Hmm. Is that any better? I can't tell, there's some blogger problems. Trouble shooting these days, like what. Today was as long as a Wednesday. I was early for Murder for once, although Ester didn't make it at all (she just told me why, maybe she told you too.) It was actually a really fun class: we divided into two groups and took sides for a mock "town meeting." Erin and Ed were the most loudspoken of my group, representing Methodist ministers, while our opponents amusingly insisted on referring to themselves as "gentlemen" and "sirs." It was just interesting to have a different learning approach in that class, since everything we do is very predictable. That's one significant difference between college and high school - the format of the classes here vary rarely vary from meeting to meeting. In the hour between classes (plus a few minutes late), I went to as many public buildings as possible: Tarble (to meet Rebecca and get the invitations from her; neither were in evidence), Beardsley (to meet with Mack Daddy Cothren; he told me that Arth and Ling are related, and that everything is all right), Parrish (to visit the Office of Student Employ, where I shall return soon with my passport), McCabe (where I talked at length to Jess Sheldon and then to Jonah and Sarah about classes for next semester) - more options keep coming up; Nori wants me to take IntroPhil with her and a Bach course, both of which sound really tempting; would they really insist on that German requirement? also I think Nori just wants to be mentioned here, she seems to read more frequently than anyone, and e-mails me about it in depth the next day, I think what usually happens will happen which is that I accumulate a long list of possible courses and then rule them out through the shopping process into a more reasonable number. That seems to work really well. I think I'll try to read a Pinker book over break and see if I still want to take CogSci.

I made myself my most successful reuben yet for lunch (pleasant surprise to find a promo copy of the highly acclaimed Zero 7 debut album waiting for me at home) which I attribute to lots of dressing. Printed out some interesting stuff about the glassarmonica and went to class, which was pretty good. This book is more discussable. We shared vocabulary terms and concepts (quaquadirectional, syzygy, quidnunc), read aloud, small-group-discussed, argued about history and pot, listed recent historical fiction. From there I encountered Rebecca, who promptly lay down on the ground to protect her butt from Gerrit, who just waited patiently as she whined about not being able to go to work. I spent an inordinate amount of time fiddling with the invitations, trying to make it possible to print them at home, since the copying machine had not worked, then came home and started the long printing process, which is still continuing. African was purty good; lots of nice smily visitors (Maria, Liza, Christy on percs; Lela rumpshaking and shimmying) and intense leg stretches. I sat in on the first half-hour of a lecture on hip-hop culture, which was excellent, and included an in-depth analysis of Ice Cube's first album. I really wanted to stay but I was already late for Keller Method rehearsal. I got a pretty decent chicken sandwich at Tarble (from Claire who repeated my name whenever she spoke to me) and went to PPR.

The rehearsal was in Palmer basement, which I haven't seen since Ben's massive painting party last year. Someone came by later and added about twice as much paint, much of it covering over the work we had done that night; someone else put of a little note complaining about it ("thanks for being an asshole"), but in a lot of places it's probably an improvement. The walls look nice with this extreme level of saturation, and most of the best works were preserved - Rebecca's self-described "Naked Titties," Erik's "Robot Timmy vs. the bears." Pretty productive. We worked first on "song three" ("what's this song about?" "desire" "okay, let's title it 'want'"), which starts out with a sunny guitar riff and has a wispy verse. We added a police-style reggae chorus and lots of vocal and drum breaks, which, if performed cleanly, will sound really cool. We sounded really loud in that echo chamber. An attempt to work on the "ba-ba-ba" song broke down when I pointed out that there is nothing more to the song than that, as nice as it might be. So they started working on something else without much of a drum part, and then something else which it took them forever to figure out, and then they started tuning their guitars, and I got tired of banging on the paint cans in the corner, even though I was getting some pretty cool patterns and sounds, and I escaped for a while. It took me a while to wend my way through the maze, but I eventually found Heather's room. It took her a while to answer the knock in a daze and a t-shirt, hair down and human, out of a bad dream about a bad drug. I gave her my lollipop, because I didn't like it. We chatted. She sounds a little ambivalent about leaving next semester.

I went back downstairs to work on "song number one," to which I applied a half-time "street-spirit" beat and attempted to cull as many different textures as possible out of the high hat. Eventually, eventually, back here. Exhausted, but staying up to work on invitations (it's 2:30 now and my printer is still chugging away, spitting them out in sepia-tone now for some reason; Ester is folding and writing names, Rebecca is selectively stickering and occasionally adding comments.) I still have a bit of French to do. Time to put on some music and get something else to drink.

we live in a mountain
right at the top