aUguSt, 2000
August 3, 2000, 11:58 PMI have been ripping CDs from the library onto my hard drive like a banshee. A banshee! He he he. Joan Osbourne and Dee Carstensen on winamp right now, with a purple skin. I love this machine. As soon as I get my monitor (grrrrr) i'm going to watch a DVD on it! :-) Just saw Midsummer Night's Dream with Alexis & Alana at APT--mom couldn't go; stuff at work. Excellent show! I love it. Puck and the fairies were great (ill met by moonlight, proud titania) and I loved seeing the play again after having performed the little play within a play at the end with willets 1st south last year. Hehe. I miss Alyssa, my Thisbe. I miss Anna, my Robin Goodfellow.Been missing Swatties a lot today! Talked with Nadav for about an hour on AIM at work (stupid java applets; i'm right now burning the AOL setup file onto a CD so I can install it from that drive instead of trying to download a forbidden file--stupid windows NT), about a variety of things, the issues involved in relationships, what we'd been doing, &c. So good to talk to him. I miss him so much! And then seeing Midsummer Night's, and missing Alyssa painfully, and Anna (though not a swattie--I'm going to see her for 3 days in a few weeks! i got a friday off and i'm going to drive down), and watching Alana and Joel get their room assignments (she's in Willets 3rd, on Claire P-T's hall, right next to me!; he's in a Wharton 2nd AB quad!), and damn,
Been talking to Dave Choffnes, a friend of anna likewise trapped in an office setting, with a few major differences--he's doing skilled work, and I'm not; he's getting significanly more corporate dough for doing that work than I am; he quits friday, I stay on another 3 weeks. We keep each other company via odious java applets and waste WPS' money, hehe. Much fun. Love the company; he's quite cool. Discussion all over the map. Dee Carstensen rocks. Have I mentioned this? This electric harp playing woman opened for Dar Williams when the latter came to Swat this past spring. So much I could talk about. So much I've been discussing with people recently. Weird, this vantage point of being absent from school, but still in it. So many people I miss, am ardently trying to keep in contact with, get to know better, love from a distance. I am grateful for the fact that Alana, Ben, Michael, and Emilie are here. goddamn, instead of going to work tomorrow, all I want to do is lie in the sun in my new pink bikini and read Lolita. Psychosexual, yes--I realized i've read about four of these in a row (The Fermata, Baker; Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera; Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald; now this Nabokov)--but it's so well-written! i love his style. And his vocabulary! i need to know and use these words.
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August 5, 2000, 10:54 PMI have a ridiculous grin on my face, a daisy stuck behind one ear, and one between my teeth. I'm wearing my oldest (and only pair with knees) pair of jeans, supersoft with the washing, and my longsleeved pink shirt that comes over my hands in faux indian patterns. Hair up somehow behind my head, flopping. Daisies in it and my mouth. :-) I am smiling and the cliché ear-to-ear comes to mind; feels like my mouth (or at least certainly my exuberance) extends that far, across my head, compassing my brain.I just returned from the last Bach Dancing & Dynamite concert of this season, where as usual they passed out daisies and brownies, and played the best music. Shostakovitch Piano Quintet, among other very very cool things. I've been learning the viola part to that recently, because Midnight is playing it next year, and yesterday I burned it onto a CD for Ben (along with the Debussy quartet and the Bartók 3rd string quartet), and he's been listening to it too. I love that piece! So tonight, when we saw it, we knew the piece already, and it was that much cooler. And it's so cool already! Yaaaaaaay! Oh, hurrah for music. An entire crew came along this time--not only did I bring Ben, but Mike Gilles, Dom, John Cohen, and Mona Lewandoski (ben's flute-playing, stilts-walking gf from Harvard; my friend--up for 4 days from vermont) also came along for the fun. I just sat there smiling ridiculously throughout the whole concert, grinning, loving this music. I'm going to practice tomorrow. Today, however, was great. I woke up at 8:15 and went running with Mona for about 20 minutes, whereupon we showered at our respective houses and I got her, ben, and mike for an excursion to the farmer's market, where I ran into Mme Delord! I thought she was still in France! but no, and we talked for about five minutes, and though my french has atrophied with disuse a little, it has not suffered much, and mme didn't lapse into english, for which i was grateful. I told her Alana was back, her and the three of us could go get coffee sometime. yay! Also ran into Andrea Rock, at her last day on the job of the Teddywedgers shop, hehe, and we promised to play violas on the street before we go back to school. Mona and I purchased honey sticks, mm. Lunch then (first food of the day) at Mickey's Dairy Bar, where i think I've only been once before. Excellent stuff. Wisconsin culture is a weird thing, but the more I'm away from it,  the more I enjoy it. Weirdness. Red vynil barstools, walls, a big menu on the wall, old HS acquaintences working there (a guy i had a huge crush on in 11th grade or so was there--fun to be able to look at him completely impassively. guess out of sight, out of mind :-), the red bottles of ketchup and containers of fake syrup on the table (mona, from the green mountain of vermont, was appalled). I had an excellent tuna melt with cheese on charred pumpernickel bread. Huge meal. It started pouring. Cold, wet, rain. I was wearing a tank top with my bikini top in hopes that i would get to swim later today with emilie (the weather did not permit it) and my orange shorts, pretending it was warm summer, so i froze. We drove back to Ben's house and played a game of scrabble. I've never found people to play scrabble with me! yo, if you got to swarthmore and you'd be down with that, email me and tell me so! Allison always is loath to play because her parents (Donna & George) are obsessed with the game (they've memorized the official Scrabble Dictionary) ... but Ben and mike and mona and I had a great game--the girls kicked the guys' asses by 22 points. Did you know that "QUAT" is a word? Means "pimple; sty" or, in provincial english, "what". Hehe. I didn't know either until I put it down, hazarding a turn but not wanting to end up with at 10-point Q! :-) The online dictionary doesn't have it, but what do they know? Unabridged Merriam-Webster's does, and we won. We started making deviled eggs for ben's planned picnic, and the rain started coming down in torrents. I wanted to go outside and run in it, but Mona wanted to devil eggs. Mike said he'd go out with me, though, and soon Ben and Mona followed--i just wore my bikini top (i knew i'd get to go swimming!) and we ran down to wingra park, shouting and laughing and ben and mike tackling each other in the mud, running through the huge puddles and rivers coursing around the streets, getting completely soaked. So much fun. I haven't run in the rain in the longest time! We stopped by michael's [frozen custard, for the uninitiated] and bought a pint of peanut butter cookie dough custard, which we later forgot to consume. (we couldn't then because we were still too full from the huge lunch.) Back to ben's house. Mona and i went to my place for a minute; i jumped in a hot shower, and we returned. at this point, Jax (Jon Althouse Cohen), Steven Burt, and Dom had showed up, and over an excellent dinner, we discussed what is and makes music, lapsing into analogies in linguistics and computer science. --tangent: I realized that for all my current worry about what i'm going to major in, i really should stick to my original idea of a kind of combined triple in music, ling, and CS. There's so much merit to that! Combine the CS with something I love. I shouldn't have abandoned the idea of the ling major just because of Ted's stupid class. I still really really enjoy the stuff, and would hate to stop being educated about it at where i am now. So, i sense a little [more] schedule reärranging is in order ... blah (but worth it). At this point, I realize it's 7:10 PM , and drag the interested party out the door to the BDDS concert. God, I had so much fun. I'm very excited to play Rasumovsky again with Matt and Michael tomorrow (and my mom says Victor called while I was out--maybe we'll have a full quartet)! And then my week-long repertoire orchestra starts tomorrow, too (lots of viola! and i'm going to practice!). Also I'm meeting this girl Erin, an entering frosh at Swat ('04) who lives in Madison whom I've never met, for breakfast, and i want to go running, so it should be a full and great day. Weekends contain so much when you work 40 hours a week. Offices suck! (But i love music!) |
August 25, 2000, 5:21 PMBen has been in a snit recently. I hope he finds what makes him happy ... give me a viola and a book of bach and i'll be happy for a long time to come. Give him the world to change and he'll try, and have to get good offices, and run campaigns, and convince people to vote for him, to vote for him to change the world ... really, each of us only needs one thing.
It's true, though. I am very solipsistic about the whole thing. The thing. the world, life, the goings-on around me, the sandwich i eat and whose cheese i almost drown in, the counterpoint swirling in suspended variations above the piano and viola, the orange markers in which i doodle, the fabulous books i read--i love my people but the thing I need to be happy is solo--even disregarding the orchestra, the chamber players, the audience. Ben needs people interact. His soapbox is only an empty crate without voters. Says he doesn't feel like he can appreciate poetry. Baffles me. Meantime, I've been sleeping till noon or past, aestivating for the imminent school year. I'm so excited. Mike Smith is back on campus. So are Alyssa, Megan, Bonnie French, Adrian ... damn, damn, i need to go back there now! Soon nori, soon. You need to pack first. Voice of reason keeps me in check sometimes. Had lunch with Mike Gilles at the Radical Rye (mmmm, gotta love that place)--got the sandwich all over me like a two-year old. Bought a plain silver band to make up for my still-broken Hug Ring. Have written the designer asking for another but the phone number was disconnected ... maybe. I'm trying to get a jeweler to mend my old one but the ones i've called only deal with gold. Stupid yuppies. My finger now feels whole again. :-) Saw Racine's Phèdre last night at APT. I love APT. It is to the Euripedes as the Anouilh Antigone is to the Sophocles--a french reworking of the original Greek. Lovely stuff.
Been playing around a little with images for the sccs site. These are "weather" images. 40x40 px. The last one is entitled "two AM with a chance of Nori being bored." I amuse myself. I feel like i should know a lot more html--and have a lot more computer acumen in general--than I do. Oh well, this is what the webmaster stint and CS gig are about, right? ;-) Time to go practice. Been doing it in 15 minute chunks. I'm going to start pushing that up--it's really frustrating, and there's no pain. I finally got the audition information out of the Haddonfield Symphony Orchestra. I have until September 15th to work up 3-4 minutes of slow music, 3-4 of fast, and be able to sight read what they give me. No excerpts. I think I can do this. Wish me luck ...
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