Die Sonne, sie scheinet allgemein! (The sun...it shines on all...)

I listened to Christa Ludwig before I went to bed (as is a usual custom). There is a fantastic recording of her doing Mahler lieder, I especially like the Ruckert lieder. She has the best female voice of anyone on the planet. Her voice has a tremolo sometimes that is just scary…also she is incredibly hooked up to her breath. And to think she made this recording when she was only thirty. Such a mezzo…such a woman.

Could this be love?

Sunday nights are usually so sad…especially if it’s raining. But this one is so good. Maybe ‘cause I am addicted to Flonase? Maybe so.

Welcome to Inexia...

Friday night Aaron and I went to Jeff Co. Saw floor friends from last year. General ridiculousness. 1:30AM: Laura, “That is a pretty fucking good potato.”

Saturday night a bunch of us went to Shattered for 80’s night. There were less people there than usual…which was sad. But I had a great time dancing with Robyn, Sarah, and Eryn. I forgot how much fun Sarah is--I miss that kid. Good times.

The whole concept of 80’s night just blows my mind. Does that mean that in 2015, bad 90’s pop will be in? Because if it does, I am definitely going to kill myself by then.

virtual insanity is what we're livin' in (but it's alright)

A tradition of mine is to make a list of to-dos for the weekend on Friday afternoons. Most of the time, I don’t accomplish all the things on the list…but I would get half as much done if I didn’t write it down on a little index card and tape it to my computer screen. The only problem is it makes me feel so inferior…and then I curl into the fetal position when the protestant guilt kicks in. Here is a sample of what I gots going on this weekend:

1) school work:
a) Organic reading (4 hours)
b) Cell bio outline+ quiz+ recitation problems (4 hours)
c) Do keyboard assignment for ear training/MacGamut (1 hour)
d) Finish chem lab write up/do pre lab/take chem Quiz. (2 hours)
e) Figure out how to form diagram a piano sonata for theory (1 hour)
f) Study for German diction vowel quiz on Tuesday (1hour)
g) Practice 4X1 hour for my literature
h) Learn and memorize 4 Poulenc Lenten motets (3 hours)

2) non-school work
a) Turn in my fucking library books so that I am not fined $1,750
b) Send letters to my little sisters/ write thank-you notes to my grandparents
c) Get an extension for my distance learning courses
d) Clean my room…really…it’s a health hazard
e) Figure out where I am going to live next year
f) Finish lab website (also figure out how to hack into the bio server-- so I can post it)
g) Work out/go running/bike riding
f) Do laundry (Rainman: definitely, definitely not wearing underwear)
i) File FAFSA?
j) decide if I want to go back to student death...i mean student health

3) Things I actually want to do:
a) See Katherine/Joe tonight, also go to Karen’s and see Steph
b) Go to Shattered on 80’s night on Sat w/ Eryn and Robyn
c) See Rachel when she gets back from NY

the real me

So in between 5 hours of class, an advising appointment, a sight singing test, and a doctor’s appointment (tuberculosis?), I saw a snippet of Telemundo today. Sadly it wasn’t a Spanish soap opera (those are splendiferous), but a court room show. Think of a power dressed Judge Judy…only Mexican not Jewish, and talking about 3 times faster. Pretty Amusing.

And that got me to thinking (as I often do), about how ridiculous Telemundo is —but maybe to some lonely Hispanic in middle America, it is what keeps them going every day. They yearn for the characteristic fast talking clowns and mariachi bands that parade endlessly through game shows, talk shows, and dramas. In my own mind I just negated an entire ethnic group based on a TV network.

Normally, I have absolutely no problem judging someone or something…I think everyone that knows me can pick that up. But what if everyone was as closed minded and spiteful as me? What if there are technologically advanced aliens hovering above earth…and the only thing that keeps them from blowing us up is the spectacle and ridiculousness of what us humans find important. I think there was a South Park episode once along those lines…Anyway, I think the point of all this rambling is something much deeper. I am a judgmental bastard. And I am never going to change. Ever.

It's the day of the show yall

This weekend I went on the U-singers tour of St. Louis, and it was totally fun. I was expecting the worst, but I got along really well with everyone. We even had some free time…which was really nice.

We sang in some schools and churches including the Basilica (during Saturday night mass) and Aaron and JP came and saw us. I was pretty bummed out about how much time choir takes up lately (like 6+ hours a week…that I don’t have), but now I am really excited about the rest of the year. I know, I know. Such a nerd.

I got to hang out with all the music kids that I don’t see very much…there was lots of alcohol involved. I will probably still be drunk for days to come. Rachel and I shared 2 carafes of wine and a 12 pack over the course of 2 nights. I remember taking off my shirt and attaching the no-hanger (WTF?) stickers to my nipples and tackling Tessa when she tried to open our door at like 1AM. I found out Craig is a top (most of the time). And if Patrick says, “Mommy needs a drink” one more time, I swear to god….Also, we spent the weekend quoting Napoleon Dynamite…which got old. I must have said, “Tina, you fat lard, come get some ham” at least one hundred times.

I put some pamphlets in Dr. Crabbs music as a practical joke that we picked up last year—they included:
1) How to give yourself a self breast exam
2) Hip replacement
3) and Cancer of the colon and rectum
He was as amused as a anal-retentive puritan (I love him to death) can get.
Good times.

the darkness hushes wide...

So not much is really going on my life right now; school/work is taking over like a giant tropical strangling vine. But that is normal.

Rachel and I sat outside and ate dinner together on Valentines Day—watching her in the twilight (with her newly dyed Red-As-Franka-Potente-In-Run-Lola-Run hair) made me realize how important she is to me. This is the first time I had actually been in a relationship on February 14. We were both to busy to really talk, just weary of the world.

Things like that make me question what the hell I think I’m accomplishing by wasting my entire youth on school. I could be 28 before I get out of grad school…I don’t know if I can wait that long to start living. Hell, for cavemen, that was more than half of their lifespan.

As far as good news goes, I have several items:
1) I finally joined facebook (and am more than enthralled with the spectacle of it all)
2) My chem lab went ok today
3) I have rediscovered the glory of pre-1990 Madonna (Look around, everywhere you turn is heartache...It's everywhere that you go)

Sugar-induced ramblings

Had two very literary experiences today:

While studying tonight, I got up to walk around my enormous apartment building to get a change of scenery. Even though there are about 1,000 people that live in U-Place, there is still a hallway on the third floor that no uses. I just sat on the carpet and read for about an hour. Its seclusion reminded me of The Secret Garden. When I was about to leave, I looked out the window because it was snowing, and the sky was purple from the reflected street-lights. The horizon was blurred by the reflection in the window of the cheap, white popcorn ceiling…I couldn’t tell where it started or ended.

I read a story in Alfred Hitchcock’s Stories to Read with the Lights On once about a woman who discovers a race of people living in the center of the earth. In return for the food she puts down the well, the subterranean people send her bars of gold. Of course they don’t know English, but can imperfectly learn the whole language in the span of several hours with only the use of a dictionary.

At the end of the story, the woman sends her husband down the well, and the sub-dwellers send a note back saying, “Delicious. Send more turkey.” In the process of relating this story I have discovered that my experience today isn’t really like that at all—but here goes. If I was the subterranean race, I would send for more wild berry skittles, which in the last several days I have spent a fortune on. In fact, I counted the wrappers….I have eaten 9 bags. My room is like a graveyard for purple skittle wrappers. How sad.

I have lived and loved....and closed the door

The weekend was a success for several reasons:
1) I went salsa dancing on Friday with Rachel and Jessie
2)Eryn and I fixed a pinic lunch and studied on the quad. And when I say study, I mean talk about the lifetime movies she has seen. Good times.
3)I had a really good voice lesson on Sunday, and managed to watch less than ten seconds of the Superbowl.

I have decided that I want to go to the ocean for spring break. By myself. The idea of a road trip is an attractive part of Americana—there is a lyric from Songs of Travel: “To the heart of youth, the world is a highwayside, passing forever--he fares.” Driving in a gas-guzzling car to nowhere in particular…alone…such a vivid image of Howard Roark individualism.

I had never seen a picture of the ocean when it was cloudy before, but that is what I imagine it to be when I get there. Then I will walk into the gray surf singing with all my clothes on and rub the salt water in my hair. And walk down into the sea. He to his nobler fate fares…and his face is gone (is gone).

It's official: I now give the world permission to fuck itself

Ok, here is another list.

Things that the world has done recently to disappoint me:

1) Allow advertising to still exist. Isn’t that supposed to be some hold-over from the cold war? Why do people still listen when commercials tell us that the only way to make ourselves stand out is to consume a beer with a red label instead of a blue one? Or have A&F instead of A&E on our identical horizontally-striped shirts? You are not a unique and individual snowflake. Why don’t people just accept the fact that they are pretty much the same boring, mundane, worthless, consuming, shit-factories?

2)Let people like Paris Hilton or Ashley Simpson exist. Or even worse, wield any semblance of power.

3) Put, and I quote, “Preview XXXIX Mind Game: The Thinking Man’s Superbowl” on the cover of a nationally distributed magazine.

4) Not be anything but completely ashamed and embarrassed of The United Socialist States of America.

Ok, I think I am done. (The sound of me getting off my soapbox)

Hepatitis Mizzou

Talked to my mom today on the phone. As usual she was doing about five things at once, including saying, “Rebecca, get your hair out of the butter.” It is so reassuring to realize that some things never change—and that I did exist before Mizzou happened to me.

It sounds like a disease. I caught Mizzou. I didn’t wash my hands and was infected with Mizzou. I slept around and came down with a bad case of Mizzou.

He's our Hero (gonna take polution down to zero)

Despite being totally worn out by Saturday night, Rachel and I still went out. Amy had a Napoleon Dynamite party (complete with k-sa-dillas and tater-tots) that was completely amusing.

But the highlight of the night was Zach’s birthday party, in which Zach, Marie, Joelle, and Rachel got in a wrestling match over control of the alcohol and rolled around on the linoleum kitchen floor at 2AM. Cake was eaten and beer was flung on the walls. Marie showed off her birthmark—which is described as half Sherlock Holmes, half standard poodle. Totally bizarre, especially since this was the first time I had met any of these people.

I busied myself with schoolwork today…unfortunately I think my cell bio presentation on Tuesday is going to crash and burn. And of course I am worried; doing well in school is a ridiculously large part of who I am. I am not sure why, maybe I am just kind of good at everything else…but being a nerd—I kick ass at that. Which makes me think of the Indian kid in Captain Planet. He got stuck with “heart.” What a total loser.

Once it hits your lips...it's just so good

Lately I haven’t been going out much, so Aaron, Matt and I went to Karen’s for some beer pong last night. I turned out to be really good at it, winning 3 games in a row with my partner Anson, a frat guy from UMR. Maybe too good.

It was totally fun and I saw all of the drunks from last year. I don’t have a hangover at all, probably because I threw it all up last night…there is a trail of puke all the way from Jeff Co to University. Anyway, woke up this morning with bruises around my eye sockets. Frank the Tank is back!

This will be the last time I ever do your hair

I am really into lists right now. Here are some more:

Things that should cease to exist:
English professors (they are all a bunch of parasitic communists who can’t make it in the real world)
Toe lint
Pushy fat people

Things we should invent:
A way of controlling the weather
Larger portion sizes for skittles
A machine that looks and sounds like me that deals with the rest of humanity when I won’t

You're a virgin and you can't drive. That was way harsh Ty.

Here is a list of good things that happened to me today:
I worked out.
I got free pizza at work (and I got to pick the toppings).
The kindly people at the Plasma Biological gave me $25.
I finished a modicum of homework.
I dyed my hair black again with the rest of the henna.
I found out that my roommate, along with (supposedly) “like, so many other guys” uses the hole in the front of his underwear to pee out of. Before I was feeling left out that no one told me that.

Here is a list of bad things that happened to me today:
Manda got pissed off and stopped talking to me when I insisted several times that midgets are "extremely" decadent.
The first thing I saw outside this morning was a dead pigeon in the grass with its severed leg bleeding in the sidewalk.
My room is still a veritable crack-den despite putting ‘clean room’ on my to-do list for the past week.
I had a bag of microwave popcorn, a glass of pink grapefruit juice, and a fuzzy green skittle for dinner (looking back, maybe that should go in the good things list).

you wouldn't know beauty if...

Rachel/Craig and I went to the met auditions in KC. They were amazing, although we didn’t agree with the judge’s final selection. Also ran into Sherry Liu and met her compulsive pre-med friends who had just finished a seminar on geriatric medicine. On Saturday.

Spent most of Sunday catching up on organic homework and picking out new literature.

So, I have realized that my posts may be a little stilted…even news-like, one might say. So, in an effort to remedy that here is this:

"Is there anything more beautiful than a beautiful, beautiful flamingo flying across a beautiful sunset? And he’s carrying in his beak a beautiful rose and he’s also carrying a beautiful painting in his feet. And also, you’re drunk."
-Jack Handey

A thimblesworth of milky moon...

Yesterday, Rachel and I went to downtown to get Turkish coffee, and relax before school started. We ended up listing all the French verbs we could remember. Favorites include: descendre-to go down, klaxonner- to honk, fumer-to smoke. Fittingly enough, she knows all the nouns and I know all the verbs, so between us we have a semi-functional French speaker.

Among other disappointments is my new humidifier. It isn’t a vaporizer—but a humidifier. So, you can’t see the water droplets and I have no idea whether it actually works or not. Pretty good business proposition…come up with some product whose intended effect is so subtle that the consumer can’t tell whether it is doing anything at all.

Meat poisoning?

Last Wednesday, Rachel/Craig/and I went to KC to have voice lessons with Dr. Witzsky, this baritone voice professor. Craig had 6 arias to go through because he is doing met auditions with Rachel this weekend.

I of course felt completely sheepish and self-conscious at first, but he turned out to be really cool. A little weird (I swear he never blinked), but people like that who have been alone with their art for so long do lose touch with the rest of the world. We made a lot of headway, mostly in the area of resonance and vowel placement-- and it was well worth the (ugh) $35/hour. Craig and I talked a lot about how important it is to hear someone demonstrate what we hear all the time in our lessons.

We went to get hamburgers after, and I ate a pound of beef in one sitting. If there is such a thing as meat poisoning I had it. Not fun—especially driving home 85 mph+ in sleet on I-70.

School starts tomorrow. Actually today. For some reason I feel optimistic about this semester…I should be way more jaded by now.

In the beginning

This is an unashamed self-aggrandizing vehicle for my domination of the universe. Note: more to follow.