It's late again. This is the fourth night in a row that I have been awake later than 3:00am. And I haven't slept much beyond ten any of those mornings. That means no more than seven hours a night, which actually isn't that bad come to think of it. Although some nights it has been less. It's okay. I'll sleep tomorrow. I like this fluidity - the loosening of the temporal, accompanying the diminuendo of the academic. If there are flarings-up, they are like aftershocks, residue. I'm listening to To Rococo Rot, which encourages this kind of thing. There are at least four people up in this apartment, not including Ester. When I went downstairs to put in another load of laundry, Ben Schweigert greeted me as though nothing was amiss with laundry at 3am. I'm hungry again now, so I think I'll munch on a peanut butter granola bar.

In my game of catch-up, the retelling of the last three days, I have written up to 4:30 Thursday (yesterday.) I kind of want to finish tonight, and probably I will. It doesn't sound like a lot, but I was awake for another thirteen hours after that yesterday. And then there's today. I interrupted my progress earlier this evening to record Ester reading her septapartite verse epic on the Avery/Cornell case, entitled the Mill-iad. She was inspired to scrap her more predictable short story and write it after Catherine, Amalle, Blair, and I helped to expand the bounds of the assignment. The recording came to eight and a half minutes, and was well. I told her something that occurred to me earlier today; that of my three roommates, she is the one to whom I feel closest. Not that I don't love the others equally dearly, but it is with Ester that I have my freest and most comfortable interactions - long "meaningful" conversations, giggle-fests, siblingly spats and love-nagging, flashes of honesty and emotion. She almost never makes me feel put-upon or patronized in the way that Joel and Rebecca, at the worst of times, are capable of. I gave her her present (hannukah, christmas, going-away, what-you-will): the Roches, "Can We Go Home Now?", one of those especially significant presents that I wished I myself owned. In a sense, it occurs to me, the essence of the gift was not in the CD, which I could have substituted with any number of things that I know she would like or wish she could appreciate, but in my willingness to let her have this thing that I do not; so that the Roches belong to her in a way that they never belonged to me (it was my parents who bought the records; I just enjoyed them.) She is the keeper of a specialized kind of musical knowledge, and I think the (substantial) patches where we intersect are at times areas of discomfort for us - each approaches them with respect to the rest of his musical domain, and cannot appreciate them in quite the same way as the other. This present, then, could be called a cession of territory. Ester is actively developing her own musical identity, one that in some ways is more honest and concrete than mine. The phrase genre-whore comes to mind in reference to me. Rebecca would like that term, she likes to make up words that incorporate "whore." My disparate, would-be-all-encompassing musical knowledge allows me to have these exchanges - with Nori about the German techno she gleaned from MarTin, with Lillie about the Elephant 6 she gleaned from James and John, with Joel even about his corners of indiedom, with others about show-tunes, punk, Phish - where even if I am the more knowledgable, their interest is more valid and authentic. Where some part of my approach is pure and sterile and academic, theirs seems unambiguously real and human, stemming from wonder and sensuality. I am but a dilletante, and I have nothing to hold up as my own. With some exceptions - there are pockets of my musical universe that I feel truly are mine alone, if only because there's nobody I know who has a potential counterclaim: French house, sixties soul, Spoon, Fatboy Slim, country, the Roots, jazz, and the list continues. These things are mine partly because I found them more or less on my own (or the people with whom I found them have since faded from my life at least musically), partly because I don't know anyone who enjoys them in the way that I do - I can slip on a Six String Drag album while I'm on my own and enjoy it more than I could in the context of a larger group. Essentially, I think, my love for these genres and artists extends beyond my intellectual interest in popular music; they bring me joy, simply and absolutely.

Oh man, a sidetrack. Right. So I gave Ester a CD. And she gave me a book. "Coming Soon!!!", the new John Barth novel. Which was a great present and exactly the sort of thing I would want. She didn't know two things, unfortunates that discolored my acceptance: that I much prefer paperback to hardcover (and so almost always wait until paperbacks come out) and that I have decided to read Barth's works in order. I have a long way to go before I get to this book, and it looks like the sort of fun and fluffy meta-novel I'll be tempted to pick up and start reading on a whim. Besides which I was planning to buy it for my dad. (He has most of the other novels, and I'll just borrow all the rest from him anyway.) More presents were exchanged more publicly, after candles-lighting (I didn't sing tonight, I just listened): Rebecca and Ester knew exactly what the other would want. Ester wanted to watch Chungking Express, and I was set to watch it with her when the call came from across the hall that Trivial Pursuit was in the works.

At first I was uncertain whether I had made the right choice; the assembled crowd included few of my particular friends - Samara and Lizzie (who have quite taken to me, it's cute), their beaux and Ben's sister, Alice Hershey and friend Kate, birthday girl Hilarie. Beer and cigarettes and carbonara and then the game, the Millenium Edition, which is definitely an improvement over Genus IV, although there are definitely some questionable questions. Decisions about how to divide into teams were complicated by the gradual arrival of Renee and Jess, and we spent a good twenty minutes trying to decide how to decide - settling on Ben's nifty solution that the first person to roll a six would count off a team of four starting to his left, then another continuing clockwise, leaving three to his right. I ended up in the three, with Renee and Kate. We learned all kinds of things, of course. My team did especially well with first instincts on uncertain questions, especially Renee's: Tom Hanks, David (Kaczynski), India, hummingbird, etc. Near miss: Van Cliburn. Alice, Hilarie, Jess, and Lizzie's red-head, the drunkest team, stalled for hilarious lengths on several occasions, such as "Chinese-run Portuguese island," and amazingly came up with the correct answer for the 21st-century maturation year for bonds called "Bo Dereks," even though they failed to identify the correct gender of their namesake. It just goes to show that Trivial Pursuit can be fun for anyone to play, regardless of how well your brain might be working. It provides lots of fodder for hilarity and jokes, and on a range of interest topics beside. People left, but we eventually won, with my incredulous answer to a question that I didn't even realize was the final one (what was the only thing a certain Olympian wore on her gold-medal celebration lap? too easy, right?) So that was a good time. A good college time. The wine wasn't bad either.

And then I was here, writing this, doing this, signing that, recording, talking to Joel who's still playing with his Juno, now under the aegis of Victorian Poets final project. I think maybe I won't finish this right now. I went on about tonight longer than I had anticipated.

the only thing worse than bad memories
is no memories at all

(that could almost be an epigram for this site)