Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
Mirabai: remember to take your mother's CDs out of the CD player before you go to the airport. And don't fall asleep until after 6:00. Man, Cassie's right... it is a strange thing to refer to yourself by name. I think that's partly why I sign off as "Fafner" or "M.K.K."; I don't mind other people calling me "Mirabai", but it feels importunate, somehow, to do it myself. I mean, I talk to myself all the time, and if I thought of myself as "Mirabai", who would I be addressing? Which voice would deserve the name? Neither. That makes it so much less confusing.
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(2)
03:56:57 AM,Tuesday 6 May 2003
I've often read that the human tongue can sense only four (or is it five, with umami?) flavors: salty, sweet, sour, and bitter, and that all the other subtle delicacies of what we think of as the flavor in food is really a mingling of those four (five) in combination with the food's scent, as perceived by our nose, acting in concert with the tongue. So what I'm wondering is... what does food taste like when your tongue's been cut out?
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(3)
02:35:14 AM,Tuesday 6 May 2003
I've hurt my mother very badly, because I don't love enough. I love her more than anything I could possibly name, but I don't love her enough to put aside my idleness and discomfort and help her with the one thing she's ever asked of me. I loved St. John's and the four years I spent there more than any other time or place I've ever been, but I didn't love it enough to do anything that didn't come easy, and I betrayed it -- betrayed myself; it doesn't care -- by doing everything I did there with a slipshod resentment of the work, even when I enjoyed it, even when I wanted to do it justice.
I love my family, my music, my friends, and I push them all aside for inert isolation and chaos and mess. Every weekend, I think "I finally have time, now that I'm not working. I can read, go for a walk, clean my room, write, practice, enjoy myself -- do something with all this infinite richness and opportunity and ease I've been given." But every weekend I sit on my ass and stare into space and sleep and wake up and do it again, and then I go back to work. And the only time I actually feel happy is when I'm scrubbing toilets and cleaning mirrors and showering D. at the group home. 'Cause that's the only time I respect myself. Even then, I'm doing it for money, not love, but I don't resent it. I just do it, and it makes me happy to do it.
I can't be like this forever. Can I? Will I? Will I choose to be? Selfish, self-absorbed, sucking up the goodwill and pleasure from everything around me and transmuting it into bloated hoarded nothing. If I loved enough, hard work would still be hard, but it wouldn't matter. Vacuuming would still be a drag, but it wouldn't matter. I still wouldn't know how to write a cover letter, but I'd do it anyway, and it would show my mom what I truly think of her, her book, the incredible hours of diligence she's given it, and me. I could be grateful. But I make the choice not to be, again and again and again and again. It's disgusting.
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(4)
11:19:21 PM,Sunday 4 May 2003
Unmentionables, Langour, and Marmite Breath at Three in the Morning.
Life ain't so bad, after all.
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04:59:59 AM,Sunday 4 May 2003
The Seria Killers vs. The Ismo Kids -- Tonight on Pay-Per-View!
I hate those goddamn Ismo Kids.
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04:57:13 AM,Sunday 4 May 2003
Edward Lear came to my bedchamber last night,
wearing a washcloth and carrying a flashlight.
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(3)
04:20:17 AM,Sunday 4 May 2003
"Now farewell, dearest friend, dearest Hikkiti Horky! That is your name, as you must know. We all invented names for ourselves on the journey. Here they are: I am Punkitititi. My wife is Schabla Pumfa. Hofer is Rozka Pumpa. Stadler is Notschibikitschibi. My servant Joseph is Sagadarata. My dog Goukerl is Schomanntzky. Madame Quallenberg is Runzifunzi. Mlle. Crux is Rambo Schurimuri. Freistaedtler is Gaulimauli. Be so kind so as to tell him his name."
-- W. A. Mozart
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05:44:06 PM,Monday 28 April 2003
Was ever woman in this manner won?
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(1)
11:53:27 AM,Monday 28 April 2003
I'm in the library, and for the past half hour, I have heard a mellifluous but slightly stammering voice having a conversation by the front desk. I swear it sounds absolutely in every way like Neil's -- so of course, fearing that he missed his plane and had to come back here to find help, raced up there to find him. But it turned out to be Beata Ruhm von Oppen.
The past several days have been such, such bliss. I am tremendous happy, etched with delicate little lines of wrenching sadness for only having this a little while longer and then not again for a year.
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(1)
11:50:40 AM,Monday 28 April 2003
Just checked on the official SJC webpage, and they say the game's been postponed on account of rain. Set for 1:00 tomorrow. Finches. But what do they do if it's still raining then? Anyway... what are the lot of us planning to do with our unexpected day of leisure?
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(6)
09:26:20 AM,Saturday 26 April 2003
From the seatpocket leaflet in the tiny plane from Missoula to Billings:
"Q. What is that rumbling?
A. Again, a sound from which to draw solace."
From the lady with the Jamaican accent who gave me my cheeseburger at the Minneapolis McDonalds:
"You came to the right place -- you'd better rope up your shoes and tie them. You're gonna slip and fall over."
And when I was waiting for the metro, I saw a lady down below in a brown coat standing behind a metal sign. It was only when she walked away that I realized she wasn't a bass fiddle.
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(6)
09:00:32 AM,Saturday 26 April 2003
AIEEEEEEEE! I'M GOING! I'M ACTUALLY GONNA BE THERE! JUUUUUUUUUUUBILATION!!!!
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(1)
11:33:18 AM,Friday 25 April 2003
I must have one of the few jobs where I can yell "Call me when you're naked!" on a daily basis and not get sued.
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04:27:14 PM,Thursday 24 April 2003
Lordy. I composed the blog I'm about to blog last week, or maybe the week before, when I was sweeping the Easy Street kitchen floor. But I didn't blog it, because every time I sat down to do it it seemed formless and trivial. Now, though, I'm in the mood where I know rationally that if I don't go to sleep very soon the consequences will be dire, but can't seem to put myself into a universe in which it is at all possible that I've ever slept, or will ever sleep again. I lost all the staples from my trouser leg, and now it's flapping like a rook. I did a sort of quasi-oriental claw dance while my mother was talking Norwegian on the phone, did two loads of laundry, quoted several execrable poems (from Pegasus Descending, a godsend in moods like these) into my jukebox, and blew non-popping bubbles all over the stairwell, and now I've run out of things. There's half a jar of caviar in the fridge, though. No, I'll blog it after all. But it's dwindled a bit in the time it's had to spend puttering around my mind and getting dingy. God... the pigeons are getting bold. They used to live on the neighbors' roof, until they put up one of those freaky whirling exorcist owl sculptures. Now they're sitting on our windowsill and actually pecking the pane. The gall. The actual blog I meant to blog:
My parents have this CD put out by some sort of Bulgarian religious community who call themselves IDEAL. It's not really my cup of tea, but it's nice enough -- sweet-voiced choral music, mostly original compositions. Very traditional harmonic structures. Somehow, though, I trust them, just because of this CD. It's not a cult, my heart tells me, if they devote themselves to something concrete. I mean, God, Love, Holiness, Purity, all that... those words can be twisted and deformed easy as play-dough in a garlic press. But the laws of harmony, they're concrete. You build a religious order around the laws of harmony, it can't be corrupted, can it? I sort of feel the same way about religious hospitals. Whatever unavoidable bullshit there is in any religion, and whatever potentially horrific bullshit there can be in some, has to give way to the laws of health, death, and sickness. Fervor's subdued by fact. Both medicine and music are antidotes to the dangerous effects of coercive ideologies. Says I.
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(10)
03:34:06 PM,Tuesday 22 April 2003
I dislike the following colors: Red, White, Brown, Pink, and Orange. Except in Nature.
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(3)
03:20:21 PM,Tuesday 22 April 2003
Sometimes all I want to be is facile.
Sometimes all I want to be is easy.
They mean two different things, but they're both true.
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01:42:52 PM,Tuesday 22 April 2003
Double damn. This is the part where I kvetch peevishly. I've been up all night, and a good hour or two of that was spent in Wal-Mart, so you'll understand if I'm not my usual upright stoic self. I've been burning blogswap CDs and they're making me a nervous wreck. On one CD player, they work perfectly. On another, they make a horrible hideous hiss. On another, they only work after the player winds itself up while groaning for twenty seconds. I'm worried that the fancy new labels have something to do with it, but I figure if anyone else has the same problem, they can just peel the labels off and they'll be serviceable. Dunno about that hiss, though. Blah. And I've ruined three CDs already due to my damn crashing laptop. It only started doing this a few weeks ago, after I got it back from my brother, and it seems only to do it when the CD-ROM's running, but it worries me, 'cause the one I had previously, the same model, which I exchanged for this one when it was still under warranty, used to shut itself off with no warning in just the same way. The battery's a flopping codfish, too -- supposed to run for three hours at the least, but I'm lucky if I get forty minutes out of it at full charge. All right. I'm done with the kvetch. It's a glorious day and I get to sleep all the way through it... bliss. And the days are shriveling steadily. It's so soon I don't know what to do with myself.
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(1)
12:15:57 PM,Monday 21 April 2003
I finally finished my blogswap CD. I'm burning the master copy right now. I'm kinda proud of it, if I do say so... lord knows if anyone else can stand to listen to it, but I like all the stuff on there, so it won't be wasted time no matter. Lord, Croquet is fast approaching. I'm getting a little more apoplectic with joy every day. By the time I get there, I'll look like I've got St. Vitus's Boogie Woogie Flu.
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(2)
02:26:03 PM,Sunday 20 April 2003