Does FedEx ever *not* come while i am half-naked or in the bathroom?
Or, do i just spend an inordinate amount of time half-naked or in the bathroom?
thoughts
Thoughts Right Now
I don’t really like chocolate, but believe in it. I have faith in chocolate. Because, even though I don’t really like it – the dirty smell, the heavy taste it leaves in my mouth – I find that I still love to eat it. I’ve probably eaten more chocolate so far this year than I did in all of 2004. I can appreciate that it does something for the brain. Sometimes I intellectually want chocolate, even when it’s the last possible taste that I’m interested in.
I feel starved. No, wait, not because I’m just eating chocolate. I feel intellectually starved. Usually after six months at a job I’m back to class. We’re going into month eight. My body is primed to learn something new and intense. I am afraid that my brain might atrophy, and try to cram in new facts from magazines and new songs by ear.
A friend of ours is playing at South-by-Southwest this year. He’s a terrific singer and guitar player, but I am not a fan of his songwriting. I’m sad because I’ve always wanted to go to SxSW, and because I’m sure that he will break there, and I haven’t even had a gig in a bar since 2001. I’m sad because no one is singing along to my songs.
This weekend Sara visited from California. I felt like such a nerd, but all I could talk about for a third of the time is how I wanted to go back. I still can’t tell if it was because it was the perfect vacation at the perfect time, or because I really liked what I saw of LA. All I am sure of is that Sara has so fabulously evolved past Philadelphia that talking to her about something that happened in Philadelphia is like someone extolling the virtues of a horse-drawn carriage – its quaint, but outmoded.
We’re moving, Elise and I. A company who we are not fond of took over the management of our building, and if the world operated exclusively on my parameters we would move out NOW, because I don’t like people I don’t trust profiting from me. I am sick of apartments; I have decided that we must rent an entire house. I want to know that everything that happens behind the front door is my responsibility; I am sick of letting people in because other apartments’ bells don’t work.
Elise complained a few days ago that I am always home. It’s winter, I told her, and I don’t drive. And I work all day. And, I don’t have extracurricular activities to attend. And, I never want to go outside or do anything or interact with other people and find out their opinions anyhow. So, really, I have no choice but to stay home.
There is always a choice.
Thoughts Right Now
Do you remember when i would just sit in my horrid little apartment sophomore year, just banging out as many posts as i had thoughts? Today i feel like that, only less horrid. I cleaned. I bought groceries. I took that pile of books to the used bookstore. I have every right in the world to sit and transcribe thoughts until sundown, at which point i’m going to a BYOB Mexican restaurant to drink margaritas on a work-night against my better judgment.
Anywho, allow me to digress to the though i came here to transcribe: I sometimes wonder what my co-workers do when they go home.
I mean, we see what i’m doing right now, and it’s not all that impressive, but it’s something. Some of them have children, so that pretty much explains what they’re up to. The rest? Some like sports, some go to gyms, some engage in serial home-repair. One creates terrific bead work that i’m going to make a website for sooner or later. Aside from her, though, rarely do i hear about anyone’s personal projects (aside from buying tickets, or getting in shape, or putting up gold-plated gutters).
Surely they must have projects – we are all comm people, after all – defined by our interest in devouring a enormous subset of all things, and governed by secret wishes to be star reporters or gossip rousers. Surely they must have a novel in draft form, or an article, or an experiment in social engineering. Something.
I try to ferret something out of them, but they are either entirely inscrutable or they really do just hang out and watch television every night. It’s hard for me to imagine it – being defined just by what i do during the day. It seems like a horrid fate.
We all know about my songwriting habit, and my blogging hobby, but in the last few weeks i’ve been working just as much on two others, one of which is arranging music. When you arrange a song, you have to listen to it many, many, many times. You have to listen for pitches and rhythms, tonality and feel. Sometimes you have to listen at half speed, or with a section looped indefinitely. You have to listen until your brain and fingers have absorbed the sound, and can recreate it in standard notation, however inefficient it seems at the time.
Before i ever knew about a cappella music or polyphony or even, hell, arranging, i used to arrange Tori Amos songs for guitar. I didn’t really understand what i was teaching myself at the time – i would just sit with the sheet music in my lap and slowly transcribe it into a single staff of guitar tab. Sometimes it was physically unplayable, but my software would still play it, allowing me to hear what six separate guitarists playing one string each could make of a Tori song.
At the time i barely could read music, let alone transcribe pitches and rhythms by ear. Over half a decade later I just listen to “Since U Been Gone” more than 200 times and somehow, after more than a dozen hours of magical effort, i have an arrangement.
When they return my question, volleying: well, what’s your hobby, that always sounds so insubstantial. And, right now, it is. But, by god, the TrebleMakers will perform it live at a cappella fest 2005 or lose their voices trying, and then it will be real and alive and in the air, and i’ll know just why i spent a whole week of my live living, breathing, and singing every element of that damn song.
As for my other hobby, you can have a hint: inebriated cinema. I dare not say any more, because i… erm… have to go and fix the broken thing that Gina just found.
Sucker (OALD-P)
I had assumed that the squealing coming from outside of my window was one car hopelessly mired in a snowy parking spot, which seemed a little incongruous, as it’s not really snowing hard enough to create mrie. After over an hour of the squealing i decided that i would go and push the car out of the damn spot if that’s what it took, but a look out the window revealed that it was no one car but actually any car that was conscientious enough to stop at the stop sign at the top of the hill of my street. Because, apparently, stopping there in this light dusting enters your vehicle into some sort of anti-gravity zone where traction means nothing and you have to spin your tires for five minutes to get into the intersection.
After ascertaining that it definitely wasn’t the same car squealing (via watching three different cars experience the problem), i decided that the squealing didn’t bother me nearly enough to stand outside for an hour giving the reticent vehicles a push like a short-legged child on a high swing.
Speaking of children (man, can i fucking nail a segueway), i am a sucker for baby blogs. I love’em. Love reading about the too-cute exploits of children who i will never have to interact with (thus making them infinitely cuter). I think it’s PRECIOUS.
(wow, that car sounded really angry. jeeze, even i know gunning it to 60mph isn’t gonna help you in the anti-gravity zone)
Anyhow, child-blogs: hoochie-coochie coo. Yes. Aside from the obvious choice of Melly, who i consider to be queen of the acerbic baby-baring wits, Dooce also has a good bit of baby material (her’s is too young for much mischief, though). If you require some mayhem with your cooing, trying Bairn-Raising, written by longtime member of my extended blog-family/mafia, Funky Helix. And, um… i can’t think of any more, but boy do i read those three a lot.
Also, tiny sorta-ugly dogs are sortof like babies, only i COVET tiny sorta-ugly dogs (only when i see them in pictures, though, as then they are silent).
Damn hill.
I Might Explode (someday, soon)
Everyone here has apologized for the rain. Waiters, even. As if i came all this way just to turn up my nose on Los Angeles just because it is soggy.
I have been tempted to write about it, but every attempt to pre-compose in my head has made it all seem so minimal. That’s why i have been taking pictures – better to show the moments that have made me want to write than fail to capture them later.
Returning from the airport, we turned up a street that offered a perfect, scenic view of the Hollywood sign, framed by a nearly doubled rainbow. Somehow, in all of my planning, i had forgotten that i would come face to face with this formidable national landmark. The moment was to rare to interrupt by taking a picture; i had arrived.
I don’t know what i actually expected from Los Angeles. I suppose a clue is that for the entirety of my first day i kept singing “Why You’d Want To Live Here” in my head. I expected the air to be dirty, the people to be surly, and the buildings to be tall.
Apparently, i’m not in that bit of LA. That’s the bit you don’t want to visit. I am in the bit roughly three miles south of Sunset & Vine. Every house looks different from the next; there are no cookie-cutter row homes. For two days we were down the 405 at the Manse where SL nannies. It was, of course, the nicest house i had ever been in; my favorite part was that the two story living room had a second living room that overlooked it from the top of the stairs. I just loved the idea of a house with an interior balcony.
It seems that my adventures to this point have been few, but i am a vacationer more than a tourist, so for me it is about being somewhere, not doing or seeing something. Aside from discovering my thirsty lust for Tanqueray Cosmos, so far i have shopped at The Grove, eaten sushi, walked through Ventura Beach, jammed on the mansion’s baby grand piano, had fresh avocado omelets, and went to Amoeba Music.
I am on my own now, in Laurel’s house; SL back with her children, and Laurel off to Costa Rica for vacation. On Saturday we made three small excursions to help me understand the lay of the land; no number streets here. On one i went to Amoeba music, which i adored and cost me more than it should have. On another we wound up on that same block, but by a different route, standing on Michael Jackson’s star. I was left with a rather imposing book of street maps and a small compass to aid me in subsequent adventures (which, as some of you know, is just the way i like it). All that’s left is to decide whether i brave it on foot, chance having Laurel’s bike stolen, or laze my way there via buses and cabs.
Finally: the entire time, from arrival at PHL last week, I have been reading Harry Potter books. I found them unimpressive up until five, which was the powerhouse i had been anticipating the entire time. Funny how popular mythologies are so similar; Rowling’s scenes are so similar to ones i penned in my never-finished pubescent novel, from the Hogwarts Express to encounters with the ArchVillain. Yet, i have been sitting here since i finished, wondering: Where is my opus?
I think the answer is that i’ve had a few already, and there still may be some to come.