bloglet - last updated Wednesday 16 April 2003 at 11:41:00 PM

Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup --
Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup

No-Time Toulouse. _
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11:41:00 PM, Wednesday 16 April 2003

Pleonasty. What the hell does it mean? I hope it isn't catching. _
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08:29:49 PM, Tuesday 15 April 2003

My hip swinging bachelor pad just got 23% more pimpalicious! My dad picked up a computer speaker and subwoofer for $1.99, and then (the stud) not only dug up a power supply for it and soldered a connector cord out of scraps, but when I decided I wanted another speaker, so it and the other two computer speakers I've been using (which I picked up for $5 in Towson, sans power supply, a substitute for which my father graciously located and, since the plug was the wrong size, hardwired into them) could hook into my quadraphonic jukebox (which we spray-painted silver yesterday and damn, does it look sweet), he found one moldering on one of his treasure heaps in the basement, sniffed out a power supply for that, and soldered a double-male mono connector quicker than you could say "check for short and continuity"... so I got 'em stacked all around my bed, two at the head, one at the foot, the subwoofer under the bedside table, and one floating like a cherub on my windowframe. I'm listening to quiet quiet cornetto music right now, 'cause we woke up my mom blasting Hildegard von Bingen techno earlier, and she was righteously pissed, but oooooh! it's so beautiful I could plotz. _
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03:21:19 AM, Tuesday 15 April 2003

My ma had me make her up some CDs, and, after listening to them, I realized they were pretty good. I know kids are supposed to hate their parents' music, but I thought only one song (Rod Stewart) on here was utterly stomach-turningly godawful, and one song (Elvis) just this side of too cheesy to appreciate. But the rest is all pretty nifty. I asked, and she said it would be fine by her if any of you guys wanted one or both of 'em for your own. I'd just ship 'em out with my blogswap mix, or deliver 'em alongside to Croquet.

Music to Write My Cookbook By
mix by Karin Knight

CD I:

Love Is Teasin' -- Marianne Faithful and the Chieftains
Mo Ve'la Bella Mia Da La Muntagna -- Matteo Salvatore
She Loves So Good -- Phil Alvin
Via Con Me -- Paolo Conte
Deeply Sorry -- Chuck E. Weiss
Love Me Tender -- Elvis Presley
Empty Bed Blues -- Sam Price
Time Is Winding Up -- Ginny Hawker and Carol Elizabeth Jones
Mi Ranchito -- Linda Ronstadt
Spurv På En Snor -- Leonard Cohen
Across the Universe -- The Beatles
I Cover the Waterfront -- Billie Holiday

CD II:

It Had To Be You -- Rod Stewart
Testimony -- Brother Joe May
California Dreamin' -- The Mamas and the Papas
Shine on Harvest Moon -- Hank Williams, Jr.
Ballad of the Absent Mare -- Leonard Cohen
Summertime -- Louis Armstrong
Mazir Main Maziq (Drowning in a Sea of Fire) -- The Sabri Brothers
Didn't Leave Nobody but the Baby -- Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss, and Gillian Welch
Vienta Del Sur -- Katia Cardenal
Bike -- Pink Floyd
Big City Life -- Gerry Mulligan
All That Jazz -- Kander & Ebb
Fumblin' With The Blues -- Tom Waits _
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09:40:00 PM, Monday 14 April 2003

Your search - "minuet minuet revolution" - did not match any documents.

Your search - "gavotte gavotte revolution" - did not match any documents.

Your search - "chaconne chaconne revolution" - did not match any documents.

Sighhhhhh... _
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05:37:01 AM, Monday 14 April 2003

Me and my mom were watching a movie last night, and my dad comes in with a box of cream puffs. He foists them on us and sits on the foot of the bed. "I went to mass today," he says. We kind of boggle, 'cause as far as either of us know, he hadn't set foot in a church since my brother's wedding, and god knows how many decades before that. He was beaten by nuns a lot, back when, so you can hardly blame him. We asked him what inspired him to go all of a sudden. "Oh, I don't know, one of those spur-of-the-moment impulses. I figured you're supposed to listen to them, right?" "So, how was it?" "Humph. Nothing like when I was a kid. The inside of the church was beautiful, with the paintings on the ceiling and the organ pipes, but there was no Latin! No mystery! No incense! Well, ok, there was a little bit of incense, but the two priests just sat up there and had the lay people do all the work. Their vestments weren't all that nice, and the sermon was nothing special, and the congregation was singing instead of the choir! It was like a protestant service -- like a low-grade protestant service, almost Presbyterian, even. The lay people even handed out the host. That was just never done. I tell you, a lot has changed since I was a believer. It's no fun anymore." My mom started waving her hands around triumphantly. "Yay! You don't know how long we've been working on this! The Catholics are defeated! The Lutherans have finally won!" _
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04:04:20 PM, Sunday 13 April 2003

I'm in my bathrobe. It's nearly two in the morning. Mid-afternoon, by my schedule. What I really want to do is leave the house and stalk the streets, lurk in darkness, glint malevolently through the haze of fog and sodium lamps while my footsteps echo through the oblivion of the empty city. But it's raining, damnit, and I'm worried it'll get my jukebox wet. I've got to work on my blogswap mix, that's certain, and there's really no good reason why I shouldn't do it in the sanctity and comfort of my bed, but what's the good of working graveyard if you can't be a specter on your nights off? I could go down to the Oxford and see if tonight will be the night I find I have the stomach for scrambled eggs and cow's brains... or I could go to Bonner park and sit in the dugout and work on the blogswap... or I could walk up the mountain and look out over the valley and pretend to be angst-ridden and melancholy... or I could try to break into the underground tunnels, though I don't have any idea how to get to them. I wonder if there are any clues on the internet? Lemme look. Couldn't find anything.

Once, in high school, I got to spend a whole school day in the tunnels under Hellgate, reading The Cask of Amontillado for English classes, and I thought I saw a door leading to another tunnel, presumably to the main network of 'em, but I didn't try to follow it. I stayed where I was and read the graffiti from the '40's. Good stuff. Classier than what you get most times these days. I think the rain's stopped. It should just be good and damp and atmospheric out there by now, right? Right. I'll gird my loins and step out. _
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03:59:37 AM, Sunday 13 April 2003

I've been waiting for days to have some sort of divine afflatus in the way of blogging, but nothing's happened, so I guess I gotta fall back on the old day to day drone.

Speaking of drones, I'm reading P.G. Wodehouse's Tales from the Drones Club, and it's lovely. I was reading Isak Dineson, but I decided to put her down and go back to her after I've filled up on silliness for a while. I don't read as much as I used to, though, and it bugs me. I don't know what's to blame... I'm figuring either St. John's, Sara, or the Internet. One of 'em gave me so much good stuff to read, I felt guilty about reading anything else; one of 'em just didn't like me reading, and I felt guilty when I did; and one gives me so much ephemeral stuff to read, I wind up frittering my time away on it instead of books, feeling guilty all the while. Fooey. I get a couple hours at my job to do whatever I wanna, but the T.V.'s going all the time there, and it's distracting. That thing about habit being the groundswell of virtue, though... it's dead-on.

What else was I gonna write? I plotted out this whole long blog, brimming with wisdom and wit, while I was sweeping the kitchen floor last night, and now there's nothing but d'aaaaaah... Um. It's spring. The birds are at it twelve hours a day. We might get to plant another plum tree, and I can see the trains and the river and the mountains in full sunlight by the time I leave work in the morning.

Oh yeah, I remember what I was going to write... there are two cats at my group home, Iaro and Kaspar (I don't know how to spell their names; it could just as well be Yarrow and Casper. I didn't realize until recently how maddening it is to me to know someone's name without knowing how to spell it). One's little and aggressively affectionate and the spitting image of Roger from Diesel Sweeties. The other has long silver fur, with a dark noble face, likes butting his head against peoples' heads (actually, I'm not completely sure he's a boy; his fur's too long to see properly), and is dying of cancer. He's got a huge horrible tumor on his shoulders. It's been growing rapidly in the three months I've worked there. He's still eating well, and washing himself, and has enough pep to jump up and open the door by clocking the handle, and he doesn't seem to be in pain, but how can you tell with cats? I think what hurts him the most is that everyone finds him disturbing and gross, and won't pet him, no matter how much he begs... even me, I rub his head a little, and let him sit next to me on the sofa, but I'm so scared I'll hurt him, and I worry what's been getting caught in his coat during his night travels that he can't reach back and groom out because of that thing on his back. I wonder if he knows he's dying.

Oy. I dunno. I'm naked and well-fed and happy. And isolated and at peace. Nothing much gets to me anymore, which is bad, maybe, but I think it's just temporary. I'm dormant, like a cicada. I could go play my violin or I could go play Super Metroid. I've got an hour and a half 'til work. Sometimes it's hard not to be a solipsist... it's the blogmass that saves me from that. Well, and my parents, but even if I'm the only human being on earth, that doesn't preclude them from existing -- they're obviously the gods above me. But you guys, what you write isn't just great and massively more than I could ever hatch up by myself, 'cause the books I read are that too, but you're alive. You keep writing, every day, and the words are there in neat rows every time I wake up. It'll be a shock to see you in the flesh again, though. It'll be wonderful. _
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09:58:02 PM, Friday 11 April 2003

My mom just tried to convince me that an omelette made with strawberries, vinegar, margarine, and yogurt was good. I think she's lost it. _
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05:41:52 PM, Sunday 6 April 2003

The place where I work has cable. Woe be it unto me.

T.I.A.I.L.W.: Christine Cavanaugh. _
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09:46:31 AM, Sunday 6 April 2003

It staggers me how bloody incredible you guys are. The blogmass is around 4/5 of the delight I take in life. And considering how studly the other 1/5 has been lately, that's saying something. I've gotten through all the blogs (except the non blt-tracked ones), but haven't done any of the comments yet. I've only been at it around three hours; was gonna start earlier, but me and my ma wound up watching the last two acts of Le Nozze di Figaro and then we were like what the hell so we watched the last two acts of Norma and then she kicked me out of her room but it was pretty late by that point. My brain has, for a long time, been curdling under the relentless influence of the Pernicious Opera Leech, but it's been getting especially bad lately. [BRAZEN LISTING OF LOOT TO FOLLOW. IGNORE IGNORE IGNORE.] In the space of, like, two weeks, I got a free Idomeneo from some random guy on the internet who I'd never met, a massive package of 12 video tapes (Idomeneo, Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute, Macbeth, Falstaff, La Serva Padrona, and another Pergolesi opera whose name I can't even remember) for thirty bucks, that Met Quiz windfall, with The Saint of Bleecker Street, Jenufa, Il Trovatore, La Boheme, A View From the Bridge, and Pelleas et Melisande, not to mention the $100 gift certificate, with which I bought DVDs of Norma and Semiramide, a VHS of Janet Baker's Orfeo ed Euridice (rrrrowwwl), and Luisa Miller, which I gave to my benefactress, who had flown me out to New York and gotten me freaking spitting-distance seats from an INSANELY glorious production of Ariadne Auf Naxos. I mean, fuck me. Yipes. Plus I finally found a videotape of Yidl Mitn Fidl, to boot, and it's as divine as I ever coulda hoped. So, uh. Yeah.

Nuffa that. I just bought my plane ticket to Croquet, WOOO! Anyone with tips on how to get to Annapolis from Reagan International and back in the dead of night should come forward and receive my eternal gratitude. I can't wait. To see some of you in the flesh... eeeeeh! Glory! Maybe I'll start blogging something of substance again sometime. 'Til then, I'm going to bed to work on my blogmix some more. Or maybe to the bathtub to read. Ain't decided yet. And tomorrow I'll read all the comments that have been piling up for ages and rejoice again that I've got such pithy and heartful and sweet and indefatigable acquaintances such as y'all. _
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09:00:05 AM, Sunday 6 April 2003

AAAAaaaAAaaAAaaAAAH!

One of my questions was accepted on the Metropolitan Opera Quiz! But it aired LAST WEEK. While I was SLEEPING!

AARRRRRGH! And WHEEEEEE! And AARRRRGGGH! _
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02:17:56 PM, Thursday 27 March 2003

Rashers, Jarlsberg, malted milk, strained yogurt with gooseberries and honey. _
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11:39:11 AM, Wednesday 26 March 2003

I think what I'd really like to be is a conductor. I mean, what a job -- stand in the thick of glorious music, bow every soul to your whim, work nights, wear a tux, sleep with all the divas, shoot your mouth off, wave a lovely little stick, and if the intonation is off, it's never your fault... lord, how perfect! Unfortunately, I have neither the talent nor the temperament. Nor the Natural Authoritah, as Aristotle would say. And even if I did, I have no idea how someone with a liberal arts degree would go about breaking into the field. There's also the snag that seems to confront me in every highflown career I consider -- all the positions below the tippy-top are pretty hellish. Who wants to lead some two-bit podunk community college orchestra in Butte? If I don't get to be Toscanini, I don't wanna play. Heh. Maybe I could be the world's greatest yeast extract connoisseur. Yeah, that sounds easier. Sign me up. _
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04:12:02 AM, Tuesday 25 March 2003

T.I.A.O.M.I.L.W.: Brigitte Fassbaender. But only 'cause I can't for the life of me find a picture of Maggie Smith as that hot dour nurse in Death on the Nile. Rrrrowwl. This blogswap CD is going to kill me, or at least humiliate me. And that's if I can actually pull it off, which is looking increasingly unlikely.

I like this life of idleness, though. I've started playing video games again, and whole weekends go by when I don't wear a stitch of clothing. My job is fun and I dig my parents and next weekend I get to go to an opera! The living is easy. But I'm starting to despise myself a bit. There's a Leonard Cohen song that goes: "Let me be somebody I admire -- let me be that muscle down the street. Stick another turtle on the fire -- guys like me are mad for turtle meat." I had a dream about eating turtle meat the other day, but that's nothing to do with this. What I mean is...

I've got the same complex as that pathetic creep: I want to be like the people who give me so much pleasure and envy, the writers and composers and poets and scholars and wits (I'm using the same words I used an archive page or so ago, 'cause I'm talking about the same thing, only in a little more detail, see) but that's the level that it burns the hardest on -- the ego. It's my self respect that suffers, not the rest of me. Real creators, so I've been told, suffer when they're not creating, 'cause they have such a tremendous amount of thought and feeling burbling inside them that they've got to give it outlet. Everything else gets silenced in the face of that.

But me, I just suffer because I realize that there's nothing but tumbleweeds where there should be fonts of brilliance, and because I can't seem to shut up the nattering voice that insists I'm worthless if I don't give myself over to art and passion (or, alternately, become a saint, but that's a bit too ambitious even for my swollen ego). It's forcing myself to crave turtle meat when I'm not hungry and couldn't stomach the stuff if I was.

But there is a choice to make, and I keep stalling. Either I figure out a way to live fully and deeply without producing anything of any note (except, I suppose, children -- but for God's sake I'm too young to be thinking of that right now), or I decide to see if I have it in me to be something more than I have been 'til now. But, if it's all springing out of nothing but ego and envy, what good could it be? And what do I do with myself if I see that it's not good, after I give it all that I am? What a stupid, petty question. It's very telling, I think. _
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10:15:57 PM, Monday 24 March 2003

Finches, I wish I had broadband. Jeanette Winterson interviewed at Glyndebourne. I hope the two short stories she wrote for 'em aren't gone forever... I want to read 'em, damnit. I've decided to move to England after my stint in Antarctica. I just don't know what I'll live on. I have a bachelor of arts in liberal arts. I was thinking: proofreader, cheesemaker, holding horses outside the Globe, roadie for a touring opera company, gigolo, or... I dunno what else. Damn Glyndebourne doesn't seem to have any grunt jobs available, at least not listed on their site. And work visas are impossible to come by anyway, but... but... finches. _
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11:27:44 AM, Saturday 22 March 2003

In other news: hot milk with malt and melted carob. _
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11:24:16 PM, Friday 21 March 2003

One of my mom's friends (the one whose son had the "Nouveau-Moderne Moroccan Cowboy" wedding) was talking to her the other day about me. Another one of my mom's friends had a birthday party, and we were all there. Everyone was sozzled but me. My dad had two martinis and started making wildly improper advances to my mother in the middle of her hourlong toasting speech. I laughed my ass off. So later her friend says to my mom, "I saw another side of Mirabai that night. I never knew she could be like that." For some reason, it was kind of disturbing to me to think that in the many times we've been in the same room together, I always came off as some sort of serious-minded scowling scholar type or something. I mean, argh. I ain't serious. I don't want people to think I'm serious. I like screwing around and drinking Kool-Aid and watching Beavis and Butthead. It's just... well, when my brother was in college, he'd come up on holidays and eat Captain Crunch with me and stuff me in the oven and convince me that his combat boots were the only thing saving the world by extinction from his toxic socks and he had a mohawk and he invented a wearable computer and he sent me secret codes and Klopstockian nose flies and we'd go target shooting at pictures of cafeteria food and Margaret Thatcher... and now, he's as awesome as ever, what with his hydra asses and his incredible computer programs, and now I can even carry on a conversation with him, more or less... or try to, in my stumbling bumblepuppy kinda way... but he's all... serious. A lot of the time, at least. He's still silly when we play the dictionary game and when Robert does impressions of him and in little random moments when the mood hits him right, but he's... a grown-up. God help me, I don't wanna be a grown-up. And I don't wanna be serious. I don't know what I wanna be, but serious ain't it. Oof. _
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11:23:41 PM, Friday 21 March 2003

Do you remember the futuristic innovation the cartoons told us we were supposed to get, along with flying cars and nutrition pills and robot domestic servants? The little machine that you sit in and fasten your limbs to and it flexes them all around and gives you muscles. I want one, of course, but I still can't decide if it's a fallacious idea or not. I mean, the problem with why I'm a flabby bastard comes down to a matter of will -- I like having things done to me, even if they involve slight pain or discomfort, more than actually doing things, even if they're not any more taxing than choosing to lift my arm up and down a few times over. But would a machine like this work, or not? On the one hand, your muscles are having to relax and contract whenever they're bent, and that seems like it should stimulate the tissue to some degree, no matter who's making the decision to do the flexing, but on the other hand, you're not doing any of the actual work; all the weight you might put on the thing is being pushed around by the machine, and not you -- 10 pounds or a hundred, your muscles shouldn't know the difference. Right? Now, of course, in the cartoons, your arms and legs got bent up and down so rapidly you hardly knew what hit you, but if they're not acting against any particular force, that won't get you very far. Disappointing. _
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11:04:09 PM, Thursday 20 March 2003

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