the outer chaos

I've been having problems with my ears for the last few days, so today I had to play a quartet concert where I essentially could barely hear anybody else. Right after that (time was not on my side) I went to campus health and they flushed some truly giant pieces of wax out of my ears. Now the world is super loud, it's amazing! I wonder how my recital might have been effected by doing this earlier.
I found out today that the music and film class that I'm registered for is a seminar on Westerns, of all things, and is also a lot of work. I'm intrigued by the subject matter and I don't mind working necessarily, but I'm still deciding whether I should/can go through with it. I have at least two auditions coming up... But on of them will come only a day or two into the quarter. Hmm.

the aftermath

My graduate recital is done, finally finally finally. I was starting to think that if I had to spend another day with those same pieces I was going to go crazy. It went really well, except my teacher forgot to come (presumably, anyway, since he has a terrible memory and wasn't there) and I feel kind of disappointed by that. But actually, a lot of friends and such came and it was really nice for me to realize that I actually do have people here who care that I exist (other than Anna, of course :-).
In other news, bell hooks is coming to my campus on Wednesday!!!!!!!! Holy shit, I'm so there. I'm shocked that I didn't hear about it until Saturday, that seems like such big news, doesn't it?

"hello, my name is Ammie and I'm an internet addict"

I'm intrigued by this. For some reason it won't make it a link, but I'm sure you all are capable of copying and pasting.
http://kevan.org/johari?name=altogirl

the home stretch

Well, my recital is in about three days, on Saturday night. It seems useless to speculate at this point whether or not I will be sick; I'm sick now, at least a little bit, so presumably I'll still be sick then. Luckily it's toned itself down, and now I mostly just have a cough. Not ideal, but better than plugged ears and sniffling. I have a student who's a medical student, and she was quizzing me about my ailment on Tuesday. She informed me that it takes nine days (!) for your body to mount an effective defense on a disease. According to my calculations, I should recover just before my recital starts, then :-)
I'm looking forward so much to this being over. I feel like I've actually been dealing with the stress a lot better than I normally deal with stress, although I did get absurdly overly angry at somebody yesterday for stealing some stands I set up and I think that might be a little connected. Mostly, I'm just focusing on the spots that could still be better and that I think I still have the ability to make better in my music. I mean, there are things that just aren't going to be there, so I'm trying to figure out ways to make them not as badly wrong.
Non-recital news... The lake has been freezing over. I can see it from my practice room window, I keep an eye on it from day to day. I love it, it's like an ocean, all moody and such. Anyway, when it's starting to freeze it gets this skim of ice on the top, but waves keep coming along and breaking it up. The chunks of thin ice throw the sun back in my eyes, and these little sparkling waves just keep coming in and disturbing all the birds resting on the water. There have been a lot of geese lately, which I wonder about. I mean, I don't know much about migratory patterns, but don't geese fly south for the winter? And isn't winter well under way? I wonder if the geese I see are late or early, or if the pattern is just much more complex than I thought (the latter is probably the case).
I also saw what is perhaps my current favorite lesbian movie, tying or perhaps edging out "High Art". It's called "D.E.B.S.", and it's about these young women who have been chosen by a special test hidden within the SAT to become elite undercover spies. They wear these ridiculously short plaid skirts and little ties everywhere, and it's so campy and funny! Most lesbian movies are either terribly depressing or just plain terrible, so it was incredibly refreshing to see one with a sense of humor. I guess I can't really compare it to "High Art", it's just such a different movie. Anyway...
Okay, so that was a long post. Adios! I'll probably write again before the recital, in an effort to kill time and impatience.

and also...

I know I've been posting like three little mostly-self-serving posts a day, and I apologize. But, I'd love some input on this statement. I was writing the intro for my vegan cookbook, about how I feel about calling myself a vegan when I'm not.

"It’s not only like calling yourself vegetarian and eating chicken; it’s almost more like the women-identified “lesbians” in the second wave of feminism who called themselves lesbians but didn’t actually sleep with women. It’s the taking of a label for your own purposes, either for political or strictly personal ones, and it makes me uneasy. You can easily call yourself anything you like, it doesn’t have to mean anything, it’s just a word. When you use that word for some sort of gain, it loses it’s meaning and you potentially hurt the people who might really identify as what you’ve co-opted."

Gah, I hate language sometimes! It's so limiting. You have to take into account the historical moment in which straight-identified women called themselves lesbians (something I didn't know enough about when I wrote this), and the fact that the word "vegetarian", for example, means wildly different things to different people. Does it really hurt people who don't eat any meat if some people call themselves vegetarians, other than the annoyance of being asked if you eat chicken? I was intending to delete this and then forgot and glued it in, and I'm still debating whether or not to paste something over it.

but

You should look at this if you want to feel really weirded out. I found this while trying to do some half-assed research for my vegan cookbook zine which I am finally gluing together.

no comment

The big news right now is that I'm sick; I feel somewhat okay for most of the day, but I feel pretty bad at night and in the morning. Mostly just a sore throat, but also just general malaise, I guess. No good so soon to my recital (1 week and 1 hour from now). The only three other bits of newsworthiness in my life right now: the library people wrote back and I will hopefully volunteer for them come summer, there's a feels-like temperature of about -9 outside right now, and I might be auditioning for the Buffalo Philharmonic in early April.

ooh!

How's this for cool? There's actually some people organizing an "underground library" to preserve independant and small-press publication, like zines and such, then put them in an online database and have an actual library where you can go read them. Isn't that just about exactly what I've been talking about and thinking about, in terms of my own desires to maybe become a librarian? I emailed them today, desperately hoping they need volunteers and I can get involved.

bizarre

Anna's mom sent her this weird website for valentine's day. I have no real idea what purpose it might serve, and my rudimentary translation of the french doesn't help (although I really like where it just says "Boum...boum...boum"). I love Anna's mom to death, but she seriously sends us some weird shit.

ho hum

I had a nasty day where I got rained on and soaked through twice, all my pants are now dirty (the most exciting pants-dirtying incident was when I dropped a big drip of hummus right on my own crotch), and I slammed my hand in a car door. Go me! And I'm sitting here procrastinating instead of doing our masses of dirty dishes or practicing.

i'll take what i can get

Also, since I can't find my camera cord still, check out this picture from my friend Monica in China. I think she said it's called Tiger Leaping Gorge.

my week, so far

It's been a fairly uneventful but slightly interesting week.

Good things:
1)My friend Erica (from Flagstaff, but not the Erica in Argentina:) came to visit this weekend, and we had a great time going out dancing, eating, and thrift store shopping.
2)I have now played every piece on my recital program with a piano player, for better or worse.
3)Anna and I are meeting this cool-sounding queer couple for the first time tonight that I originally met on friendster/myspace. That's my first time meeting somebody solely through electronic means, and I think it'll be fun.
4)I was on a train this morning, and the woman next to me was reading the bible in spanish while the man across from her was reading Atlas Shrugged. It just seemed like a nice diverse moment.
5)I've been experimenting with cooking a little bit lately, and nothing has sucked so far.
6)Due to my last post, a friend of mine called me at 6:30 this morning to talk. Luckily, the phone was on silent, because this is a day where I didn't have to get up until 7, but I still appreciated the gesture ;-)

Bad things:
1)I can't take the "music and the visual arts" class that I was looking forward to for next semester. It meets during orchestra. Nor do any gender studies classes particularly catch my eye. I might end up in "music and film" if I end up in anything. Not how I was wanting to end (this part) of my academic career.
2)Somebody I know slightly was killed in a car accident last night. It's sad, even if I didn't know him well.
3)I have rehearsal at 8 am on Monday morning! Eep!
4)It got cold again. Damn winter.
5)I have to go all the way downtown tomorrow to pick up a piece of music. I asked them to mail it, but they told me they only do that in "special circumstances." Apparently having a recital in a week and no other reason whatsoever to spend the extra hour or so to go downtown doesn't count.
I think that's it.

impatience

One of the worst things about getting up at 5 is that there is nobody I can conceivably talk to for several hours after Anna leaves. All I can do is sit around writing emails that won't be read for hours, listening to the same Tegan and Sara record over and over again, drinking too much coffee and checking AIM every once in a while to see if some other poor soul has woken up before 7. I think in the spring/summer I will probably go on walks or bike rides and it will be lovely, but for now it's just becoming dead time, at least on some days.

inarticulation

I had some sort of interesting internal connection between my own thoughts and my "Sex and Real Estate" book recently, but I've been trying to remember and articulate it here for the past two days and I haven't been able to do it. It was something about the cultural catchet of owning a house, and also about how we base our ideas of authenticity on material objects (especially name-brand objects), on the image of authenticity rather than on actual authenticity. All of this is interesting, but I can't remember how exactly I related it to myself. I think it was something along these lines: I was thinking recently about how maybe someday I would like to live in a house I owned, and now I get to think about how much of that thought is the desire to not move around all the time and be able to decorate however I wanted to and how much of it is related to the cultural symbol of "a place of my own to show how cool and rich I am" or whatever. But, that said, the book is pretty interesting. Not as mind-blowing as I thought it would be perhaps, but definitely I have a lot more interesting thoughts about living spaces. The best part (so far, anyway, and I'm almost done) has been the chapter on the Trophy House. My favorite quote, by psychiatrist Robert J. Stoller: "A fetish is a story masquerading as an object."

bar math

We went out, Anna and Sarah and I, to the Heartland Cafe last night to meet some of Anna's work buddies. It was good times, as far as I could tell :-) I hadn't eaten dinner so my three drinks pretty much kicked my ass right out of commission, but it was one of those nights where there are so many people talking about so many different things all around you that you're bound to catch some funny bit of something if you just keep turning your head. The bartender didn't card anybody, as far as I could tell, and also grossly undercharged me for my drinks. I should have tipped him better, and would have if I had realized exactly how much smaller my bill was than it should have been. Just because I can, here's my rough estimation: Stella Artois ($4.50)+ Red Velvet (Guinness and Framboise, something I'd been wanting to try there forever)($7)+ Amaretto Straight Sour (Amaretto and oj, apparently, bought for Sarah) ($?)+ Jack and coke (for Anna)($?)+ Berghoff beer ($2)=$16. That definitely seem to make the question marks seem to equal $1.25 each. Even if he left off the jack and coke, as I think he told me he did, that still makes the amaretto thing cost only about $2.50. Anyway, whatever.
Anna has finally caved into the blogging craze after dishing out criticism for years, so you should all click on her link above and read some of her entries :-)

future shock

I've been thinking a lot about what I might do if this whole music thing doesn't work out, which is entirely possible. Lately, I've been leaning towards going to school and getting another degree (yes, another one) in library science. There are a number of reasons why this appeals to me: it seems like it would be academically challenging, I love libraries and books, and I think librarians are really crucial to the preservation of things that represent all viewpoints, not just that of the dominant culture. I read someone's master's thesis last year that was all about zines, and there was a whole section about how zines should be being archived to preserve the culture they represent. I guess at Bowling Green there's a popular library that does things like that. There was a lot about the laws of the American Library Association, and they were just so damn inspiring. It really seems to be, in theory anyway, a profession that is truly dedicated to the preservation and encouragement of knowledge.
I am not sure whether this possibility is actual or fantastical. I mean, getting a whole other degree, changing my whole life around, and possibly finding out that it's no better suited for me than music is a really scary thought to me. And considering that this wasn't something I ever considered before I came here means that I would potentially have to consider these two years the most stressful and expensive prompting in the world.

holy shit

This is undoubtedly the funniest thing I've read in the past few days. To give it some context, it was part of an analysis of how public and private acts, body parts, and parts of houses have changed places and functions and whatall over time. But still!

"To be able to attend a king's defecation was once an honor accorded to a dignitary given the title "Knight of the Stool" (the stool in question was a bodily product, not a piece of furniture)."
from "Sex and Real Estate", Marjorie Garber

thwarted again

I was going to post some pictures I took today, but of course I can't find the stupid cord that connects my camera to my computer. I swear, I only own that one little cord and I can never ever find it. This whole day has been kind of like that; I had a quartet rehearsal (cancelled), lots of time to practice (mostly wasted on fidgiting endlessly around the room) and then the pictures. Anyway, Anna took this picture in Tucson over Christmas. I want her to go take a picture of Manlove Street next time she's there (it's somewhere near my old house, but across Broadway. I only saw it in person once, and I was drunk), but for now, there's just this one. Doesn't it seem like some sort of right-wing joke propaganda or something?