waiting to cross

elsewhere

2009-05-28T03:46:00.002-04:00

http://parkingcars.tumblr.com
Quasi-relocation -- let's see where this goes.

yesterday

2009-05-22T02:25:00.005-04:00

I graduated from college yesterday, after four years of everything from terrible misery to eternal bliss. This felt like something important that one should make note of, which I am doing here of all places, for some reason. What a strange feeling. What next?

Perhaps now is the time to begin writing.

für alina

2009-05-02T04:08:00.001-04:00

This feels perfect.

like two people whose paths seem to cross

2009-04-30T10:26:00.002-04:00

What I think is most intriguing about Arvo Pärt’s music is how honest and clear it is. How is it possible that so few notes can make one’s heart tremble?

“It could be like a break in the radio. Such signals sometimes sound as if they lasted an entire life. Or future, or past, outside time. Like I said: a blade of grass has the status of a flower. To see in this tiny phrase, something more than just the black and white key...”

variations on

2009-04-16T23:22:00.004-04:00

My galley chargèd with forgetfulness
Thorough sharp seas, in winter nights doth pass
'Tween rock and rock; and eke mine enemy, alas,
That is my lord, steereth with cruelness,
And every oar a thought in readiness,
As though that death were light in such a case.
An endless wind doth tear the sail apace
Of forcèd sighs and trusty fearfulness.
A rain of tears, a cloud of dark disdain,
Hath done the wearied cords great hinderance;
Wreathèd with error and eke with ignorance.
The stars be hid that led me to this pain.
Drownèd is reason that should me consort,
And I remain despairing of the port.

- Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)

Jean Epstein, Le Tempestaire, 1947

TO THE HARBORMASTER

I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught
in some moorings. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart. In storms and
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide
around my fathomless arms, I am unable
to understand the forms of my vanity
or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder
in my hand and the sun sinking. To
you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage
of my will. The terrible channels where
the wind drives me against the brown lips
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks, it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.

- Frank O'Hara, 1954

I wish I wrote it

2009-03-29T23:11:00.003-04:00

A certain violinist had a beautiful violin
But before he had had time to play her long and listen
To her tones as such, he was compelled to renounce music
And sell her, and go on a far journey, and leave his violin
in the hands of the violin case.

What was there to do? It is said You cannot live life in quarter tones.
What was there to do? It is said you cannot live your life in silence.
What was there to do? It is said you cannot live your life playing scales.
What was there to do? It is said you cannot live your life listening to the Americans.

What was there to do? It is said you cannot live your life in your room and not go out.
What was there to do? It is said music disobeys
and reaches the prince's courtyard ever farther than smell and grits its
notes like teeth and gives us food and drink.
And orders a fire to be lighted, famished silk to hang over it and repetitions to be sharpened.

What was there to do? It is said it is the violinists who do not sleep.
What was there to do? It is said we think and don't think; we are asleep.
What was there to do? It is said music sinks into the mire up to its neck,
wants to crawl out, but cannot.
What was there to do? It is said the violin was a swan, seized the boy, falling
upwards to some height above the earth.

"Falling Upwards," David Shapiro
from A Burning Interior

I hope, David, should you run into this you wouldn't have a problem with it being here and all (not that too many folks probably run into this place anyway), but it just rang far too well with my sentiments this evening. I couldn't resist.

Regards,
MP

college angst

2009-03-26T02:25:00.009-04:00

This is what happens to one who spends a lot of time in libraries late at night, spending half the time merely wasting time, the other half of it attempting to write papers about how miserable T.S. Eliot was and doing problem sets about Cepheid stars and other astronomical terms you actually know nothing about. Not to be discounted, there is also the portion of time where you start looking up symptoms of various psychological disorders on the internet, wondering what your problem is.

Today in my body's fatigued misery I slept for about 7 hours in the middle of the day. I am so over this feeling that not even an aimless spring break could fix. Second thoughts, I guess I'm full of them these days. Admittedly, I probably brought most of this upon myself, which doesn't necessarily make it feel any better. Part of me is over this feeling, the other part of me lives in an optimistic fear (if there is such a thing) of what comes next.

I don't even like T.S. Eliot. At least, I don't like him much this morning. I've met at least one professor who doesn't like him either, which I always thought was a rarity. This is probably blasphemy in the world of literary academia. On the other hand, my advisor told me that he kind of goes in patterns with the poet, which I could probably relate to -- sometimes there are days when you just don't care much for the long-winded booming voice and this supposed sheer brilliance that exists in poems like "The Waste Land" with Dante-this and Shanti-Shanti-that, and on other days you realize that he was probably just as confused about himself as anyone.

Today I don't like him much, tomorrow I'll be more sympathetic. If I could have it my way, my thoughts would be more composed than for it to be as simple as that. Then, perhaps it would makes sense to you.

what brings me to tears every time

2009-02-02T18:22:00.002-05:00

Christian Ferras plays Sibelius Violin Concerto: 2nd movement - Adagio di molto.

Three years later, since the first time I heard this, my ears and my mind still, oh my God.

2008-12-28T00:01:00.006-05:00

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdum must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

- "Musee des Beaux Arts," W. H. Auden

suddenly this becomes a diary again

2008-12-12T03:45:00.004-05:00

What had you been thinking about

the face studiously bloodied

heaven blotted region

I go on loving you like water but

there is a terrible breath in the way all of this

You were not elected president, yet won the race

All the way through fog and drizzle

When you read it was sincere the coasts

stammered with unintentional villages the

horse strains fatigued I guess . . . the calls . . .

I worry
. . .

from "The Tennis Court Oath," John Ashbery

----------

The tulips started blooming sometime around mid-November. What are they doing here? I am convinced it is the confusion of being a mere foot away from the heater and sitting on the windowsill in the sunlight all day, as though it were actually springtime but it's merely a trick to them. Imagine their disappointment when they all grow up and it won't even be April yet.

It's 3:45 in the morning and while preoccupations over a German exam linger over my brain and a pair of essays to follow I am writing in here instead, for the first time in over two months. This may well be the first personal thing I have written since then. At near 4 AM, 5 hours away from an exam. This must be important. What to say? I suppose I'm at a loss for words and merely trying to scrounge something up for the sake of preserving the one thing in life that I've had the least struggle with. I still struggle with it all the time. What should I tell you? I've been reading Orhan Pamuk, Snow, over the last few months but I haven't finished it yet because I haven't the time, but it moves me and makes me wish that snow also reminded me of God. What else? I am constantly in good company but so many times I feel alone and a little useless but I suppose this is just another one of those feelings that most human beings experience. Or am I wrong? It must be nice to be someone who doesn't ever worry about isolation; in the subway today a pair of us talked about self-reliance. I wish I were less so sometimes, but I feel like it's beaten into me. "...A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles..."

I feel like my self-reliance is turning me into a robot; it doesn't feel so transcendental, but maybe I read the whole thing wrong to begin with. And I feel so convoluted inside about this. Am I becoming duller by the day? Is it strange to I used to fear failure more than anything but now I think my fears have changed into becoming dull. I've heard the argument in my suite once that individualism is a false hope, everyone wants to be interesting or beautiful in some way but the truth is that everyone is boring and more or less the same. The mechanics of this city and the masses of people within it get to the mind I think. And I think this is because I feel so lonely and sometimes wish there were someone to pull some sort of lost spark out of me, and when someone does for awhile I get hopeful and suddenly am disappointed and forgotten and a little lost all over again. And sure I can laugh and smile and crack jokes (sometimes even dirty ones) in company but my heart keeps to itself -- not intentionally, it just prefers to not expand and explode.

I suppose that all my solace is in books and walking around in museums filled with strange artifacts that are not even my own, and I don't even know how much music does for me anymore; I feel like so much of it has been taken away and conversations about sonatas and quartets depress me after awhile but I can't escape the company that indulges in it, it seems, so that's no good. Sometimes I wish I had the nerve to quit. In Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror John Ashbery wrote a poem called "Märchenbilder," a name borrowed from a piece for viola and piano by Robert Schumann -- I am bewildered by the schizophrenia of the poem because it's just so appropriate. I like Ashbery in his earlier days because he can make his sentences as disjunct and as seemingly non-sequitur as he wants and no one seems to mind. I like the brokenness because it makes so much damn sense to me; do you know how hard and unnatural it is to think and write coherently and still feel like a genuine human being?

Seasonal depression? Perhaps, but maybe it's far milder than it seems. Sometimes things seem excessively emotional when written on paper. I wouldn't mind tulips blossoming in December, really, and I suppose this is all I wish to say to you tonight.

on obsession, or o'hara's ghost

2008-10-08T01:08:00.010-04:00

All this poetry mess is beginning to get to my head. A few nights ago I dreamt that I was in the same room as Frank O'Hara and that we had the most beautiful conversation that lasted for hours but in reality perhaps was just a convolution of my brain and went over the span of a couple of minutes. I don't know if it was about anything but I think the piano was somewhere in there and I am pretty sure it had something to do with my reading Professor Edward Mendelson's recent article on O'Hara in the New York Review of Books. I must have read it three times over by now.

O'Hara was a poet well-known for his coterie -- a conglomeration of artists, painters, composers in what ended up being called the "New York School" -- yet Mendelson writes that "O'Hara wrote most fluently when he was alone, and the densely populated world of his most public poems was his defense against an emptiness that both tempted him and terrified him." He calls him a man of moral crisis; imagine that for the life of the party. In person he was a performer, and wrote to please audiences to some degree -- and what more to expect from a man who once aspired to be a concert pianist? -- and yet the older he became and the further he sank into his public image, surrounded by young and beautiful people, the more internal he became. The tragedy of it, Professor Mendelson argues: "The more time O'Hara spent barhopping with his coterie, the fewer poems he wrote, and the more convinced he became that he had nothing more to say."

In his poem "Mayakovsky" O'Hara is convinced that he has dried up, the "catastrophe of his personality" faltering toward a stagnant flatness. On the contrary, however, his eloquence and inwardness come out in the three stanzas that complete the last segment of the poem. A male friend of mine, in his frustration of unrequited attraction, once said to me that it is the simplest women who made themselves appear more complicated than they really were, and that meanwhile the most complicated try to make themselves simpler than they really are. This applies to all human beings, I believe, with O'Hara being no exception.

Maybe it's precisely that which drew me to his poems nearly two years ago. I don't remember how I came across his poetry in the first place; all I know is that it somehow stemmed from a milder fascination with Kenneth Koch and a meeting with David Shapiro and suddenly I've got these books everywhere and I can't stop reading them. I try to subdue things by bringing Ashbery into the picture but it's no use. Maybe it was the musical aspect of his life that pulled me in; or maybe the whimsical anti-academic way in which he tried to portray himself, rebelling against Eliot/Pound tradition of footnotes and Eastern fascination. Or maybe it was because no matter how hard he tried to pull off his startling ideas of Personism and public performance, he couldn't hide the fact that there was a loneliness, a self-resentment that he was trying to cut off, an internal dialogue that wouldn't turn itself off.

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

And doesn't everyone feel this way at a certain point? It's that sensation when you're standing in a room full of people socializing while on an alcohol buzz and suddenly while your talking about some incoherent insignificant thing with a circle of people the room stands still and you feel very lonely or inadequate or both. It is a fleeting sensation but you feel it, it feels very heavy.

The funny thing about art is that you know it's effective when it revives those sensations, moves you. Now I'm trying to turn that feeling into something academic, a senior thesis. Somehow, I feel like I'm betraying someone. Perhaps, a modest museum curator who wrote in memory to his feelings on scrap sheets of paper while trying to stay grounded. We had a conversation in a dream, and his presence was beautiful and modest and all black-and-white like in the pictures.

Someday, perhaps, I'll be enraptured with a different kind of poetry.

rimbaud is getting to me, maybe

2008-08-31T02:02:00.002-04:00

There was a point about four weeks ago when, for the first time since last year, I wrote like mad everyday in a little notebook because I felt like my thoughts were beginning to get overwhelming. Certain thoughts suddenly get very loud when you find that you have significantly less to do. The same effect happens when you stare out windows for too long, I think. I just moved into a 6-person, 3-story townhouse for this New York school year and I have a view that begins over Morningside Park and extends into Harlem and all the things in the northeastern corners of this city that I have never been to. Boredom, vastness, I don't know what it is that they do that suddenly triggers your brain into murmuring at you but they do.

I am struggling with a few things, I guess -- but who doesn't? In the meantime I am attempting to play it cool and not embarrass myself in the process. It works, more or less. A friend of mine called me a defeatist the other day. What? Really? No, I wouldn't say defeatist; I'm just a hesitant realist. I can't afford to give up my wariness; it's expensive and precious and it seems that when I do give a little bit of it up something goes broken and I have a hard time making good repairs. Who ever heard of a broken mirror that looked good when you glued it back together? I can't take risks breaking too many mirrors. The funny thing is I guess I'm decent at playing it cool but I'm pretty bad at giving up pride at the same time. Ouch, ouch. Something needs to happen in situations like these.

I bought these tulips in Holland that need planting. I am hoping they'll grow well on my windowsill. The amazing thing about tulips is how they seem so temporal, but out of those same old bulbs you can get something beautiful to blossom for at least a good four years. You just have to be willing to start a few things over and try again, I guess.

two poems by people who are not frank o'hara

2008-08-06T22:21:00.004-04:00

An unemployed
machinist
An unemployed machinist
who travelled
here
who travelled here
from Georgia
from Georgia 10 days ago
10 days ago
and could not find
a job
and could not find a job
walked
into a police station
walked into a police station
yesterday and said
yesterday
and said:

"I'm tired
of being scared
I'm tired of being scared."

- John Giorno

-------------------------------

Like musical instruments
Abandoned in a field
The parts of your feelings

Are starting to know a quiet
The pure conversion of your
Life into art seems destined

Never to occur
You don't mind
You feel spiritual and alert

As the air must feel
Turning into sky aloft and blue
You feel like

You'll never feel like touching anything or anyone
Again
And then you do

- Tom Clark

meditations after back from across the atlantic

2008-08-04T21:35:00.006-04:00

To Houston: I don't think I could come back to you and live in you even if I wanted to. There's something about you that reminds me too much of old stupid ideas and old boyfriends and your stretches of asphalt and cement depress me a bit. I can't use my feet on your sidewalks or I'd never get anywhere or perhaps experience something violent like nearly being run over in an air of humidity that seems to persist 85% of the year. Everything within you is out of reach aside from the pharmacies and fast food franchises; you're like a city of suburbia but almost worst in the way that you could fool someone into thinking otherwise. I don't know if I could ever be happy with you for that long, even my body tells me so. I am tired of allergy attacks and coughing fits in this house. My mother feels it too, and we suspect it to be a mold attack. What's going for this place? It's cheap and it's good to doctors and engineers. I'm not good for either profession.

Something about Europe creates wanderlust in a person. It convinces you for awhile that you can't deal with America anymore, although I guess you get over it after awhile. I miss the way I ate for five weeks (although dinner was often terrible lunch and breakfast were fine and balanced), and even the difference in how people spoke. French may sound pretentious to some Americans but I find it beautiful. It's as beautiful as the oldness of the continent; I already miss walking on cobblestones at the chateau, even if they ruin most shoes a girl would wear.

I tend to over-romanticize all this, I am sure, although I wonder sometimes how much I would actually miss America if I were to one day disappear across the sea. I think I would miss thinking in a native language, and I would get tired of old ways of thinking. I see this frustration in my parents and I am not sure how well I'd be in that situation, although who knows. I think Europeans (on a large scale) are very proud of tradition which is wonderful to an extent but can also sometimes be problematic. Who knows what would happen anyway? I am not old until I can't use my legs any longer.

Something strange: somewhere between the drive from Brussels to Fontainebleau in my uncle's car we passed by Illiers-Combray, the town in which the narrator of In Search of Lost Time spends much of his childhood. The book was in my lap as we passed the town by. Another strange incident like this happened about three weeks later while reading a biography on Frank O'Hara by Joe LeSeur -- there is a section in the book where LeSeur recalls talking to Frank about whether or not they would see Noel Lee in his performance of a Copland fantasy, I think it was. That week I found myself working on Noel Lee's string quartet and met the man himself, who was on the piano faculty of the program and is in his 84th year. There is something rather magical about him: after giving lessons on the fairly high stage (about three feet off the ground) of the Salle des Colonnes in the chateau, he would leap off gracefully -- like the way a cat jumps off a fence when he has some different place to go.

and it's only the last week of may.

2008-05-29T16:15:00.003-04:00

I'm home again. What do I do with myself now?

I haven't even read any poetry lately. I read House of Sand and Fog this past weekend and it was the saddest book I've read in awhile. It also taught me an interesting handful of Persian vocabulary my father never taught me. Still, I don't know if I liked it very much. Something unsettling with these books about Iranian ex-pats. Especially when they're not written by Iranian ex-pats.

Houston has a bad transportation system. It's been my project since the summer after freshman year of college to figure out how it works. I think I will finally start this Saturday.

an update II

2008-05-06T02:41:00.005-04:00

The pear tree that last year
was heavy laden this year
bears little fruit. Was
it that wet spring we had?
All the pear tree leaves
go shimmer, all at once. The
August sun blasts down
into the coolness from the
ocean. The New York Times
is on strike. My daily
fare! I'll starve! Not
quite. On my sill, balls
of twine wrapped up in
cellophane glitter. The
brown, the white, and one
I think you'd call écru.
The sunlight falls partly
in a cup: it has a blue
transfer of two boys, a
dog and a duck and says,
"Come Away Pompey." I
like that cup, half
full of sunlight. Today
you could take up the
tattered shadows off
the grass. Roll them
and stow them. And collect
the shimmerings in a
cup, like the coffee
here at my right hand.

- "Shimmer," James Schuyler

Do I really lack that much grace? Sometimes I wonder. I have a fear of doing ungraceful things, and I must do three or four of them a day.

an update

2008-03-25T00:43:00.005-04:00

Sometimes when I read back on these posts I feel like such a ridiculous idealist. Blogs are things that can make you feel very self-conscious, I guess. How embarrassing.

What kind of dorky high schooler thinks about naming their kids after poets and opera heroines?

Until a few days ago I was in Houston, Texas again. On a particular day I went to a birthday party in which some very small cousins of mine(once removed) beat down some piñatas while wearing princess dresses. A few days later I went prom dress shopping with my sister -- this lasted over the course of the entire week. There were really few differences between the birthday dresses and my sister's choices (including size and non-relative length).

Also, Spanish piñata chants can sound very disturbing when sung by a chorus of people under the age of 10. The children do not sing in tune together. That dissonant top-of-a-bunch-of-small-lungs shout in conjunction with that hard thrashing noise made against some poor papier mache animal getting beaten to death just sounds violent. This all happened at the start of Holy Week.

Somehow I am willing to bet that William Faulkner reads really damn well in Spanish. El sonido y la furia.

dear gidon kremer

2008-03-05T00:58:00.005-05:00

This is just to say that every time I listen to your performance of the final movement of the Brahms violin concerto, it makes me feel quite invincible.

(Although I have to say -- and this is totally not your fault -- about two months later, I am still incredibly perturbed by the way the movement was used in the soundtrack of There Will Be Blood, to the point where I don't know if I can ever listen to this piece in quite the same way again.)

Best,

M.P.

para un nuevo tiempo

2008-02-19T00:57:00.012-05:00

What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families
shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes! and you, Garcia Lorca, what
were you doing down by the watermelons?
- Allen Ginsberg, "A Supermarket in California"

Equivocar el camino
es llegar a la nieve
y llegar a la nieve
es pacer durante varios siglos las hierbas de los cementerios.

Equivocar el camino
es llegar a la mujer,
la mujer que no teme la luz,
la mujer que mata dos gallos en un segundo,
la luz que no teme a los gallos
y los gallos que no saben cantar sobre la nieve.

Pero si la nieve se equivoca de corazón
puede llegar el viento Austro
y como el aire no hace caso de los gemidos
tendremos que pacer otra vez las hierbas de los cementerios.

Yo vi dos dolorosas espigas de cera
que enterraban un paisaje de volcanes
y vi dos niños locos que empujaban llorando las pupilas de un asesino.

Pero el dos no ha sido nunca un número
porque es una angustia y su sombra,
porque es la guitarra donde el amor se desespera,
porque es la demostración de otro infinito que no es suyo
y es las murallas del muerto
y el castigo de la nueva resurrección sin finales.

Los muertos odian el número dos,
pero el número dos adormece a las mujeres
y como la mujer teme la luz
la luz tiembla delante de los gallos
y los gallos solo saben volar sobre la nieve
tendremos que pacer sin descanso las hierbas de los cementerios.

- Pequeño Poema Infinito, Gabriel García Lorca
New York, 10 de enero de 1930

Over the past few days I've had some wonderful conversation with Mark Statman, who along with Pablo Medina has created a beautiful, very well-done translation of Lorca's Poeta en Nueva York, which Edward Hirsch has called "a Poet in New York for our time." It's impossible for a translation to ever be as good as the original, but for the English reader this it's as good as it gets -- and it's well-deserved, for a poet's words in which so many (including Allen Ginsberg) found resonance.

I first read his poetry when I was thirteen years old, perhaps a bit young to understand any of his intentions in any language. Reading a Lorca poem is almost like reading heiroglyphics; you're constantly looking for some way to crack his code, his duende and his moons and his blood and his blue and grey-to-black color schemes. The catch with this poet -- as with any poet -- is to understand him in his own jargon.

There's background story to this work, of course. Lorca composed Poet in New York during the several months he spent in New York as a student. It is important to know, while reading this work, that Lorca lived in Manhattan right at the time of the stock market collapse -- he happened to be walking on Wall Street on Black Tuesday, and witnessed six businessmen jumped out their windows. Over several months he responded to his feelings of appalledness, depression, and turmoil through poetry. He ended up with Poeta en Nueva York, which reads in some ways like an epic -- a map, if you will, of his emotional response to the things he experienced. After the World Trade Center tragedy, the translators realized upon re-reading the work that it responded to so much of the emotion and confusion that New Yorkers were experiencing in 2001. As poets themselves, they felt compelled enough to create a new translation that would transmit those sentiments as the author meant for them to be felt.

Eight years later, I find myself reading Poet in New York for the first time, and I'm beginning to see him from a different angle. "Lorca doesn't write in Spanish," Mark said to me, more than once, during our conversations. "Lorca writes in Lorca." I suppose this is how he translates too.

appellations

2008-02-16T02:49:00.007-05:00

Sometimes I think about my name and how strange it is that it is uncommon enough in America for people to still question its pronunciation, but common enough to merit 500+ search results on Facebook. It is strange to see my name over and over again on the internet without it being me listed. Somewhere in London lives a young woman who has stolen my identity -- or perhaps I have stolen hers, last name and all -- and once awhile ago I was messaged by a friend of hers who had mistakenly contacted me. She quickly apologized and explained that, believe it or not, there lives another girl in the world with my name. I felt so naked, almost othered in a strange way. Who is this Maryam, is she a nice person, does she like books and Messiaen like me or does she like better things, what does she do? Does she know better what to do with herself than I? Wait! What if someone Googles us? Won't that be confusing? Case in point: I am not a unique snowflake, alas.

When I was younger I always thought that hypothetically someday I would name my daughters after opera heroines that I knew of at the time like Aida or Isolde or Pamina, and my sons after immortalized poets -- Federico, Hafez, Guillaume (although at the time I think I had very little idea of what Apollinaire's poems were like). They are all lovely names but I worry that if I actually followed through with that I would have a very Europeanesquely-named group of children, save Hafez of course. My roommate tells me that in Indian culture sometimes children, post-birth, are nameless for awhile, until the perfect name arises. Names are very sensitive things. My mother tells me I was almost a Cynthia, and I am very glad I am not.

By bad luck today I lost, among other things, a wonderful 90-minute interview. This has never happened to me before; I just spent two and a half hours feeling like a horrible journalist. I had such a pleasant afternoon in Park Slope, I don't know what happened. But Park Slope is lovely. I dislike these paradoxical sort of days because they are so unsettling. It is most unfortunate to end a fairly happy day with disappointment. If you poured yourself (by accident) a cup of rotten milk into your bowl of cereal in the evening before bedtime, it would be much more unsettling than if the same thing happened in the morning.

Perhaps Other Maryam has better thoughts.

si se puede

2008-02-06T22:05:00.000-05:00

From Denver, last Thursday night:

"We're the party of a man who overcame his own disability; who told us that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself; and who faced down fascism and liberated a continent from tyranny.

"We're the party of Jackson, who took back the White House for the people of this country.

"And we're the party of Jefferson, who wrote the words that we are still trying to heed - that all of us are created equal - and who sent us West to blaze new trails, to make new discoveries, and to realize the promise of our highest ideals.

"That is who we are. That is the Party that we need to be, and can be, if we cast off our doubts, and leave behind our fears, and choose the America that we know is possible. Because there is a moment in the life of every generation, if it is to make its mark on history, when its spirit has to come through, when it must choose the future over the past, when it must make its own change from the bottom up.
"This is our moment. This is our message - the same message we had when we were up, and when we were down. . ."

For a long time I had been a skeptic, but a few weeks ago, I finally bought in.

Why Obama? There are many reasons, I think, but the fact that he moves people enough to create something like this -- completely unsolicited -- is just amazing.

Still a long way to go, baby. . .

Also, For the first time in years -- and literally, years -- there will be a Texas primary that matters. And I get to vote in it. I never thought I would be so terribly excited over the idea of voting in my life.

just, don't leave --

2008-02-03T01:35:00.001-05:00

-- and true love waits in haunted attics

on quiet saturdays

2008-01-26T23:54:00.000-05:00

There is not a more ominous way to start the semester than to have automatic doors awkwardly close on you when you are on your way out of the library with a large armful of books. I was very flustered to have discovered this two days ago. Somehow I cannot avoid carrying a million things at once and when doors close on you it just makes you feel, well...

I had lunch in a tiny little diner near Lincoln Center today with a good friend of mine who is currently in the process of making big changes in his life. He is a wonderfully intelligent person, one of the few I can speak very openly with. In midst of this long wild discussion on time-space fabric and psychology and Oliver Sacks's Musicophilia and living in bubbles and moving on with things etcetera, somewhere in that progression I told him I was beginning to feel slightly old. I am turning 21, I said to him, and in about a week and a half, but all I want to do on my 21st birthday is sit on a couch somewhere and probably watch a lot of television, and I don't even own a TV.

People have a distinct way of laughing when you make a statement like that which they find remote amusement and empathy in. He gave me one of those slight laughs, and he knew that it was exactly what I was going to say. Somewhere later in that conversation I guess we both realized that we all come across days where we wish we could quit most people. It's a more human characteristic than I give it credit for, I suppose.

In the last two weeks I've been perpetually listening to the Barber violin concerto. Only a few days ago on Tuesday, while I was walking out of the violin shop where I usually go, I heard someone in a another room play the opening bars of the piece. I find it to be a very American piece; the melody has a distinct romanticism about it that makes it feel very American. Something very cinematic, or perhaps the feeling of coming across some gorgeous but unknown frontier. I've been so in love with this piece for months.

somewhere warmer

2008-01-16T02:36:00.001-05:00

Quite literally this is all cheap photography. My digital camera is a piece of junk, actually. Sometimes I have to hit it to make it work properly -- "percussion maintenance," if you will. You don't always like what you have, but you live with what you've got. Isn't that how it is usually? But anyway I'm no one terribly unfortunate. I still own a digital camera. And sometimes cheap pictures are still appreciable.

Anyway, my theory is, that's probably why people still spend so much on Polaroids.

Overall, when you think about it, theories like that are tangential and pretty silly.

Museum District, Houston, TX.
January 11, 2008.

severely disjunct thoughts from a previous hour

2008-01-16T01:12:00.000-05:00

What name do I have for you?
Certainly there is no name for you
In the sense that the stars have names
That somehow fit them.
Just walking around,

An object of curiosity to some,
But you are too preoccupied
By the secret smudge in the back of your soul
To say much and wander around,

Smiling to yourself and others.
It gets kind of lonely
But at the same time off-putting.
Counterproductive, as you realize once again

That the longest way is the most efficient way,
The one that looped among islands, and
You always seemed to be traveling in a circle.
And now that the end is near

The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.
There is light in there and mystery and food.
Come see it.
Come not for me but it.
But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other.

--- "Just Walking Around," John Ashbery

--------------------------------

"I don't know," she said.
"Of course you know. You're brilliant. Everyone says so."
"What else can they say? I do neurochemistry. No one knows what that is."
"Other scientists have some idea. And they say you're brilliant."
"We're all brilliant. Isn't that the understanding around here? You call me brilliant, I call you brilliant. It's a form of communal ego."
"No one calls me brilliant. They call me shrewd. They say I latched on to something big. I filled an opening no one knew existed."
"There are openings for brilliance too. It's my turn, that's all. Besides, I'm built funny and walk funny. If they couldn't call me brilliant, they would be forced to say cruel things about me. How awful for everyone."

--- from White Noise, Don DeLilo

-------------------------------------

In my room the radiator buzzes like an AM radio all the time and everything around here makes strange noises. Last night I had a series of terrible dreams where every time a peaceful or serene thought entered my mind it would turn itself into something hideous. I don't know if that was more of me dreaming or me trying to fall asleep. Half the time when I try put things into an explanation they only end up sounding like madness.

In my active moving life I avoid discussion of personal writing because it makes me extremely uncomfortable to explain the things I write. Why do the people who write things write them? Do they always enjoy it? I don't know if "enjoy" is the right word but I do know that writing things down can be a sort of catharsis for all the things you can't always explain so colloquially. When you play through a piece of music you hope that somehow your soul can make sense of it. Does this all fully make sense to you, whoever you are, perchance coming across this journal if you are indeed such a person, this figment of my life, you the person who are reading this? Does it matter, necessarily? Yes, no, this is garbage, non sequitur, oh maybe here and there yes, etc.

Last Tuesday they buried my grandfather in the city of Qom, early in the morning. There had been ruthless snow that week but that morning it did not come, until the very moment when the last words of the ceremony were uttered. At that instant the snow began to fall heavily. Last Tuesday marked the first day of Muharram in the Islamic calendar, the month in which Shiites observe the death of the Imam Hussain, grandson of the prophet Muhammad. The holiest of months after Ramadan, in Tehran the men dress in black and slather themselves in mud; in a mass chanted lamentation they hit their own faces and thighs until the their skin glows with the redness.

I had seen ahead of time, when it would occur. That is why, until my father told me how proud my babajun had been of me and how his face glowed when he heard his son mention my name in the hospital, I didn't cry at all. I am trying so hard to make myself deserve that, and yet endlessly I am convinced that I must be doing something wrong.

The only one who can give me any of these answers that I want so desperately is not going to hand them over so easily, if at all. My best guess is that you have to work for your answers as much as you have to work for anything else in life. And how wrong can I be about that?

things prolonged

2008-01-01T03:44:00.000-05:00

Today is January 1st 2008 and in the ICU wing of a hospital somewhere in Tehran, Iran on the other side of the world, my 91-year old grandfather is dying. He has been dying for about a month now, as we were reminded 10 minutes after midnight by a phone call from my aunt to my father. I think he is waiting for my uncle, the eldest of his boys, who has yet to make his flight from here to there.

A different story: my great grandfather on my mother's side passed away a few years ago, at 103 years old. Since 93 he had asked God to let him die, and God made him wait for 10 years. Either way by that point when you're in less-than-youthful condition I suppose you endure the wait, whether by will or by force. 91 is also a very long time. Anyway, I know nothing about what it's like. I'm only 20 and still very mobile.

I'm sitting on my bed right now, and supposedly I would be asleep by this point. On the contrary, I am very much awake, and behind me through my window I can hear the bass rhythms of parties going on in the houses behind us. I have never understood why the fireworks continue two and a half hours past midnight on this holiday. I hate fireworks, especially when they're set off in neighborhoods. Anyway, in this household New Year's eve is consistently un-celebrated, unless watching the ball drop on NBC with your parents on the couch half-asleep qualifies as celebration. I guess in a way I am just jealous of everyone else having a good time. Sometimes in a way I am really bothered by drunken shouting and salsa music.

inevitably, at least 4 of these may not happen

2007-12-31T20:07:00.000-05:00

More water, more vegetables. And take vitamins.

Get out of some of my debts. Do more lucrative things with my brain.

Develop social dance skills in hopes that it makes me less socially awkward. (Not that it will necessarily help? The key word, anyway, is hope.)

Be a better student. Be a bolder writer, be a bolder musician. Learn Bartok. Play more Beethoven. Read more biographies. Get to Germany, maybe stay for awhile. Speak German. Get a good accent.

Less clumsiness in high heels. Be a better-coordinated human being. Develop some classiness, avoid trashiness. Be a little less selfless and a little less selfish, both at the same time.

Get published somewhere outside of school magazines. Read more new writers and the things I've never read that people have been telling me to read for too long, i.e. Luc Sante, Ayn Rand, Victorian literature, so on. Finish all assigned readings.

Fearlessness, sans (too much) stupidity. Learn when to turn off my brain. Learn to sleep better. Think less about things lost, figure out how to get out of holes.

Either stay out of trouble by talking less, or come to terms with the fact that talking will often get one into trouble and there is nothing I can do about it sometimes. I always learn the hard way.

Among these, many other things. This includes figuring out what to do with myself sometime before the following year.

between major cities

2007-12-24T01:46:00.000-05:00

If you have ever found yourself within a 100-foot radius of a stranger with an extraordinarily resemblance to someone you know, it is a strange, haunting thing. While waiting in the Philadelphia bus line at Grand Authority on Saturday morning I noticed a man in one of the other bus lines who looked so much like a good friend of mine -- one who I recently sort of had a falling out with and hadn't really spoken to in a long time. I stood in my bus line for nearly half an hour, and the entire time I couldn't help but observe this man and all his features and mannerisms that reminded me so much of that friend; the haircut, the body frame and facial features, the way he answered his phone, his poise, the look of confusion on his face in response to whatever the person on the other line was saying. It was a resemblance was so striking that I wanted to shout my friend's name in that terminal filled with probably 500-some-odd people on the rare coincidence that it really was him, but of course such resemblances only go so far and I would have just been so embarrassed for no reason; it just couldn't have been, anyway.

The entire time in my half hour of being unable to not watch this person I felt guilty for many things, until our line was moved to another terminal. In any case certain guilts persist -- long story short, uncanniness is often awkward and very unsettling. I don't like it because it makes you feel so delusional.

Half the time on the bus ride to Philly I kept thinking about people I hadn't talked to for so long and, somewhat tangentially to all this I suppose, how breakups are very difficult processes that must force estrangement upon many people. Anyway, long trips by yourself often make you think a lot in a very segueing fashion, to the point where you dream those thoughts during those brief spells of sleep on those jolting bus/train/plane rides. They kind of fall into the same league as thoughts that happen when you're sitting on the subway looking at people's faces as they're reading their newspapers or listening to their iPods or thinking idly themselves; you don't quite know how to label that thinking but it reminds you that you're passing time and are on many levels a small part of something that is very large.

Philadelphia is one of my favorite cities to visit, for being so compact and old-school and a place where you can get almost anywhere you need to solely by walking. I was there for 4 1/2 hours on Saturday afternoon seeing friends before flying back home, and while there Ben and I stood in front of the Kimmel Center waved to Joel on the 25th floor of his apartment building a few blocks away. I wish I had taken a picture because it made me really happy.

That flight home was probably the worst flight I have ever taken back, and I had never wanted to get back to Houston so quickly in my last two and a half years of college. On a side note, Tex-Mex tastes so brilliant and delicious when you haven't had it in so long. I guess like this city too. I like it when Texans put lit reindeer and snowmen and fake wreaths and a preposterous amount of lights around their patio home garages when it's 54 degrees outside. I mean, you gotta do the best you can.

something of moderate coherence

2007-12-21T03:47:00.000-05:00

I realize what my problem is, and I think that my problem is that I think in fragments. I think that coherence is an art, especially when it comes to putting your thoughts together with words. It takes a very long time for me to get adjusted to words, or rather, get comfortable with the words that I gravitate to. Coherence, I've decided, is difficult sometimes. Often times. In academic writing, when you're struggling with coherence or are unsure of whether you have it or not, it's kind of a challenge.

I think this is the type of realization that comes from trying to write 40 pages of essays within a relatively short time span. Granted, it could have been much worse. Anyway, now that that thought is over with, today signified the end of my fifth semester at this fine institution. Ha! Who would have thought? Finished semesters make me want to sleep forever. I woke up on our lovely couch at approximately 11:30 pm this evening.

Another flaw of mine is my tendency to waste lots of time on Youtube. The week before finals week I consecutively watched several Swedish Chef episodes and, probably as a result of being overschooled in theory as of late, thought to myself that clips such as this one make such great cases for surrealist humor:

... it was after the spur of that thought that I realized it was time to get out of school and go home as quickly possible.

On the other hand, I am really looking forward to seeing Persepolis this holiday break. This preview of the French version is amazing -- not to mention, how amazing/hilarious is it that Marjane sings "Eye of the Tiger" with a French accent?

Indeed. It is getting quite late.

on missing

2007-12-03T03:20:00.000-05:00

I've got to tell you
how I love you always
I think of it on grey
mornings with death

in my mouth the tea
is never hot enough
then and the cigarette
dry the maroon robe

chills me I need you
and look out the window
at the noiseless snow

At night on the dock
the buses glow like
clouds and I am lonely
thinking of flutes

I miss you always
when I go to the beach
the sand is wet with
tears that seem mine

although I never weep
and hold you in my
heart with a very real
humor you'd be proud of

the parking lot is
crowded and I stand
rattling my keys the car
is empty as a bicycle

what are you doing now
where did you eat your
lunch and were there
lots of anchovies it

is difficult to think
of you without me in
the sentence you depress
me when you are alone

Last night the stars
were numerous and today
snow is their calling
card I'll not be cordial

there is nothing that
distracts me music is
only a crossword puzzle
do you know how it is

when you are the only
passenger if there is a
place further from me
I beg you do not go

- "Morning," Frank O'Hara

---------------------------------------

It is strange and somewhat lonely, I think, when you find yourself organizing the books on your shelf by the people that they remind you of.

It snowed today.

messiaen the dreamweaver

2007-11-20T22:44:00.000-05:00

“Vocalise, pour l'Ange qui annonce la fin du Temps”

When the French army medical auxilliary Olivier Messiaen began composing his Quatuor pour la fin du temps in his cell in Stalag VIII-A, a prison camp in Görlitz, the malnourishment from his imprisonment had caused him the strangest suffering: he began to see colors in his sleep, and in his dreams saw the Angel of the Apocalypse bearing a rainbow crown over his forehead, his presence more immense than the world itself, one foot settled in an emerald sea, and the other upon the red earth. This is only part of how the second movement in the Quartet for the End of Time came to be born. The rest of it lays in the end of Messiaen's dream, when the angel raised his hands towards heaven and declared, "There will be no more Time." The movement itself is a slow-moving rhythmic chaos, a whirlwind of dissonances in irregular 3/4 time, where phrases have broken all the rules, endless as the ocean waves that stir from the rainbow Angel's foot in the water. For Messiaen, the end of Time did not mean hopelessness, but a calming dissonance.

Thus, One of the most ethereally intriguing pieces to ever have been composed in one of the most hopeless moments of western history was not written out of fear but out of waiting. . .

. . . How do you explain what is so striking about the sound of dissonance? It seems that humanity has always valued the beauty of regulation: a diamond is cut to be proportional on all sides; to be considered pretty, you must have a symmetrical face; in an ideal world civilization abides by the law. Dissonance, however, is complete disruption, a tonal asymmetry -- yet its unresolved quality can be most intriguing at the least expected moment. There is a certain satisfaction to be found in going against the grain; somehow, dissonance is a most satisfactory discomfort.

For once, something to think about in an all too perfect world. I suppose it's only almost all too perfect.

In the beginning there was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. John 1:1

The verse in Messiaen's introduction to the score the pretext to the fifth movement of the End of Time, "Louange á l'Eternité de Jésus" (praise to the eternity of Jesus.) What colors accompanied such quaint calmness? It is a pleasant distraction from the prior movements; like a haunting song without words -- in the score the solo cello and piano are literally instructed to play infinitely slowly, ecstatically. It is impossible to explain the poignancy of its beautiful sound, but at best it is this: imagine what it would feels like to close your eyes under direct sunlight while laying in the softest grass in world, only the slightest breeze flickering over your skin after having been defeated (perhaps even violently beaten) under the palest shade of blue sky.

In the Book of Revelations it is said that the Apocalypse will come accompanied with the sound of seven angels blasting their trumpets; one could almost expect a Mahler symphony to be playing, thunderous brass blaring from the skies. Instead, Messiaen produces, in the distant sound of an ascending cello, ethereal love. What does it mean, to write of the end of Time and say I love you from a prison cell when the world at large has become filled with so much hate? In the beginning there was the world and the world was with God; perhaps this was the composer's way of expressing, instead of the hopelessness of a tragic end, the hope of some new beginning. An opportunity for something better, maybe.

at this moment

2007-10-15T01:43:00.000-04:00

I'd actually much rather be here:

optical illusions

2007-09-15T01:33:00.000-04:00

"For we are like tree trunks in the snow. In appearance they lie sleekly and a little push should be enough to set them rolling. No, it can't be done, for they are firmly wedded to the ground. But see, even that is only appearance."

- "The Trees," Franz Kafka

In New York as of two weeks ago. Day by day I am learning to live more with imperfection, both my own and the world's. Mostly my own. Day by day I am getting adjusted to different ideas, and falling more in love with Chet Baker's "My Funny Valentine."

learning to shut up

2007-08-15T18:26:00.000-04:00

My father used to say,
"Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow's grave
nor the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self reliant like the cat --
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth --
they sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint."
Nor was he insincere in saying, "Make my house your inn."
Inns are not residences.

- "Silence," Marianne Moore

from one of the most beautiful books i have ever read

2007-07-08T01:56:00.000-04:00

Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I do not know why, but I do know that the universe never began.

Let no one be mistaken. I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.

So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing. How does one start at the beginning, if things happen before they actually happen? If before the pre-prehistory there already existed apocalyptic monsters? If this history does not exist, it will come to exist. To think is an act. To feel is a fact. Put the two together -- it is me who is writing what I am writing. God is the world. The truth is always some inner power without explanation. The more genuine part of my life is unrecognizable, extremely intimate and impossible to define. My heart has shed every desire and reduced itself to one final or initial beat. The toothache that passes through this narrative has given me a sharp twinge right in the mouth. I break out into a strident, high-pitched, syncopated melody. It is the sound of my own pain, of someone who carries this world with so little happiness...

The first page of Clarice Lispector's Hour of the Star begins with this passage, which I have found myself drawn to for many weeks, almost months now.

I used to feel really stupid in my literature classes in college whenever someone would a comment about a book like they knew exactly what the author was talking about. However, if there's anything I've learned about being an English major, it's that 90% of the time no one can be completely sure about the suggestions that come out of their mouths. I can make a guess about what she is trying to say, but I am no Lispector, who completed Hour of the Star within a year of her death. I don't know anything about dying and feeling nostalgia for Pernambuco, Brazil, but somewhere in there, there's a way to relate because it comes from another human being.

That can be the most beautiful, or despised, thing about literature -- the foggy parts that you have to determine for yourself. I think this is why sometimes people who dread James Joyce or don't know what to make of him take on Portrait of the Arist or Finnegan's Wake anyway. There's something about the murkiness of books like those which makes you curious as to what the author could have possibly been thinking, and so the best way to come close is, for the period that you read it and perhaps beyond, converse with the text and get to the ending.

Most writers write out of a search for clarification and understanding in life -- I think Lispector's passage suggests that. A friend of mine here put it this way: everyone has this innate voice in their head that's constantly talking to them, but most of us are afraid to listen to what's being said. The frightening thing about some books is that when you read them, you start paying attention to yourself.

Perhaps this is all very blatant. Nevertheless I have been thinking about this for days. I think more than anything I have just been trying to find reason in the things that I pursue because day by day everything feels more illogical. I am tired of the idea of learning for the sake of simply being educated.

It's got to mean more than proving that you're smart enough for law school, I hope.

Pardon the mess.

thank goodness

2007-07-01T22:52:00.000-04:00

At least someone in the media still has their head on straight.

Anyway, I almost forgot how amazing the following are:
- Swimming pools;
- Swings;
- IcePops;
- Microwaveable popcorn;
- Reading under trees;
- Cityless noise;
- Intelligent conversation with people who aren't talking for the sake of sounding intelligent;
- Also, go-karts and laser tag. And putt-putt.
- Also, fireflies (but I had never seen those before until I came here, so that doesn't count);
- (If I wanted to show how productive I'm being, I would add scales and arpeggios to this list);
- Also, Ernst Bloch (whose 1919 Suite I am falling in love with more and more everyday, as much as it drives me crazy).

I wish I could explain what it precisely is that I miss most when I'm at school, but it has something to do with a different kind of atmosphere. I don't know, but for once I don't feel too crazy.

Or maybe just a little.

my life is turning into a twisted woody allen movie

2007-06-24T14:00:00.000-04:00

I am sitting in my dorm room in little Hudson, Ohio. I suppose I could be practicing, or exploring the area for other signs of life. Instead I am sitting in here with my falling-apart suitcases undone, writing nonsense because staring out the window on plane rides always makes me inexplicably sad, just a little. Generally, I have felt strange and sad this weekend for various reasons.

Instead, I will tell a strange little story, that corresponds with my luck of being accosted by strange old men in the library.

So I'm sitting in the computer lab on campus getting stuff done for work, sitting in the chair with my instrument case still on my back. This guy, gray curly-haired with a blue Yankees cap passes by me from the printer, pauses and comments comments that I look uncomfortable. Oh, actually no, I reply to him with a smile, and explain that I'm used to doing it on subway cars. He laughs. He asks what kind of music I play and recommends me a site to get music from, insisting I do it right at that very moment, telling me that Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata inspired him to write poetry, and he would love to be invited to one of my concerts when I perform (he goes to concerts as much as possible when they're free because tickets are so expensive, of course) . Um, sure, I reply, hoping he would sit down now. He sits down, but next to me, to carry on the conversation. And, oh, did I know that he wrote poetry?

Do I like poetry? Yes, I guess I do, reply. He puts his hand over his heart as though he were taken aback and then tells me I should read his poems, then proceeds to print two out for me to read (one in English, one in Spanish, both signed to me personally in their respective languages after he figures out my name). I can read in Spanish? Gasp! (he does the hand thing again) and he tells me he took a few Spanish literature courses including one that almost killed him and made him depressed. He tells me I am beautiful, asks my ethnicity (er, part Salvadorian, except he insists Guatemalan but I am too tall to be Guatemalan) and tells me his life story about living in Cuba, asks if I love my parents, what do I think about immigration, and did I know that I was beautiful and had pretty eyes and was such a simple person? I think he added "simple" because I gave him mostly one-word answers.

Did I know he wrote 4 books, including some on philosophy? (He took a few philosophy classes.) Did I know that the world is a crazy place but that happiness was important nevertheless? Did I know, did I know that he also took a few classes in literature? What's wrong? Why am I looking at him like that? He apologizes to the man behind him for talking so much and keeps going. He tells me it's beautiful that I'm studying literature and makes a list of books I should read (including Tickets for a Prayer Wheel by Annie Dillard and Night by Elie Weisel, because they changed his life). And, oh my lord, I don't look full Hispanic? Half Middle Eastern? Beautiful, beautiful, I am the emblem of universal love. Have I been to Guatemala? I don't remember going, I reply. Did I know that, isn't it funny, how he was just naturally drawn to me because I look uncomfortable and yet he feels like he has such an amazing connection with me? Isn't it amazing? Sure, I suppose.

The conversation goes like this for about 45 minutes, until finally he decides to go back to his work after getting my "e-mail address" and attempting to get my phone number so he could hear my beautiful voice again (because that cell phone in front of me by the keyboard? Definitely not mine.) In fear that he would come back, I leave the computer lab, using a staged phone call from a friend as an excuse so I wouldn't be stopped on the way out. The man must have been at least twice as old as me. Along with his poetry, he signed the back of a card for me with his full name, e-mail address, phone number, and Shakespeare quote ("to be or not to be"). He said he was going to e-mail me a poem a day.

I spent the rest of the evening feeling incredibly dirty and sketched out about whole event, as well as much of the next morning relaying the story to my boss at work. "You gotta be careful about these creeps, they prey on girls in libraries like that all the time," Lisa tells me, and unfortunately I let my politeness get the best of me in those sorts of situations. She also suggeseted I not read the poems. I haven't.

Regardless, thinking back to the weird event, a person like that would theoretically be a dream on the account of three things: 1) if he were, er, much closer to my age, 2), if I didn't have to hear someone talk so much in a computer lab when I had a deadline to work on, and 3) if it hadn't sounded like so much bullshit from a crazy guy who hangs out in collegelibraries. Yes, theoretically, it would be amazing to meet someone who thinks like that.

The day I meet someone who tells me I have a certain beautiful look in my eyes again, I hope I can believe it to be genuine, in a situation that doesn't feel like a big Candid Camera-esque prank. I think it would be nice.

In fact, yes, it would feel amazing, but I must be kidding myself.

"these are the days my friends"

2007-06-14T21:40:00.001-04:00

The day with its cares and perplexities is ended and the night is now upon us. The night should be a time of peace and tranquility, a time to relax and be calm. We have need of a soothing story to banish the disturbing thoughts of the day, to set at rest our troubled minds, and put at ease our ruffled spirits.

And what sort of story shall we hear? Ah, it will be a familiar story, a story that is so very, very old, and yet it is so new. It is the old, old story of love.

Two lovers sat on a park bench, with their bodies touching each other, holding hands in the moonlight.

There was silence between them. So profound was their love for each other, they needed no words to express it. And so they sat in silence, on a park bench, with their bodies touching, holding hands in the moonlight.

Finally she spoke. "Do you love me, John?" she asked. "You know I love you, darling," he replied. "I love you more than tongue can tell. You are the light of my life, my sun, moon and stars. You are my everything. Without you I have no reason for being."

Again there was silence as the two lovers sat on a park bench, their bodies touching, holding hands in the moonlight. Once more she spoke. "How much do you love me, John?" she asked. He answered: "How much do I love you? Count the stars in the sky. Measure the waters of the oceans with a teaspoon. Number the grains of sand on the sea shore. Impossible, you say?"

"Yes and it is just as impossible for me to say how much I love you. My love for you is higher than the heavens, deeper than Hades, and broader than the earth. It has no limits, no bounds. Everything must have an ending except my love for you."

There was more of silence as the two lovers sat on a park bench with their bodies touching, holding hands in the moonlight.

Once more her voice was heard. "Kiss me, John," she implored. And leaning over, he pressed his lips warmly to hers in fervent osculation.

- "Lovers on a Park Bench," Samuel M. Johnson

(The music in this beautiful stop-motion video is "Knee Play 5" from Phillip Glass' opera Einstein on the Beach. The text is what you hear being narrated around 3:20 minutes in. The text being narrated by the woman is from a poem by Christopher Knowles, whose work is used throughout the opera.)

of interest at BiFF

2007-06-05T11:16:00.000-04:00

The 10th Brooklyn International Film Festival goes on this week! While there are several films that look enticing (and while I anticipate getting a $25 4-screening pass), there are two films that I particularly want to see, out of interest in both personal heritage and current events in my parents' countries.

Have You Another Apple? (Baaz ham sib daari?) is Iranian director Bayram Fazli's 2006 sci-fi film, best described in its synopsis as an "allegorical comedy." The setting is an unnamed Middle Eastern dystopia, and the hero (Zabih Afshar) is "overweight, bald, clumsy, and interested solely in his next meal." The film has already been screened at festivals in Venice, Cairo, Tokyo and Stockholm. I haven't been able to find out too much about it in English, but I'd be interested to see what exactly this allegory leads to given the revolutionary history and current events in Iran today.

Children of the War (Hijos de la guerra) is a debut docementary by French director Alexandre Fuchs and investigates the story of the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), the most violent street gang in the world. La Mara Salvatrucha was started in the 1980's by Salvadoran civil war refugees in Los Angeles and boasts over 100,000 members in the United States and El Salvador. In the film, Fuchs explores the root reasons for the MS-13 's existence and the complications it has created both socially and politically. The film is also a contender at the Seattle International Film Festival, where it will be given a world premiere on June 8th.

Perhaps I will say more later, once these films are actually seen.

about brooklyn again

2007-05-27T19:37:00.000-04:00

As of yesterday, I live about 5 minutes away from Prospect Park, which is beautiful. Internet there is pretty much non-existent, but it's not terribly necessary yet. The commute to Columbia is somewhat long. Luckily, there are books for that. And I still need a bicycle.

I also made the mistake of trying to buy a toothbrush in this neighborhood at 1 in the morning. Sometime in April I remember an editorial in the Columbia Spectator about the psychology of the female victim in the crude art of cat-calling, and how women secretly like being hollered at by creepy men. Egh, in all honesty and contrary to the writer's thoughts, I'm not so sure there's much fun in hearing what sketchy old men think of you. But I mean, after all, it's just an editorial piece.

Other news: apparently the Iranian police force is cracking down on women for their mode of dress in the country. This story probably tells enough.

may the force be with you

2007-05-26T06:41:00.000-04:00

Yesterday while sitting in a small Salvadorean restaurant across the highway from my old high school, my mother, sister and I noticed that the truck parked next to her car had a strange-looking child sitting in the passenger seat. Taken by surprise and confusion, we looked more carefully and realized that the child was in fact a life-sized Yoda dummy, cane and robe and all.

"The owner must be either a kid or a fat 40something year-old dorky man," I said to my mom, who was laughing at the thing.

"It doesn't matter, that person is crazy," she said. "He must be. He's parked in front of the liquor store!"

While waiting for our food I went looking through my mother's back seat for my phone. Meanwhile, a girl about my age walked by the Yoda-inhabited truck and, startled, screamed, "Oh shoot!" The girl then paused with a sigh, looked at the doll again, shook her head. She proceeded walking while catching her breath.

Needless to say, we missed the driver on his way out three minutes later.

On a different note, I noticed on the way home that one of the stop signs had been graffiti'ed. Instead of reading "STOP [ALL WAY]" it now reads "STOP LYING [ALL THE WAY]." It makes no sense but for some reason my mother and I laughed about it three times that night.

Alief might be a ghetto, but it has quirks. I will miss it by this time tomorrow. If I am awake.

brooklyn trains and houston houses

2007-05-16T22:07:00.000-04:00

[Overheard on a train from Brooklyn to Manhattan, a dialogue between a mother and her son, who couldn't have been more than four years old:]

- Caw caw I'm a parrot.
- You are not a parrot, silly.
- I am a parrot!
- You are not a parrot, you are my son.
- I am not a parrot I am your son!
- Yes you are my son
- I am not your son I am your son baby

[Upon which the two walk through the subway doors as they open]

-----

Six days later, I am sitting in my bedroom in Houston, Texas, the one where I grew up for 15 of the first 18 years of my life. Since the chain she worked for shut down a few weeks ago my mother has been suffering this miniature crisis where suddenly she has become a house mom a good 20 years too late, at least for the timebeing. My mother, the former alpha female, redecorated my room and cleaned my blinds before I came home from New York on Monday night. For that I am grateful; I haven't had a sneezing fit yet.

She tells me, though, that she now understands what it must feel like for my Aunt Razieh, who has been living in the U.S. for the past 10 years and doesn't like it so much -- she spends most of her days watching Friends re-runs and knitting until my uncle comes home from work. Then they drink tea and watch old movies until 2 in the morning. It feels like a kind of sickness, my mother says, when suddenly you're not making money and your kids are away and don't have much to do.

Besides, it's hard finding a job when you've worked for the same company for over 25 years. Admittedly, I'm not quite used to the idea either. For all the years that I've lived in this house, it was never very often that I spent 24 hours in the company of the same parent. There is something lopsided about the world right now.

uh oh

2007-05-05T22:49:00.000-04:00

As glad as I am for technology, there are times when I fear how good it's getting. Take this article for instance, "Fugue for Man & Machine," published in the Wall Street Journal today:

Amid all the troubles facing the classical music world in recent years -- from declining attendance to budget cuts -- none has mobilized musicians more than the emergence of computers that can stand in for performers. Musicians have battled with mixed success to keep them out of orchestra pits in theaters, ballets and opera houses. Now, a new alliance of conductors, musicians and engineers is taking a counterintuitive stance: that embracing the science is actually the best hope for keeping the art form vital and relevant. They say recent technological advances mean the music now sounds good enough to be played outside the touring musicals and Cirque du Soleil shows it is typically associated with.

Among their arguments: Aspiring composers who couldn't otherwise afford to have their creations performed by an orchestra can now commission a high-quality computer-generated recording for a fraction of the price. For communities facing the loss of their orchestra, it could be a way to keep performances in town -- even if it means a computer stands in for half the players.

Granted, I am all for composers getting their music heard, even if it takes a machine to do it. Nevertheless, it's a little bit frightening for a musician to think that one's future career could become limited because computers that can do the job better. Although I doubt that the day would ever come when everyone is listening to computerized symphony orchestras vs. a real live one, it will be interesting to see how/if this technology develops and affects the classical musician's job market. Somehow I doubt that people would go as far as listening to a digital concerto performance as opposed to a live one.

(At least, I would hope so?)

Anyway, now Chris is suggesting I trade my instrument for one of these, since I might not be needing it as much in the future:

Or maybe I should just take up Guitar Hero.

some ado about something

2007-04-28T22:15:00.000-04:00

I love how so many things happen outdoors on this campus. The King's Crown Shakespeare Troupe's been doing this production of Much Ado About Nothing during the last few days, using the campus as a set which they move around on as their audience follows. Granted, I think last night's showing lacked a completely sober audience, but the crashing bottles of x alcohol added its own touch to the occasion.

***

"My mother carried me for 10 months. I tell her, 'Mother you have extra month, why you not make for me beautiful face?' And mother tell me, 'My son, I was busy with make you beautiful hands.'"

Mstislav Rostropovich, 80, arguably the most famous cellist of the 20th century, died on Thursday of intestinal cancer in Moscow. Not only were several works in 20th-century cello repertoire dedicated to him, however; he also played a major activist role in obtaining rights for Soviet Union dissidents. The NPR remembrance is especially touching -- listen to it, if you have any interest in classical music or Soviet-era history.

I really hope not all the great people in the world are dying. They're still needed, I think.

street fair photos (and not writing papers)

2007-04-25T03:01:00.000-04:00

From the Broadway street fair near campus on the Upper West Side. April 14, 2007.
They are somewhat big.

Someday I'll own a real(ly nice) camera. In the meantime I think I'll take what I can get.

What is nice is that, in two weeks, I will be undergoing the cathartic process of getting over sophomore year. In the meantime, I've come to the conclusion that hell must be a place where you're required to write menial academic essays for all of eternity.

in midst of silvery stars, radio cures

2007-04-19T00:36:00.000-04:00

In CC today, Professor Pazzaglini brought up this article in Tuesday's New York Times:

While loss of memory can occur for many reasons, dissociative fugue has no direct physical or medical cause. Rather, it is precipitated by a severe stress or emotionally traumatic event that is so painful the mind seems to shut down and erase everything, like a failed computer hard drive...

...While in the fugue state, people are unaware that their identity and memory have been lost, said David Schacter, professor of psychology at Harvard. They wander off, often traveling far from home. It is only when they are forced to reveal some piece of biographical information that they realize they do not know who they are, which may lead to a desperate search to uncover their identity...

The rest of the article, "When a Brain Forgets Where Memory Is," is here.

In class we discussed Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.Later in the evening I performed in a hospital for children with special needs and could not concentrate. Consequentially, perhaps due to a combination of this and listening to Wilco and several other events that have occured within the last several days, I found myself in a funk on the subway ride back to campus.

An existentialist funk, maybe, but that could be pushing it.

I never have anything to say anymore.

as the world turns

2007-04-16T07:06:00.000-04:00

New York Magazine has this article about "Columbia's student radicals" out this week. Granted, I'm not sure I'm a fan of how over-the-top it's been written, but it's not completely dismissable either. This campus has an itch, although it's hard to tell how far students will go to scratch it. In a way there's the whole 1968 reputation that I think some students feel responsible
to live up to, but I wonder sometimes how much activism is dismissed as a merely part that romanticism.

Somewhat related, every day that I am on this campus I realize how much less like a moderate I feel. To some degree I suppose it's a good thing, but when start to realize that your views are shifting it can startle you.

In other news, Barack Obama is on the cover of that same issue. In fact, his head takes up about 70% of it.

"What am I doing!?"

2007-04-07T19:56:00.001-04:00

Two dollars to anyone who can get through the entire thing. I promise, somewhere in that video, there is pure genius.

Every year around April, when it comes time to make course/housing selections, summer plans and etc. there is this excitement with choosing something new over the tiresome and stale way things are arranged at present.

The unfortunate thing is when you realize that you will probably feel the same way exactly a year from now. It's one of those things, regardless, that best goes unspoken.

Whaaaat?

2007-04-02T00:58:00.000-04:00

Apparently Wilco's drummer, Glenn Kotche, wrote a piece for the Kronos Quartet.

For serious: http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003565171

oof

2007-03-20T23:59:00.000-04:00

I realize that I write so scarcely in this thing that does not get read very much, perhaps because I never say anything with much legitimacy. In spite of that, I think I will keep using it anyway. Maybe I will thank myself later.

I've really started digging The Brooklyn Rail since I've picked it up in the arts building on campus and realized how well it approaches the local arts scene and urban culture. This month's article on the federalization of the death penalty and racial bias is particularly drawing, given the (loosely) related coverage on the Sean Bell Queens shooting trial.

Also, although I don't find Rush Limbaugh particularly funny in making fun of John Edwards a couple of weeks ago by calling him a woman and beating the joke like a dead horse, I have a feeling he was asking for it given this video from the Slate archives. Oh my, John. Your hair.

Today my professor in History of American Novel (Revolution to Civil War) made references to Beck and Madonna in addressing repressed sexuality in Hope Leslie, a frontier romance novel written in 1827.

it is pink.

2007-03-08T22:47:00.000-05:00

I bought my first MP3 player/iPod this weekend.

So far it has changed my life.

Finishing midterms and completing these papers for my Latin American Lit class -- that will all change my life too.

dynamite!

2007-03-03T18:36:00.001-05:00

It has been said, supposedly, that although Jim Henson was very interested in psychadelic ideas he was never into drug use of any sort. It has also been said that although he created commercials for coffee companies, Henson was not a coffee drinker himself.

Anyway, they just don't make 'em like they used to.

what the hell?

2007-02-26T21:14:00.000-05:00

I never thought the day would come when I'd see James Cameron and Jesus Christ in the same news story.

Today I learned the history of the word "chingon" from my Latin American Lit professor. He also taught me other things about Spanish profanity that I never knew before. He is a sketchy old man with a sleazy laugh. Great guy.

a shame

2007-02-26T00:17:00.000-05:00

If I could ever play the Ravel piano trio I think I'd melt.
Alas, it seems I've picked up the wrong instrument for that.

Also, I think Ravel is perfect for snow.

perfection?

2007-02-23T02:00:00.001-05:00

-- and I'm thinking that it really hits right at 3:21 -- and again, about 40 seconds before the finale with that single sustained F-sharp in a sea of pizzicatos that's so stirring it could all give you chills, make you gasp without even realizing it.

Thank you, Slava.

jump on the bandwagon

2007-02-21T22:56:00.000-05:00

If you have ever feared losing your entire iTunes library, well, your problems may be solved.

Bandwagon backs up your music library -- and for free if you're a blogger willing to advertise before 11:59 PM tomorrow, February 22. Knock yourselves out, although apparently it only works with Macs as of now. Damn.

gr

2007-02-18T14:38:00.000-05:00

The day technology stops faltering in my hands is the day I die happy.

on preserving or remembering things that are often ephemeral

2007-02-14T20:33:00.000-05:00

Now the thing about affection is, once some of it has been displaced, ____ ____ ______ ___________ __ ____ _______ ____ ___ ____ ____ ____ _____ ____ ____ _____ _______ ________________ __ ________ __________ ______________ ....
...
...
...

and now that I think of it maybe I am better off leaving what I think in blanks.

---

Awhile back, when I was in Houston for the holiday break, Jonathan and I took a trip to the Museum of Fine Arts there and checked out one of their exhibits at the time, "The Past Made Present." The craziest thing there, which I just remembered thanks to some old notes I took at the time, was a project by Allen Ruppersberg entitled "The New Five-Foot Shelf." The project, a reference to the "Dr. Eliot's Five-Foot Shelf" Harvard Classics anthology, is Ruppersberg attempt to recreate his former New York studio apartment complete with his own five-foot shelf, containing words and artifacts of his own:

"...Ruppersberg invites us to stand in his shoes, or at least sit at his desk. For an artist whose practice is centered around reading, to make available these texts is metaphorically equivalent to handing viewers the painter's brush and palette and letting them loose in his studio...

"In Ruppersberg's edition, the first volume contains a facsimile of the original introduction by Dr. Eliot. Volumes two through forty-eight contain sixteen pages each of five narratives that run concurrently, so that they may be read simultaneously or individually throughout the volumes. The fiftieth volume, represented on the web in the upper right corner of the screen, contains an index of photographs of the four walls of the studio. Numbers beneath the pages of text reference this index and can be clicked. Alternately, one can navigate around the studio using the arrows surrounding each image. Several dozen of the photographs offer the viewer the option of clicking on a box, chest, pile of papers, or books, revealing a selection of items including postcards, photographs, greeting cards, pages from pulp novels, and sheet music covers. Sound from films, tapes, and various other recordings found in Ruppersberg's studio are available as a soundtrack."

The project itself is really incredible and almost overwhelming when you think about how much of this man's life is in it. For the viewer's use of idle time, The New York Dia Art Center has a digitial reproduction of Ruppersberg's project available online: http://www.diacenter.org/ruppersberg.

in an ideal world

2007-02-12T22:35:00.000-05:00

"You gettin' any chocolates for Valentine's Day?" the security guard at the Hartley desk asks me while I am fishing for my ID in my coat pockets this evening, after dinner.

"What?"

"Are you gettin' any chocolates for Valentine's Day?" he asks again.

"I don't think so," I answer, laughing.

"Ah, why not?"

"I don't know."

"You don't have a boyfriend?" he asks me.

"No -- why?"

"Well two girls came in before you," he responds, "and the first one said she was gettin' chocolates from her mama and she looked really happy about that; then the next one came in and I asked her if she was gettin' any but she said, 'No, I don't got a boyfriend,' so now I'm asking every girl that walks in through this door."

He pauses for a second.

"Anyway, I think every young lady should get chocolates for Valentine's Day."

Quietly, I laugh again through a crooked smile. "Well, tell me how the rest of your survey goes," I say to him.

He nods. "I think a girl like you should get some chocolates. You hear what I said, every lady should get some chocolates on Valentine's Day," he says to me, and asks the next girl swiping into the building the same question as I'm turning the corner, proceeding towards the elevators.

on regret

2007-02-12T00:22:00.000-05:00

I can't believe I missed The Police on the Grammys.
Anyway, the Europan sirloin steak sandwich, complimented by cannoli, I guess compensates.

My suitemates have rasterbated this image of Stalin and posted it on our wall. I think they are shooting for Gary Coleman next.

They want to throw a Yalta party.

I love how all this cell phone interference with my computer speakers start is beginning to mess with my head.

belated, a revival

2007-02-10T23:24:00.000-05:00

In my Contemporary Civilization class this week we are reading selections from Tocqueville's Democracy in America and the Marx-Engels reader. In History of the American Novel, we are reading early gothic American literature, namely Edgar Huntly, or Memoirs of a Sleepwalker. For Latin American Literature (in Translation) we are reading several essays and short stories by Jorge Luis Borges. It doesn't end. Even for Art Humanities, our weekly reader contains several poems written by Michelangelo (which honestly I did not know existed).

Now, the problem is that while I get the feeling that he's trying to tell me something important, I'm not so sure about what to make of Borges. In fact, I think that this is true of most students who read what he has to say, although I think only so many on this campus would be likely to admit what they do not understand. In fact, I think this is true of most of what we have to read in classes. And you know, it's nothing that I don't enjoy. I just like to hope that I'm absorbing it all better than I think.

In the meantime -- something different. Anything? Everything? Something.

Also, I am 20.

Also --

-- and really I think that is all for now.

2006-12-23T00:42:00.000-05:00

Every time I am in an airplane, for some reason, I get drawn into this state where I feel the need to reevaluate my life and I can't decide whether it makes me feel terrible or something else. After I'm over that, all I can ever think of on airplane rides is how infinite trees are and how endless the world seems to be when you're thousands of feet in the air.

For now, I will leave things at that. Sometimes I wish I had a better way with words.

2006-12-11T20:25:00.000-05:00

To hell with the end of the semester. That is all I have to say.

well i'll be amsterdamned

2006-12-01T02:23:00.000-05:00

Did you know that the term "Yankee" was actually coined by the English as a name for Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam -- due to the most common Dutch male names at the time being Jan and Kees?

Anyway, um, the Dutch called, and they want their city back. "Give Us Back New York" is an initiative driven by those who would like to see the revival of New Amsterdam. Perhaps the quote on the main page of the website, stated by GUBNY president Nico Akkerman, says it all:

“For over 200 years, we’ve watched our proud city evolve the wrong way. But the bell has chimed! The time has come for New York to be returned to its righteous owner: The Netherlands!”

Also, check out the video of the city being bombarded with draaiorgels (you'll see).

wunderbar!

2006-11-10T17:04:00.000-05:00

Recently for work I've been reading and writing about Fritz Stern's new book Five Germanys I Have Known. It's definitely worth checking out if you have the slightest inkling of interest in European history.

Stern, a Columbia alumnus and professor emeritus who left his homeland at age 12 during its rise in National Socialism. In his book, he writes about his experience in Germany by reflecting upon its several stages in the 20th century, beginning with the Weimar Republic and finishing with the country as we know it today. In a cross between historical examination and memoir, Stern writes honestly while trying to answer the question of how a country as civilized as Germany could become guilty of committing one of the greatest crimes against humanity in Western history. Throughout the book Stern unyieldingly reflects on the political lessons that Germany has to teach, looking past the country's issues universal ones that concern the rest of the world.

(Also, he and Ginsberg were BFFs in college, which he mentions
in the book -- in fact, Ginsberg was part of what inspired him to become a history major.)

The pictures we have on file for Stern, taken by John Smock, make me incredibly happy. Look at him! So jovial. I am inclined to somehow make him my adopted German grandfather. Aw.
------------------------
It is the eve of Thanksgiving and I am sitting downstairs in the 2C lounge, watching sub-par cable television. The suite is pretty much empty at this point, and I have gourged on far too many cookies in the last few hours. Somehow, I am alright with calling this a good feeling.

I guess The Facts of Life isn't too mediocre. The movie, I mean.

friday playlist

2006-11-10T16:17:00.000-05:00

Being back in Houston this past weekend reminded me of how much I used to love listening to KTRU, Rice University's awesome radio station. I've been a little nostalgic and listening to it at work. Perhaps it's the epitome of college radio, but I still think it's great.

The Fiery Furnaces: Teach Me Sweetheart
Fleetwood Mac: Homework
Thom Yorke: The Eraser
Weezer: My Name Is Jonas
Chet Baker: My Heart Stood Still
The New Pornographers: Stacked Crooked
R.E.M.: Man On The Moon
Neutral Milk Hotel: Oh Comely
Black Box Recorder: Hated Sunday
The White Stripes: I'm Finding It Harder To Be A Gentleman
Pavement: The Hexx

------------------------------------

Today Vaclav Havel, writer and former president of Czechoslavakia/the Czech Republic, gave a coursewide lecture to students currently taking Contemporary Civilizations, a course required of all sophomores enrolled in the College. To quote what he mentioned in regards to journalists who asked him about the changes in his country years ago: “Be careful, things are happening under the surface – and you will be surprised."

To also quote the first thing he said upon arriving onstage, he sat down in his chair, adjusted the microphone, and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I have one bad news for you – I don’t like my English.”

Oh Vaclav, such a charmer.

today marks the end of midterms

2006-11-02T00:23:00.000-05:00

Did you know: This American Life is now available on Podcasts?
Of course, I am weeks late on this information.

Man asleep in subway car on a late Saturday night a couple of weeks ago.

Tonight I went for a walk down Broadway with no particular intention, no idea about where I would end up. When I got tired I turned around and ran into a friendly homeless woman sitting next to a man who kept silent. As he only looked at me the woman asked me if I had any money for some bread. I said all I had was some change, and she said, "Oh well anything helps, you know, when something is a dollar they got the 8 cents on it and you have to pay more!" I opened my wallet and gave her whatever change was in there; 14 cents. When I handed her the change she put it in her other hand with the rest of the change and she said, "Will you look at that!? I got me a dollar! I got me more than a dollar!" with a big toothless grin.

I told her to have a good night and she said the same, and when I walked off I heard her proudly singing, "I got a dollar, I got a dollar!" to people who passed her after me.

in which the writer realizes her inner mutiny with poetry analysis

2006-10-20T03:25:00.000-04:00

The Plain Sense of Things

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savior.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as necessity requires.

- Wallace Stevens

I am pretty much awful.

Amusement for your, er, Thursday morning

2006-10-18T00:22:00.000-04:00

The good ol' air of Englishman elitism has certainly done some evolving itself these days.

"Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge. . . The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the "underclass" humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures."

More about the future goblin underclass. A future Middle Earth is always exciting.

I also am not quite sure what to think about this.

------------------------

On a personal note -- not that it is important -- I just thought I should let the world know, this week in the middle of my lesson my bow arm magically came through, thanks to the grand practice total of 20 minutes this week. Unfortunately, that did not do much good to poor Ernst Bloch.

Other things:

- Irritation with Introduction to Statistics A 1111, quite possibly the most banal thing I have ever experienced.
- Frustration at not being able to write a poetry analysis on Wallace Stevens so easy. Easy like Sunday morning.
- Disgust with dirty suite and dirty suite kitchen.
- Nausea from eating too much disgusting Columbia-quality trail mix today.
- Slight dissapointment at the fact that I am once again awake longer than I should be.
- Complete and utter joy with the approach of theweekend. I had to say something positive.

College student angst, anyone?

protest and profess

2006-10-13T15:02:00.000-04:00

Sometimes it can be exhaustingly overwhelming to say what you think, which is why I haven't posted in awhile.

While rummaging through photo files at work I found this one of protesters perched on the Alma Mater with signs on stopping US intervention in El Salvador , probably during the 80’s. In a way it’s an appropriate find with everything that has been happening on our campus lately. Sum of evens from the last several weeks:

Ahmadinejad is invited to speak on campus in late September, invitation revoked days later due to security reasons, people are pissed either because the invitation was made or because he didn't speak,; generally everyone sort of shrugs.
Last Wednesday the College Rupublicans intive Minutemen fro the US-Mexican border to speak on campus; people are pissed and some caused a commotion on stage; Columbia on National TV and FOX news thinks we're a bunch of punks and Jon Stewart makes fun of us; protesters may face possible consequences and the theme of the semester is now free speech. Less shrugging this time.
This Wednesday, College Republicans invite Wallid Shoebat, a former PLO member, came to speak on campus with a couple of his buddies (another ex-PLO and a former Nazi) about how they became sympathetic with the Israeli cause; 120 people are not let into the auditorium which causes more pissage; notably, Zacharias Anani (the other ex-PLO) makes a statement about how the only true Muslims are terrorist Muslims, while everyone else is ignorant. Naturally, people are not pleased.

There are quite a few side-stories that have stemmed off this, but the Bwog (the Columbia Blue & White blog -- and it's gotten tons of commentary) has plenty more details as does the Columbia Spectator; IvyLeak has also been making postings of its own about the situation. My favorite headline from them: "It's 1968 at Columbia, and there's reason to live again."

(On the upside for the University, two professors have received Nobel prizes.)

The amazing thing about being on a campus that suddenly has crazy spouts of activism is that you have this opportunity to see what causes things to go wrong, where support lies on various issues that affect a majority of the student body, and at the same time you're exposed more to a way people think. My awareness of politics while on this campus has definitely heightened, but also the more I see the more things seem to cloud, and the more disappointed I am with the way activism takes place on this campus. What the protest organizers lack is a form of more intelligent argument -- certainly, a physical commotion will get you all over television, but what good is a brawl if it comes in halfway through the speaker's argument? And whatever happened to asking questions? With these guys I'm sure if the protesters had orginized some strategic questions to ask during the actual event they would have had some positive effects, and things would have been less animalistic. Admittedly, however, things are more interesting when people rush a stage and make a ruckus.

I guess a question I've been trying to define for myself is, What is bad activism? Perhaps the Minutemen incident could be an example, but at the same time wouldn't it grab more attention as opposed to a progressive Q&A? How effective is this sort of thing anyway?

To diverge, there was then the Shoebat event, which felt increasingly uncomfortable being among a crowd that constantly clapped when he or Anani referred to Islam and criticized the religion. While the audience did ask questions concerning how the religion could assimilate itself peacefully into modern society, they did not offer any true solution. While many Muslims has been trying especially to knock Islam's bad rep since the beginning of the 21st century, it's sort of disappointing that they could not see much possibility (due to Islam being a practice of religion and politics, one of the speakers claimed). When Shoebat got particularly excited, the first thing he said was, "Any Muslim could convert to Christianity!" or something similar, which many people confused with "Every Muslim should convert to Christianity!" It was probably not the best example of human rights he should have made.

So politically on campus it's been quite a month, and while increasingly I've found myself looking more for a definition of where to stand on these things, especially after talking to other students about these issues (they've come up on Wallach 2C a bit, and once religion comes into the picture it doesn't end). I think I end up coming out of these situations with more questions than answers, but perhaps for now that's not such a bad thing.

required reading for english 4604, american modernism

2006-09-26T23:15:00.000-04:00

We make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
Facing the dull squint with what innocence
And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies
More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

- "Chaplinesque," Hart Crane

----------------------------------------------

Sometimes my life feels a little bit like chaos. Sometimes I like it that way.
This is how I can be somewhat sure that I am doing something right with my life.

(brush the cobwebs out of the sky)

2006-09-19T23:38:00.000-04:00

Columbia Trades Loans for Grants
Financial Aid Policy Change Will Give Families Making $50,000 or Less Relief From Debt

"Beginning with the 2007-2008 academic year, Columbia's Office of Financial Aid will issue grants instead of loans to all current and incoming Columbia College and Engineering students whose families earn less than $50,000 per year, the office announced publicly today."

(Article from the Columbia Spectator here.)

This is wonderful news for undergraduate students on financial aid at the university. While this is a big step, Harvard, on the other hand (according to that same article), has gone as far as eliminating any contribution from families making under $60,000 annually.

---------------------------------------------------------------
Things for tomorrow:
- Payroll documents
- 100 pages of reading on economic development
- Half of Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer
- Read Journal articles for Modernism class
- A few books of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics
- Statistics homework
- Bach.

Goal for the semester: to not flip out this time.

The books we've been reading in my American Modernism class are beautifully written but they depress me sometimes. John Dos Passos' book Manhattan Transfer, for instance, deals with all kinds of people in early 20th-century New York struggling to catch up with a changing metropolis before it tears them apart. We've been talking about reluctance to change in the course lately. Immigrants clung onto their native languages for as long as they could; workers feared new factory jobs because of the monotonous Fordism structure of their tasks; people were hesitant about moving transport like subways and common automobiles. In that time period even certain buildings were criticized for being attached to some sense of "antiquity" in the way that they took after Roman architecture and did not innovate steel.

It's been sneaky, but I think this minor low began to kick in today while riding on the subway, maybe because I was reading the Dos Passos book and because as soon as I got out of the station at 50th the sky looked incredibly gray behind the tall industrial-colored buildings. Maybe because they only thing I had eaten during that day, up to that point, was an apple.
Sometimes thins become inconvenient, but in spite of this I try to be generally happy with my life. Even the mildest chaos can be distracting sometimes. And often, books manipulate on the way your mind sees things. Sometimes you just have to adapt to make it through things successfully.

It is also my mother's birthday.

typical hodgepodge

2006-09-12T17:31:00.000-04:00

On my way back from my lesson to the subway station today a homeless man shaking a cup of coins while crouched on the sidewalk yelled at me. "You've got too much weight on you lady!" he said, "Too much weight!" and kept shouting it until I was past his block. I wasn't sure if he was actually calling me fat or if he was referring to the viola case on my back. As a result, I wasn't sure whether I should have been laughing or been offended at that moment.

Once I was actually in the subway car, however, I managed to squeeze into a seat next to a disgruntled-looking clown by the name of "Looney Louie." Even earlier today during a stop at the violin shop I walked past a hallway full of musical theater actors making sound effects that reminded me of neurotic raccoons. Little did I know that they were preparing audition material for some show about cruise ships.

Somehow, of course, this is all perfectly acceptable.

one week since arrival

2006-09-08T17:34:00.000-04:00

In an e-mail from the Columbia College Student Council, a quote from Groucho Marx:

"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."

----------------------------------------------

I've been at school since last Friday night. I think I can conclude that reading is going to get mighty popular this semester. My Mondays and Wednesdays run on the more haywirish side from 8:45 AM to 6 PM (with classes almost back-to-back) but my Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays are fairly light, given that I either have work and/or one class on those days.

Current things that have my attention:

- Call It Sleep by Henry Roth
I'm reading this right now for my American Modernism class and have been glued to the words while sitting outside for the last few hours. In some way Roth's book is similar to Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (think stream of consciousness) but is focused on a young immigrant Jewish boy in New York City during the early 20th century. According to my professor, the novel was so overwhelming that it took Roth 60 years before he could write another book.

- Rabbit Fur Coat - Jenny Lewis with the Watson Twins
Think of that old folksy country sound on very much of the Rilo Kiley side. I've been listening to this album almost nonstop since yesterday. Favorite tracks include "Melt Your Heart" (on the Myspace page) and "Happy."

From my window on the 4th floor of my building on the campus quad I can see 115th Street run the bock between the Law School and St. Luke's down to Morningside Park. Cars line up along the side as people travel on the sidewalks and every now and then you hear a bus or truck shifting gears among the occasional cars after the traffic lights change colors. There is a sticker that says "DO NOT OPEN THE WINDOW" on the glass pane but I've had it cracked open just a bit nevertheless. I think it would be strange to not hear a thing from the outdoors of Morningside Heights from this little dorm room. I spent my afternoon on Hamilton Lawn, still in the process of being restored, reading and occasionally being distracted by the rest of campus lively floating by, running errands or going to class or whatever else that possibly needs to be done on a pleasant Friday afternoon after the first week of classes. I've missed this place.

something

2006-08-30T13:34:00.000-04:00

Me muevo. Uno, dos, tres pasos. Nadie puede negar que avancé un poco. Se pueden ver mis huellas en el suelo, pero amanezco en el mismo sitio. ¿No me desplacé? Es cierto —verifico las marcas— que ayer no estaba donde ahora estoy, pero algo me dice que no me he movido. No sé qué significa desplazarme.

- Rafael Cadenas

---------------------------

Even after last year, still, packing remains impossible.

What happens when you harass a girl (or guy) in NYC?
You get your picture taken.

hourglass

2006-08-23T21:18:00.000-04:00

Today around noon a minibus pulled into the driveway of the restaurant. The caretaker came in before they unloaded and said to me in Spanish that the group from Silverado was in, and also sorry for not calling in advance. I thought at first Silverado was some new oil or technology company that opened up nearby but it was when I returned to the door that I realized it was the minibus from the local nursing home.

I held the door open as the eight elderly people carefully shuffled through, slightly hunched from the shrinkage that comes with age, and most of them on the support of walkers with tennis balls under the ends. The last woman to walk through apologized for being so slow. "I'm afraid I'm not walking so well today," she said to me with a smile on her face, the kind of smile you make when you don't know what else to do. I smiled back and said not to worry; she could take her time. Her hair was very brown; I could have sworn it was her natural color.

It is when your body begins to lose its significance -- serving as a mere incasement -- that you find yourself in a form of paralysis. What will I have done with myself by that point?

It was then, I think, that I realized how afraid I am of growing too old.

what day is it?

2006-08-23T02:01:00.000-04:00

So who remembers this obscure little guy?

Well, in case you didn't know (which you probably didn't), his name is Lew Zealand. His job was to run out and throw fish offstage in midst of massive chaos at the end of random episodes of The Muppet Show.

His signature catchphrase?
"I throw the fish away, and it comes back to me!"

Remember kids, Google answers all your questions.

------------------------------------------

I've felt obligated to say something significant in here for the last few days but have found little. Very little whatsoever, except to go as far and say that I am at a general loss for words right now because I seem to just dwindle much like the leaves on the trees outside dwindle, drooping over from ideleness and heat in the sun like they're made of wax-- and what exactly was I saying? Oh, this is getting ridiculous.

In terms of productivity I've been reading A Farewell to Arms for the first time and attempting to play Bloch and Bach on a sore jaw. We took a trip to the new neighborhood Target today but ended up getting a flat tire on the way home. Coincidentally, the "specially designed" lug nut in the tire-changing kit of my mother's Toyota Camry was nowhere to be found, so my parents couldn't bring the car home until about 12 am after getting the same part from my sister's friend's mother. My father thinks this all happened because he accidentally brought a door hanger home from the store without paying for it.

Also, I keep forgetting to wear a tie to work. Some womens seem to believe wearing ties is a trendy declaration, or a sign of equality among the sexes, or even a symbol of classiness. For me, the tie is merely an obstacle I have to resist in humid 100-degree weather, right there with the long-sleeved collared shirt. This will only be necessary for three more days. Then I get to wear a Mexican over-the-shoulder top for the weekend (AKA, table-waiting duty). That is another fashion statement I would like to avoid getting into.

And what else?

In nine days I will be on my way back to New York.
And just like that, my summer will have gone.

Today I've been thinking to the Vieuxtemps tune of Yankee Doodle, which gets really annoying after awhile.

reminiscing while on vicodin

2006-08-18T22:10:00.000-04:00

Well, the wisdom teeth removal process was not as awful as I thought, except the part that involved salivating blood in a cup for a couple of hours. There is also the other part where for some reason anytime I drink something that's too cold, it ends up stinging. I should start looking like a chipmunk in a couple of days, when the swelling kicks in. Excellent.

Lately I've been finding myself dancing and humming to the mental version of Sibelius' Valse Triste in my head. The last time I was entranced with that piece, as somewhat cheesy as it is, was (I think) almost a year ago. Does anyone ever play that? I want to play it. It's wonderful.
---------------
Speaking of old revivals -- for the last 4 years, long before starting this blog, I've kept a separate, more personal journal. Recently to pass the time I'd been reading back to old entries I'd written, because that's what you have to do with such things after you get over how annoying your old voice sounds.

I got rid of everything I had written prior to December 19th, 2002. I don't know what it is specifically that inclines us to get rid of old things we write in that way -- maybe because everything else just sounded stupid or maybe it had something to do with whatever happened in the year before that. Anyway, my first kept entry in the journal begins fairly simply, about seeing The Two Towers with Kevin and Gio and getting into a fight with my father for being out too late and preoccupations with getting an A on my last math final. I remember the argument with my father and how terrible the year had actually been, yet I managed to make it sound like nothing happened. Half a year later, about three years from now I wrote about confusion and the circumstances of various relationships and how I didn't know exactly what I wanted in life. Things have changed since then but not everything is totally clear yet, and I expect that to take awhile anyway. I wrote about rose-colored glasses in Austin and how "in true colors, everything is so much less than it seems to be." Now I know that isn't necessarily true.

About two years ago I wrote about my mother stirring a bowl of Cheerios her calling me careless for not crying about my father like she and my sister did when he left to Iran for a few weeks, and how she sneered at me for being ridiculous and really caring about playing again (I had to quit studying privately for a couple of years and worked to start again because I realized how important it was to me). Reading back to that entry recently I remember how rough the whole situation was and realize how much things have changed here as well, for the better -- if anything my mother's support has grown tremendously, in spite of whatever I ultimately choose to do. Thinking about it is enough to make me feel a little sappy. Maybe it's lame of me, but just to realize how much things have altered themselves is enough to do it.

One year ago I wrote about visiting my old high school before leaving and working for a composer at the Houston Ballet for a day, getting lost on the Houston METRO, clicking my black satin slippers back to Kansas, and having to work on Brahms. A few days later, I find myself reminscing on being terrible with goodbyes and changing plans and how a few months end up being something like tomorrow. This was all before I left for school in New York for the first time, and now I am going to do it for the second time. I wonder if I'll remember to read back on this in a few years. If I do, I can declare the following things:

1. I am the most optimistic and motivated I have been in years, about the future and life in general.
2. The trick is optimism in careful doses. But most importantly, careful doses even if things seem unclear.
3. I think I have a better idea of what I want to do now, even if things are still all mangled up in a knot.
4. When things get bad, it's a matter of time before you realize that they always get better when you give them the chance.
5. My grip on public transportation has gotten much, much better.

Let's see how the list changes next.

thoughts from a host's pedestal in a mexican restaurant

2006-08-12T03:24:00.000-04:00

It's Friday night at Ninfa's in Sugar Creek , as can be told by the flock of waiters bustling in and out of the kitchen doors with trays of soft drinks and chips and fajitas and whatever Tex-Mex dish you can name over their shoulders. It's about 7:45 and I'm playing the hostess card tonight, making this the fifth summer in a row that I've worked for the place. My mother, a 23-year veteran of the chain and the general manager of this particular location since 2001, is on the phone with a customer, explaining, "Well you see ma'am, the pound of fajitas to go is cheaper than the pound on the dine-in menu because it doesn't come with all the side orders..." while I glance at the seating chart, making sure all the waiters have a balanced number of tables (although their complaints are inevitable, as usual).

Luckily it's nearly the end of the Friday night rush, and my cousin/host-in-training Erick is checking out returned menus in case there are any "salsa surprises" smeared on the glossy pages. Meanwhile, a new young busboy -- barely 15 (if not 14), stickly and with flimsy wire-framed glasses and resembling perhaps a Hispanic version of Harry Potter -- scampers by, almost falling over as he carries a heaping tray of dirty dishes back to the kitchen for washing. "Ey, cuidado nino! Careful!" the bartender scolds him with a laugh, and the kid smiles in spite of his adolescent clumsiness. It's less busy than usual, but it's August, and people are out of town. The air is a strong combination of grilled onions and cigarettes from the bar, and the carpeted floor is a little sticky from a recent margarita spill.

The Ninfa's chain of Tex-Mex restaurants carries mostly through Houston, Texas, and is legendary for being the first to serve food of its kind. It began its life in 1973 as a ten-table restaurant near the center of Houston and was raised by "Mama" Ninfa Rodriguez Lorenzo, a Texas-bred Mexican woman who married an Italian man and has her painted portrait hanging in every location, sometimes along with old photos of her rolling tortillas in the kitchen of her old East End dough factory. Lorenzo passed away in 2001, but her restaurants have remained popular in spite of her death and a bankruptcy suit in 1996. This particular location is within the Houston metropolitan area in Sugar Land, Texas, the fastest-growing city in the state and founding home of the Imperial Sugar Company.

A nice little nook for eating, Ninfa's-Sugar Creek comes complete with a bar, a plant-filled fountain in the dining room, and a patio that overlooks the creek itself, which customers crowd on the 4th of July for a hot view of the fireworks coming from the country club across the water. The Sugar Creek country club and neighborhood is not more than five minutes' walking distance from the restaurant, which caters predominantly to local upper-middle class and well-to-do families, lawyers and doctors, and Schlumberger employees on their lunch breaks. Tom Delay used to frequent the restaurant before his whole gerrymandering case. I bussed his table once a few years ago.

Ligia comes to the hostess counter, looking flustered and slightly irritated. In her accented Spanglish she complains about how she got a cruddy tip again, and don't these customers know that waiters only make $2.15 an hour, and aren't they better-educated than that? Ligia is a five-foot tall Nicaraguan lady with a big heart. She went out of her way from Katy and gave me a ride to work this morning, and when she was visiting family in New York she came by with a duffle bag of stuff from my mom and money for a set of strings. She sent my sister a Get Well card and balloon with candy after she broke her finger a few years ago. Ligia left Nicaragua with her family to New York in midst of threats from the Sandinista movement. Somehow she later ended up in Houston, and she's been a waitress for this place forever. "You know," my mother said to me once, "I wonder if some of these customers ever consider where some of these workers come from. Most of the time all they see is someone who can't do anything better, and so many times it's not true."

Usually Ligia has a lot of costumers who request her as their server. They like her sense of humor and her height makes her more endearing. I wonder how many of them know how close she was to being something else, halfway through law school in Nicaragua.

Meanwhile, Javier -- the bartender -- is ranting half at us and half at the CNN screen about the situation in the Middle East, and laughter and clanking stein glasses erupt in the corner of the bar.

What do you do when you leave something that could have been better, when you leave home in hopes of other opportunities, and you find yourself stuck in some place like this, with new barriers to worry about? It's almost threatening, to think of such a thing. In truth you'd probably be surprised over how many of these immigrant workers come from such educated backgrounds, having left their countries in hope of something better than filthy politics or living in slums where anything could happen. In a sadistic view, it's as though these people are appreciated only because they do the things customers would rather not, and look positive about it. But, well, isn't that the purpose of labor? Doesn't work require energy? Don't you work to save someone else's energy, and time? Cooking, cleaning, serving your dinner? All work, essentially, is based on one person serving the benefit of others, but what happens when you leave home and find yourself with a loss of choice?

And now, this too becomes a work in progress.

cheers from austin

2006-08-04T02:47:00.000-04:00

Took a weekend trip to the good ol' state capital with the family to visit my cousin Amir. I hadn't been to Austin since last May. At Amir's apartment complex, right by Lake Austin, funny animals like possums and raccoons and armadilloes come out at night. It's those sorts of things that remind you where you are and what a strange place Texas can be to someone from, say, the East Coast. This is alongside the big stretch of the Colorado River embroidered by cacti in the middle of the little city, and the countless cattle ranches on the 290 route between Houston and Austin.

Of course there were other less wild things too, like The Drag and UT and the general "Keep Austin Weird" and independent business scene that's popped out everytime I've been. We had dinner last night at Kerbey Lane and ice cream from Amy's (their Honey Vanila is amazing when you add some banana chunk'ns to the whole deal). As happy as I am in New York, I think I wouldn't have minded living there. Something strange to consider.

----------------------------
Second point: this article from the New York Times, which Humberto posted on LJ not so long ago. The subject is Rev. Gregory A. Boyd and his superchurch in Minnesota. Unlike many superchurches in America, however, Boyd refuses to cater to politically conservative issues such as anti-gay marriages, anti-abortion issues, war support and Republican party endorsement.

[Boyd] said he first became alarmed while visiting another megachurch’s worship service on a Fourth of July years ago. The service finished with the chorus singing “God Bless America” and a video of fighter jets flying over a hill silhouetted with crosses.

“I thought to myself, ‘What just happened? Fighter jets mixed up with the cross?’ ” he said in an interview.

Read the rest of the article for yourself.

Je suis dans l'amour

2006-07-30T18:53:00.000-04:00

Keep on with the force don't stop
Don't stop 'til you get enough!

"You know, all the American girls, they are very [brings fingers to the lips and makes a kiss to the air]...they are beautiful! But, it is too bad because, we do not speakeh Eeeenglish!"

The two silly drunken French boys (violinists) had their arms over each other's shoulders and were barely able to stand as they spoke to Rhys and me near the main building of the Château Moulerens, in between the cantina-style bar where we'd hang out on late nights playing Pictionary and stacking Orangina and Heineken cans and dancing to musical toys that came out of the Happy Meals we'd get from McDonald's at 2 in the morning when we were hungry and couldn't sleep. That night, it wasn't only the Americans and the Brits staying up, but everyone seemed to be wide awake. Most of us were leaving early the next day and I think the all-nighter attempt came partly from a fear of sleeping through the departure, but more than anything because it was the last night of the two weeks we'd all spent together in this little Gradignan château, not too far from the city of Bordeaux but in a good enough situation for come what may to happen. It was a place where you could practice in the woods, feed horses apples and sugar cubes in your spare time, watch cello teachers play with half a cigarette in their bow hand, and make friends with a half-eared cat named Olivier, a dog called Bartok, and a gimp pigeon unanimously named Edgar -- and at the same time, a place you could easily escape from and come back to as you pleased, with the help of foot paths to the supermarket and trams to Bordeaux.

The last night at the camp full of all the things you'd expect a foreign music camp to have -- kids staggering around in the fields after a little too much to drink, a Michael Jackson discolight dance party in the barn-like shack a few feet away (because everyone all over the world listens to Michael Jackson, dontcha know), final goodbyes of all sorts, ideas of "naked swimming" (as they say in Britain apparently), miniature scandals, and that strange happy sadness of leaving such neat people. I left the chateau at about 7:15 in the morning, and Lizzy helped me get my suitcases to the cab. I told everyone who was awake goodbye and the cab driver turned out to be a man with very good English and friends with Hans Graf, conductor of the Houston Symphony. Small world.

Things learned while in the country:
1. The American idea of of a lovely little French "château" should be taken with precaution, because chances are it will lack air conditioning,
2. When you're at a camp where your teacher's working, expect to learn many new things about him/her.
3. In France you get a ridiculous amount of food for every meal, almost always involving meat and cheese. Also, the average meal lasts about 1.5 hours and I think the average French person goes through one whole baguette a day.
4. In France very few fat people seem to exist. WTFmate?
5. English kids trying to imitate American accents are hilarious. Especially when they say things like "part-skimmed milk."
6. Don't be fooled by the value of the Euro.
7. If your English or minimal French fail you in the southern part of the country, try Spanish. It just may work.
8. Sitting through a never-ending tango concert is frightening.
9. Sitting through a never-ending klezmer concert is not so bad.
10. Men are all the same, no matter what country they're from. They just have different accents.
11. How to say "this towel smells like butt" in French.
12. The drinking age for alcohol is 18, and for wine it's 16.
13. French wine is stronger than in most places, in terms of proof.
14. Clubbing in Europe can be dangerous.
15. French emergency medical care is free, including the ambulance trip.
16. President Bush is a joke, and telling people you're from Texas immediately brings him up, along with, "Cheval, cheval!" (Horse, horse!)
17. Mariah Carey can actually be quite refined artist, according to Mateja. Right up there with Johnny Mathis. And George Michael.
18. Slow dancing is a refined art, also according to Mateja. Every musician should learn to be a good dancer, he says.
19. When going to the beach, try not to be too surprised by the topless sunbathers.
20. Kate, Lizzy and I do the best dancing ever. But probably more Lizzy than the rest of us.
21. You can dance to anything, including the Arpeggione Sonata.
22. Be prepared to eat bread, and lots of it.
23. French kids smoke loooots of cigarettes, starting around age 16.
24. The boutiques surprisingly almost always play music in English, or salsa.
25. Bordeaux can be just as weird as NYC at night.
26. Waiting for a tram at 4:30 AM is pretty sketchy.
27. You can probably get away without paying for a 4:30 AM tram anyway.
28. Cycling on roads is actually safe!
29. If your whole section quitely starts laughing in the middle of a concert because of one person, chances are it will carry through the rest of the orchestra.
30. Ice cream is cheaper. And better.
31. Beware of pianists tossing balls in the pool. You'll probably get hit upside the head.
33. Playing the Dvorak American quartet with a couple of British violinists and a French cellist can work pretty well.
32. There's nothing cooler than a chamber music concert while it's thunderstorming outside.
33. You can see alot more stars in the sky from Bordeaux than any city in America.

Plenty more pictures here.

Basically, yes, my trip was amazing, and this probably doesn't cover half of it. Not only did I cover so much musicially and get to see something new, but it was so nice to just get far away from the States for awhile. Even sitting in my room for a bit just reading without any preoccupations was nice. It was also great to just make so many new connections with people from all over the place, which is something wonderful about music festivals. You learn things from different people and places all the time.

On the plane ride home I thought of things alot, as usual. It usually happens on plane rides. When you think alot while traveling I think it's a symbol of some sort of progress, but I must have mentioned it before.

it's friday

2006-07-15T00:05:00.000-04:00

Coming In From The Cold - The Delgados

When you're working backstage at a jazz concert, sometimes you just gotta let loose.

Tomorrow is my last day as an AFA intern. The kids are going to sound awesome, because if they don't then Dr. Evan's buttkicking will have gone to waste and he will shoot the percussionists with a maybe a flying baton. I think it would be fun. If you would like to see a very good concert or a very angry flying baton come check out the concert at Episcopal HS off 610 and Bisonnett at 6 pm. There will be some Bernstein, Copland, Mendelssohn and Weber goin' down tomorrow evening.

I'm going to miss working with AFA, in spite of lugging chairs, stands and percussion equipment (especially marimbas that don't like fitting through doors) on multiple occasions. The intern group was great, and when you listen carefully you do hear the difference between the orchestra when it started 5 weeks ago and the orchestra now. It's really such an amazing opportunity for the kids who play here, even when things seem so overwhelming at first. Things aren't impossible, you know.

I should perhaps start packing sometime soon. I don't like packing very much at all. By Monday afternoon I will be in Bordeaux, unless I run into another disaster at one of the airports.

Today Amandar and I went to Hong Kong City Mall for pho and bubble tea. When we were walking out I saw three young slightly off-the-boatish Vietnamese guys with big smiles going past us, all wearing matching blue flip-flops. Something about their giant grins, the way they walked, their floppy white t-shirts and short khaki shorts and most of all how their blue shoes coordinated (the cherry on top) made me laugh really hard in the car.

being foreign

2006-07-08T20:29:00.000-04:00

So on All Things Considered yesterday they did this really great story on an Iraqi-American musician by the name of Amir ElSaffar, who started his career in New York City clubs as a jazz trumpeter. However, as his interests in Middle Eastern music began to expand, he decided to go to Baghdad and later London to study traditional Iraqi music. Now, after having released a CD of Iraqi music, he 's writing music that mixes the elements of Iraqi maqam with jazz.

On a different part of the music spectrum, last night a few of us interns went to Helios and watched Joel do his concert. In all the time I have spent with AFA I have never heard him actually perform before, but I definitely was impressed. This is the man who taught us about composers and chords for the longest time. He's pretty darn good.

I've been in havoc this week. The fourth of July involved fluttering through the museum district and downtown Houston with my parents, a dozen mosquito bites and sitting on a hill in the rain in midst of several drunk Texans for the fireworks show they do in Reliant Park every year. I guess the fireworks were good, at least. I've never been much of an Independence Day fan, nor any American holiday in general. American holidays always seem to involve beer, barbecue, fireworks and television specials. My family doesn't do barbecue.

In general I guess American culture has really baffled me over the last week. Yesterday before going to Helios I went to an Astros game with Christine. We were in Minute Maid Park, which seems like an equivalent to the Roman colosseum filled with its wall of nearly 50,000 fans all in attendance. People who go to ballparks here like singing songs like "Deep in the Heart of Texas" and "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" and loud booing at players from the opposing team who screwed them over in the World Series last year and doing The Wave around the stadium three times over. The kids in the red monogrammed baseball caps sometimes start this little choir of "Let's Go Astros" in imitation of their parents and wave pennants while paying meticulous attention to everything going on in the field. The end of the game involved fireworks too. It wasn't bad overall, but I felt very foreign being there.

American culture hasn't been the only thing that has felt foreign lately. Maybe because I've actually been driving these past few weeks. When you're in driving in a car by yourself everyday for over an hour everything feels a little distant. This is ironic, seeing that a vehicle is what physically brings you from one point to another. I think it must be one of those other inexplicable human phenomena that no one really thinks about. Sometimes I wonder if people cyclically feel like this all throughout their lives, or if it's just because of some strange prolonged phase.

maryam, this is your life

2006-07-01T15:51:00.001-04:00

While I don't always mind Houston so much there are times when being in this city drives me crazy, especially because I live in this little craphole called Alief where the nearest thing to walk to for entertainment is the gas station at the corner. I think I'd like to live in New York for as long as I can. People tell me it probably sucks to live there, and I usually respond, Yeah unless you're a student I can pretty much see that, but I don't know how much I believe it. I mean, of course you need some sort of substantial income to live there but if it ever becomes a possibility, I am staying there.

The kids had their second concert yesterday, pulled of in an amazing five days. Firebird sounded beautiful (and Wes did a great job filling in as concertmaster at the last minute, especially given that his pages were out of order and I didn't notice at all -- that kid has come such a long way). The combos from the jazz program were pretty much kickass. Laura, Christina and I kept dancing backstage while Chaz, the percussionist from the orchestra, kept shaking his head and laughing at us. Who says you can't have fun when you're backstage?

Yesterday, on the way to picking up my dad's car to go home, I was talking to Danny about how when I was little my mother used to throw shoes at me if I couldn't fulfill little errands she'd send me on. Usually they involved doing something like putting newspaper in a recycling bin or finding something impossible like a nonexistent tub of mayo in the fridge. I think he found that a bit strange. His mother never threw shoes at him, he said. I think that's totally understandable.

Today I'm feelin' pretty lame, I think, because my nose likes to think it is a water faucet. Another reason why Houston also sucks sometimes because it gives me allergies in the summertime.

Lyric-wise, I still think We Have The Facts and We're Voting Yes is great, even if Death Cab has probably fallen into suckage over the last seven years.

Passacaille, très large

2006-06-30T01:34:00.000-04:00

On Tuesday Christine and I went to the Moores Opera House to watch some of the faculty, including Mr. Grabiec, play a French chamber music recital. Overall it was such a beautiful performance. Listening to the Ravel piano trio I think I lost myself for a bit, especially in the Passacaille. I felt my eyes blur the performers onstage and the stage itself and the curtains and the rows of people in front of me into mass of impressionistic lines and colors and for a minute there, I genuinely lost my focus on what they were doing and found myself wandering elsewhere.

I remember hearing a program on Ravel's life on KUHF awhile back, and ever since then listening to certain parts of his music has made me feel especially nostalgic or inexplicably wistful. The piano trio, in particular, was written during World War I while Ravel was serving the military as a truck driver and had taken him six years of intention to write, after nearly ten years of having not written a single work of chamber music. In all that, the gorgeousness of the third movement and the whole piece just make so much sense. I wish I could explain it better, but you'd just have to listen for yourself. In all the work's variance it speaks so much that it just makes sense for him to have written it.

I was looking at a score in the car today and my mother, who had never been exposed to classical music until i started playing, asked me, "How do you understand all that writing on the page? What do they mean?" I could not tell from the tone of voice what kind of answer she wanted, so I simply told her it was music and that it consisted of notes. I didn't know how else to answer her because I think it's something she's just always had a hard time accepting -- for the longest time I couldn't bring her to concerts (and I still usually can't) because it's something she can't comprehend so easily. I do remember, however, her commenting on how the orchestra can sound like a hundred voices. I think something people should remember is that music is an imitation of human voice, and when I hear pieces like the Ravel piano trio that's why I get so lost -- because in spite of not saying a single word, the performers are speaking the composer's language in such a way that you don't need any phonetic sounds to tell you what it all means. The music itself asks you, "Remember when?" with the sound of a progression slowly resolving from dissonance, or whispers at you softly as a single cello voice emerges above the sounds of the ensemble. It's a matter of comprehending that language and making things out for yourself, piecing together what the composer meant in writing it and how you feel when hearing it.

Since listening to the concert on Tuesday I've been thinking alot about how much I've diverged as a person from everything that has had the potential to hold me back. Looking at myself, I am at a loss between the awkward contentment of how I feel now in spite of all things that have happened in the recent past, and the dissapointment and disapproval I would have had in myself looking ahead two years ago before the overhaul.

Where do I pinpoint it?

I feel like a small bare tree covered in faint lights in the middle of December.

AFA Interning, week 2

2006-06-23T21:36:00.000-04:00

Smetana - The Moldau (from "Ma Vlast")
Schnittke - (K)ein Sommernachtstraum [(Not) A Summer Night's Dream]
Juanes - "A Dios Le Pido" (thanks to riding in Christine's car, along with the Shakira)
Stars - "What The Snowman Learned About Love"

This week I finally realized that the silly theme I've heard Gabe play on the violin every now and then that reminds me of a happy cat food commercial comes from the middle of The Moldau. Good to know.

So tomorrow is going to be a manic day since there's a middle school concert, high school orchestra concert, faculty jazz concert and choir orientation all lined up like cards. As for today, concerto finals were in the late afternoon, the concertmaster of the Utah Symphony gave a master class, there was a lunch barbecue for everyone, and as usual we were in a busy run shuffling chairs and stands before the next thing hit. Then, of course, there were the Hours of Happiness for faculty and interns at the most ridiculous place (Armadillo Palace, complete with a giant silver armadillo out front), where I think I almost died from disbelief/laughter.
And in all honesty, Ralph Matson, who gave the master class, is so amazing. I watched him work with the chamber group I sub-coached yesterday and with the kids who performed today and it's so great to watch how he analyzes different issues in performing music. Michael talked to him after the master class about getting me a lesson with him and he agreed. I love how within an hour the Schumann suddenly seemed ten times easier to play. He wrote out some exercises to do with it that will help build up the strength in my right fingers to get that right little "flicker" in them when using the bow. It's so magical when someone can tell you within such a short period of time what to do to fix a problem that has been boggling you for days -- not to mention it does wonders with rebuilding confidence after getting so frustrated with things sometimes. Music is always a learning progress with so many different approaches behind it. I remember Yuko (Victoria's pianist, who did my tapes with me) calling the Schumann one of those "lifelong pieces" that you just learn more and more from as you keep playing it. In one way it can be a hard to embrace, and in another you have this astonishing amazement. In general it's hard to embrace as a kid, and I see that in some of the ones at AFA. But, you know, that's why I guess you just turn around and try to see how close you can get to what things would sound like "in a perfect world" (as Ralph says). Looking back, I realize how much the experience did for me for the summers that I went.

Hopefully all goes well with the kids tomorrow. The high school is playing Smetana, Mussorgsky (pictures!) and Theofanidis for their concert at Moores -- then it's Stravinsky time for Week 3.

(Thankyouthankyouthankyou)

2006-06-16T20:00:00.001-04:00

It's good to realize that sometimes you don't have to worry about stuff being taken care of. In fact, if anything I should realize it more often because I'd probably worry about things alot less than I need to that way -- and maybe it's just a matter of giving in when I can't be a superwoman and, you know, letting the Upstairs department do all the problem solving? Hm.

Outside of this good news, everything else this summer has been wonderful now that I have something to do. I love working at AFA and the people there. I have time to actually read/practice/exercise/live when I come home. Also, just maybe, we can put together a quintet for the Brahms (opus 111!) which will potentially be amazing. I love New York and being at school, but sometimes home is just what you need for awhile -- not to mention summer.

Today in Underwood while the high school orchestra took a break Barbara Scowcroft (the conductor for the first concert, who's been there since I was an AFA kid) came up to me and said, "Your favorite writer..David Sedaris? You know, I was reading the newsletter and when I saw that I absolutely died, I absolutely died!" while shaking her head and smiling with her hand on her chest. I love her and her stories and her braces and the tie-dyed shirt she wore today. The woman is amazing.

Yesterday in the office Amanda was talking to Danny and I about her boyfriend's roommate and how he used to be one of those types who lived in the "image" of a tortured philosopher who drank his sorrows away. This stemmed, I think, from talking about how there are some people who insist on putting on the dramatic tortured face because they think it's what they need to do to make a point of things and to be successful, but you know, it's a funny (albeit sad) attention-grabbing phenomenon.

another story about my father

2006-06-11T23:10:00.000-04:00

My father has these new black glasses. My mother picked them up from the restaurant. Somebody left them there for months. They're as thick as a cassette tape and they make him look like Dmitri Shostakovich. He's wearing them right now while watching Walk The Line with my mother in the living room. There's nothing to watch on the TV.

Our cable's been out for a few days and today he decides he would try to fix it, except as soon as he runs out there he's harassed by a swarm of honeybees that have unexpectedly established themselves right over the cable wires. He comes back inside swearing and bearing two stings, one on the right of his chin and one on his left arm.
So, he goes into his closet and about ten minutes later he comes into the living room where my sister and I are watching a movie (Walk The Line -- which is not too bad, by the way). He's wearing about three layers over his chest including his shirt, a vest and a thick winter coat, corduroys and socks thicker than a stack of Aunt Jemimah pancakes under his loafers. He has a pair of mismatched gardener's gloves on, one yellow and the other green and khaki-colored. It's when we look up at his face when things seem most ridiculous, though -- he's wearing one of those plastic protecting masks you'd wear if you worked at a sawmill with a cap on his head, and towel is wrapped really thick around his neck.
"What's wrong with you?" my sister asks, like a mother who's found.
"I'm going to get them," he says. He sounds just like Joaquin Phoenix on the TV. He picks up my mother's clean nightgown from the laundry basket in the living room.
"What is this?"
"It's mom's."
"I'm going to use it. Go get two rubber bands from the kitchen."
"You'll get it dirty."
"I'll wash it."
He wraps the nightgown around his neck, over the towel. My sister brings him two rubber bands and he ties them around the cuffs of the sleeves. Looking like a child's version of what Armstrong looked like on the moon, he marches out the backyard door. Samira runs to my room to look out the window, and I follow her after she starts shouting for me to come. I look through the glass into our volleyball court-sized yard and see hundreds of bees in a mad panic as my father is attacking them with a water hose, roach poison and a 20-inch fan.
About half an hour later he comes back inside the house slightly angry and very sweaty. The stupid bees have chewed through the cables, he says, and he continues complaining about how we didn't even bother to bring him a bottle of water. In the meanwhile we scream at him to stop rambling because a stowaway is crawling his way into the collar of his shirt. He runs outside through the front door to shoo it out.

This, of course, is all because he wants to watch the World Cup on the television before he misses anything.

(I think if I had a folding street bicycle right now my life would pretty much be perfect.)

my father bought a pair of sandals at the dollar store

2006-06-08T20:39:00.000-04:00

Specifically, my dad bought a pair of cheap sandals at the dollar store that say "bomber USA" on the front. I don't know if he realizes what a bad connotation those sandals hold for him.

My first couple of days as an AFA intern have gone pretty well (although I was a little confused about the office being located in the Republican Party building. It reminded me that I was in Texas again, along with seeing all the sheriffs along Richmond construction sites wearing stetson hats). Today was a little bit of gruntwork and involved moving a crapload of percussion instruments from the band hall to the theater, which sort of sucks when you're dealing with things like a heavy set of rickety chimes. Anyway, the next 5 weeks are going to be great, and so far working with the admins and other interns is alot of fun.

Also, whooo wants to listen to TMF tomorrow? Krager's conducting, Mahler's oh-so-"Tragic" 6th Friday night, 7:30 at Moores Opera House. There's a percussive hammer involved onstage. Who who who? :) :) :)
------------------------------------

The strangest thing happened while jogging the day before yesterday. I was out on the Brays Bayou trail behind my neighborhood turning the corner where Westpark runs when I notice this funny trio of strays trotting along together.
A chihuahua, a cocker spaniel, and a something that looked like a mix between a boston terrier and something else were jollily strolling down the trail when they noticed me jogging. I looked at them and didn't think much of them except for how funny they looked together until I heard a panting sound behind me. While continuing with my jog I turned my head and looked down, and there was the terrier mix, about 4 inches away following and looking up at me with its tongue hanging out of its mouth, looking quite pleased with itself. I shook my head and turned back around. Suddenly the other two dogs were on my right looking equally pleased, not looking at anything particular except for maybe whatever path lay ahead. Despite them, I kept going. A man on his own jog passed me by on the left and chuckled while nodding hello.
For a moment I felt silly, being followed by three small stray dogs while jogging in sweats at 6 in the afternoon on a Houston bayou trail. I realized what a funny situation it was, anyway, and after awhile I was sort of pleased with it. The pleasant-looking trio followed me for a good 10 minutes until two women walking their own two dogs crossed my path.
"One, two, three!" one of them counted while laughing.
"Oh, they're not mine!" I replied, smiling to myself.
"Oh, they aren't? How funny!" the other woman laughed.
After the brief pause I kept jogging down the rest of the trail. I looked behind me for a second and noticed the dogs had stopped following. They were mingling with the two women and their pets, and as soon as a man with his toddler of a daughter came up the path they began to play with the girl, jumping into the patches of grass and running along the edge of the bayou, admiring the cranelike birds and spotting turtles. I was a little sad about the loss of company, but keep on truckin', yeah?
I told my mother about it and I think she found the story very amusingly random, referring to the strays as the tres amigos and laughing about how I run across the strangest things, literally. "You are my little dog," she said in Spanish, laughing. I don't know exactly what to have made of that comment, or if I even should have been bothered by it at all.

"Why is youth so terribly unmerciful? And who has given it permission to be that way?"

2006-06-04T03:31:00.001-04:00

Last night in midst of my horrible allergies I stayed up watching Smiles of a Summer Night on TCM, directed by famed Swede Ingmar Bergman. After finishing it and thinking about what a ridiculously operatic story it is, I looked it up online and found out it actually is an opera called A Little Night Music (cleverly written completely in waltz time). The opera was later made into another film starring Elizabeth Taylor. Whatever.

In seems like the president is finally considering what Jimmy Carter's been talking about forever now: sitting down and having an unconditional talk with Iran. Also, if you go to that Iran Focus website there's a nice little page called "Who is Ahmadinejad?" with a dandy icon of the Iranian president, how pleasant! Educate yourself if you haven't already.

mosquito bite count: 17

2006-05-29T00:15:00.000-04:00

This is only a tally of my legs. The right one almost looks like disease, or maybe hives. Sometimes living in Houston can be a jerk -- although I have to admit I'm fascinated by this record.

Ballet choreographed to the techno sounds of Moby may sound pretty questionable, but it's actually hot stuff. I applaud you, Houston Ballet dancers (and awesome Aussie choreographer Stanton Welch). Also incredible is Francis Poulenc's Gloria, for orchestra, choir, and soprano, the piece used for the company's last production Sunday afternoon. The story is, basically, about ghosts of WWI fighting for glory in spite of how the glory itself, personified by a phantomly costumed female dancer, has been withered down. The music is an amazing reflection of Poulenc's spiritual life during his own hard times and has this eerily haunting Domine Deus in the fifth movement. Gloria was definitely a saving grace from the Michael Torke piece, which musically irritated me in its duration. It sounded like Tchaikovsky on a defunct record player.

In less aesthetic terms, I bring you the random fascinatingly gross thing of the day: the fetus in fetu, better known as a parasitic twin. What happens is something goes wrong during a twin pregnancy, causing one of the children to be born with the other underdeveloped fetus inside of him/her (usually becoming a ball of flesh, hair and teeth, but barely anything of an actual brain). For further fascination (and perhaps less graphic information), there is also the fetus papyracus. I should just sell my soul and pursue the premedical path because Wikipedia draws me into looking at these sorts of things for too long.

Lastly, I leave a photograph, hopefully with excusable lighting. See the kid in the middle? He's got a fine pair of cello hands on him, not to mention some pretty darn impressive piano hands (especially when it comes to Chopin) as I learned from watching his senior recital on Friday night -- and, you know, as I've come to learn over the last seven years that he's not that bad of a person, either.

No, not at all. I really hope that the kids in St. Louis learn that about him as well.

From observing what people older than me have said and from having realized that I've been in college for a year now, I think that once you're out of high school, there are times when you turn around and blink twice because all over again the whole growth process takes you by this weird surprise. I think it's especially put into consideration when you notice what people that you've grown up with are doing with themselves, then you think of what, on the other hand, you''ve done with yourself.

microchimerism

2006-05-24T02:28:00.001-04:00

Death and Transfiguration - R. Strauss (Berlin Philharmonic w/von Karajan)
"Arpeggione" Sonata - Schubert (Leonard Rose & Benjamin Britten)
Needle in the Hay - Elliott Smith
Love is a Place - Metric
Cowboys - The Fugees
Beautiful - Belle & Sebastian

----------------------------------------------------

In other news,
- a late dinner on Sunday was spent with the Virtuosi conductors at Katz's (where somehow they brought up conversation about pickling foods and gas came up in midst of Mr. Grabiec's story about the angry man who commissioned the Barber Violin Concerto),
- I spent too much time sabotaging Facebook photos with MS Paint,
- looking at dental cavities make me sad and paranoid about sugar consumption, and
- they sent my grant money to -- instead of home -- my workplace. In New York. What the heezy?

I'm getting back into the swing of things here. Except for my battle against Texas-sized mosquitoes and the humidity.

When we came back home today my father told me about this interesting story that he heard on NPR the other day, I think on All Things Considered. I wish I knew the exact details, but I couldn't find it online and this is mostly based on what he told me and what little I did find out about it on my own. After a baby is born, a small part of the child remains inside the mother, just as part of the mother remains inside the child -- it is a cell exchange between the former fetus and the mother. These cellular "pieces" of the child (microchimerism) last inside the mother for several years, almost permanently. They say this is why there is often such a strong bond between a mother and her children, often exceeding the one with their father. They also say, my father explained, that this explains the particular feeling a child has when his or her mother passes away, supposedly different from any other death that could possibly affect a person.

This is what my father told me, and he went on afterwards telling about a woman who had to remove several of these fetal cells surrounding one of her lungs because they had become hazardous to her health, and about how the entire explanation before made the story a very touchy situation. At the same time, however, in this reference article from the Boston Globe there is mention of a case with a woman who died from lupus. While a Tufts professor was conducting an autopsy on the woman he discovered several male cells in a sample from her disintegrated small intestines, suggesting that the cells had actually fought the disease before her death. The male cells were "presumably from her sons," as the article notes.

I don't know why, but something about the whole thing bothers me. Maybe it's because I often think about my mother and what would happen if she were ever to suddenly disappear from me, and because I'm always afraid that it's going to be because of something I did or didn't do. It's something I've even had nightmares about on multiple occasions. My crazy guilt is always out to get me, and I won't be surprised if one day it drives me into madness.

92 degrees and partly cloudy skies

2006-05-19T17:22:00.000-04:00

It's good to be home, although one thing I'm not so sure I've missed about this place is the humidity factor.

If you have minimal understanding of the Iranian Revolution and the effect that it had on the Iranian population and have never read Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, by all means, do. I thought I knew enough, but your family only tells you so much about such a crazy thing.

When I brought the book to my father he looked at the cover and said, "Oh, yes, I remember seeing this when I went to Iran," referring to his recent trip there to visit my grandparents. It surprised me that such a book would even be allowed in the country, and in Tehran of all places. Then I realized that he meant he had seen it in the market, probably Tabriz, where merchants will often distribute software, music, books, magazines and other things that are technically illegal to sell in the country. They keep these things on the down-low, however, and often they are things that you have to ask for or are hidden as soon as officials make their inspections. In fact, in this BBC article Satrapi mentions that her book is circulated only "under the table," and that if she returns to Iran anytime soon they could go as far as having her killed. There's so much hype in the country these days that it drives the whole world to concern; now the most recent rumor has it that Ahmadinejad wants non-Muslims to wear colored badges in public (although there are allegations that the whole thing may be a farce). Crazy media. Nevertheless even my uncle, who has made trips back every year, is questioning whether or not he may return there this year.

---------------

I visited the Virtuosi studio this week, and I got to see Krager and Grabiec again -- of course this meant a greeting of big hugs and kisses on the forehead from the maestros. Maestros? Maestri? Whatever. I miss the orchestra, although we (Christine, Greg, Shyla and I -- all visiting alums from last year) noticed that there were so many new kids this season. Mr. Grabiec said that it happens every few years in the orchestra, and it's like rebuilding all over again. The handful of us that visited are actually playing with the orchestra on their Sunday concert as a little alumni thing, and hopefully something will be done on a bigger scale sometime within the next few years if the alumni network stretches out (hopefully as far back as the original orchestra).

While standing around stealing brownies in the back table with the other three I couldn't help but think of the different things we ended up doing -- Christine and Shyla are Music Ed. majors at UH, Greg is doing performance and composition up at Longy in Boston, and I'm a Columbia student majoring in, well, something. It's an interesting contrast, considering that in one light we all came from the same place. I thought it was funny that Greg said he was playing the Brahms Viola Quintet in G this summer because, hey, weren't we reading that not so long ago in the John Jay lounge? It's so glorious! I heard him playing his part to himself in the studio and realized the familiarity. A musical education manages to take itself everywhere. Anywhere you go, you're bound to find someone who's in love with Brahms.

I can't wait to play quartets again.

I finally got my FedEx boxes, meaning I also finally got my phone charger. Over the last six days I've aquired 13 voicemail messages, including several from my parents asking where in world I was, one from a certain New Yorker asking about the circumstances of taking care of my bamboo plant I left with him, another from a friend asking if I was still in the city, and another from some blasted commercial business with a cut-off recorded voice saying that there's good news in store if I call 1-800-blahblahblah. Meanwhile, everyone at home asks me what my new number is when it's been the same as it was two years ago.

the process of homecoming, or why I now hate flying

2006-05-16T16:54:00.000-04:00

"You know, if worse comes to worst...wait, I really keep saying that, don't I?"
"Yeah....yeah, you really do," said Chris, nodding his head. It was 7:30 am and we were both sitting in the LaGuardia Airport food court, about fourteen hours after my originally planned departure.

We came to some agreement yesterday morning that it's probably better, in such circumstances, to use "if all else fails" as opposed to "if worse comes to worst." Somehow the latter makes things seem as though you've already jumped the gun in assumptions.

To sum things up, I showed up Sunday evening at the airport about an hour before my scheduled flight back to Houston only to find out that my trip had been rescheduled to an hour earlier and that I "should have been contacted" about the delay. Obviously. To clarify, by the time I arrived at the airport the plane was already in the process of departing, and at the time I was thinking to myself, "Damn, I really hate crying at airports." If there’s one thing that bothers me more than crying, it’s probably crying in public.

The man at the assistance counter gave me a rescheduled flight for 9:50 AM the next day. Chris, who had helped me get my ridiculous 170 lbs. of luggage from Columbia onto the bus to LaGuardia (I can't pack my life home in a car like everyone who lives on the East Coast, I'm sorry to say), kept me company overnight at the airport. We talked about things you’d bring up when you’re stuck in an airport like copycats, attraction, books, people, and the ridiculousness of some kid at school who goes by "Chuckles." I got about four hours of sleep in the waiting area, on top of an uncomfortable A/C grate.

We woke up around the same time, a little before 6 AM, and had a breakfast of hashbrowns and biscuits from the airport Wendy’s. After a mess of wandering and checking in and figuring out what to do with an extra bag (I left my copy of Decameron in the waiting area) I said good-bye to Chris and crossed over to the terminal. Of course once I was there I found out that my supposedly changed ticked was on "stand-by," which made things more unfortunate. Of course, given my luck I was three people away from the stand-by cut-off, and of course all over again I’m thinking, "Damn, I really, really hate crying at airports," and of course this was after a terminal change and having to lug my viola and laptop case and messenger bag through the security gates all over again.

By the time I’m finally on an airplane at about 12 noon I fall asleep, not waking up until the plane arrived in Dallas where I was scheduled to switch planes. I ran for the next terminal in fear of something terrible happening all over again but I made it in time. On the flight to Houston I thought about misfortune. In fact, I probably thought about misfortune alot. The process of traveling via air can make you a very bitter person. By the time I landed at the Bush Intercontinental Airport, though, I realized that there are far worse things in the world. Like in La Mala Educación when Enrique is reading through the newspaper stories and talks about the one where the woman, not uttering a single word, dies with her body being torn apart by alligators in the zoo. I don’t know why that example in particular came to mind, but when you’re physically exhausted your brain might as well be a bag of Scrabble letters.

When I got out of the terminal I retrieved my luggage from the AA offices. It got there a couple of hours before I did, on the 9:50 flight. I loaded everything on a cart and called my family on a pay phone (my cell phone died the day before). They were outside at the pick-up area. My mother gave me a big hug when she saw me and on the way back my father told me I should have made them pay for a hotel. My sister told me about how softball went. When we finally got to our little white house on Maxfield Drive I took out my things and slugglishly dragged them in with the help of my parents, falling asleep on my bed within 15 minutes of seeing my room again.

This morning when I woke up the first thing I realized was that I had been in the same clothes for over 48 hours, and right after that I realized I was in a bigger bed than usual. I got out of bed and walked through the living room to the front door of the house. I stepped outside and realized that it would probably be around 85 degrees out today and that it would be beautiful weather for a bike ride out by the bayou, maybe, while the rest of the house was asleep.

Moral of the story: American Airlines hates me, but it's okay anyway.

Poof

2006-05-14T02:52:00.000-04:00

Currently:
A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left - Andrew Bird
Scarborough Fair - Simon & Garfunkel
Gaspard de la Nuit - Maurice Ravel/Martha Argerich
Oh! Sweet Nuthin' - The Velvet Underground
Holland - Sufjan Stevens
Those to Come - The Shins

-------------------------------------------------

Halfway through finding the right words to explain what it was like to pack my life into a pair of suitcases, to roll a 60-lb box of my belongings down 37 blocks to a Kinko's on 79th and Broadway due to unfortunate circumstances, to not hear Tommaso singing to Edith Piaf at 2 am, to explain my feelings toward how Jono will not be picking on my odd pronunciation for 3 1/2 months and to how I haven't heard anyone pretending to be a cat by meowing at my door anymore everything disappeared. Words tend to do that when I use them. Either that or technology hates me.

In the meantime I leave this:

Chris is asleep on my room floor. We packed it all. Tonight I sleep on cheap vinyl, the sheets are storage.

Tenative Status: Gone to Texas, as of 5:35 pm, 5/14/2006, LaGuardia Airport, NYC.
Scheduled arrival at Houston Hobby Airport, 9:45 pm.

Premature East Coast fever.

Sometimes the problem is, when your room's too hot, the fan makes it all too cold.

It's over.

2006-05-09T17:35:00.000-04:00

What?
What?
What?

Walking out 500D Kent Hall at approximately 4:00 pm today I felt myself suddenly become light as a feather as I came to the realization that, academically, my first year as a college student at Columbia University in New York City, New York had just ceased.

What? Wait, are you serious?

I walked down Low Steps feeling much better about not having been eaten alive by an oral Asian Humanities exam.

I also lost 6 inches of hair on Sunday. No more messy long locks. No more freshman year of college. In the end even my hair is cut short.

on being underwater

2006-05-07T01:57:00.000-04:00

"You know," I heard a woman looking over at the sight from her spot on Lincoln Center Plaza tell her husband, "this is kind of like one of those things you absorb slowly. You look at it for awhile and you either realize how strange it is, or, hey, it's just some guy in a fish tank."

Today I made an excursion to Lincoln Center with Soo to the Library of the Performing Arts and on the way out, between Robertson Plaza and Avery Fisher Hall, saw a line longer than if Santa Claus had suddenly decided to make a visit from the North Pole. Hundreds of people were gathered to see David Blaine, the man who has been frozen alive, buried alive, and suspended in mid air (the crowd reaction from the last being particularly amusing). This week, Blaine who has been living in a sphere filled with water in for about six days, is trying to avoid being "drowned alive." On Monday he will remove his oxygen tube and attempt to break the record for breath-holding ability underwater, 8 minutes, 58 seconds. On top of this he will attempt to break out of 150 pounds of chains before something unfortunate occurs.

My first thought upon seeing Blaine in a giant bubble of water was not really anything of surprise. The only thing I could think of at the time was how much of a prune he’s going to look like when he gets out of that bubble. I'm still waiting for the shock value. Yes, people live underwater all the time, you know. All the time. Do I make no sense for seeing the people in the long winding line as senseless, or am I fine?

I think I'm just going to move my entire life to the floor. I fall sleep on the floor, eat on the floor, do my homework on the floor. I can't bring myself to utilize my desk anymore, and I'm not certain if it's because it's been swallowed by a chaos of papers and library books and clothes and the rest of my life, or if it's because I just hate desks. I think next year I will get rid of mine. Heck, maybe I'll get rid of my bed frame and just sleep on a matress, a few inches above the ground. At least my room will look bigger.

By Tuesday afternoon I will have killed my freshman year of college.

It seems to make no sense to anyone that I find this place as the death of my morale. Or maybe I should just suck it up, stop whining about and come to the realization that this is Columbia and if I don't think people should find an A- on a paper as wrong then there is something wrong with me. Would I be so right as to blame something else? Find some excuse for my incompetence and lack of grace? And what am I to blame in the first place? Maybe my morale has been dying gradually the entire time, since who-knows-when. Or is this perfectly normal?

Sometimes I just get tired of laughing at myself. And in what am I submerged?
Yes, people live underwater all the time, you know. All the time.
It scares me, honestly.

you've got 120 seconds

2006-05-04T21:44:00.000-04:00

There was beautiful weather in the city again and as a result Jono and I sat outside for hours today, idling again and talking about food and high school and sexuality and strange words and the people we know, the day before our Lit Hum final.

What ends up happening here, when you're outdoors, you end up seeing all these people in these quaint but but completely typical circumstances. For instance, Jude and Soo shouting at us from their windows on the 9th floor of John Jay, seeing so-and-so from this-and-such class as we're on Hamilton lawn, and Taylor leaving for cello class while Dani and Ernesto are on their way out of John Jay. We're about to go in briefly to get dinner and we see Cyrus sitting on a bench in front of the cafeteria, where Chris runs into us on his way out and I ask him about his living situation this summer, and suddenly Taylor's back from a cancelled cello class as we're in line for swipingn in and asks us if we'd eat with him as well. Then, of course, when we go back outside to eat we see Katie not so far away sitting on the grass and suddenly Maddie's back from the library and she joins us next and within the course of time, then Caleb with a hint of a disconcerting look is returning from his own (not-cancelled) studio class and stands mingling with us as I'm tossing an orange in the air and Jono is picking at ants on the ground and suddenly Shira appears and disappears and we're all sitting or standing as the sun is going down and eventually we all go inside because it's 8:30 at night and it's dark and the moon's all alone in the sky instead of in correspondence with bright rays of light.

This, perhaps, sums up how my late Thursday afternoon turned into evening, in about 2 minutes' worth of time in words.

the week before finals

2006-05-02T12:54:00.000-04:00

My dorm room is this chaotic mess of fallen sticky notes andmiserable papers and long-read library books and the typical college student kitsches and photographs from high school. Beaten suitcases beneath the bed, a closet full of sweaters I'll probably never wear at home again, evidence of cookie binges from all-nighters. Wires running on the floor because I never sit at my desk anymore. I'm at work right now sitting at a desk with my legs shaking and my mind is wired on caffeine because I didn't sleep so much; I was sitting on the floor writing a miserable paper or three surrounded by library books on the Red Scare and Chinese literature (but totally unrelated to each other in this case).

Meanwhile, Dostoyevsky calls me up. He is sitting in my chair scarcely used desk asking, "Where are you? You should be here right now! When are you going to write that essay on Raskolnikov? Don't you know that Eric wants it by Wednesday at 5 pm? You've given that silly McCarthy too much of the time of day -- well, I should say evening -- and besides, he died of alcoholism, didn't you know? Let's see if I help you anymore, hmph." Dostoyevsky likes to ramble alot. This is what happens when you don't sleep. You fall into this halfway state and imagine dead Russian writers nagging at you for neglecting them.

bloody monday

2006-05-01T20:55:00.001-04:00

“I’m sorry,” I say, but before the words are out of my mouth the skeleton
has morphed into a guy named Stew, who I shorted in a drug deal.

Stew and the Frenchwoman will be happy to see me go, and there are hundreds more in line behind them, some whom I can name, and others whom I managed to hurt and insult without a formal introduction. I hadn’t thought of these people in years, but that’s the skeleton’s cleverness. He gets into my head when I’m asleep, and picks through the muck at the bottom of my skull. “Why me?” I ask. “Hugh is lying in the very same bed—how come you don’t go after
him?”

And the skeleton says, “You are going to die.”

“But I’m the one who found your finger.”

“You are going to die.”

David Sedaris in the New Yorker: Memento Mori