19 XI 2001 - 11:42 - ira6

I have Brahms's Academic Festival Overture in my head, and it's driving me up the wall. What's more, I know exactly why I have it stuck in my head: mwarren was singing it today and complaining about how she had it stuck in her head. Why I still talk to her, I have no idea. Well, it's because she's a wonderful person and she's also the only other music dork at my school, but I think getting this piece stuck in my head still undoes all of that good.

I got out of a science test a little early, and I have about three minutes until I'm supposed to be eating lunch by the computer clock, but judging from the noise in the hall, lunch has already started. *sighs* It's really nice that our school has computers available. I like Macs. Macs are my friends. The keyboards, however, aren't. Since when did they decide ("they" being, oh, I don't know, the computer manufacturers would be logical I guess) that having keyboards with less and less contrast between the keys would be a *good* thing? Not only that; the keys don't work if you don't press down hard on them, which means that I basically have to strike from a distance of about three inches. It's sort of like a loud piano passage which has been played improperly, but even less rewarding. Mark my words, before you know it, keyboards will be coming out that are like those touchpad deals on laptops (which *also* drive me up the wall; bring the trackball back!) - completely flat. After a while, they might decide to get rid of any squares as guides, you know, leading to typing which is even worse than most of my classmates' spelling.

All right, that was mean and totally unfair of me. But it's true. It's as if no one learned how to spell properly. I was lucky; I learned how to spell (although evidently it was at the cost of learning proper arithmetic; on a recent math test, I wrote that 20 + 32 was 42). Unfortunately, that ability, combined with my immanent anal-retentiveness, means that I tend to be rather nitpicky about it. (One word? Hyphenated? I'm not sure...)

After the concert last night, I went out with my family to eat at a Japanese restaurant that my friend's father owns. My friend was out at an OYO concert (why do they insist on scheduling them all on the same day?) but we did run into his older brother, which was nice. He's gotten a little more touchy-feely, which is fine, because I would be a hypocrite if I complained about any invasion of boundaries (yes, nothing's sacred, unless I'm scared... wow! those are anagrams! anyway...) but it's sort of weird talking to him now. The last time I saw him, I was in seventh grade, and the last memories I have of him are of him as a jerk - but that was probably colored by the conversations I had with his younger brother. Now that I don't see his brother as often, since we're at different schools, he seems a lot nicer than I had ever realized he was. We've both had time to change, and indeed, I find that talking to his brother now is sort of like talking to him was just a few years ago. It's sort of sad, really, but I don't have time to humor myself by engaging in little bouts of how-good-things-were, not at my age.

The last few days feel now much as if they happened to someone else. It was mostly being sick that I remember; everything else was filtered through that, and for a while, it was filtered through a haze of aspirin and some weird Chinese medicine as well. I'm slowly getting better, although I appear to have infected most of my friends. It's just that suspension of self that sort of occurs whenever I get busy... I know I sound crazy, but give me a chance to explain. It's sort of, once things start piling up, the goal becomes merely to get through it all - being sick and pushing myself through night concerts and even later rehearsals and a weekend of classes and more rehearsals and, finally, a concert which wasn't half bad - there was a haze which developed around it. I don't remember it all that clearly. I did see a couple of people who used to be in YO and spent a bit of time catching up with them, especially with A. It was nice, but I wish I'd been a bit more present when we met again. Now, I'm just disoriented, and completely unsure of just who at orchestra I'm out to. It's so much simpler at school, where I can work on the assumption that everyone who was here last year knows, and that there is a very efficient gossip network among the freshmen.

Looking at myself in the mirror this morning: I gave up small and cute long ago, and big and imposing will never come. Which means basically that I will always be getting annoying offhand comments like "Oh my God, it's like he's in miniature!" I sort of wish it wouldn't get to me so much, but then again, I can wish that for a lot of things. I don't think I really want it, though, because it tells me I still feel. It's one of my certainties when things around me seem to be in flux.

I always wondered why the Chinese were the yellow men, the cowards, the effeminate, until I looked at my skin and I saw red and white and a little tan and, maybe in some places, a hint of yellow undertone; but you know, it was never that way for my father, or his fathers before him. I don't know why I'm the only one of my family to turn out feeling this lost in the States, I who don't have the easy adjustment of my sisters or the simple old-country frameworks of my parents.

I still wonder why it has to be.

And I'm grateful, too, that I don't live in Sinkiang or Heilongjiang, not so far and yet worlds away from the villages we governed and the cities we haunted not too long ago; that I can read, that I can go to school. But it wears on me, and I feel that something in me dies so much faster than it should. Teenage melodrama? Perhaps. But it's hard to see that from here.

It's so easy to question myself that it's hard to know what's true.

I'm considering courage at one remove re:Blake. But it just seems... so crass somehow. Like I'm foolish enough to do it but not wholeheartedly enough into my foolishness to risk...

Risk what? What the hell would I be risking?

oculus, oculi m. eye
os, oris n. mouth