may, 2001

Wednesday, May 2, 2001, 25:52 AM

listening to beethoven's op. 131 string quartets (guarneri -- i kept jenny yun late at underhill tonight, trying to find books on rachmaninoff but getting distracted by scores to verdi's stabat mater and ein deutsches requiem, books on the second Viennese school (soooooo excited!)). beethoven (it was symphony number seven, sieben, this afternoon; my wishes about the second movement fulfilled) on the stereo, a personal guru critiquing my LaTeX coding style behind me ... this is a beautiful stasis which violates all definitions of the word we learned in Mrs. Sager (was she?)'s 8th grade Language Arts class. Dynamic vs. Static, we were told. as themes in literature; as they describe characters; as they name situations. this is a stasis full of swell and subito piano, inflected like the streichquartette from this man of the first viennese school, crescendo and decrescendo, full of dynamics. a beautiful stasis. god, but i want it to stay.

he whistles while inhaling, tonguing the notes like a clarinetist. my dad used to do that and would anticipate the chord progressions of whatever was playing on Wisconsin Public Radio. my mom says, freud. i say, i go to a liberal arts school; don't think i haven't considered it. more parental parallels when one of my three words is "maternal" -- my associations aren't bad, per se (quite the opposite in almost every case), but no girl wants to become their mother.

(eating ramen. one of the last times i had it there was german pancake in it.)

Sunday, May 6, 2001, 12:27 PM

was haben wir gemacht ? ~ my first german sentence to speak of.

they say that sometimes your first utterances are indicative of your personality. "book" was my first word; "follow me" my first complete sentence (and note that it was an imperative).

drinking riesling before brunch. (i don't intend to regret anything.)

i will learn german by reading wine labels; looking at bilingual CD liner notes on Bach; grilling the native speakers (by whom i suddenly seem to be surrounded -- marTin, oliver, henrike) on pronouns, numbers, days of the week; from memorizing poetry and recalling constructions from rilke and goethe; by sheer will and belief (it's worked for me up till now).

we don't need no education -- who needs a textbook?

i will learn german by cutting hair; driving through the delaware valley singing along to the beatles; by making my hair gesund und schön (albeit knotty -- tag für tag); by learning shell scripting and the ins and outs of procmail; by sheer will and belief (it's worked for me up till now).

finished the bottle. was haben wir gemacht?
(at least the moon is right.)

Wednesday, May 9, 2001, 8:09 PM

here, there, everywhere; morning time and evening time and summertime and wintertime ...

joel-o told me of talk he's heard. of people commenting on marTin's and my entrance this [monday] morning, running up and attacking hedda and mark from the sharples tunnel on the « sharplesian plane », and how we looked so happy and how we were right together. this kind of gossip makes me happy. i love that my happiness is this transparent and evident.

what has been going on recently? i can't remember and i don't care to. i could parse my days if i had to but i'd rather parse my sentences. learning german, slowly. ich habe drei grosse knutschfleken. i can't wait even eight hours. and it will have been more unless he reappears right around the end of my 7 - 10 underhill shift. i've been working a couple of these recently, taking people's shifts where they need extra time and sitting behind this neon-orange desk, trying to get MacSSH to use protocol 1 (i think; it just doesn't like sccs or orange -- i have to log into them through allspice), listening to whatever swims into my ken. it's eroica right now. (all it needs is a[n aspirated] T.) monday i went through beethoven 1 and 7 before coming around to the rep tests which i'm vaguely doing ... at least beethoven 3 is on them. as is six. it just might be an evening of this first viennese master.

i apologize for the repetition of certain phrases, certain metaphors i get hung up on. it's all in the process of codification, in the realization that einmal ist keinmal as kundera says and as i've echoed (yes that's geekspeak seeping through) (please tell me what the fuck renice means?). and i don't mean once as in once per lifetime. i mean once as in iterations within the day, iterations within the minute as i wake up, iterations around a blue-and-green cycle, iterations of three words in various combinations, iterations in all the languages in which i can hope to think, iterations varying location from place to place and country to country. this phrase is resonating and i'm just exploring its imprints in my life recently. (just don't let me latch on to the other german phrases in that book, muss es sein ? and ess muss sein -- much more fatalistic. which is not at all what i need now, to keep being able to seize the days while i have them.)

this fall i will be in vienna. i'm applying for my international student ID card (not sure it will do me much good but counciltravel.com seems to think so and what can it hurt. airfare discounts? received an email from our contact person at DePauw this afternoon (at least, when sccs went back online -- it was sent yesterday) detailing some aspects of our courses, &c. the theory course they're describing (which i don't understand as being geared for the both of us, me and Olivia -- she's had one semester of theory; i've had FOUR) sounds fucking awesome. and they totally incorporated the suggestions i had for them as for syllabus:

Fin de Siecle/Theory Course Description: In this course we will focus on the theoretical aspects of the music by composers living in Vienna from approx. 1880 to 1945 which includes the Late Romantic composers (Brahms, Mahler, Bruckner) and the Second Viennese School (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern). We will listen to and analyse a number of pieces and the students will take advantage of the massive concert offerings in the city of Vienna. Projects will be tailored to the students individual level in theory in a seminar-like environment.

... how cool is that. i mean, i'm not sure what they can find to say to a student who's analyzed wagner and one who's barely touched mozart, but "projects will be tailored," and we'll be in fucking Vienna. viENNa. prospects look so good for this fall ... 210 miles, 5h by train, a yellow convertible, a few weeks before and after ... sheer will and belligerence ... vouloir c'est pouvoir, non? god[dess] let it continue. i'll hold my breath and hold my tears lest i lose anything. keep me safely through the night.

Friday, May 11, 2001, 5:51 PM

i have a tendency to personalize my environment, to declare myself at home wherever i am, and to settle in. right now i'm seated at aleppo (if you knew that was a spice, you get points -- extra points if you knew it was from Syria, and that it's a city there) in the sun lab right now (an Ultra-10 sun microsystems computer running Sun OS 2.6), in front of a window which would have a great, fully-green view of the hill down from Sproul to DU, but is instead blocked by this huge monitor. strewn all around me are bits of detritus which have accumulated over the past day and a half ... pinker's words and rules, my sunglasses, a cloth in which a loaf of hot bread was initially wrapped, a pink nalgene bottle, my new Swat QSA shirt, a hot pot, a box of Pasta Roni shells & white cheddar, one of kasia's green pens (i lost my red one at the same time as i received those tree scratches last night). i'd say i've moved in but this is so temporary and nowhere near the amount of stuff (cube fridge full of snapple and white wine; several books of CDs; &c.) that marTin has stored in the adjacent robot lab.

i haven't moved in but i'm certainly domesticating the place. not wanting tarble for lunch (vegetarian options include bean burritos, grilled cheese, veggie burgers, and (for me, the bad veggie) tuna sandwiches or melts -- all of which get old fast), i whined until marTin threw a box of gnocchi at me (<-- extracted from the same genuardi's bag as a package of almond flour, for to make rum cake with -- call your aunt and get the recipe, boy!). i dragged the hot pot into the sun lab proper and set up a small kitchen next to Coriander, procuring olive oil from tarble with which to mix the over-salty pesto sauce. but there was spinach gnocchi in four minutes, just like the box promised. i took a bowl up to boy, studying for his next honors exam (the second 8:30 AM one in two days -- i'm not sure i support that kind of brutality, especially when it affects my sleeping locations!), and felt ridiculously domestic. ah well, so be it. never tried to counter that one.

woke up this morning feeling very relaxed and happy, watching the sunlight (only between 8:30 and 9:30 a.m. do i get any sun in that cave of a basement room) traverse the translucent petals of one of the pink roses i have up to dry above my bed, left over from the twelve a month ago or so. woke up hair down feeling warm in many ways and made my way to the sun lab, where i've been since.

fuck this shit, yo. this project due sunday night, and i've got to work straight through this next week (until the 18th) to get everything solidly out of the way. at which point i will be blessedly done, and can concentrate on moving (temporarily).

until then, work.

Sunday, May 13, 2001, 26:11 AM

all i want is food and creative love ... all i want is food and creative love ... all i want is food and creative love ... all i want is food and creative love ... (... you call me nimmersatt with good reason.)

listening to rusted root in the sun lab. still working on this paper, goddamn it. fighting with linux. and winning occasionally. poking around as root and no, i'm not breaking my system as i've hypothesized. (that doesn't mean i can get this paper to compile. LaTeX is cool, but fuck this \input{filename} command.

orange:/home/nori/school/Linguistics/cs129/final# ls -l | grep 'carlisle' | awk '{print $9}' abstract.tex abstract.tex.bak appendix.tex simulation.tex simulation.tex.bak orange:/home/nori/school/Linguistics/cs129/final# chown nori `!!` chown nori `ls -l | grep 'carlisle' | awk '{print $9}'`

it's a little weird switching between languages. i suppose i'll get used to it. it's more syntaxes than anything. gave a vi lesson this afternoon, someone who wanted to insert a space at the beginning of every line in a chunk. beautiful -- :'<,'>s/^/ / :) going LaTeX to shell scripting to html. marTin was thrown this evening, riding home from the PYO Academy (cello and viola in trunk of subaru -- i love my subaru, i can't wait to get home and drive stick!) with Oliver and hearing rapid switches between chinese (oliver and brother to mother), german (siblings to each other), english (lingua franca of all in vehicle), and french (me to marTin and back).

! LaTeX Error: Missing \begin{document}. See the LaTeX manual or LaTeX Companion for explanation. Type H for immediate help. ... l.13 ...h.3em}\OT1\textunderscore summary.tex.aux} ?

ali is walking around the sun lab. (wonder what he knows about me.) rusted root, as i mentioned, playing using aaron's mxaudio program, my mp3s downloaded from orange to /local. an orange in front of this Sun Ultra 10. i had chocolate-covered strawberries at sarah kate's "study break" this evening after marTin and i returned from the concert (he said the tannhäuser overture gave him goosebumps -- always a good sign; was incredulous when oliver said he missed about 20% of the notes). no dinner proper because of this project and and concert in combination. but i don't mind -- a late chinese lunch (more vegetable lo mein than i can possibly eat; i covered it and just received a check for "services rendered") and the adrenaline from Wagner, tchaikovsky (romeo & juliette overture), brahms (Akademische Festoverütre), the chinese piece, and schumann (though less the two latter than three former) sustained me fine. and now there's even left-over lo mein.

stasis. status quo. walking around philly this evening, after perfunctory socializing at the reception finished, asking for three words and making me smile in a square. interesting that he noticed that! the way my grandmother smiles when she isn't actually happy, just drops the lower corners of her mouth into an inverted rhombus, and pastes the expression onto her embouchre. i've always hated that face -- i think it makes her look senile (which she largely isn't). every so often i notice it in my mother, when she's apologizing too much for something, qualifying her speech so the dumbasses with whom she's surrounded will understand her. (it appalled me when i figured out that my parents, even in their academic settings, have to self-censor their own vocabularies, topics of thought, and modes of expression. my mother especially frequently apologizes for her thought -- her brain is too active to actually not vocalize the cool things she's thinking (when i called today for mother's day, she was outside re-potting plants, listening to a lecture on Dante on tape), but she often smiles in apology when she says what she's thinking.) this trapezoidal smile is one of the eleanor-inherited traits i promised myself i would conscientiously avoid. and he says that when i'm especially pleased with something, i have a "square smile" for a fraction of a second before my mouth resumes its normal happy shape. ah well -- like mother like daughter like daughter, i guess.

more later. must go finish wrapping up this fucking project, which didn't work. Pinker triumphs. wah. :-(

Wednesday, May 16, 2001, 25:35 AM

• the world looks different from atop the sun lab
• i never realized how many different kinds of
  white socks there were! pairing them an exercise
  in detail recognition.

Thursday, May 17, 2001, 29:39 AM

it's dawn, or fast approaching it. there's light behind the belltower and it's silhouetted perfectly from where i'm sitting, at rosemary (Sun Ultra 10 in the robot lab -- in ten years i won't remember what all these odd spice references were, perhaps). blue dawn through the window. alternately david bowie, tangerine dream, the beatles, and pink floyd come across the stream from ceylon, the mp3 server that has more pink floyd than i do beethoven. (hm ...) i've been here since ten last night, or should i say this night, meaning the one that just passed in the day of which it is now actually 29:42 AM -- ten o'clock PM, i say, or rather 22h00, when i locked up Underhill (where was the girl who was supposed to work? --she never showed, so i got the key and got $6.25 / h to typeset my newly-written fugue.

yeah, i wrote a fugue. vinny says (in addition to "come to california!"):

For a canon in inversion is a dangerous diversion,
And a bit of augmentation is a serious temptation,
While a stretto diminution is an obvious allusion.

this morning -- i mean last, or this first morning, since there are now two and twenty-four hours are expanding indefinitely (or at least until i finish this fucking god-awful paper -- fifteen pages of excrement) -- i woke up already fatigued, and have since written a fugue exposition in six flats and four voices, typeset it, gotten paid to do so, eaten three meals with kellam, and written a good half if not more of a 15-page paper. not fucking bad.

kellam and i are amusing ourselves. emailing each other to keep ourselves on track and bitching about work ... i think he went to bed a few hours ago; i'm supposed to call him at 7 AM (31h00) to wake him up so we can go to breakfast (sharples opens at 7:30, the bastards. i'm always bitter at how late they open when i pull all-nighters like this).

teehee. . . wanna read my first paragraph?? i kid you not, this is what it is. . . (so far, i mean) One fascinating lens through which scholars have considered viewing Homer's Odyssey is that of Odysseus as a bard. Ostensibly, yep, that's it. . .

> tomorrow, sometime. but i want everything in by noon ... > but i want this dONE!! :( ummm. . . POOF!!! it's done! now you're free : ) bill: $2,487.02 please pay all accounts by friday, may 19th, lest you incur a late fee. good day. : )

from my paper: "A closer look, however, reveals that this seeming farce -- filled with crossed lovers, cross-gartering, and even a little cross-dressing to boot -- has a more sober side." heh. i hate this shite.

marTin and i had roach wars over my desktop remotely the other day. i held my own killing his processes and tracking his motions as root (not only to my computer, hey), until he started cheating and running xroach from his computer remotely to mine. he's got root to mine and i don't to his ... i better not be extending this. shut up, nori; you're wearing purple wool and you're allergic; it's almost 30 o'clock; you're hungry, and you haven't been functioning well. growing pains or something.

nah, it's all good. i think. shooting for noon on what appears to be today ...

Tuesday, May 22, 2001, 7:05 PM

i had an awful dream last night, vivid and elaborate without much of the usual rêve-like haziness and morphing. i woke up married and calling out, and, remembering the rest of it, cried for half an hour.

she wrote him letters in blue daily, several times daily. short blond hair.

tereza too dreamed in the unbearable lightness of being. (there are too many parallels, and none of them fit exactly.) who knows what i'll do in two weeks. banish thoughts of proximity mattering, and clamp onto all but two neurons. believe. i hope.

almost done with my work. the big things that were due the 18th (the last day of finals) got turned in ... it meant that i saw the sun rise over the belltower from the inside of the robot lab, but it also meant that i got to see dawn, which is always beautiful. i didn't start shaking with cold sleeplessness until after breakfast, at which point i found a paper i'd written three years ago on a similar topic (same play -- fuck twelfth night) and stuck in a couple paragraphs of that wholesale to complete the thirteen pages i'd written that day, in addition to a fugue exposition. felt hardcore. all that's left now is some music stuff, which i'm currently in underhill doing. rep tests with peter yoo -- he has four left (silly senior) before wednesday, and i agreed to study with him, since i may as well take them. symphonic is tomorrow. ought not to be hard. meantime writing a paper on scriabin and his color perception. romantic-style piece (shut up).

marTin and gabe helped me move my and everyone else's (laurel) shit out of lodge deux sunday night, the last of the dynasty. or something. it's felt less cohesive as the year's gone on ... fine by me. dynasty shmynasty; all i want is what i have right now:

• installing random unix OS's on marTin's old computer
• bread and nutella in a forbidden kitchen
• dreams of france and a yellow convertible
• time frames beyond june 4th
• eyes

... and i want good dreams. o god, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

we live like god in france: login messages on my terminals. roach wars. a diminished need for renicing. command-line mp3 players streaming banco de gaia and beethoven. rehydrating over dinner with seanius, rebecca, and gabe the other night. vitamin b-6. more allegra. (stolen roses from worth.) genuardi's on a quest for nutella and chocolate sprinkles; recording shopping lists on a digital voice recorder. pairs of connections. cute, roban says:

roban@merlin:~$ w     USER     TTY      FROM              LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU     WHAT     nori     pts/28   d178.mary-lyon01 17Apr 1 12:45m  7.40s  7.40s     -tcsh     madduck  pts/3    d178.mary-lyon01  3Mar 1 42:20m  3.07s  3.07s     -bash     nori     pts/56   d108.bond-lodges Tue10pm  8:21m 15.15s 15.15s     -tcsh     madduck  pts/38   d108.bond-lodges Wed 1pm  2days  0.68s  0.68s     -bash     nori     pts/49   catnip.cs.swarth 11:58pm 21:34   5.70s  0.75s     mutt     madduck  pts/20   d172.sproul.swar  2:41pm  2:52m  0.43s  0.43s     -bash

king of infinite space. o god. i mean it.

Thursday, May 31, 2001, 11:17 AM

i am wordless but must change the angstiness of my previous entry. i still have bad dreams semi-regularly but they're only vivid, not always frightening. (sometimes they are and i wake up calling.) this doesn't mean i'm not scared; i'm terrified. i cannot stand this situation and all i can think is T minus two days, four till i leave. five-ish. however you count it, the present moment ends there.

but while i am scared, and perhaps because of it, the most exquisite flower is unfolding. and here the wordlessness begins. the sum of the component parts is less than the total, so what does an orange bean pillow stand for alone?

fanjul came back, and jeanne stayed. the two of them crashed at wayne's place in philly, where electra now spends half her time. the six of us, until the two former left two days ago, have been chilling between our two pads -- cooking tortillas and wayne's beer-y corn chowder, cakes, gingerbread, &c.; at wayne's beer &c. and two muppet movies in a row. driving into philly in search of muppets and company sunday night, marTin and i got lost when chris took a sudden hard left, and we took a soft. eventually we caught back up with them, but with the beatles on the stereo, i wouldn't have minded had we driven all night like that. i love these people. chris and jeanne brought us bagels in bed tuesday morning before they left.

yesterday talia threw a tye-dying extravaganza for he 22nd birthday, and the third floor of the barn transformed into one big kitchen (a feast was being made) and craftshop. julie brought the much talked-of denise. someone put the beatles on the stereo and i sang along even though we weren't driving down some road. dyed a shirt laurel left me; marTin fell into his element and did three. feasted on orzo with capers, muffins, and brownies, and we left to poke around south street downtown for the evening.

wordlessness. i can describe situations, and how many different kinds of flans and pudding patrick had on the barn table (three), but i can't apply words as fluently to the warm buzz where i was yesterday, on the train head on shoulder, bright color speeding by and there was no sense of time (four hours start to finish, i think it may have been), only sense of marTin. small hike from the train station but the warm humming emanating from my heart apparently didn't affect my sense of direction, or the geography of downtown philadelphia. it was last year's south street with a mission, but everything was too expensive. should have anticipated. not a matter ... looking through the cavernous (tiny?) grocery store in search of tissues to go with m's sudafed is an adventure in itself, and the warm buzzing gets louder when i'm near him. maybe i can't hear it, maybe others can't hear it, maybe the grocery store isn't really this big, maybe everything's happening in normal time to everyone else. but i love him.

he swore he wasn't hungry but ended up eating half the pizza i ordered at ("proper attire required") (he zipped on the legs of his pants) pietro's. and not regretting it. fresh rolls and olive oil. staring. i could be bounded in a nutshell ... please don't leave. but until you do please never look away.

the warmth is still here even though the audible buzzing has subsided. or maybe it was music. a beat stayed with me yesterday. but for these two -- four (-- time won't matter if you keep looking in my eyes like you did yesterday) -- days, don't look away. i don't know how to describe this flower but the sense of beauty awakened a month and a half or more ago is here and is becoming more full-fledged every day.

don't go.