i now have more pants than god. (as they say.) a definite advantage of mallshopping over thriftshopping: i tried nearly as many pairs saturday at VoA as monday at eastview, an astronomically higher percentage of the latter fit (well, since none of the former did). although for some reason the pants at kaufmann's fit a lot better than the ones at lord and taylor's. i went shopping with my parents and ended up with seven pairs (some of which i was tricked into by the buy one get one deals) plus two belts. then yesterday i went to archimage and got some loose earthy recycled pants for dance classes. also some joolery.

not much break left. time has been going surprisingly quickly; the days seems so short. also impressive: i haven't gotten bored at all. i think i've been generally productive: room-cleaning, make-mixing, lots of practicing (shostakovich, smith). i found used life and death of the great american cities within a minute of entering the brownbag bookshop. yesterday i went to the rochester hearing and speech center to have molds made of my ears: twice (because she didn't realize the first time how deep they had to be), janey mixed together some white stuff and some green stuff and squirted it in, sealing me into a little muffled soundworld until it hardened to the consistensy of spongy rubber. so they'll send me some purple earplugs in a few weeks.

regrets: i haven't done really any songwriting or electronic musicfoolery. didn't get a chance to see ruth (my old piano teacher, who was in london until the other day), although i did talk to her for a while this morning, and played her some sinfonias over the phone. i haven't seen much of my friends either, though not really for lack of trying.

i finished fast food nation today: it's not as well-written or alarming as suburban nation (i'm more convinced that cars are the cause of all of our problems than that fast food is. but that's partly because cars are the cause of fast food.) and he has a tendency to ramble off topic within his clever headings. but still, a very enjoyable read, with lots of startling revelations. it ends on an optimistic note, but the problems he outlines are pretty discouraging and its hard to imagine they'll improve much soon. it makes me even less inclined to eat fast food than i am anyway - except that sometimes it makes me want to eat fast food because it talks about it so much.

oh yeah, and i saw adaptation. sorry, but i'm not convinced. to be sure, it's enjoyable, with remarkable acting from all corners, and lots of cute moments. but it's nowhere near as bizarre or original as malkatraz - more on par with the somewhat unfairly ignored human nature, which isn't to say it's bad. my main complaint is that it's so painfully self-indulgent on the part of kaufman. ultimately, the problem with this trend of "post-modern" movies is that all of this stuff (playing with time, perspective, layers of reality, etc.) has been going on in literature for over fifty years - not that it doesn't often work extremely well in movie format (momento, fight club, malkovich, pi, etc. what else again?), it's just not enough for a movie to have multiple layers for it to be interesting. i really enjoyed the laroche/orleans stuff, but kaufman's "story" trying fairly fast. of course, it does make me curious about what he's really like. as they say in the movie, it's the last act that makes or breaks it (although i don't think that's necessarily always true), and i actually rather enjoyed the ending, but it's not quite as clever as it could have been.

okay, then. see you tomorrow (if you're ester), or someothertime soon.

throughout the night
when there's no direct light
and a thin veil of clouds keep the stars out of sight
i can smell the colors outside on my lawn
the moist green organic that your feet tread upon