woke up from a sleep i didn't even realize i'd drifted off to, just as the postmarks was about to end - guess that makes it by default the rainy chinatown bus indie pop headphone nap album of the year. it took fixing idly for several minutes on the ubiquitous pseudo-profound "we are not response" sign for me to arrive at: oh! i can blog on the bus!

so i'm blogging on the bus. leaving home again - this time only two days after i'd returned. why i'm as bad as my roommate! had this sudden insight - if that's what it was - at the time of my most major recent stymied blogging impulse - how remarkably closely the physical space dichotomy of at-home/out maps onto a kind of psychological interiority/exteriority. that i feel inside of myself when i'm at home, and when i'm go somewhere else, i'm abstracted; outside of - inhabiting something other than - my life, almost. this might work out to be more limitedly true wherein by home you mean my apartment, but i think i was construing "home" somewhat more broadly as the places germane to my current daily existence, which might include much of the streets and public spaces of central philadelphia [although, like, worklife certainly feels like an abstraction. the loft - yoga - does feel homely though.]

most markedly (i feel like i've mentioned this before) i definitely enter a psychological elsewhere whenever i go on a trip, depending on the destination and my familiarity with it, this might be a wholly exterior space, or a psychotemporal past, or even a future, but it's never precisely present. if that makes sense. is this observation in any way remarkable? i can't tell. anyway, was originally gonna mention that in reference to the evacuation of two weekends ago; in between one in d.c. and one in seattle [and now i'm headed to nyc, after which i'll have spent effectively all of april outside of my city and my life - it amounts to escapism as a lived reality.]

that was the time i stayed in philly - and my parents came here to visit - but we did spend all day saturday out swarthward, starting with early brunch at the box car cafe (in glen mills - "home of scrapple fries and pancakes as big as your face"), then two plays at swat - the fishbowl (as stage-managed by rebecca) and into the woods (as produced by martha) - punctuated by dinner at heng's thai and drinks/dessert at (!?) charlie brown's steakhouse. the meals were no better or worse than those i ate in the city with my parents the night before at isla ibiza and after at farmicia - but the plays were both great. itw especially, i want to say, by virtue of being such a great great great show to begin with, and also probably the most impressive drama board production i've ever seen (as primarily evidenced by its doing justice to the show.) fishbowl (a new original; playwrighting thesis by anna belc) had me struggling a bit at first, but revealed itself marvelously, especially after several rounds of post-discussion which had me wanted to view it again. also, unquestionably the finest stage-managing i've ever witnessed.

both plays dealt centrally parental-filial relationships - as, to a slightly lesser extent, did caroline, or change, which i'd seen earlier in the week [i decided that it's not quite as phenomenal a work as itw, but it's close, and makes comparably excellent use of little-explored possibilities of the musical-theatre form] - and i might have had something ponderous and intertextual to say about those relationships in the context of my parents' visit (and parents weekend) and the universality of those themes in the plays. but i'll just mention that the final suite of songs ("no-one is alone";"children will listen") definitely brought some tears to my eyes, of the resonant-shared-humanity perfect-imperfection sort also evoked by bobby and the us v. john lennon.

this is from an e-mail: "nice dinner with my parents at fARMiCia tonight - food not amazing, but good talking, mostly about into the woods and life/career kinds of things. my mom has done so much incredible good work as a doctor and a teacher, but she feels like she is a failure as an academic - so in a sense like her career is not successful. talking about what the "obvious" things would be for me to do (after my mom had said that my dad tends to avoid doing those things in his own life - for instance not going to grad school for south asian studies at penn - cutting off his nose to spite his face) my parents at first were saying to be an academic or a cultural critic, or a composer (my dad) or a graphics person of some sort. among other things, am wary of some of those things because i'm afraid of self-promotion, or at least having to self-promote on a constant/regular basis. we'll see though. there is something [perversely?] appealing about waiting tables."

i'll stop now to keep this neat; i'm not on the bus anymore. i'd write about seattle but i'm obliged to report on the conference elsewhere, even though on balance the non-conference parts were more fulfilling than the conference.

perhaps, my post-rate will increase and i will reach my 1000th sometime before the end of the year.

now i'm gonna say something slightly off-topic:
shy represents, buy my album when i drop it