Every performer, I have been told, has a recurring nightmare in which one finds oneself in the middle of a performance for which one is thoroughly unprepared.
This nightmare scenario just happened to me In Real Life.
In early November, I applied to participate in NATSAA (the National Association of Teachers of Singing Artist Award), a biennial competition requiring vocalists to prepare an hours' worth of repertoire meeting a series of requirements relating to language, stylistic period, and composition date. The District competition was scheduled to take place on the 25th of February, allowing ample time for the competition's organizers to collect and review applications and make preparations for the event. This is, for the most part, what happened.
Until the informational e-mail sent out in mid-January was eaten by the internet. This e-mail included, among other details relating to the event, the vital information that singers were to provide their own accompanists for the District and Regional auditions. It never arrived--was never even filtered into my Spam folder--so I did not receive this information until February 22. Three days before the competition.
At this point I feel that it is important for me to point out that this type of crazy random happenstance is fairly typical of my luck--if there is a pit in the cherry pie or an eggshell in the brownie batter, that slice of pie or brownie usually finds its way to my plate. So, really, given my history, I probably should have expected something along the lines of an e-mail containing crucial information disappearing into the vastness of the internet and reached out to The Powers That Be much earlier. However, I did not. Instead, I waited. And then I had a crisis.
In the end, it took me all of about four hours to find a pianist--and, thank goodness, I found one who was both willing to and capable of learning a recital program's worth of incredibly difficult music (Ravel and Marx and Barber, oh my!) in a span of 24 hours. We ended up winning Districts and, although I didn't win Regionals, the judges were very positive and encouraging. And so, NATSAA, I will see you again in two years, when I will no longer be the youngest competitor by a margin of 4-5 years.
My mother, who was a witness to this entire situation as it unfolded (including many tearful phone calls and a particularly harrowing last-minute search for a copy of Handel's Messiah), has offered the following advice: "Get used to it. You chose this life. Also, maybe you should start looking for a copy of the music you need before the day of a competition." Words to live by.
It's Business Time in the life of BS--and by "business" I mean busy-ness, which is not the same thing at all.
Unsurprising though this may be, as it's my chosen professional field, music has taken over my life once more. With Elijah rehearsals beginning at American Chamber Opera and both NATSAA (National Association of Teachers of Singing Artist Awards) and NATS (National Association of Teachers of Singing) competitions looming in the too-near future, what I have been up to is singing. And thinking about singing. And learning new music to sing. And listening to other people sing. And planning to go hear other people sing. That is to say, it's nice when your obsessions and compulsions complement each other: my current obsession is opera; its related compulsion is seeing operas. It all works out very easily, you see.
I do feel a little sorry for the people who follow me on Tumblr and Twitter, especially those who aren't musically-inclined, because I've been spamming YouTube links of my favorite singers lately. Then again, my roommate, who I finally wheedled into seeing a Met HD Simulcast with me (first Faust, then, upon her insistence, The Enchanted Island) seems to have taken very quickly to Joyce DiDonato and Luca Pisaroni, so at least I'm in no danger of being smothered in my sleep by a housemate sick of my constant cries of, "Jonas Kaufmann's hair! My god, his hair!"
Don't even try to act surprised that I included an illustrative example.
It is true, though, that I am experiencing a resurgence of love for opera. To be fair, I was never really indifferent to it, but the sudden ease of its access (performing with ACO, being able to attend the Chicago Lyric Opera, finally learning about the Met HD Simulcasts) has caused me to fall in love all over again. Since October, I have seen two live performances in which I was not a participant (the Lyric's Lucia di Lammermoor and Aida) and three not-live performances (Anna Bolena, Faust, and The Enchanted Island). I have been listening to the Sutherland/Pavarotti/Caballerecording of Turandot on the bus--this is mostly due to the fact that the first act is terrifying and I am afraid to listen to it at home alone when it is dark (I had the same problem with Poe's album Haunted).
This process of re-discovery leads, naturally, to a lot of Feelings, which can sometimes be difficult. I realize that in our society it is, for some reason, not cool to be enthusiastic about things, but when I go to the opera to spend four hours sitting in the dark having all these emotions forcibly drawn out of my body, slowly, and I leave exhausted and wired all at the same time--after seeing Anna Bolena I walked home from the movie theater, two miles in the cold--I can't help but let some of it spill out. It's like falling in love, except the honeymoon phase never ends. It's amazing. I am unapologetically enthusiastic about opera. Do I want to curl up inside "E lucevan le stelle" (here, if you've never had the pleasure) and never leave? Yes. I could live in that damn aria these days.
It makes me sad sometimes to think of how many misconceptions there are about opera, even among my friends and family. Here's the thing: opera isn't boring, or outdated, or "too long" (well--most of it, but for the sake of argument, let's ignore Wagner for right now). Interestingly, a lot of people who tell me that they can't sit through an opera because it's too long have no issue with watching a football game, which is the one place I can think of where thirty seconds can last for twenty minutes. Opera isn't always depressing, although I'm perfectly willing to let Mario Cavaradossi or Salome break my heart on a regular basis. It is okay to enjoy yourself at the opera; it is even okay to laugh. This is something I recently re-learned as I laughed out loud through a good portion of The Enchanted Island or giggled while showing my roommate YouTube videos of Leporello's Catalogue Aria from Don Giovanni (one of my favorite recent performances of which can be seen here). The best part of opera is that it not only depicts the complete range of human emotion, but makes you feel those emotions, too: giddiness, despair, terror, hope. I often feel that the entire second act of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor is written to feel like a nightmare you can't wake up from, and that the audience is dragged alone for the ride like Lucia, almost carried to the altar for a wedding in which she doesn't want to be a participant. It's no surprise that Lucia goes crazy, since the constant spinning in the music, the gradually accelerating tempo, and wildly distorted recalled melodies make even the audience feel disoriented.
Incidentally, today I was feeling especially positive after my voice lesson and as one the baristas (a friend of mine) was taking my order, she said, "You look really happy, is there a guy?" I laughed. "No, no guy. There's almost never a guy, really. Just opera."
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.
Christmas Eve! The holidays snuck up on me this year, probably due to the fact that I was working up until two days ago, so everything seems to be happening very suddenly. For example, wrapping presents! Well. Wrapping one, and writing IOUs for the two I haven't yet finished, because nothing says Christmas like an IOU in a box.
What else says Christmas? My mother watching 2012 political ads promoting the Republican Presidential candidates, all of whom seem to be increasingly crazyface. Ron Paul has apparently ripped off a Ford Truck commercial. This is the latest news from the S house this afternoon. This holiday season, I am most thankful for politically progressive parents, especially my blog-reading mother. I wish as many people paid this much attention to political goings-on, as opposed to repeating the hated words: "I just really don't like politics." Well, yes, most people don't like politics, but as the goings-on of the government affect us on a daily basis, we should be involved, or at least aware of what is going on.
But I digress. It is Christmastime, and I am a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant looking to celebrate. I should point out right now that it has been a long time since Christmas represented anything terribly religious (the birth of Jesus not being anywhere near the most important event in Christianity--that distinction belongs to either the death or resurrection, in my opinion--and said birth not having even occurred on December 25, in any case), but rather a time of year to gather with friends and family and do nice things for each other. Colored lights, hot spiced wine, and animated holiday specials are also involved. To that end, I would like to share with you, dear reader(s), a list of my five favorite movies to watch at Christmas time. Aaaaand awayyyy we go:
1. A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)
A friend of mine once told me that, as a child, he had never seen the end of A Charlie Brown Christmas. "We had a VHS tape of all of these Christmas specials--Rudolph, Frosty the Snowman--and Charlie Brown was the last one, but the tape ran out five minutes from the end of the special, which made it really depressing: 'You suck, Charlie Brown. Go die. Aaaaaand, scene.'" I always thought the last five minutes felt a little tacked on, myself, but I do appreciate the character of Charlie Brown and his disillusionment with the modern commercialization and commodification of Christmas, and Schroeder's squabbling with Lucy Van Pelt over "Jingle Bells" makes me giggle every time I watch it. Charlie Brown, congratulations: you have made the list.
2. The Snowman (1982)
The Snowman, based on the children's book by Raymond Briggs, is the first video I remember watching as a child every winter. It is not, strictly speaking, Christmas-specific, but where stories about children befriending magically animated snowmen are concerned, I prefer this to the old Frosty the Snowman cartoons. As a child, I watched this 20-minute-long animated short on a beat-up VHS tape my parents had owned since, I assumed, the invention of the VCR. As an adult, I sought it out on DVD and now make friends and family watch it every year at wintertime. The plot, which follows a young boy and the snowman he has built as they sneak out of the house without waking the boy's parents, fly through the air to a snowman dance, and meet Father Christmas, is told entirely without dialogue, but through music. "Walking in the Air," the song which accompanies their flight to the North Pole, is still one of the most gorgeous pieces of music I have ever heard.
3. How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966)
Firstly, I am absolutely not talking about the 2000 live-action film of the same name, starring Jim Carrey in the title role. That movie was awful, and does not even deserve to be considered in the same league as the 1966 TV special. So, to the explanation: I will confess to occasionally exhibiting Grinchlike tendencies during the holidays--a bit more subtle than Ebenezer Scrooge, I am less apt to "Bah Humbug!"than to wince at the noise from screaming children opening their toys, saying, "Oh my God, will you please shut up?!" This year, however, I am living with a roommate who is brilliant at living with a Grinch and insisted that we put up Christmas decorations, including multicolored lights with candy canes hanging from them, two days after Halloween, thereby effectively forcing me into the Christmas spirit. Also, we bake a lot, and baking makes me think of winter holidays. Since then, my heart has apparently grown three sizes from its previous two-sizes-too-small, because I cry at just about everything remotely sentimental. So, there. This is probably my favorite of all the Christmas TV specials, and not just because I find the stop-motion claymation specials from the 1960s and 70s incredibly creepy.
4. Peter and the Wolf (2006)
I am aware that Peter and the Wolf is not, strictly speaking, a Christmas film, but for some reason I always find myself watching it during the winter holidays, possibly because it is set during the Russian winter and features several characters who are animals and believe they are people? I guess? Either way, as the daughter of two musicians, I have always been aware ofProkofiev's Peter and the Wolf, been able to sing all of the themes and identify their corresponding instruments, and have watched/listened to about a thousand different versions. Suzie Templeton's 2006 stop-motion animation is my favorite of all those I have seen. Maybe this preference is due to the fact thatthis version removes the traditional narrative voice-over, thus de-cluttering the story and allowing the music to move the plot along. I do know that I like the ending, which is unlike any Peter and the Wolf I have ever seen, and which tends more towards gritty realism than tacked-on happy endings. Either way, this animated short is stark and funny and sad and beautiful, and I look forward to forcing my friends and family to watch it with me for many years to come.
5. Nativity! (2009)
This one is a bit of a late edition, as I just recently had occasion to watch it when it was made available for Instant Streaming on Netflix. And oh. my. God. Martin Freeman, whom I have long considered to be The Perfect Human Being, stars as Paul Maddens, a failed actor-turned-primary-school-teacher, who has developed an antagonist relationship toward Christmas after being chucked my his girlfriend on Christmas Day but is nonetheless selected to direct a group of misfit students in the school's Nativity play, assisted by a character best described by the words "idiot man-child." And then everything goes horribly wrong. I laughed until I cried, and then I cried because it was all so heart-warming (again with the unexpected warming of my cold, black heart), and then I laughed a little more. I have loved Martin Freeman since he was Tim Canterbury on The Office, and I'm so pleased that he's finally getting a bit of international recognition with the success of Sherlock and the upcoming Hobbit films. So, Nativity? Watch it. The DVD isn't available in the United States (I've looked), but it is on Netflix.
And now I must be away, as it is about time to order the Traditional Christmas Burrito from the local biker bar/Mexican restaurant. No, I am not joking, except about the "Traditional" bit. My family, you guys. My family.
At last! After two weeks of sitting shivering in my makeshift home-office in front of the heating vent, fingerless mittens on, a scarf wrapped twice around my neck, and a blanket over my lap, I have located the source of the draft in our apartment. Unfortunately, all this gets me is a sense of accomplishment, since the draft is coming from our laundry room and I can't actually do anything about it. Later this week, I may stop by JoAnn to pick up some fleece to block the space between the door and the floor, because this is going to be ridiculous come Thursday.
A slew of knitting commissions rolled in suddenly a couple of weeks ago, and now I'm rushing to finish them all before Christmas. So far, the benefit of living in a cold climate seems to be an increased appreciation of warm hand-knit goods. In addition, there are two finished pairs of fingerless mittens about to be listed on my Etsy shop, and several purses worth of fabric to cut and construct. The sense of productivity helps my mood during the holiday season which, as usual, has its difficulties.
Here's the thing about the holiday season: every year, it seems as if society is scheming to make us all self-loathing between Thanksgiving and Valentine's Day. It's clearly no accident that the holiday season inevitably marks a sharp uptick in the amount of advertising money handed over to every major television channel by online dating services and weight-loss companies. The strategy is brilliant: as we head into a holiday characterized by gift-giving, we are told, as individuals, that we are somehow less complete because of our lack of material possessions. How do we regain our feeling of self-worth? By seeking out romantic relationships. What do we feel makes us more desirable to others? Weight loss. The extreme self-denial required by most fad diets advertised on television leads to a feeling of physical emptiness, and to fill that void we purchase more material things, and so forth.
This is, of course, a long-winded explanation of (although certainly not a justification for) the utter Grinchiness I have been dealing with at work in recent days. Listen, I understand that most people don't have home phones any more, that text messaging has made us a more casual society, that fewer people are aware of the basic rules of etiquette, blah blah blah kids these days and their haircuts and their rock music, but there are a few important things to remember when working in an administrative setting and dealing with telephones. The doctor is in:
When answering a telephone at your place of employment, please state its name, as well as your own name. This eliminates the need for the inevitable awkward "Have I reached the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry? May I please speak with Albus Dumbledore?" exchange, in which the caller has not reached Hogwarts, but instead the Royal Philharmonic of Durmstrang.
If you have questions, please ask them one at a time and allow a reasonable amount of time for a response between them.
Never start a sentence with "I'm sure you're a lovely person, but . . . " because the second half of that sentence is rarely anything short of a thinly-veiled insult.
It is rude to hang up on someone. It is rude to hang up on someone. Even if you said goodbye, if you cut the other person mid-sentence and did not hear them say "Goodbye" as well, you have still just hung up on someone. And you may just be a terrible person.
Do you know who I love so far, though? Every single person with whom I have spoken in Scandinavia, and most in Switzerland and Belgium. Attention, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, and Belgium: the next time I have a party, you are all invited. Germany, you can swing by, too, but try not to start any fights--I've got my eye on you.
This new life as an Employed Person/Actual Productive Member of Society (as opposed to my previous state of Embarrassing Drain on Society) is nice, though. I'm tired almost all the time, but I'm insanely productive most of the time while still managing to cut down majorly on my coffee intake and sleeping the recommended number of hours per night. As a pleasant side-effect to getting enough sleep, the desire to punch someone in the face occurs far less frequently, which is important for reasons of I Don't Need An Assault Charge On My Record Right Now. At the moment, life feels a little bit like an indie comedy film, something between Garden State and Harold and Maude. And maybe a little bit like La Boheme, since I can't really afford to turn up the heating much above 65 degrees and, sometimes in my knitting, I make flowers that "ahimè, non hanno odore." My voice teacher said in my last lesson, "My God, so you're actually Mimi, huh?" Yes. Pretty much.
I baked tonight, as anyone who has interacted with me at all via social media can tell you. And the thing about me is, when I decide to do something, it's rarely half-assed. In this case, a decision to bake in celebration of the completion of Boheme's iTunes recording and imminent opening (Saturday night! Saint John Cantius! Get yer tickets!) turned into nearly four dozen cookies and fifteen blueberry muffins. Another (little-known?) BS fact: I don't often eat much of my own baking. With the exception of loaves of bread, I generally make things for the sense of accomplishment it gives me, have two or three, and give the rest away. This was especially true during the rehearsal period of Hansel and Gretel last fall, when I lived alone and suffered from a significant amount of character bleed that led to much baking experimentation.
It's been a long time since I've shown my face here. Depression (in retrospect, probably circumstantial and due in large part to my state of unemployment) is to blame, of course, but I'm not going to go into that in any depth, as the brilliant Allie Brosh of Hyperbole and a Half recently dealt with the same thing and addressed it more brilliantly than I could ever hope to.
Very suddenly, though, I'm feeling all right. Last week I visited my parents--which is, let's face it, an excuse to see my grouchy sixteen-year-old cat rather than an expression of my desire to return to the small town where I attended high school--and it was nice to get out of the apartment for a while, however nice said apartment is (and it is--Stephanie just decorated for Christmas, so it's all very homey). I drank coffee and read a book and considered going to see a high school production of Phantom of the Opera before experiencing a return to sanity and subsequent decision to not see Phantom after all.
Oh, Phantom of the Opera. My relationship with that musical is fairly complex. Here's the thing--despite the fact that it is the bane of every single opera singer's existence ("What do you do?" "I sing opera." "Oh, like Phantom of the Opera?" "No. Not even."), I actually sort of enjoy it. The music is pretty and easy to listen to in the first half and, given half the chance, I would play Carlotta in a second because she's hilarious. The whole thing is written to be a complete spectacle, which is why I would have loved to see it in Las Vegas last spring had I not gotten so sick during my time there. But the writing is just cruel, especially to the Phantom and Christine--the approach to the Eb in the title song is about as difficult to sing as anything. Never mind the fact that I worry about a seventeen-year-old soprano singing a high E in the first place, even if it is within the reaches of her range. So I thought better of it. Also, my mom didn't feel like going, so we went to dinner instead.
To get to my hometown and back, I took Amtrak, and had the wildest of all possible times on both trips--at least as far as train travel is concerned. On the way there, I sat a few seats away from a toothless and possibly drunk man who had apparently fainted in Union Station while waiting to board the train, and who spent a good deal of the hours-long trip attempting to engage those of us around him in awkward conversation and having a very loud and vulgar conversation with someone who I believe to be his . . . girlfriend? wife? I know it isn't polite to eavesdrop, but, honestly, even with my iPod in I couldn't help but overhear him as he shouted down the phone about how, yes, he loved her more than his previous what-have-you, and that's why he was going to get a tattoo with her name, and he was going to get the tattoo of his ex-wife's name removed as soon as he had the money.
And then on the train ride back, I contracted what might have been food-poisoning and vomited in the train car's restroom. There are some places where no one wants to worship at the porcelain altar, and the Amtrak train's restroom definitely makes the top three. The girl sitting next to me on the train was extremely nice about the fact that I repeatedly had to get up and go to the restroom, and after we finally arrived in Chicago, a very nice man saw that I was exhausted to the point that I was completely unable to lift my suitcase and did it for me, asking me if I was feeling all right, but none of this makes up for the fact that a pair of nice-looking Amish (or possibly Mennonite, given where I was coming from) gentlemen undoubtably heard me performing reverse peristalsis and probably assumed I was some drunken young English suffering the earthly consequences of the previous evening's sinful behaviors.
And I would most definitely be asleep by now, but while baking I forgot that I was also doing laundry, so the dry cycle began much, much later than I had intended and now I'm waiting until I hear it finish so the sneaky Polish dental students upstairs don't steal my socks or, whatever, I know they actually would never do that, but I like to know where my panties are. There's so much more to tell, such as why I am actually paying attention to when I go to bed--which is that I am employed and it's a Guy Fawkes Day miracle. I won't say just now what it is I'm doing, but needless to say, it involves phoning both Russia and Italy on a semi-regular basis and, no, I'm not in the Mob.
I think I'll just let (those of) you (who don't know me in Real Life) wonder about that for now.
I just took two Chlorpheniramine Maleate pills and a Tylenol PM, so this post is a bit of a race against the clock--how many words can BS manage before she loses consciousness? Coherent thinking is already a bit of a challenge (but isn't it always, really?), but if nothing else, there's a possibility I'll get a laugh out of this in the morning.
(That makes one of us.)
The last time I sat down and wrote an entry here, I was finishing up my first temp position. Tomorrow, as a matter of fact, I am headed off to start a second position--underemployment is a sad, sad, way to live when you're in your twenties--and this time I will be taking inventory of public parking spaces for the company that manages the city's parking meters. What this means, as I have been led to understand it, is that I'm basically being paid to take a long walk on my own while occasionally writing things down, and, what's more, during my favorite season. The ungodliness of the hour aside (because, really, 7am is cruel), I'm actually pretty excited about this assignment, given that the four days I work are nonconsecutive. As long as no one mistakes me for someone who writes parking tickets, this should be just fine.
What else, what else? I learned that my upstairs neighbors are Polish dental students at the nearby university, and that they occasionally have get-togethers in our house's back yard with their Polish dental student friends, where they sit around speaking Polish and doing Polish things, like cooking sausages and drinking vodka. I had made a batch of cookies on Friday evening, which I brought out to share with them since it's good to get to know one's neighbors, in my opinion, and to reassure them that you are not some weird recluse who sings opera at inappropriate hours of the night and barely leaves the house except to buy coffee to enjoy while reading biographies about manic-depressive Dutch painters, of course you are not. In fact, I had meant to bring some of those cookies to a friend's house the next day, since she was doing a Mary Kay product demonstration, but the baked goods were, it must be said, annexed by Poland. On the whole, though, I must say, well done, Polish-speaking, vodka-drinking, potluck-having housemates, you kids definitely know how to throw a party, and the back yard wasn't even too disastrous-looking the next day. Although--it must be said--there has been a charred hamburger sitting on one of the multiple outdoor grills back there for probably three weeks, and I have no idea where the cover that goes to that grill has got to, and frankly, I'm a little afraid to ask.
It's autumn, so of course I'm baking again. Some day I will branch out from chocolate-and-butterscotch-chip cookies, but for now they're pretty delicious. I have some ideas about cinnamon-raisin bread, and there's got to be a recipe in one of the four zillion cookbooks we have sitting around the apartment. The Roommate and I obviously can't manage to eat six dozen cookies on our own--or, I guess, we could, but it wouldn't be very good for us--so I have been bagging them up and bringing them to the baristas at the Starbucks near my apartment. As it turns out, giving people baked goods is generally a good way to make them like you--at least temporarily, and only as long as you're actually okay at baking.
Aaaaaand I've started to go a little cross-eyed, so that plus the knowledge that my alarm is set for six means that I should probably climb up into my bed and wait for sleep. It figures, I guess, that the one night I actually have things to talk about--the show I'm in, the production of Lucia di Lammermoor I saw last night, how much it warms my cold black heart to see protestors carrying their homemade signs to Occupy Chicago on the Blue Line train--also happens to be the night I'm teetering on the edge of unconsciousness. Well done, universe. I salute you.
- - -
E.T.A., four minutes later
Tagging these things is always such an adventure. I briefly considered adding a tag called productive member of society, but after about forty-five seconds of deep thought, I decided that anything I could discuss there could also probably be filed under the heading of grown-upitude. So there you go. I have also added a tag called almost unconscious, which I suspect will see a lot of action in the coming weeks/months/LIFETIME.
