Non Sequiturville

I share the same birthday with Woody Allen, Bette Midler, Richard Pryor, and Mary Martin. When I see good Woody Allen films (I’ve only seen a few, though) I realize how very much we have in common.

Some movie with Diane Keaton is on right now (Turner is celebrating his birthday–it’s not Annie Hall, btw). Woody is flipping out and is going to have people over and can’t decide what would be the most impressive music to play, so Diane suggests he puts on Oscar Peterson and put out the Bartok so everyone can see it. Classic.

I saw Hannah and her Sisters about a year ago–I’d seen it in the theater when it came out but I was about twelve and had no idea why anyone would find Michael Caine remotely sexy. But I love it now. It’s a wonderful movie. All these couples in it love and care about each other but mess things up anyway. No one is stupid or clueless or malicious at all–they’re just people. I think the whole movie is about love and how it can be misguided sometimes.

Woody and I are both totally paranoid and neurotic, and have fantasies about having big, happy families with big, happy family get-togethers over holidays. We share the same taste in music and the same reverence for the Marx Brothers. I wish we were friends.

Anyway. Mercury, by the way, can work wonders as well as disasters. Sometimes things just fall *together* when Mercury is in retrograde. My license expires tomorrow (it being my birthday) and it’s a Colorado license. So I packed a backpack full of activities to do while camping out all afternoon today at the DMV. I went into the conservation lab this morning and a woman who works there told me that the DMV sets up an office on campus once a month. She thought it was the last Wednesday of each month. Well, this being the 30th and a Wednesday, that worked out nicely. Furthermore, I got interviewed by CBS and will probably be on the telly. I had to take the written test and missed SIX out of fifteen signs. Of course, I know what the fucking things are when things are written or drawn on them–these were blank yellow trapezoids and sideways triangles and stuff. Hello. How am I supposed to remember shapes?

1. my friend told me she would also be bummed if she had to sing Bruckner on her birthday.

2. a couple of my friends can’t make it to my Balkan Ensemble concert (but can make it to my birthday party afterwards) because it conflicts with the Physics Revue.

like Love Actually are so incredibly ridiculous. I can’t think of a single happy instance in that movie that actually reflects anything that has ever happened for anyone in real life. Of course, I’m at the point right now where I think people are inherently foolish, weak, and absurd and stay in stupid relationships, and make stupid decisions. A good example of this is throwing away true love for an insipid little 21-year-old at a community college who presents no challenge, no threat, no meaningful conversation, and thank God, would never make true feelings soar.

Well, at this actual moment, I am living life temporarily as a tuber in my brother’s basement apartment in DC. But other than that, I’ve made some major decisions in the past week.

The biggest one is that I intend to withdraw from school should I land a job by the beginning of February. I only stand to get more in debt doing another semester. I am no longer staying for a second degree and I’m 100% focused on moving out of Urbana ASAP. No looking back.

Strangely, I don’t think this is likely to change–I think this is my firm decision. If I can’t land a job by the beginning of February, I’ll obviously stick around for another semester and take the courses for which I’m registered, but finally getting one’s ass out of town for a bit makes you wake up. I’m extremely unhappy in Urbana and I always have been. I’ve gotten by OK and met some great people and made the right decision to move there for the degree and not do the online program, but it’s beyond time for me to leave.

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Originally uploaded by freyjawaru.

Thanksgiving 2005. My brother is a much better cook than I am.

There is nothing quite like listening to Love Train by the O’Jays when riding a train. We have a gramma announcer who likes to chastise us and nag us and tell us not to walk around without our shoes on, etc. I really wish I had some kind of minidisk recording device or something so I could record these priceless moments.

I am using my noise-cancellation headphones and streaming in a ‘70s soundtrack, so I don’t really hear the gramma announcer when she comes on. My neighbor told me that she just announced that the dining car is open and that a movie will be showing soon. For some odd reason, that reminded me of the brilliant movie showing Smith College had when I was in orientation my first year. They showed Jaws in the swimming pool. I guess they used one of the white brick walls as a projection screen, and had everyone who wanted to see it blow up inner tubes and just…well, sit in the water and watch it. At the time I couldn’t deal with scary movies in any way, shape or form, so I missed out. However, maybe that was a good thing because that pool was always insanely cold.

I don’t think I’ve ever had so much instruction or bossing around getting on a train in my life. These dorks in Chicago could learn something from Penn Station in NYC, let me tell you. Transportation folks in NYC can’t fuck around with bad organization skills. They just have too much traffic. You would think Chicago would, too, but whatever. The woman in charge of opening the gate kept yelling at people who were standing around waiting to board and telling them to go sit down elsewhere. She was very particular about who was supposed to stand or sit where and it didn’t ultimately have any rhyme or reason. Now we have this very chatty woman on the overhead announcement system yapping about how we need to be considerate and keep the bathrooms clean and how we need to be mindful of little kids and how we shouldn’t smoke on the train because they’d have to stop the train and throw us off and we don’t want THAT, do we?

I’ve decided temporarily (this week) to forego getting a master’s in musicology right now in order to become a music librarian. After looking into it a bit and observing some interesting things around me, I think I need to have a penis to really succeed in the field. Since I don’t have one, I’m going ahead and applying for jobs now and hoping to get the fuck out of here sometime soon.

I told a friend of mine this in the lab today, and he said, “You want to borrow my penis? My wife has absolutely no use for it, but sometimes she takes it out and shows it to me and says, ‘Remember when this was yours?’”

was rather amusing. There’s a lot of mediocre choral music out there, even by otherwise-thought-of-as-great composers. This Bruckner mass we’re working on has some nice moments and some pretty lame ones.

About a year and a half ago, I had to sing Dubois’s Seven Last Words of Christ. I have no idea how that work managed to get into standard reportory, but it sounds like something he might have written for eighth-grade composition class.

Oh, well. I suppose not everyone could write like Brahms.

if you don’t like or appreciate what I have to say, then don’t fucking read my blog. Some of my stuff may be lame, some of it not so much. Posting anonymous comments that are obnoxious and rude is immature and pathetic, not to mention cowardly. If I know you, then pick your bone with me in person. If not, then be a grownup about it and discuss it with me–you’ll have the chance now since I changed my settings on postings.