-age, but it was a great concert. Nadav commented that it was really tight -- both the tuning and the rhythm -- and even though he swears he hates classical music, he knows what he's talking about. I was quite pleased. I played viola on a motet "Weep O Mine Eyes" and it sounded very authentic, even though we got a little shit about being "a cappella." Suck it up.

Had a photo-taking frenzy afterwards -- Emily brought her real camera, and the rest of us were playing around with our point-and-shoots, shooting each other in various postures draped over Hollis and Nadav (the two hapless (or hapful, i suppose) men who wandered by our room, with Massey standing on her head, us looking pulchritudinous (we named the CD we burned for our seniors "Pulchritude," hehe). I hope I can reconcile staying in that group. I love it.

Anyhow, in this getup I went to my first SCCS webmaster meeting (they're going to call us "webninjas!" Hehehe). I'm excited for that. Roban'll be a sysadmin, and I get to apply my minimal knowledge of html (and soon java I hope) and learn more and be all official. Rock on computers.

Juries in the morning ... it is now time to sleep, and dream of Bach and secondary dominants. While I'm asleep, you should go see my viola case auction on ebay and bid on it! (please!)

May 4, 2000

Title: Not a poem

Bartók
clashes violently with the techno down the hall

I do not envy those who will move into First South next year.

nor do I really pity them, i suppose --
every so often I like it
when the hard beat of computer-generated noise
meshes with the beatles in Paul's room
and interlocks with Beethoven IX in mine

and I suppose I will miss
leaving my door open and watching half of swarthmore float by
and the pot smoke float in
...
perhaps I won't miss it.

Title: Another Not-Poem

personal pronouns, hate.
prepositions too.

Title: Having Far Too Much Fun with the Not-Poem format

Wish could actually write poetry
went to the reading from the workshop yesterday
alyssa was in it and sean brennan too
(whom she would call a 'badass')
-- inspired.

Maybe will write more. Today sitting in the sun
trying to read Jane Austen
(too many interruptions--love those)
i forgot my notebook
but as it turned out, Jeanne showed up
and laurel
and we ate nutella
and chris laughed at me -- in general,
and at the orange iBook cutout on the top of my sobbing Fujitsu

(it just crashed six times in a row!
the poor thing! i think it hates me)

on which Laurel was trying to write a paper

but the sun

sol

was far too bright and her paper disappeared into a black void of pixels
and Jeanne and I held up my sarong

(one should always carry
a sarong and jar of nutella with one,
laurel and I decided)

and made a purple canopy
and we further vowed to sew, on our new badass sewing machine,
canopies
for our beds.

And all day in the sun, the beach green and golden, the dingle starry
(what is a dingle?)
, I basked
bask
bask

Dinner à la syllabic-ell Sharples
did not exist
rather we trekked into the Ville for la cuisine chinoise

after which milkshakes
and lemon-chocolate-soda
and fries
and small green aliens

you can keep your WEED in it!

at Nifty Fifty's
and the people i love whose company i do not keep enough
bright neon signs behind our heads

i came back and the hall had pizza
i shall grow fat at this rate.

Title: Postscript -- Most Not-Poem of All

2/3rds scholarship from juries.

= $1000!
Orchestra 2001 just asked me to play a gig:

=$200!
Shit yeah.
go me.
badass.

May 18, 2000

I woke up this morning to hail pummeling my roof. Not the flaky kind that's just hardened snow, but marbles of ice pounding down so that it woke even me, who has slept through huge thunderstorms, up. Trust the Capital Times to run a dumb headline later this afternoon: All Hail Breaks Loose. Har har.

My two other boxes that we had to ship came today. Now I have a clock *. I'm not sure whether that's a good or bad thing. I can set alarms and see the red LCD time in the dark, but I rather liked waking up at eight AM for the hail today, then falling back into the arms of Morpheus and not regaining consciousness until one PM. Just enough time to shower, eat a bagel, read some of Mists, and call AAA to try and jump my car before my sister came home [early--prom aud] from school. I still can't get over the fact that she's still doing 8:25 to 3:25 until June 4th!

Mists of Avalon, a.k.a. simply, "Mists." One of my favorites. An 876-page tome. Suppose you could classify it as 'fantasy', though I prefer not to--really more like historical fiction with a very very liberal and narrative hand. In this trend of devouring anything "ink on flattened tree pulp," to paraphrase Vonnegut, I picked up the aforementioned's Timequake and started going through that. However, while V's earlier stuff (Cat's Cradle, Sirens of Titan) can hold me well with its removed, tongue-in-cheek ridiculousness, this later stuff is just so far removed from anything fictional and linear that it's as if V has been completely subsumed into his own notion of the Tralfamadorian novel--everything smacked at you all at once, assembley required. If there is sense you must pick it out yourself, but most likely the point (as was the case with Slaughterhouse Five, but in that case in a much more gruesome way) if there is one is that there really is no point to it all. It's all just sound and fury. He even quotes As You Like It: "All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players" [II.vii], saying that after this, no other words need have been written, it was so definitive.

It was at this point I put the book down in disgust and reached for Mists. Something else yesterday had been trying to convince me that life was just so hard to live, that there was too much effort and not enough reward, that it was all stuff and nonsense. Which I think is stuff and nonsense, and I don't want any of that nihilistic propaganda being flooded into my brain on a lovely summer afternoon, thank you. I love Mists. I read it before, in ninth grade or thereabouts, and while it's a little different from before, not much has changed. Avalon still holds its spell over me. I can sit all day and read it--

that is, when I'm not shopping with Allison and Ginnie. Having called AAA, a guy came and hooked up cables to my car. It started promisingly a few times, but when he removed them, the croaking machine promptly died. New battery is now at hand. Towing places want to charge me $100 to bring this clunker seven blocks down to the garage! My dad tells me triple-A will probably do it for me, but I kind of don't want them to--I'd much rather put it in neutral and roll it down the hill. It would only be thirty or so feet of flat pushing, and I'll recruit my Mawrtrys (Ginnie's staying at Allison's for the week) to steer/push. New battery, then we paint it orange. My mom thinks it's a death trap. I think it's just old and wheezy. Pobrecito.

A and G and I hit Tar-zhay, the French discount store, and Woodman's today. I love Madison, even if it's only entering a national chain of stores and a huge, twenty-four-hour grocery. I got photo albums in which to store my five years of pictures! three pair new pretty underwear (you can never have too much underwear, no matter what Allison says)! cute hair clips à la Amira & Kate Conover! a purple silk bra! peanut butter m&m's! a purple tank top (Allison got an identical one, so I'm going to stitch our initials in orange thread on the backs, hehe)! a phone jack coupler so i can hook up my modem and phone to the same jack! woo-hoo! Yay capitalism! Plus I transferred my money back into my UW Credit Union account so I won't have to be writing out-of-state checks forever.

I believe it is bedtime. I hate modems. Want my ethernet back! Moan moan.

^*I typed initially, "Now I have a cock." That would definitely be a bad thing, no vacillation involved. ; )