2001-08-18 - 7:28 p.m. - defessus8

I've been tired recently. My mother thinks I have some weird sleep disorder. It's blah - after all, the end of the summer draws near, I'm feeling more ready to snap than I have all summer, and at some level, I know that this is how I'm going to be feeling for eight months (give or take) once school starts. So I sleep. I think.

First things first: Lorah made some HTML changes for me! There's still some stuff that I want to do and can't figure out, but she did what she could, so thank you very much. (Confused? Don't worry, so am I.) If anyone knows how to make tables and would be willing to help me make those final changes to my diary-? It should be straightforward enough, getting in touch with me.

Today, we had a visitor, and so I went through my concert repertoire in the living room that I spent yesterday helping my mother rearrange. I need to build up more endurance- I shouldn't get tired that quickly (I started cramping in the third movement of the sonata I'm playing). My shifts and bow changes are still a little too screwy for comfort, and I have only - ack! - two more days. Well, one more, really. This isn't good.

Notes I made on Friday:

-Thursday night, I noticed that the ink had gone bad again, but instead of going rotten and stinking (as it did last time this happened), its "normal" odor got more intense and I noticed that I was starting to feel a little woozy. I've got to look into whether this Chinese ink can be hallucinogenic. For the time being, I think I'll stick to making it myself. No more of this premixed stuff- we go through it too slowly.

The Ninth Annual Short Attention Span Film Festival played yesterday at the Castro- I wanted to go and see it, but instead I stayed home and practiced because - hey, my concert is on Monday, and I need the work badly. It sounds intriguing, though: 50-odd films, each two minutes or less. Sounds like my kind of film festival.

I tried to resist, because I knew I wouldn't have time, but I just had to stop by the public library yesterday - after all, I was meeting a friend nearby, and it wouldn't hurt, would it? Well... I met my friend, she and her friend decided to go and eat around State, and I went to the public library. I'm glad the librarian found a plastic bag for me, or else I would have dropped a couple of books. As it was, it took a death grip to make sure that none fell out. The collection keeps changing- I look in the computer, and it seems like all the most interesting books get sent to the Main or to other branches. Grr.

-under that: I checked out a book on the Arabic alphabet; it's making my head spin, especially the way they try to explain in words sounds that don't occur in European languages (and: I know what a glottal stop is - I just can't call it up on command.) Time for a tongue-in-cheek question: would anybody who speaks Arabic and reads this be willing to email me/call me and take me through some of these sounds? I could... oh, god knows what I could do in return, be slavishly grateful? You'll have to understand: substandard products of an overworked mind, and this idea is one of them.

Notes I made earlier:

My friends: we've all of us changed. I haven't tried A. or J. or K. yet, but now I'm calling Frannie a lot for - sympathy? an ear? late at night, and things are sort of iffy with Tiff and Al. I don't know...

I'm convinced my notebook-journal rearranges itself when I'm not around; how else to explain how things I write disappear at will, only to reappear months later? (It doesn't help, I suppose, that I write out of order, but I find it suits. And it's more fun - or more embarrassing, whichever - to have to flip through to find things. I discover things about myself that I've forgotten...)

The above might be why I can't find any of my old notes but the ones I just typed.

*Part of my browser just crashed (this is why I use IE over Netscape: if I'm lucky, IE crashes only bits at a time, not all at once like Netscape- then sometimes IE crashes all at once and my computer to boot. You win some, you lose some) so I'm going to cut this short.

As a parting "old note"-

My kimchi fermented.

J