ponderances

Here's what I've been thinking about today: Does the lesbian community perpetuate our own stereotypes in terms of appearance? I go to queer events, and a lot (not all, but a lot) of women there are people who, if I saw them on the street, I'd think "Oh, a dyke." I wonder if that's what we've currently been acculturated to think is sexy, and so everybody keeps striving to look somewhat similar. Or maybe it's just a good way of identifying yourself without having to say anything. I remember when I was a lot younger (early high school perhaps) I thought it would be really sucky to be gay because it would be so hard to meet people, because how could you tell? And wouldn't it be embarrassing and even potentially dangerous to ask someone out and find out they were straight? But if you can look at someone and pretty much tell (or think you can, anyway) that makes things a lot easier. It makes us a visible community.
Also, what does actually androgeny look like? I have a hard time picturing a truly androgenous person. I've been realizing more and more this past year or so that we're all really a lot more alike than we probably think. I mistake people for the opposite sex all the freaking time. I am tempted to say an androgenous person would be unidentifiable as male or female, but given my aforementioned inability to tell, that seems a little shaky. Is androgeny as an idea just something that we mostly use as a blank catagory, a neither/nor type of thing? Would it be more accurate to think about how we all have "male" and "female" traits and leave it at that?
In other news, Anna finished her bisexuality zine. If you're interested, send me a message or email :-)

you're so tragedy

Today is the high point (or low point, depending on whether you're counting hours spent or mental health), in my mind anyway, of all this doubling up of orchestra pieces I've been slogging through for the past two weeks or so. This morning, I have a rehearsal at my school from 10-12, Mahler 1 and some Dvorak overtures. Then we will all frantically rush downtown for a 1-4 Civic rehearsal, also Mahler 1 and some Debussy Nocturns. Then it's home for about an hour, and back to school for a concert of the aforementioned pieces.
The fun's going to continue throughout the weekend, but today is the heaviest as far as doubling and bulk of rehearsal. Tomorrow it's just one rehearsal and another concert, and Monday it's a half hour dress rehearsal and a final concert. I'm sure it'll be fine, but it's kind of tiring even just looking at it on my computer. But, after Monday, my life gets so much less busy, or at least busy in a different way. Then I get to start really focusing on my recital instead of focusing on it in the sparse moments between Mahler 1 rehearsals.

peering out from my coffee cup

Somthing about getting up this early sometimes makes me feel kind of introspective. I've been getting up at 5 this quarter still to have coffee with Anna, but most of the time I am so tired that I have to go back to bed when she leaves; I get too tired and my eyes hurt and everything makes me feel like having a nervous breakdown, so I try to remedy that when I get the chance. But last night I got something close to enough sleep, and I have to leave soon myself to cram for a lesson, so here I am.
Lauren posted one of these in her blog, so I'm going to be a copycat :-)

Things I feel good about:
1) I am almost done with Civic, and then I get nearly a month off.
2) The conductor at my school told me the other day that "he liked the way I play the viola, and that was his final decision." I'm not sure if he was being entirely sincere or what exactly that meant, but it was at least encouraging.
3) I checked out a book recently called "Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses" that sounds fascinating.
4) All the people in my new quartet are super awesome and nice, and we all get along really well. And we're playing great music!
5) It's been mostly sunny lately :-)
6) I've been much better about practicing on my own this week, making sure I make the time to actually do that.
7) I will have at least one job next year for sure.
8) I've been oddly freaked out lately by the fact that I'm getting grey hairs, and finally I feel a little less weird about that.
9)I got a letter from Greta recently for the first time in a while.
10) Soon, I won't have to play Mahler 1 again for a long, long time.

Reasonable goals for the semester:
1) Have a decent graduate recital
2) Not get chastised by the Civic conductor again
3) Finish my damn cookbook zine! It's all printed out, I just ran out of energy to gluestick it.
4) See Jesse and Lauren maybe?
5) Not spend too much money either at restaurants or bars
6) But, visit a few more of the places that get good reviews in the weekly Reader
7) Visit Milwaukee, see the state of Wisconsin for the first time
8) Use my Nalgene bottle without letting it sit full for too long and get gross-smelling again
9) Play the whole Brahms quartet that my group is working on
10) Finish at least a few more good books than I have so far

Fantastical goals for the semester
1) See Tegan and Sara after they miraculously decide to re-route to Chicago on their tour
2) Play my whole recital for memory
3) Play even one piece on my recital from memory :-)
4) Write and publish a paper on RuPaul and the gender issues in his music
5) Control my cheese-eating mania
6) Actually talk to any of the drag kings
7) Visit Erica in Argentina
8) Get a mohawk, despite my highly visible and rather formal job
9) Watch Democracy Now! every single day
10) Become a gourmet chef

i'll be watching you

Some of you know I recently updated and actually started using (a little bit, anyway) a myspace account that had been lying dormant for a few years. It still said I was single and living in Tucson, that's how old it was :-) Anyway, so there's a little thingy that says how many times my profile has been looked at; so far, I'm up to 220 in a little more than a month. Now, since I have this blog I don't have one on there, so people probably aren't looking at me repeatedly for something like that. So who are all these people? It's usually gone up at least a few numbers between every time I check it. This train of thought kind of dovetails with my misgivings about the fact that on Friendster you can optionally see who has looked at you as long as they haven't blocked that option out themselves. I am kind of simultaneously fascinated and creeped out that there's just random people looking at what I felt moved to post on the internet. It's such a voyeur/exhibitionist split, these websites. You can show yourself off in a controlled way and see if people (even people you don't know) respond, and you can look up people based on various criterion and read what they chose to put up. The internet is such a fascinating social thing, isn't it? I've been thinking more these last few months about just how much things have changed in even the last few years, and the social and theoretical implications are amazing.
Anyway, my last thought in this train is a much more embarrassing one. Someone recently advised my friend Jesse to put up a "hidden counter" on his blog to see who was looking at it. I, technological imbecile that I am, didn't really know you could do that. I'm a total internet addict, even worse since I moved here, and generally when I use the internet I am wasting or killing time so I check my email and then just check through everybody's blogs to see if anything new has come up. Does that mean a lot of my friends are aware that I look at their blogs at least a few times a day and sometimes much more than that, depending on my access and my level of procrastination? Eep.

flotsam

Did you know the government appears to have a website to teach girls about shaving? I found it last year when I was trying to find pictures for my Crafty Beaver zine, and recently found it in my "Favorites" listings on my computer. Odd. I guess it's good to have information out there, I'm just kind of weirded out by the whole thing in general.

gah

After a bit of thought, I decided not to delete the last post. Hopefully I don't sound as crazy as I felt. I've been trying to think of a good analogy for non-music people as to why I was upset; in terms of inanimate objects, I think pehaps a laptop is the closest analogy in terms of price and personal stuff, but it really was more like I had left a child or a loved one alone to fend for themself. After the bar guy ran after me and gave me my viola back and I realized what I had done, I was actually hugging it because I felt so much that I had abandoned something important.
The last time I did this was in Tucson, when I was a sophomore. I played in the Tucson Symphony's young artist competition and just really fucked it up badly. I played my concerto and had a major memory slip and was just kind of angry about it, and I was supposed to drive to Sedona right after the competition was over so I could have a lesson there the next morning. I was so preoccupied by my total fuckuppedness that I left my viola there, and thank god my friend Devin picked it up for me. As it was I drove most of the way to Phoenix before I figured it out and had to turn around. I don't know that I can explain how horrible that realization is, that something that's supposed to be there just isn't. Ugh... Okay, I'm going to finish my coffee and attempt to move on.

omg

I left my viola in a bar tonight, after watching the L Word. Thank fucking god someone who worked there almost immediately realized I had forgotten it and ran after us and returned it to me. I don't know if I am vastly overreacting right now or whether hyperventilation and a feeling like I'm going to throw up and I hate myself for doing this is in any way justified. I mean, shit. After Anna, that's probably the most fucking important thing in my life right now, and I LEFT IT AT A BAR. And I'm not even drunk. What the hell is wrong with me.
Perhaps I'll delete this tomorrow. I am overreacting, and this is too much information for y'all.

"I'm the Mexican!"

On a lighter note, here's an extremely drunken picture that Anna took of one of her co-workers at a party last week. Apparently, she was arguing with another co-worker about who was entitled to wear the sombrero, and her reasoning was "I'm the Mexican!" Ah, alcohol...

I wash the windows outside in hopes that the glare will bring you around

I'm grumpy, because of the former post and because I'm grossly obsessive about music. I just feel very discontented with myself today. Anyway, so here's a song by my obsession, Tegan and Sara, which if it wasn't about love would be slightly more fitting but still seems to describe my mood a little bit.

"You Wouldn't Like Me"
there's a war inside of me
do I cause new heartbreak to write a new broken song
do I push it down or let it run me right into the ground
I feel like I wouldn't like me if I met me
well I can't stop talking for fear of listening to unwelcome sound
and you haven't called me in weeks and honestly it's bringing me down
I feel like I wouldn't like me if I met me
I feel like you wouldn't like me if you met me
and don't you worry there's still time
there's nothing to live for when I'm sleeping alone
and I wash the windows outside in hopes that the glare will bring you around
sunshine is days away I won't be saved I know all the words
I can't say that I'll love you forever
I won't say that I'll love you forever

no matter how much I think about it, it's never enough

I've been writing back and forth for the last few days with a high school friend of mine who lives in Sao Paolo. After catching up, we were discussing his current job options: working for Greenpeace with climate issues, or teaching kids in Brazil about birth control. He has some really strong opinions about teenage pregnancy and having lots of kids, and even though I essentially think we agree we have somehow been having this really intense back-and-forth dialogue. I made a statement that went something like this: "I think that if a person knows about birth control and has a handle on the world situation and everything and still wants to have a lot of kids, they have that right." Okay, I do. I think it's a bad idea, but I feel like as a pro-choice person and also as a feminist I have to really acknowledge that having lots of kids is as much a personal individual choice as having an abortion.
I got his response when I checked my email at about 7 this morning. It was this extremely well-thought-out response to my statement, based on his personal experiences in Brazil. For instance, he has worked with kids there, around 13-17 I think, but he only gets to work with boys because ALL the girls have already left school because they've already had their first kids. There are states around where he lives that the average number of children per adult woman is 7. Sao Paolo itself grows by several hundred thousand people every year, mostly though immigration and births in poor areas. As he pointed out, it's no wonder people are forced to live in shanty towns, because what government could build enough new houses every year to hold such a large and mostly unemployed influx?
I hate it when I exhibit my own priviledge and cultural ignorance so blatently. As I wrote back to him, I do believe what I said, but I'm also speaking from the context of a middle-class american who is currently getting a second college degree from a really expensive university in something practically useless and extravagant. Although perhaps theoretically I know or could guess what he's telling me he experiences there, I guess I don't always remember to incorporate that into my views on things. I was remembering, during all of this, an article I read a few months ago in Northwestern's "radical" journal. It was about sweatshops, the usual list of statistics and a specific story about one specific worker, and then the writer said that the only true solution to sweatshops is the abolishment of the capitalist system. I thought at the time that while that's probably a valid theoretical viewpoint, it doesn't do jack shit for the people who are working in sweatshops right now. The practicality of this ideology is so far removed from where we are currently that, to me, it's rendered almost useless. I wondered at the time if thinking that meant I had politically grown or if I had abandoned ideology. Anyway, so here I am doing essentially the same thing! Yes, my statement perhaps holds at least a little ideological validity for a middle-class American (freedom of choice and all that, as I wrote to him), but my friend's statements seemed to me to be saying that having 3 children by the time you are my age is not really a choice for a poor woman in Sao Paolo. It sounds a lot more like that's just kind of what happens, for almost everybody that my friend meets anyway.
I don't really know where I'm going with this. Suffice to say, perhaps, that our dialogue has only told me once again that I am not yet able to think past my own surroundings without prompting.

food and other good things

Despite the somewhat down note of my last post, the last two or three days have been a lot better. My heavy work is done for the week (only one rehearsal for each of the next three days! Amazing!), and I once again survived several 12-or-more hour days. Last night I cooked something from my brand-spanking-new Chicago Diner cookbook, and it was really really good. It was Moussaka, which is two layers of breaded baked eggplant with a filling of tempeh, tomato, mushroom (it was supposed to be onion, but i don't like onions and i had mushrooms), garlic, and cinnamon, covered by a lot of bechamel sauce (flour, soy milk, salt, pepper, and nutmeg) and baked for about 35 minutes. Delicious! Then this morning, Anna and I got up early to eat at the Heartland Cafe, a neighborhood veggie-friendly restaurant/infocenter/bar/shop with nifty things and books. I had a really good tofu scramble. Now I'm going to school but only for a few hours, and tonight we're going to a photography exhibit of photos by one of the Chicago Kings. It sounds really awesome, and I've seen some of her photography before and liked it, so it's all good. So yay for good moods! Probably next week I'll be blah again, but for now I'm happy.

stuff

Lately I feel like I don't have a whole lot to say on here that's interesting to anybody but me. Bah. Yet for some reason, I feel compelled to write anyway.
Actually, today I'm just feeling really blah in general. This has been happening to me a lot lately, where for no good reason I just wake up feeling really shitty and upset over nothing at all, and it makes me this depressed and utterly unproductive person. I'm not sure what is going on, really. It kind of scares me, that I feel so randomly upset so much of the time. I keep hoping it will go away, but it doesn't seem to be. Perhaps this is too personal to put on here. But anyway. I don't think anybody really reads this who I wouldn't feel comfortable telling about this anyway.
However, tomorrow will hopefully be a happy day, because it is my and Anna's two year anniversary! Yay us! We're going out to dinner somewhere that is yet to be determined, perhaps a Turkish restaurant semi-close to here that we can bring our own bottle of wine to. Luckily, I don't have to work, so the evening is ours :-) It seems like so much longer than two years, like so much has happened and I can't imagine a time before this. It's amazing.

i can fly!

Happy things in my life right now:
1) I got my job back for next year with Civic! Which means I have at least a rudimentary plan for one more year before I have to start being proactive about my future.
2) Anna gave me RuPaul's autobiography, "Lettin it All Hang Out", and one of his cd's, "Supermodel of the World," for Christmas. Yay RuPaul! What a funny but sometimes quite insightful person.
3) Also a Christmas present from Anna, another book called "Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers." It's kind of like lesbian history, tracing from the "romantic friendships" of the 1800's to the defining of lesbians (as mannish degenerate inverts, of course) by sexologists in the early 20th century and then through to the 80's (I haven't gotten that far yet). It's fascinating, although I do sometimes feel like the author feels differently about certain things than I do. Still, pretty cool.
4) My playing is quite a lot better right now than it has ever been before, I think. Last week I got through the whole of the hardest piece on my recital (Paganini's "La Campanella"), which I never really believed I'd be able to play, and this week was also quite encouraging.
5) I only have two hours of rehearsal today! Yay!

moving on...

Well, my obsession has transferred from the aformentioned Dar Williams song to a whole new group: Tegan and Sara. They're queer Canadian twin sisters, and I've been hearing about them for awhile but had never actually heard them until a few days ago. We have two cds, "So Jealous" and "The Business of Art," and they sound completely different. It's weird, it's like two different bands. But anyway, they have both grown on me quite a bit. I spent some much-needed downtime last night reading bios and things online, and they're really funny and weird. On their official website right now, they appear to have written each other's bios, and on a fansite there were a bunch of old bios as well. Here is my favorite quote from that, referring to their producers for one of their albums:
""John and Dave did everything," admits Sara. "That's actually them singing on the album. We sped up their voices to sound more feminine. Tegan and I just did a lot of blow and hung out with hookers in the lounge.""
I also read an interview where they got into a fight in the middle and exchanged profanities because one accused the other of issuing a fake snore in the middle of her explanation of something. Cute.
Other than that, I've just been crazy busy this week. Today is the third day where I'll be gone from about 8 until about 11 tonight. Tuesday actually ran longer, 7-11, but I have to play for about one more hour today so it evens out. Today I will almost certainly play for 10 hours. Damn. I just hope I can hold through. I've been having a little bit of a problem with my right elbow, so I took last night off and plan to take it very easy tomorrow. I can't afford to have an injury right now, or ever. I've been lucky about that my whole life until now, and I just want to make it through these last few months.

what's done is done

Well, I have a recital date. February 25, 8:30 pm. On one hand, far too soon, on the other not soon enough. Once it's over, I can relax a little bit maybe someday...

iowa

Does anybody else ever get obsessed with one song, for no apparent reason, and just end up playing it over and over again? I do, all the time. I've noticed that generally, if I listen to the song a few months later, it does very little for me. Why is that? It seems mysterious to me that you could feel like something is totally strinking a chord with you and then later feel completely ambivalent. I suppose it says something about the nature of personal growth or change or whatever. Anyway, this is my current obsessive song. I particularly like this person's interpretation of the chorus:-) Perhaps it's standard or something, but I don't think it's how I would have done it.

Dar Williams, "Iowa"

I've never had a way with women, but the hills of Iowa make me wish that I could,
And I've never found a way to say I love you, but if the chance came by, oh I, I would,
But way back where I come from, we never mean to bother,
We don't like to make our passions other peoples concern,
And we walk in the world of safe people, and at night we walk into our houses and burn.

Iowa oh ooo oh, Iowa oh ooooh ooo oh I-Iowa

How I long to fall just a little bit, to dance out of the lines and stray from the light,
But I fear that to fall in love with you is to fall from a great and gruesome height.
So I asked a friend about it, on a bad day, her husband had just left her,
She sat down on the chair he left behind, she said,
"What is love, where did it get me? Whoever thought of love is no friend of mine."

Ioway oh ooo oh, Iowa oh ooooh ooo oh I-Iowa

Once I had everything, I gave it up for the shoulder of your driveway and the words I've never felt.
And so for you, I came this far across the tracks, ten miles above the limit, and with no seatbelt, and I'd do it again,
For tonight I went running through the screen doors of discretion,
For I woke up from a nightmare that I could not stand to see,
You were a-wandering out on the hills of Iowa and you were not thinking of me.

Ioway oh ooo oh, Iowa oh ooooh ooo oh I-Iowa
Ioway oh ooo oh, Iowa oh ooooh ooo oh I-Iowa

silence

I've been here alone for about a week, and it's starting to get to me. I'm starting to get overemotional and spend waaaay too much time in front of the computer. Luckily, Anna's getting back tomorrow. Yay!!! But anyway, I've been having a lot of time to think about random stuff, and for some reason this has been coming back to me a lot. It kind of reminds me of how ambivalent I feel here sometimes in the city, like I can't decide whether to love it here or hate it and leave.
Maybe a month or six weeks ago, we were riding a train somewhere, I can't remember where, and it was snowing really hard. It was the nice kind, with the big puffy flake clumps that drift all over and softly land on you, not the nasty hard kind that tries to abrade your corneas. Anyway, as we were riding, the lights in our car kept flickering out. I feel like it was quiet, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't because I also remember that nobody changed their tone or said anything when the light went on or off. It was like we were all ignoring it, trying not to let on that we had noticed anything different. I think I just remember it being quiet because the outside gets so quiet when it snows like that, like the flakes are soaking up all the sound. We were sitting right by a window, and it was so beautiful. The sky was that reddish color that city skies turn when the cloud cover is really low, so we could see everything really clearly, and the snow was falling really thickly everywhere. It was so beautiful, sitting there in the dark. It was moment where I loved where I was, and I could recognize that as it was happening. I don't know, it just really got to me. That's why I feel so torn here, because there are so many days where I feel like this is just another big dirty city with too much poverty and racism, and then sometimes I just think it's so beautiful and it's amazing that we all live here without killing each other.

ah, nostalgia

1. What did you do in 2005 that you'd never done before?
driven to Alaska, moved in with a significant other, survived a chicago winter

2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I never make resolutions, because I know I'm just going to do whatever I want to anyway and I try to act in my own best interests at any rate. Maybe, if I had to, to try and be more assertive.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
A cousin, but we aren't really close.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
No.

5. What countries did you visit?
Canada, finally!

6. What would you like to have in 2006 that you lacked in 2005?
Maybe a plan that extends farther than next year. I had a nice conversation with an indian man on the train platform today about my viola, which kind of derteriorated into him asking me repeatedly what I wanted to do next and me saying "I don't know!!!" Also, to spend the holidays with Anna next year. This bites right now.

7. What date from 2005 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
None, honestly.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Getting into Civic orchestra.

9. What was your biggest failure?
I can't remember any big ones, just an endless procession of little ones. Mostly viola related. Perhaps playing my jury last year and then having my teacher tell me that his wife said "I don't look like one of his students."

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Nothing unusual.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
A camera for Anna, for Christmas.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
Anna was really good to me last year when I was having a hard time adjusting.

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?
Bush and co., Pat Robertson (thanks, Lauren), way too many people, honestly.

14. Where did most of your money go?
food :-) as it should be

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Drag Kings!!!

16. What song will always remind you of 2005?
Maybe Le Tigre's cover of "I'm So Excited." When Anna would visit last year we would dance our asses off to it in my little bedroom.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
I. happier or sadder? Happier!!! Anna's here instead of far away, I'm a little more adjusted to my life as a grad-school loser, and I finally know where stuff is in Chicago.

18. What do you wish you'd done more of?
Explored the city more. Read more. Practiced more.

19. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Taking stupid-ass online quizzes.

20. How will you be spending Christmas?
Next year? Hopefully with Anna somewhere.

21. How will you be spending New Years?
Why would I plan that far in advance?

22. Did you fall in love in 2005?
Nope, can't say I did.

23. How many one-night stands?
zero.

24. What was your favourite TV program?
The Daily Show, Sex and the City, the L Word (although we have a slightly contentious relationship)

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?
hate is such a strong word

26. What was the best book you read?
I hate questions like this. I read so damn many good books this year, I can't even remember half of them right now.

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?
um, I discovered that I actually kind of like some of the Dixie Chicks :-/

28. What did you want and get?
Into civic.

30. What was your favorite film of this year?
shit, I don't know

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I had rehearsal, then I picked up Anna from a party and we couldn't find a spot and the car got towed.

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Having last quarter end better.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2005?
Same old, same old.

34. What kept you sane?
the internet, sadly. and Anna

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Kathleen Hanna!

36. What political issue stirred you the most?
Perhaps the transgendered rights movement, if I had to single one out. I learned a lot about it, and it's so under-represented.

37. Who did you miss?
All of my friends from Tucson :-( Anna, for much of the year.

38. Who was the best new person you met?
Miriam cracks me up. And Josh, my straight quaker roommate who loves the drag kings as much as I do.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2005
You can get through a lot of bad shit.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
"There's a very fine line between a groove and a rut/ a fine line between eccentrics and people who are just plain nuts" -Christine Lavine, "Prisoners of Their Hairdos"

how i miss sunsets... and hiking...

Pictures from my solstice hike on the 21st!




It occurs to me that I think I've only seen about one sunset here, and it was a wimpy one. I'm either not out, because it happens at four-freakin-thirty in the afternoon, or it's hidden by building, or it's cloudy. Weird.

my brother, the dead fiddler

I just listened to the first three movements of Mahler's first symphony, a piece I'm going to be spending a very significant portion of the next month with. Lucky me, the civic orchestra and the Northwestern orchestra programmed the same piece to be performed on three consecutive days at the end of January. That means I have to play it under two different conductors, and that there are very probably going to be a lot of days where I'm spending up to 4 or 5 hours on this one piece. Luckily, it's about an hour long, so hopefully they won't overlap directly too many times.
Anyway, this is a piece I really should know anyway, and as I was listening tonight I was very pleased with how much I was enjoying it. Mahler always makes me think of really depressing things; he had a really hard life (lots of loved ones dying and things like that) and he was big on Fate, if I recall correctly. He actually wrote songs around the theme of "the death of children." But all was well and happy and beautiful and fun until I got to the third movement. It starts with, seriously, "Frere Jacques" in a minor key, predictably done in a round just like you might have sung it when you were a kid. Then, after that was over, we moved on to some very Jewish-sounding music, which unmistakeably reminded me of "Fiddler on the Roof." (After further thought, I think the sound of Jewish music just makes me think of "Fiddler," which is dumb. I probably need more klezmer in my life. But this did sound quite a bit more like the stuff from the musical than not.) My god, I'll be spending the next month with mopey Brother John. I just hope the other monements can make up for this one. Or maybe I'll learn to like it...

i'm straight and i love your coffeecake

Happy new year... Today is always kind of like the day of a birthday, with everybody congratulating each other just for being a day older than we were yesterday. But it's okay, not a big deal one way or the other. I spent last night cooking west african groundnut stew (from the moosewood cookbook) with my friend Miriam, and tonight I'm going to cook the obligatory black-eyed peas and greens for good luck. I wonder how traditions like that get started? Mysterious.
Anyway, I'm just babbling because I'm lonely, so I'll stop and go read or something.