Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
I'm on the couch in the living room, editing a transcript.
My girl is in the kitchen, using a zucchini on a mandoline as a percussion instrument to accompany a Fiona Apple song.
Hot damn, I love my life.
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06:15:05 PM,Thursday 10 January 2013
Prosicated asked me to describe what my life was like at 17, as part of the "where I was at age..." meme. So here it is.
17 (March 17th 1998 - 1999) was a wonderful year. It was my last semester of high school, the summer of my first job, and my first semester of college.
One of my senior photos.
High school for me was all about drama and band. I remember our band bought the ship's bell from the USS John Philips Sousa and wound up using it in a suite inspired by Moby Dick, which at that time I'd never read. I had no inkling that it would become one of my favorite novels; I just enjoyed playing the bassoon solo in the Queequeg movement. I failed my last semester of math class, but I didn't need it to graduate. I'd gotten my acceptance letter to SJC in October, so I got even slackier than usual about doing homework and studying for tests, though I always went to class. My trumpet teacher offered me a summer gig at the Bigfork Summer Playhouse, and I jumped at the opportunity. It was a hell of a first job. Got to live with 30 actors in a concrete bunker, four to a room, and played Cabaret, The Will Rogers Follies, The Boys From Syracuse, and Grease (bleh!) in repertory. When I wasn't in the pit, I walked around in the woods, swam in the lake, or watered the flowers for the lady who ran the bookstore. It was bliss. Come fall, I went off to St. John's. I started learning Greek, found the Storytellers Guild (a club that sat around a fire with cookies and milk reading kids' stories to each other), who are still pretty much my oldest friends. Sadly, I haven't kept up much with my friends from high school, other than on Facebook in the most glancing and cursory way. It's kind of sad. But the college friendships are still going strong, even after so many years apart. My roommate (who I haven't kept up with, I'm sad to say) was this lovely oboe player who said she didn't mind the everpresent smell of Marmite emanating from my side of the room because it reminded her of when she worked in a bakery, bless her. We played in a wind trio with a tutor for a while, until we got too busy. I wasn't a very good student. Again, I'd go to class and enjoy myself tremendously, and I was good about doing the readings, but I never worked through the math problems, so when I had to do Euclid propositions, I'd just be flailing around. My papers were just godawful, because not only were they always started at about 2:00 am the night before they were due, but at that time I had this winceworthy highfalutin prose style that must have made my tutors seasick just to read through. Freakin' 17-year-olds, man. Pretentious wankers. But I was a happy-go-lucky one, at least. Had my first real crush, though that fizzled quickly enough when I learned how boy-crazy she was. I joined the Pink Triangle Society and was abruptly made archon when the previous archon quit, but it was mostly boys and one long-time couple, so I wasn't exactly overwhelmed with romantic prospects. Still a virgin, never been kissed, etc. I was going a bit nuts from it, but I held up okay. I worked in the dishpit with my beautiful friend Neil, also of the Pink Triangle Society, and we kept each other sane through the turmoil of that first disorienting semester.
My Freshman dorm room
Best Memory: Probably singing in Freshman Chorus. Just being in a big room, standing shoulder to shoulder with a hundred fellow freshmen, most of them not particularly musical, being forced into polyphony, and somehow combining to make this vast, rough-edged, beautiful noise. When I'm sad, I sometimes think myself back into the thick of that class, and it always buoys me up.
Worst Memory: Hearing my crush inform me (speaking about her crush), "I want to drink the sweat from his body." Hork.
Relationship: Zilch. See above. But I was pretty damn happy, for all that. If I'd been able to get into some kind of training wheels relationship before that point, I might not have fallen into such a disastrous thing the following summer, but that's another story...
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06:31:30 PM,Tuesday 4 December 2012
Every morning I get out at the 23rd Street subway stop, and it's like running the gauntlet. First thing I see is one of those disgusting anti-Muslim "Savages" ads, and I'm like "Grrrrr." Then I walk a little farther and see two pro-Muslim ads from Rabbis for Human Rights and Sojourners, and I'm like "Yaaaay!" Then I walk a little farther and I see an ad for the Church of Scientology, and I'm like "Eeuuccch." Then I climb the stairs, get on the bus, and start my day.
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07:10:30 AM,Tuesday 23 October 2012
Dmitri Fyodorovich Spermatogonium Amadeus Theophilus Gottlieb Knight. 1994-2012. A beautiful loving grumpy soft stubborn gentle importunate dog-hating loyal generous self-possessed mischievous noble wonderful cat.
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08:12:34 PM,Monday 3 September 2012
K: Eating Astronaut Ice Cream is like eating the ghost of a baby that halvah had with chalk.
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02:05:34 PM,Tuesday 21 August 2012
Just had to restore Windows (keeping my files intact but writing over the OS) on my old computer, due to a nasty virus that I couldn't get rid of. After the restore, it seemed to be working pretty well, except that the version of Chrome was really old (I hadn't used this computer for over a year), and when I tried to use it to install a new version of Chrome, it wouldn't download. And when I tried to run Firefox, nothing happened. So I used an old version of Chrome to download a new version of Firefox so I could download a new version of Chrome. Silly computer.
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10:39:49 PM,Wednesday 8 August 2012
At K.'s birthday party last night, I invented a cocktail I call The Fountain of Youth. I know it was supposed to be in Florida, not Mexico, but they were all Spanish territories once. Anyway, here's how to make one:
Fill a large martini glass with ice.
Add two parts good tequila (I used Patron)
Add one part St. Germain Elderflower liqueur
Add one part tonic
Garnish with a wedge of lime
The idea is to focus on the flavor of the tequila, moderating and deepening it somewhat with the St. Germain, and bringing it all into focus with the bite of the tonic. We tried making one with seltzer and it really wasn't the same. But this version seemed to go over well with the partygoers, so I thought maybe you guys would like it too.
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05:28:28 PM,Sunday 29 July 2012
M: It talks about the Crab Canon, which is a legitimately awesome thing that Bach wrote.
K: I'm disappointed that it's not a legitimately awesome thing that Bach shot. During the war.
M: Boom! Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack-clack! Boom! Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack!
K: Exactly.
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09:59:54 AM,Saturday 28 July 2012
M (editing transcript): Have you heard of a drug called Marcumar?
K: And the Funkabun?
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06:24:35 PM,Friday 29 June 2012
M (transcribing an ophthalmology interview): Do you suffer from Posterior Crocodile Shagreen?
K: No, but I'm afraid I might have a touch of Dorsal Caiman Ennui.
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06:00:34 PM,Friday 22 June 2012
I usually only caption plays once after previewing them once, but there's one play Off-Broadway (actually in the Village) that I've captioned twice after previewing it twice. I'm captioning it again today and again next month. It's about deafness and stars a Deaf actor, so that's why they've requested additonal captioned performances. Anyway, I just picked up the captioning sign at my boss's apartment, which is a big fancy new condo building in Queens that smells just like the hotel I lived in back in Towson. And then I dropped the sign off at the theater, which smells just like the theater I worked at for four summers in Bigfork. So I'm getting a dose of time-shifted recollection today. Riding through the city in a cab (which I very rarely do) makes me realize how much I love it here, though. Long Island City to Midtown to the Flatiron to Little India to the West Village, and after I finish the gig, back to LIC to drop off the sign and then home to Washington Heights, my favorite neighborhood of them all... It's been almost eight years since I moved here, and I still can't believe my luck.
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11:22:41 AM,Saturday 16 June 2012
Today I made a birthday mix for my mom, but you guys can listen to it too, if you want.
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03:11:10 PM,Thursday 31 May 2012
K.: "Does Bugs Bunny have a New York accent? He always sounded normal to me."*
*She continues to maintain that it is in no wise authentic, since Mel Blanc was born in San Francisco.
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06:20:54 PM,Friday 25 May 2012
Ergot: The ultimate club drug.
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04:29:41 PM,Tuesday 8 May 2012
A small group of humans has evaded the apocalypse by taking shelter in an underground factory that had been used to manufacture those little novelty license plates with kids' names on them. As essentially the last machine-made consumer goods these people would ever see, the store of licence plates were carefully hoarded; a baby would receive one bearing its name at birth, but never again. They were burned with their bearers at their death. Generations later, they're down to the very last plate. Then two babies are born...
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06:14:21 PM,Monday 30 April 2012
Just started reading Stephen King's new Dark Tower book. The frustrating thing about all the books in that series, this one included, is that he's writing at his most instinctive and least reflective. It's just all coming out in a blurt, even more than his usual potboilery style (one reason why I tend to prefer his short stories to his novels; they tend to be more polished). So while the settings and characters can feel compellingly real, like you're sharing a dream that he's been having night after night over decades, the characterizations and especially the dialogue is sometimes just brain-piercingly awful, since it's riddled with these unconscious, repetitive tics, like Roland's "go on" gesture, the hokey contrivances of Mid-World dialect, or Susannah's "sugar" after practically every line she speaks. Dialogue has never been his strength as a writer, but it's way worse in these books than in anything else he's written. It's so frustrating, because you can almost taste the reality of these characters underneath the distorted haze that seems to be the by-product of his automatic writing technique. But I keep reading, 'cause there's still something there, even if I have to keep groping for it.
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01:44:20 PM,Tuesday 24 April 2012
I wonder if there are any theistic sects who believe that the Adam and Eve story is a parable of evolution from hominid to homo sapiens sapiens. I mean, you've got Adam walking through the garden -- standing upright, but not able to do much but point at things and name them, a pretty rudimentary form of language, though still distinguishing him from the knuckle-walkers. He's able to mosey around nibbling on various plant species due to his relatively low metabolism, but he hasn't developed the ability to hunt, so apart from the occasional grubworm, meat isn't part of his diet. His skull-to-pelvis ratio is similar to that of the great apes. Then all of a sudden there's a quantum leap in evolution, with the inevitable trade-offs. His cognition explodes from the merely appelative to the conceptual; he's suddenly able to understand abstract concepts like "good" and "evil" and -- though it was of course there all along -- his own mortality. On the other hand, his offspring now have grossly oversized heads, leading to a greatly increased risk of death or injury during childbirth. The greater brain mass has drastically increased his caloric requirements, so he's got to become more omnivorous, and to actively seek high-yield foods rather than just grazing sedately on vegetation all day. As his caloric intake increases, so does his ecological footprint, and he's forced to expand the size of his habitat, ranging away from the lovely African savannah of his birth. Eventually, as he depletes the region of its fruits and other easy pickings, he'll need to start hunting and eventually to develop agriculture just to feed his huge-brained, fat-hungry children.
Okay, it's a bit 2001, but I like it. And poor God, who only wanted to bestow his favor on a bunch of friendly, mellow walking primates with simple linguistic capabilities. Then they had to go and bootstrap themselves. He had no desire to punish them, but he'd already established the rules of the system, and they were just going to have to live with the consequences.
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09:37:54 PM,Thursday 5 April 2012
