Putting it together; or, BS reassembles her jigsaw life

After the accident.

It took about five days for the initial shock to pass. Christmas night I watched the Doctor Who Christmas special (of course) and then went to do something else around the house, and happened to pass the television just as BBC America aired the very end of "The Angels Take Manhattan" which is, as anyone who watches Doctor Who knows, soul-crushing. This was the thing that broke through the post-accident brain-fog, and the thing that broke me down. After five days, I finally cried--a lot. It was, I think, a reaction to the realization of just how bad the accident was, and how much worse it could have been. The car that hit my Camry was a Hyundai Sonata, going between 35 and 40 miles an hour; a larger vehicle, or one traveling faster, could have seriously injured or even killed me. My airbags didn't deploy. Somehow, no glass was broken, I didn't hit my head, the most serious injury was the bruising from where I slammed into the driver's-side door.

I've been back in the city now for a little over a week, and it's beginning to feel as if I'm coming out of the stasis I was in during my visit to my parents' house. The holiday season, usually stressful, had a little extra kick this year, because in addition to the fallout of the accident, we also made the decision to say goodbye to Macavity, who had been a member of our family for seventeen years and nine months, after  taking a sharp turn for the worse between Christmas and the New Year. All in all, I have decided to consider this holiday season to be the lowest possible point, from which things can only improve. And, I have to admit, it's impressive that this holiday season finally edged out the year I was seven or eight and Mom had to take me to the hospital on Christmas Eve because of a high fever, after which I projectile-vomited the fluorescent pink medicine the doctor had prescribed all over my grandmother's house. That year, I opened gifts with the family while lying on the floor. That was the year my grandmother bought me a copy of Monica Furlong's book Wise Child and a collection of female-centric fairy stories called Tatterhood, which is, it is possible, are the books which first gave me an awareness of feminism.

Now that I think of it, I don't have that many memories of childhood, but the ones I do have are vivid.

So. I'm piecing my life back together after re-entering the world of the living. My re-entry was, it must be noted, not half-assed in any way: I arrived in town on Tuesday morning, and on Tuesday night a friend and I went to Hansel and Gretel at the Lyric, after which I attended an opera-affiliated networking event at a swanky bar. The next night, I went out with a friend in Wicker Park. And then I didn't leave the house for two days, because being social is work, man.

Speaking of work, I have been doing a lot of it. In fact, work takes up approximately 50% of my life (the remaining 50% is split between sleeping, drinking coffee, and reading books I hated or avoided reading in high school). I will not talk about work here, because work takes up too much of my life already without infiltrating my blog.

I taught at a high school yesterday, which was a nice change of pace from the everyday grind of making phone calls to musicians to talk about other musicians. This time it was sophomores, and the subject was chemistry (a class that, for the record, I somehow avoided in high school). Thankfully, the teacher left a worksheet for the class to do, and the subject matter basic enough that answering questions wasn't too difficult. During my planning period, I read Of Mice and Men because I had finished The Jungle while the students were working on homework during academic lab. The Jungle is an excellent book, and Of Mice and Men kind of made me hate everything. I guess one could argue that both books involve terrible people doing terrible things to other terrible people, but at least the over-the-top call to action at the end of Sinclair's book reminded me of the over-the-top choral endings of Shostakovich's 2nd and 3rd Symphonies, and those always made me smile.

This entry is terribly scattered. I suppose that's the result of my brain being shocked into almost-frantic action after doing so little during the holiday. Well, we'll just have to go with that, I suppose. I have more to say than I had expected.

A student in one of my classes yesterday had a birthday. He turned sixteen, and I realized that there are students in high school, which is damned near adulthood, who were born either the year Monicagate happened or the one before it. This is the first time I have been aware of a group of people who, for the most part, have their own thoughts and ideas and are well on their way to being independent human beings, who are too young to remember a major cultural event I remember reacting to (and, for the record, my reaction at the time was, "Really? You're calling his leadership into abilities into question because of that? Really?!" I was a precocious twelve-year old). It occurred to me, as it sometimes does: I am nearer to thirty than twenty, and I don't feel any older than 22. Is this a thing that happens to everyone, the feeling that there is a huge discrepancy between the age one is and the age one perceives oneself to be? Either way, it's a strange moment of self-awareness for someone who still occasionally gets carded while buying tickets for R-rated movies (which did happen in November, when I bought a ticket for Lincoln).

Speaking of R-rated movies, I am currently half-watching a pre-rehab Robert Downey, Jr. movie called In Dreams and I have no idea what's going on. I'm less lost than I was during The Expendables, but still . . . 

I think I've said about all I want to say for now, though. In the future, there will be book talk! There is a truly terrible book I've been meaning to write about but I needed to take a couple of months before going back to it, because it may be the worst thing I have ever read. Hilariously so. More on that later.

And I don't feel any different; or, BS does New Years

First of all: I am not going to make any jokes about the Apocalypse. I am sick to death of the word "Apocalypse" at this point. Since I am, in general, very interested in eschatological scenarios, this is a clear sign of how saturated our culture has become with end-of-world predictions of late. The world will not end in December 2012, and if it does, at least people will stop talking about how this is the year the Apocalypse is going to happen. Finally.

The New Year was rung in quietly at the BS household (that is, in my apartment): Mom drove me back to Chicago, since I refused to celebrate another New Year's Eve in my tiny hometown, and, since my roommate was working late for the holiday, we sat on the couch and snacked on apples and cheese and watched the 2009 BBC Emma. All four hours of it. I didn't get blitzed at some divey bar and I didn't watch the ball drop in Times Square--although at midnight someone in my neighborhood began setting off fireworks--because with every year that passes, New Year's Eve just makes me feel increasingly old. I mean, obviously, in terms of years spent on this earth, of course I get older every year, but now, where I used to be able to stay up till all hours drinking bottles of cheap red wine with friends and talking about which composers we'd most like to invite to a dinner party (Schubert, obviously, and maybe Puccini but definitely not Wagner), now just the merest idea of getting dressed up and going to some club to dance exhausts me. Graduate school, you have robbed me of my youth!

I have made a few New Year's resolutions, for once:

• Aided by Wii Fit, Zumba for Wii, and living in city of pedestrians, work out at least 4 times a week.
• Eat meals. Actual meals. Made of actual food. A spoonful of peanut butter does not count.
• And, most importantly--in the immortal words of The Specials (and Prince Buster before them, and Guy Lombardo first): "Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think."

One thing I have been enjoying, and immensely, is reading. A good friend of mine, Lindsey, occasionally lends me a paper bag full of books she has read and enjoyed, and while in college/grad school I never got around to reading as many of those books as I meant to--although, through Lindsey's recommendations, I discovered several wonderful books I might have otherwise not looked twice at, like Neil Gaiman's American Gods or The Time Traveller's Wife (which was gorgeous, but terribly sad). At the moment, she has me reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog and it is SO FRENCH: the two main characters, whose shared occupation seems to be musing about the meaninglessness of life and the beauty found in simple things, have just had their first face-to-face interaction--nearly two hundred pages in. And I love it! It is a translation, albeit a very good one, and I would like to one day read it in the original French, as well as Muriel Barbery's first book, Gourmet Rhapsody (I have just looked up the book on Wikipedia to determine the correct spelling of Mme. Barbery's name, and, of course, she is a professor of philosophy, which is unsurprising, given the content and tone of the novel). A couple of reviews I came across dismissed The Elegance of the Hedgehog as "pretentious," or of being devoid of actual plot, but I, for one, don't find this problematic, especially when considering the alternative; Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons certainly have a lot going on but, when you get down to it, they are basically glorified self-insert fan fiction, where Dan Brown invents for his alter ego the discipline of "Symbology" (I always think of The Boondock Saints and Willem Dafoe here: "I think the word you're looking for is symbolism. What is the ssssssymbolism here?") and concocts improbable, if readable, stories in which he traipses across the globe with attractive women in whose presence he can display his considerable . . . ahem . . . knowledge. So, yes, with that in mind, I have no issue with reading an introspective, philosophical novel every now and again, between my re-readings of the Song of Ice And Fire series and Jane Austen's comedies of manners. And besides, what semi-intelligent person who paid attention in college writing classes doesn't cringe when someone grossly abuses grammar or selects the wrong your/you're, even when jotting a brief note?

I'm not a snob, really, I promise. I just love words, and I paid attention in school for twenty-one years, even when my grades (Music Theory) didn't reflect it.

But what else? I have been knitting and sewing like a fiend; during the month of December break I finished six projects, and an seventh upon returning to Chicago in the New Year. I have just cast on for a hat that I don't need, and will probably frog in the morning, but I need something to do with my hands to burn off all of this nervous energy. I finished a purse whose main panel features a tsunami print, of which I am immensely proud. It holds, at the very least, two books, my wallet and checkbook, a knitting project, and a bottle of wine, all without becoming unbearably heavy. Soon I plan to begin making headbands/earwarmers like the ones I have seen everyone wearing this season, with a knitted flower (I can't crochet, I'm sorry, it's a personality defect or something) and a button in the back. I do have those buttons I never managed to use in any of my projects . . .

So that's my life. I am busy. The things going on around me often seem surreal, but this is probably due to the fact that grown-up life moves so quickly, and, to keep up, I always seem to be running, running, running, phoning orchestras in Europe and putting the kettle on for another cup of tea before dashing off to a voice lesson or opera rehearsal. After four months of what felt like complete stasis, it is comforting to have settled into a routine and gained momentum. Life is good, for now.

Bigger on the inside; or, BS escapes

I've been thinking a lot about escapism lately. This is, I'm sure, at least partially due to the fact that I'm feeling a bit trapped at the moment in one of those in-between places I was talking about a couple of weeks ago. Doubly frustrating is the feeling of being trapped not only situationally (a few obligations to complete before I can move on), but also physically (it being obscenely expensive to get from Seattle to anywhere else, and me being poor). How does one fulfill the need to "escape" without actually being able to escape, particularly when one is so tired of one's surroundings?

Books have always been my way out of "real life," I suppose. My family didn't have any sort of video game console when I was young, even though Nintendo and Sega and Playstation were all released during my early childhood (unless you count Atari, which I don't, really, although my four-year-old self thought Astro Grover was a massively cool game), but we did have a lot of books--most notably the entire collection of Agatha Christie mysteries, for which I was probably too young but which I slogged through anyway because I loved Miss Marple. I was bored a lot in elementary school, and my teachers used to send me on my own to the library when I finished my schoolwork early (which was always) and during that time I read Little Women and all of Lloyd Alexander's Prydain books. High school was miserable, and during that time I discovered Vonnegut, Ginsberg, Tolkein, and other authors who wrote about horrible things in beautiful ways.

A lot of people asked me in college when I found time to read "for fun", and my honest answer was always that I made time for it, that I carved it out of the time when I would otherwise eat or sleep, because I needed to force my brain out of the place where it was constantly analyzing all the things it took in. It was in college where I re-learned how to read for fun, and during this time I re-read Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Little Women, Anne of Green Gables (and its sequels), The Chronicles of Narnia, and His Dark Materials, among about a thousand other things. In grad school this need for an intellectual escape became so intense that, when under extreme stress, I often found myself in one of the used book stores near campus, looking for anything "classic" I hadn't read yet (I still hate Wuthering Heights, by the way).

Before I realized the time commitment required by the activities I had said yes to this summer (Dido and Aeneas, I'm looking at you), I identified several "projects" to complete over the holiday, which, of course, means I came up with a reading list: George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series--all of it--and all of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes mysteries. I'm making a fair amount of progress on the former, although the late addition of John Le Carre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy has relegated the Doyle to the status of bedtime reading.

It has occurred to me that my summer reading choices are relatively unromantic, something which was unintentional but which makes sense, given my current frame of mind regarding relationships. This probably has something to do with the imminent release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, pt. 2 and the absurd quantities of Ron/Hermione and Harry/Ginny showing up on my Tumblr dashboard over the past few weeks. And it is at this point that I have to make a shocking (and probably unpopular) confession:

I didn't really like the seventh Harry Potter book.

I bought it the day it was first released and read the entire thing during my shift (I was, at the time, working slow weekends at a museum), and when I finished the last page, I thought, "Hm." This reaction couldn't just have been due to the fact that I had outgrown the books, as I still, three years later, go back and re-read the first four books in the series when I'm in need of an intellectual cool-down or some easy bedtime reading. In retrospect, I can only conclude that I couldn't ever really lose myself in the story because throughout the book I felt that I was being emotionally manipulated. Each of the characters who died was, in my opinion, killed in order for the plot to have the greatest possible emotional impact on the reader--furthermore, Rowling killed off too many named characters, which began, after a few hundred pages, to desensitize me to the deaths which occurred later in the book. And the romances. Oh, god, the romances. The One Big Happy Weasley Family ending drove me mad, mostly because it happened so abruptly, and for no good reason. The plot would have functioned just as well--or probably better--without the romantic subplots.

(I did go back and read the book later, of course, after reading that affront to the entire history of literature, Twilight. After that, interestingly enough, Deathly Hallows felt like Tolkein or Pullman, so maybe the key to enjoying the later Harry Potter books is contrast.)

My book of the moment, by the way, is George R. R. Martin's A Storm of Swords, the third book in the Song of Ice and Fire series, and I'm enthralled. I bought Game of Thrones just before school ended in June, and am tearing through the series at breakneck speed, at least given my work and rehearsal schedules. There are so many characters to love in this series--Arya! Tyrion! Daenarys! And, recently and unexpectedly, Jaime? I appreciate that, although romantic subplots happen, they are not the main focus of the story, and therefore are rightfully strapped tightly into the backseat. This is something I have always loved about Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie, and also something I appreciate in formulaic TV crime shows (Criminal Minds is the best example of not allowing its characters' relationships to overtake the plot).

I'm open to book recommendations, by the way, if anyone has them--it's unlikely I'll get to any new books before the fall, but ideas will certainly be considered and added to The List.