Tuesday, October 8
if it sounds like i'm complaining, i'm not: this is me, at my best, or one of my bests. a million things to take care of, requiring considerable logistical dexterity; taking care of each task neatly in turn makes me feel (to use an analogy that probably nobody reading this will understand) like i'm playing a heated game of pounce and hitting that sweet stride, the higher realm of operating from which janet used to make a buzzing noise as she sped along and annoy the heck out of everyone else. so: despite it only being a two-day catch-up job, this entry is liable to get long and overly detailed, much like the previous one. i'm consciously not scaling it back though - the complexity and oversaturation of detail is specifically parallel to the speed of life these days. and so…
yesterday morning i waltzed through breakfast, french, and super-relax yoga with my pumpkin-walnut cake on my shoulder (albeit without the walnut oil which was to so subtly "echo and complement" the chopped walnuts), until i unloaded it in judy lord's fridge. most of the way through discussion with the crumbs, i brought it out to be served, along with cider and candy corn. david crumb ate about two-thirds of my bag of candy corn during the second half of the discussion. i tried to ask george about the problems of 'cultural appropriation' that i sort of alluded to in my last entry; he didn't have much to say about that, or about jay's question about electronics. still, it was nice to talk with him.
ester and i made close to thirty invitations with pictures cut out from national geos and new yorkers. i felt like i was being gruff and bossy with her, even as i was apologizing for it; sorry again ester. but they came out really nicely. favorites include a group of chinese toddlers playing in the balls, one with "nori" written on his butt; an italian man lifting his arms in a flurry of confetti and streamers, with "ed" tattooed on his arm; and a soviet army officer in conversation with another man, both of them sharing a thought bubble about "nicole." and the lion whose eyes complete "r" "b" "c" "x." yah.
no dinner but jazz; afterwards i popped in the new cassius that i'd just recieved from astralwerks (along with some of damon albarns new shiznit), and soon rae showed up and we spontaneously started dancing to it. that means it's a good cd. her beau nouveau (lou, whom i'd met in jazz practice) showed up eventually to go out for dinner, but everyplace was closed. so we just went to paces, for andreses and whatnot - but no guitar, as lou's had just broken; we settled for farmhouse instead. i was wearing my pink blazer, my candystriped wedding shirt, and white-pants; ready for camping. hannah met us there, as did about half of my guest list (i could have given out the invites then, but i waited to stuff them this morning.)
the sleeping bag count at this point was three: joeflo's, alyssa's, and hannah("what do you do?" "camping")'s. it was fun to break into the outsiders group space, but there turned out not to be any sleeping bags there, though we did take an excellent large tarp. after a big convergence of folks in brigster's room (estgid's?), i scrounged up three more bags from helpful danaians (jedd, audrey, sorelle; thank you thank you.) goes to show that the school's best resource is indeed its students.
by midnight-thirty, so much for an early bed, we listened to the last pixies song on srn, then headed into the woods. basically we just got into our bags and crashed. ester and ben came and joined, making it into a sort of triple date. it must have been a cute sight, three pairs of bags snuggled together on the massive tarp in the middle of crumhenge. it was cold but body and bag heat were enough that i didn't wear my sweater for most of the night. and somehow (thanks to rae i think), i got up in time to only be five minutes late for my 8:30 class. so: a successful crumsleep, but with emphasis on the sleep and unfortunately no time for other campinglike activities. in the future, we hope.
french was interesting. carole told me, after i came late and didn't have my book, that i was the model of a bad student. but i think she meant it in a nice way. we had a quiz, the grammar bits of which i think i did very well. for one of the writing bits, about a canary, i wrote a kind of parody of 1984. that was fun.
i saw nori in kcb (i'm trying to push this acronym, can you tell?) and got her key. stuffed mailboxes. went to ppr to collect n's springform pan, a tin pan for a water bath from the palmer kitchen (do you want to know how much ppr rocks? it turns out they have a spring-form pan in their dorm kitchen), and my darlin'. from the co-op, we got two lemons and a gaggle of strawberries. and now i was prepared for baking endeavour no. 2 of the week.
while h read her farha ghannam, periodically interrupted with ginger- and lemon-flavored kisses, and patsy sang of heartaches and tangled triangles despite her frightening grin on the record cover, i whipped out another in a long line of cheesecakes. chance technical innovation this go-round: i put the lemons in the microwave, which is a standard practice i have to get more juice out of them. one started squirting juice out a hole in the end. so i took it and squeezed as much as i could out of the end (i hadn't thought to procure a juicer.) that worked really well. also: the pan i borrowed from palmer was maybe the best water-bath pan i've ever found, although a tad shallow. like rose levy berenbaum, i am passionate on this subject.
we looked through some photos, and then went to bag lunch. it's nice just to walk across the beach with her. an almost entirely useless bach class (the origins of solfegge, the circle of fifths, no music whatsoever, and not even many funny marrissen moments). then i checked mail, and found another cheesecake, just on my way to take the first out of the oven. to be honest, i had predicted a cheesecake would be arriving today, the same day i was planning to make one. but hannah tells me you can't have too much cheesecake (i know from experience that this is not quite true.)
this one was an appropriately early b-day present from my folks, who also sent me a phat check (for icelandic spenses) and a box of sox and toiletries yesterday (two tubes each, double my request, of t.o.m.'s gingermint paste, my coconut-lime shave cream, and aveeno handlotion.) what swell folks my folks are. perhaps i'll see them on sunday, in the adirondacks. wouldn't that be funny.
the rest? oh, i did laundry today, and i ate various things (i have a lot of food now), and i did seminar reading (most of it, not all of it, but i think a sufficient amount, yes.) i went to a fabulous lecture on de chirico, by the curator of this coming exhibit. he showed us sides of the work that i'd certainly never seen - he (the lecturer too, but i mean the artist) certainly had a sense of humor, and a very well-developed sense of self-suffiency vis-á-vis the intellectual/art world. sounds like he was perhaps crazy as well. peter schmidt was there - i see him everywhere (ibarra, dukakis, crumb, etc.) good, good lecture. i like.
then a rush for more laundry and reading and two pieces of pizza and a shockingly good salad from tarble, before rockinar. this was a momentous rehearsal, i think, for the inflight rock band. after recomposing "composition", ripping out perhaps the rockingest "radical honesty" i've heard yet, and reworking the end of "sex digress" so much that we ended up where we started from, with an a cappella ending on a harmonized chord, we got into a discussion about our goals and intentions as a band, which has needed to happen, but hasn't exactly, for a long time. there is still a lot more to be discussed - we all disagree slightly on some issues, but are generally in the same place - and we'll hopefully have a chance to do it in a non-rehearsal setting soon - but it was good and necessary to get it started.
we spent the last hour on preparing blur covers for the halloween show. "beetlebum" came together pretty well - as with the others, it's just going to require some individual listening time - but the real breakthrough was "girls and boys." after what felt like pulling teeth all day to get them to actually try working on it, we listened through once in matt's car, and then went back in to jam out for twenty minutes on what is essentially an very simply organized song - inanely easy but great drum beat, simple guitar bits that matt got in spirit if not perfect-pitch, keyboard noodlings which joel will replace with his trademark craziness and maybe even some tonality, and an absolutely killer funky precision bassline that aaron has cold. playing that tune - and actually jamming on it, which is something we rarely get a chance for in our ultrafocused rehearsals - made my essential point better than any of my rhetoric: that playing music is supposed to be fun, and this is a great, infectious song that the audience is going to love dancing to and shouting along with, and we're going to immensely enjoy apostrophizing and apotheosizing. and so, i came home happy.
i'm excited for tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. i love my hectic, preposterous, and charmed life. but i'm also really, really tired.
you're so easy to love
you're so easy to love
you make it hard for me
to carry through
with all the little things
that I should do 'cause
you're so easy to love
you're just an angel from above
you're just the lover
that I've always dreamed of
it seems you're very easy to love