2001-07-29 - 11:40 p.m. - trivialis12

Hello everybody.

Bob, thank you for reading this thing and telling me that you do - makes me feel as if I'm not talking to myself (which I do probably more often than is healthy. Where does it cross the line from "charmingly eccentric" to "freak! get away from me, you kook"? That is a line I'd like to see drawn... now.)

I'm cleaning my drawers and bookcase out and haven't been doing much practicing lately (shame on me. grr.) but noticed that there was a buzz on certain notes on my cello. Being the concerned, dedicated person that I am (well... maybe paranoid. but not all that dedicated or concerned, really), I did the knock test and found... about four cracks. This is bad stuff. Off we went to Berkeley, my mother and I, to take it into the shop and get those cracks glued. Thirty-five dollars to get the cracks glued, and that's with a little discount. So. I open my case today, three days after the gluing. I start playing... and I hear a buzz. In the same spot. I do a knock test in the same spot. It doesn't turn up a crack. I touch the spot while playing the note that buzzes. No buzz. So what's up with my cello? Now I have to take it back into the shop, preferably before I leave for Indianapolis for my cousin's wedding. Of COURSE it works out so that there's some big car race going on at the same time... arrgh. I wonder if there's much else to do there. It's only three days, though. I can survive.

I'm getting more and more difficult to live with (and when even I start to notice it, you know that it's bad.) Not only do I spend my life in parentheses, but I'm getting more and more irritable (move my chronic bitchiness rating up a few notches to a 9 or so, folks) while at the same time getting worse and worse about restraining myself and channelling the energy into other, more productive works (like the really really horrible stories that I found while cleaning out one of my drawers. It's probably now that I should mention my claim to the Pack Rat of Pack Rats throne. I have boxes full of work from first grade [well, not entirely full of that, but I do have my work from first grade] and now I've managed to fill three boxes with assorted newspapers [Atlanta Olympics, with emphasis on swimming and men's gymnastics photos] and schoolwork from grades 7-9... this is disgusting. I will be buried in piles of things and then somewhere in our basement will occur one of the rare cases of spontaneous combustion. There's certainly enough fuel for it...) anyway, all of that was a really big parenthetic thought and I don't remember AT ALL what I was trying to say before. I'm hard to live with.

Oh yes, I was planning my wedding, too. Or... not my actual wedding, just the one that I get to have in my head (see, if I think about my wedding before I go to bed, it means that I don't get nightmares as bad as some of Kafka's writings... the Penal Colony gave me nightmares but those had nothing on these!)- after all, I'm ignoring the fact that I don't have a groom, and even if I did, I'd have to give him a horse tranquilizer before I could ever convince him to go along with the plan...

Mt. Tamalpais on a foggy day: it's a state park, all wooded, beautiful. There'll be wind through the trees, so dress warmly. Mt. Tam pokes up through the fog if you're lucky; you look out, and you're floating, suspended over a fine white sea, white-grey, breakers. My family were scholars, so white like the rice paper they used, too. Think ceremony; an altar (where does it come from? perhaps we build it) and incense. Music, of course; Schubert's "Death and the Maiden" is a prime choice, as is Britten's "Sinfonia da Requiem" if we can get the orchestra out there (ha). Dirges, funereal marches, black. Bridesmaids? My sisters, of course; the groomsmen are up to him (but they should wear tights and codpieces and ribbons if they're groomsmen...)

More on this later. I've got it planned (that, and my funeral as well... never hurts to be prepared, sort of, in advance.)

And I'm only how old? This is ridiculous, of course. But that's my life for you - ridiculous and stewed in soy sauce. Back to cleaning and back to practice. My thoughts are with Tiff and her father; Oz; the charming young fellow who signed my guestbook - incidentally, if you read this, the graphics are none of them mine (but I did pick the color at least); Frannie and the rest of the UHS gang; Alex and Lilah and Jess and whoever else at SFDS was worth it; run-on sentences everywhere and the English teachers who are gasping with horror right now; cellists, especially Rostropovich; other people who are told that it's obvious that they'd score a Kinsey 6 (hey, don't look at me, my friends on tour told me that); and whoever else is important in my life but whose name is escaping me at the moment. And, of course, to Ms. Murray and Ms. Neff. In a way, my entire life has been for you two.

Yessiree, I'm in a benevolent mood now.

I'll talk to you later.

Email me.

J (:>