Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
The trouble with blogging exciting glorious things, at least this weekend, is that everyone who reads my blog already knows all about them. For posterity, though. Five minutes before seminar, I heard Jack Roche talking with someone about deviled eggs. I looked over my shoulder and shouted, "I want deviled eggs!" He shouted back, "You'll have to come to Annapolis, then." I thought he was being torturous finchmeat -- he wasn't. He invited me along. Seminar was me jittering up and down and breathing into my fists a lot. We started off at 11:00 that night. Tennessee is looooong. We had a flat, and I learned how to fix it. My parents forbade me from driving. Why did they make me get a driver's license, then? Fooey. So Nina and Mike drove the entire way and back while me and the other two girls ate pizza popcorn and snored. We got into Annapolis at around 6:40. I snuck into Martin's apartment and saw Moss sleeping in the hall. He didn't wake up. Oop, I gotta go to music. Be back sometime or other.
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(4)
12:29:42 PM,Monday 29 April 2002
I am no longer a skank-ho!
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10:26:10 AM,Monday 29 April 2002
Different kinds:
Sleep nekkid.
Sleep in underwear.
Sleep in pajamas.
Sleep in yesterday's clothes.
Sleep with your boots on.
Sleep in water.
Sleep a heap of warm-blooded creatures.
Sleep in the air with no blanket.
Sleep cocooned.
Sleep in a four-poster with curtains.
Sleep on hot sidewalk.
Sleep in a seat instead of paying attention.
Sleep in a hammock.
Sleep with the lights on.
Sleep with stories playing.
Sleep without caring how or where.
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(7)
06:50:22 AM,Thursday 25 April 2002
The thing that bothers me after all this time is not that I'm afraid to be alone -- I like it very much, almost greedily, sometimes -- or that I'm worried no one else will ever want me; I've always known that I'm made for very peculiar, particular tastes, and it hasn't bothered me that I don't satisfy other peculiar or standard tastes. I don't know why I would want to. It's because somehow there was a mistake; she thought she loved me, said she loved me, and then it turned out a year or so later that she didn't. I didn't understand why she did in the first place, but I took it as something that couldn't be proven. I didn't understand any more than that when she didn't love me, but that's not a bit of faith made into a present like the other one; that's just an edict that doesn't let in any argument.
The funniest thing of all was that she always seemed to love me (when she did love me) in spite of myself. She didn't love my spazziness, my geekiness, my book fetish -- those were just obnoxious tagalongs that she put up with for the sake of something else. What, I don't know. Could be two things, I guess. She wanted somebody, I was there, I stood in almost adequately for a while, by various adaptations and effacements, but something better suited made itself in her imagination or maybe in real life and I was dropped as a bad fit. That seems like the most sensible reason. The other one, the one I believed at the time, was that maybe she did like something in me after all, and it overshadowed the things she didn't like for a while, but then her taste changed, or it didn't prove to be as interesting as she thought it was in the first place.
See, that thing there is what bothers me. I'm worried whenever I meet someone that eventually, after all the niceties are worn out, I'll be judged and then I'll be found out. First impressions I'm all right at; all that stuff she didn't like in me I like in myself pretty well. I mean, it marks me out at the beginning as a sort of amiable oddball. There's people who like amiable oddballs, and there's people who don't, and I don't bear any bad feelings towards either. If they don't care for my style, that's no fault of either of us. If they do, well, it's just a coincidental jiving, like there always is between different sorts of people. It's an aesthetic thing, not a moral one.
But sometimes I worry that the ones I get along with in the little matters will get in close enough to really size me up, and that's when the important things come in. I don't want to be overestimated, because I don't want to disappoint. I feel many times, though, that I invite people to overestimate me, as a sort of bluff. But it falls through. With her I thought if she didn't like me for my pleasant outer-face, any of it, if she could dislike it, even, and still want to be with me for some other reason, I must not be disappointing after all. But now I don't have that tipoff either way. I'm not devastated. I'm just waiting to see if I'm worthy or if I'm not. The trouble is, if I'm not, I don't know what I would do about it. But that's another story.
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(4)
06:41:19 AM,Thursday 25 April 2002
Lookit all these -- and none of 'em's The Burrow! Grarrgh.
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05:37:57 AM,Thursday 25 April 2002
T.I.A.I.L.W.:Mandolin babes.
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(2)
05:03:46 AM,Thursday 25 April 2002
My bathtubs just fell off the wall! And now I can't remember where they go...
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(1)
04:16:32 AM,Thursday 25 April 2002
Whether hunger or ******** or some other reason?
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(2)
02:36:02 PM,Wednesday 24 April 2002
Well, I burned a provisional first copy of my Blogswap CD. I'm gonna listen to it a few more times to make sure it's exactly right before I make mass quantities. I also made up a purty tracklisting. Damn, I'm excited.
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(6)
02:48:55 AM,Wednesday 24 April 2002
I just can't get through the day without my Naked Mole RatCam!
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(4)
08:27:15 PM,Tuesday 23 April 2002
"Where music is shadow, silence is noon.
Under the summer willows, a mazy harmony.
Clouds cast vast moving tunes
that fade across the hill.
Listen to darkness on the shadow side of earth.
Each star a breath, the moon a grand pause
in the everlasting, ever-modulating chord."
-- Ursula LeGuin
I like this. I didn't expect to. Am I right to? Maybe it's just the way she reads it. I've started castigating my own taste again. The last time I did it, it was a rightful purge -- realizing once and for all how godawful Lloyd Weber was, learning to listen to rock music with my ears instead of my memory. Now I'm getting all gulag on my own ass again. "How can you like Die Fledermaus?" I yell. "It's done by one of them waltzing Strausses! Shut that off right now!" "But... I like it," I whine. "I'm allowed to like Operettas, aren't I? Operettas don't have to be good. They're just happy. Pleeeease?" "Well, all right," I answer levelly. "But the second you start buying albums of video game themes done by symphony orchestras, I'm through with you. You hear me?!" Guilty pleasures...
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(5)
08:00:11 PM,Tuesday 23 April 2002
Quiz!
raqapugizw means:
a. to play the parasite or toad-eater
b. to give one a slap on the buttocks
c. to suffer from swellings in the groin
rafanidow
means:
a. a drunken flute player
b. want of intercourse by speech
c. to thrust a radish up the fundament
egcew means:
a. to pour in wine, to fill the cup
b. glutinous, sticky, clammy
c. attached to the nose
filorgioV means:
a. fond of orgies
b. loving the breast
c. loving booty
luzw means:
a. the phallos carried in the festivals of Bacchus
b. to have the hiccough or hiccup
c. to live wantonly, to wanton
--
all definitions from the Middle Liddell.
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(7)
07:19:21 PM,Tuesday 23 April 2002
So the plot was basically that the Buildings and Grounds guys were really a Pythagorean secret society of intellectuals. One of 'em, not thinking, trisected an angle as he was cleaning a classroom, and when it was discovered, the Instruction Committee tried to make him a tutor, but he didn't know whether he wanted to defect from B&G... it meant taking a pay cut...
I played Mr. Duvoisin, and a bit of recorder and trumpet here and there. It went down to great acclaim, and now we have a few parody songs suitable for cross-campus consumption. (the "I'm a Du, a Duvoisin" song, Mr. Bybee's papageno aria, and the Hansoctagon rap, though charming, are probably incomprehensible to the Annapoloid sector, so I'll just put down the other ones.) I figure you can guess what tunes they're to.
Words by Miss Anna Perleberg
Music by Mister Leonard Bernstein
{ahem}
When you're B&G, B&G all the way,
From your first, second, third, to last break of the day
See that blue uniform? Wear it with pride.
Go on, why doncha take a truck out for a ride --
go over the curb and drive up on the sidewalk
those numbers you heard, Dolores calling you on
The walkie talkie!
Then you are set with two capitals, see,
You don't need the Great Books, you got Johnny and me
Once you're B&G, you stay B&G!
...
Once you're a tutor, you'll never go back
From Mhnin to the Dead, the Great Books got your back. Be scathing at don rags, give subjective grades, make free men out of kids -- sure beats learning a trade. Our translations are fine, our lecture prowess fabled; you don't like our kind, we'll growl across the table, "You're disenabled!" We're St. John's tutors, we've got 'em all beat Harvard, Yale, MIT, well they just can't compete. We're St. John's tutors; we'll out-educate every last buggin' faculty in all fifty states! In the whole, fifty, mother, fuckin', staaaaaaates!
...
Sophia!
We're all in pursuit of Sophia!
As old Socrates knows,
it starts with an eros, and gros...
Sophia!
We persevere through aporia!
But if we'll just believe, you'll see...
Sophia!
The corporeal just reflects it.
With the right questions we'll recollect it.
Sophia, we'll never stop seeking Sophia!
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(1)
07:11:55 PM,Tuesday 23 April 2002
Prank 2002
Well, it started out shakily. For once, it wasn't the seniors' fault that our particular seminar prank was lame. We had rigged up all sorts of great stuff -- first, we had three non-Johnny friends of Susie go in and pretend to be prospectives. They sat quietly for the first hour, but at about 9:10, they each cracked open a Guinness and started smooching each other quietly but lasciviously. We were going to project the film of Idomeneo on the wall through the door window -- the scene where Pavarotti in full Greek armor gathers these four golden-haired boys to his chest, embraces them, and stares at the ceiling panting with his mouth open. Problem was, the projector cost $3,000 and Brendan didn't trust us enough not to bust it. So that was out.
The thing was -- it was a Febbie seminar, on the most boring reading in Thucydides (the one where nothing happens except they make alliances and break alliances and hang around waiting to go kill each other), but one of the tutors, Ms. Knight (the one who's been sending me lots of nasty notes 'cause she keeps getting my mail and somehow thinks it's my fault for not telling everyone who could possibly want to have any correspondence with me write 'Mirabai Knight, Student' on everything they send me) is chair of Steve Canny's oral committee, and she asked him not to prank until 9:30. What could he do?
The plan was to bust in, divide the table into quarters -- Spartans, Athenians, Sicilians, and Corcyrans -- pass around the three gallons of mulled wine we'd made specially, and play dirty ancient Greek word games. I think I'll post 'em in my next entry, to see how well y'all would have done. Then we were gonna go down to the fishpond where we'd rigged up two paper boats floating on frisbees and four mousetraps made into hand-held catapults which would fling flaming cottonballs soaked in Everclear into the boats, and the first team to set the other one's boat on fire got to keep the bottle. It would've been grand. Unfortunately, by 9:25 every other seminar in the school had already been pranked, which the Febbies could hear out their window. They got so antsy that they kept trickling out to get drinks of water and found us waiting, steely-eyed, in the hall. One of 'em went crazy, filled up a plastic fireman's helmet he found in the hall with water, and dumped it all over me and Steve Canny. That caused a riot, of course, and so all the febbies just bust the door down and ran out screaming before we even got a chance to prank 'em. Finches.
Other than that, though, it was grand. I'll post about the Prank Skit next.
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07:01:07 PM,Tuesday 23 April 2002
I found my Rosenberg 7 CD! Yay yay yay yay!
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(1)
06:30:55 PM,Tuesday 23 April 2002
Nyaaaaah!
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(2)
11:04:13 PM,Monday 22 April 2002
"Bene, ego quid ista significet dico, iam poteris."
Ita Bubo scripsit... et ecce inscriptio:
FLICM FELCM NTAALM TATALM TATATALM.
Pu mirabundus spectabat.
"Dico: filicem natalem," dixit Bubo obiter.
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(3)
05:09:38 PM,Monday 22 April 2002