No eres mujer. Eres hombre.

So I've found this fun new site, www.livemocha.com. It's a free language learning site. So far they only offer Spanish, French, German, English, Hindi, and Mandarin, so I am working on my Spanish. And I just had to practice the phrase "No eres mujer. Eres hombre." (You're not a woman. You're a man.)

I don't even want to picture the scene in my future where I actually need to use that phrase. It sounds so telenovela. You kind of even have to say it with a little shake of your head, leaning forward, touching his arm: "No eres mujer." Now, with conviction, and a coy straightening of the back: "Eres hombre." Growl.

Needed: The Next Great Development

There needs to be an audio Google just like there's a Google for typed words. Here's the deal.

As I have said before, I've been spending way too much time ripping CDs to digital. Fun and games, except that there are some mix discs that I've gotten my hands on to which I don't know the names of all of the songs. So I'll play the disc and type a google search for the lyrics as fast as I can type.

This was especially a problem when it came time to rip the Jerry the Vegan disc. Jerry the Vegan is one of Amilynne's old Starbucks customers. He made the Jerry the Vegan mix for them to play at work. The Jerry the Vegan disc is pretty cool, but it contains a lot of music that I have only ever heard on the Jerry the Vegan disc. So I developed my Google search tactic, paired with some intuitive Yahoo Jukebox work, to find the songs. Then I got to my favorite song on the disc and there just aren't enough lyrics to Google it. It's an astronaut drifting away on a spacewalk watching the sun light up the horizon of the Earth and the majority of the song (besides the dialogue to mission control) is "Beautiful! Beautiful! Beautiful! Just Beautiful!" It's the BEST song, but I have no idea of its real name nor of the person/group who made it. Repeat today - I'm ripping a mix disc from Frank, and there was an instrumental jazz piece that everyone would know if they heard it, but who knows its name?

So what is needed is a Google where I can upload the song and it tells me what it is. Verizon has a thing like that on some of its phones, but I don't use Verizon. What to do? It's really not worth changing phone companies over.

Basia Bulat and the Return of the Headphones

One of the toys I saved my babysitting money for when I was in seventh grade was a Walkman. It took a long time to amass the $33. I read the sales ads every week hoping for a break. Finally, the day came and I had my very own portable music device and it was the toy I was destined to own. As long as I could afford batteries, the Walkman gave me the freedom to listen to music anywhere. Some of the bands I remember listening to specifically on the Walkman in the early days are Bon Jovi (riding across the Nevada desert on the way home from California), Glass Tiger, and Europe. The summer after 7th grade my cousin came to visit and brought with her Sting's Dream of the Blue Turtles. She went to bed and I stayed up listening to it a couple of times. It was a revelation. The next year this guy named Ryan who rode the same bus as me loaned me his Art of Noise tape (In Invisible Silence) and I listened to that on the Walkman a lot, especially since it wasn't necessarily music to Amilynne's ears. (I just got a copy of it on CD, and since it's out of print and not something everyone is looking for it cost about as much as that first Walkman...) When my 9th grade art class kept me up all hours painting, it was Def Leppard, always on the headphones. I remember working on notecards for debate my junior year and in the midst of my cutting and pasting snipping through the cord of the headphones I was plugged in to. I might have been on my second Walkman by then.

With college, music became more social. Why hide in headphones when your roommates were up and everyone wanted to listen along? CDs made it harder to do headphones too--yes, there were portable CD players, I went through several, but they were prone to skipping no matter how well they claimed to be engineered.

Now the MP3s. And I finally joined the ranks of people with an MP3 player. One would think I would have been a little bit earlier of an adapter, but there were things to get into place first--a computer that could handle the volume of music I would need to have available (and the external hard drive because the computers just weren't doing a good job of keeping up). Plus the reality of every day life and the fact that it just wasn't a priority. So the long and short is that now I'm back to running around with music attached, and it brings me to the point of all of this:

There are only two ways to listen to music. One is in the car, and the other is on headphones. I spent some time this summer setting up speakers so that the music on the computer would pump from the den to the kitchen, and I do enjoy that. But the reality is that only in the car and even more so on the headphones are all of the layers balanced to create the music as it should be. And hooray for the MP3 player for bringing me back to all that.

So much so that I just yanked the speakers out of the headphone jack on the computer and put the headphones in. Yesterday I downloaded Basia Bulat's debut album and it is AWESOME, forgive me for saying it like that, but it just is. I've listened to it four or five times, but I just wanted to really hear it, and for that, headphones were the only solution. Hooray! The music just crystallizes differently when the stereo space is your frontal lobe.

So if you would like to try Basia Bulat, her myspace page is here, and you can download some of her songs, and I really suggest In the Night and Little Waltz, and all the rest, maybe you'd want to get the whole thing somewhere, but I'm telling you, you won't really hear it until you plug it the headphones.

How to keep busy

Today I finished ripping the music from another of my books of CDs. What a geek! you say, and I'm sure I am. But I want my music digitized, and I have a nice collection of music, so I've been working on this since July or so, off and on, when I have time, and today I finished another book, so I figure I'm a little more than halfway done. Or maybe just halfway.

The other part of this project is scanning photos. That's the real chore--it makes ripping discs a cakewalk. Not the least reason of which because the scanner is buried under paper and other things. So that part of the project is momentarily on hold.

Here is how else to keep busy. I made this for Amilynne as a preview for our trip this summer. Yes, it's amateurish, yes, it's not at all cool like a computer savvy friend might be able to make, but here it is for your own joy.

Another way to stay busy is to finish the set of cities we will be visiting. Venezia took a large chunk of Christmas break to do. We'll have to see about the other parts.

Cheese Crab

Here's the Cheese Crab video. testing, testing.

if this works, it will only be available for about 2 months. we'll see.

I'm playing with a new toy--Jing. This bit of video is short and it takes forever to load to play. Flash 9 required. I'm not keen on the timing, but I'm having fun and working out some applications to apply this to school.

Anyway. Isn't that fun and games. And in the mean time, hopefully they will have some new Pushing Daisies episodes by the time my free hosting for this clip of Olive Snook expires. Cheers.

So I've been gone...

I've been reading books!!! Several of them! How delicious is that?

Anyway, so that's what I've been doing. Sometimes you write, sometimes you read.

☺

Dino-Mighty Scary

The 50's are back! Bring out your biggest Cadillac! Or at least that's what it felt like when I caught this shirt while browsing birthday clothes for Junior. How scary that someone would actually make this shirt for sale today: are they intentionally trying to lobby for oil drilling in the arctic?

Here's the copy that went with:

Dino-mite! Give baby a stylish Stone-Age look with this cool dinosaur tee. Fun graphics and contrast stitching add prehistoric pizzazz. Features a rib-knit crew neck and cuffs. Tag-free for added comfort.

• Canteen Green: graphic features a young caveboy riding a giant dinosaur on wheels, with "Fossil Fuel Motors Dino-Might Power!"

Yeah. Thanks, Old Navy. This one I'm going to pass up.

The Barman

So the Kiddo got his results today: he passed the bar. We have a lawyer in the family. He gave me the news on his way to jail today. I could make a lawyer joke now but he would get mad at me. So I won't. It's his great day, after all.

He called himself the Barman. I told him that he gets to serve us drinks at Christmas whenever we're thirsty. I wonder if I can get him to serve up some peanuts and mozzarella sticks too. I would stuff a couple of dollars for him in a tip jar to keep him from calculating it as billable hours. Hmmmmm...... This might just work.

Now we just need some good contenders...

...for the Oscars. Hooray that they asked Jon Stewart to come back. Now if the movies are good, it will be a good show. Should I start planning the party?

Non ti scordar di me

What to say? I mean, I certainly am not letting the passing of Pavarotti go unnoted here, but this is just one of those times when words are inadequate and possibly do more harm than good. There aren't enough superlatives in all of the languages combined to describe his voice, his persona, or the impact he had on millions, myself included. Let's face it: Pavarotti was my first introduction to opera and to the Italian language (a beautiful and yet somewhat frustrating introduction at that--I distinctly remember when I was in second grade or so trying to follow along with the words on the dust cover of the album--they made no sense according to the spelling rules I knew at the time). So seeing him go makes me sad. The world needs more bounteous, joyful personalities like his.

The Summer in Photos

Well, since I taught a class last night, the summer is really officially over. So here is a recap of the summer from the point of view of my camera lens. Enjoy.

1. Bumper cars. Here is a picture of the car belonging to the idiot who parallel parks worse than I do.

2. Signs. The grammar is horrid. To the writer of the first, I say no wonder they haven't fixed it yet. To the writer of the second, I forgive you, hooray for Idaho.

3. Here is my sad car after the semi got to it. It doesn't look as scary as it felt:

4. This summer's praying mantis:

5. And the picture I got framed as a consolation prize for not going on vacation this summer. I did it more to protect the painting--it was in danger of having a corner bend off--than to show it off, but the frame is so great with it that I displaced some other stuff and hung it in the dining room.

Well, there it is, two months of deep breathing, and now the onslaught renews. Wish me luck.

Peach for Dinner

Tonight for dinner I had a peach that was so perfect it caused fireworks to go off at the base of my brain. The fuzziness from the fireworks explosions then wafted upward to surround my whole brain and right now it's settling into the most wonderful sense of wellbeing and awareness.

Jealous?

Kabuki and a Truck

Nasty thing happened today in the middle of some fine to good things that were happening today. Class went well enough this morning, although tomorrow is their final exam and I know we have just gone too fast for most of them to understand what they've been taught. A few of them have it, but most of them really could have used more time.

After class, I was going with friends to Washington to see a Kabuki troupe perform--really, a once in a lifetime opportunity, and we were going to see it for free for the dress rehearsal - tonight's performance was $105! But the trip up is when the nasty thing happened--we were stuck in traffic for a long, long time--an accident on the freeway had clogged things up good and proper--and we were just getting in sight of the accident, which meant we were just getting in sight of being able to move again, when a semi in the left hand lane decided he wanted to merge into our middle lane, and did so right into my car. I was sitting in the back seat so I could work on correcting, and I saw it coming and couldn't speak, I just screamed. Then the other passenger saw it and she scremed a little too, but by this time we were being hit. Now the driver is starting to honk and move a little bit out of the way, but let's face it, we're boxed in, and the semi comes forward again and hits us a second time!! Both of my driver's side doors look terrible, there are even holes torn in the back one. So we called for a trooper and now my car gets to go back to the body shop, even though it was just there two weeks ago to fix an accident from January.

The officer railed into the semi driver. He asked him what he was thinking, changing lanes in traffic that is packed in so tight. I was glad that the officer gave him a piece of his mind. I learned a couple of accidents ago to not say much to drivers who hit me or I'll end up giving them a plausible lie to tell once the police arrive! So I was happy to let the officer be frank with him.

Thankfully, no one was hurt--it could have been so much worse! But we shook it off and continued along our way and saw a great performance. Japanese woodblock prints from the 1700s and 1800s often featured kabuki performers, and some of my favorites show them making wild eyes and pulling faces. It was so strange to see that in context today. They performed two plays. The first one was boring to me (not much action, just a lot of talk, and let's face it--I don't speak Japanese). But the second one was great with lots of body movement, vocal variation, and comedy. Both plays were visually stunning, there was live musical accompaniment, it was just a fantastic performance overall.

Finally I'm home now. I have to write my final exam for tomorrow. Yikes! But then the class will be over and I will be able to focus on other things, which, unfortunately, now include getting my car fixed. :P

Big Audio Dynamite

Ok, so maybe the title is a little overreaching. But the fact is, I have a new project. After looking and looking and evaluating and looking more to find the perfect portable music/whatever else player, I ditched it and bought a big fat external hard drive (500 GB) for the purpose of collecting my music, photos, and a few other things. So now I am in the process of ripping my entire music library to MP3. Which is so much fun. I am listening to music that I never listen to because it is not in my computer. But now it is, and now I can listen to it. The whole thing makes me think of Hermione's sparkly new bag for book 7--a tiny little thing that holds way too much. (If you haven't read Deathly Hallows yet, please do--what a wonderful way to spend a weekend!)

But an external hard drive is not enough to code name this project Big Audio Dynamite. The fun part is the system of cables I'm putting together to pipe music beyond the study. Now, mind you, without a freestanding house it is really rude to do anything too loud and bass-shuddering (not that some of my neighbors over the years ever realized that--come to speak of it, it's not nice to shoot guns in the middle of the night, but some people just won't learn....) I digress. Anyway, we're not talking a big bad mother-of-all sound systems, just something to pipe some choice tunes through the house. It's fun. It makes me feel all zen with my computer and with my music all at once--everything connected, everything in balance.

ommmmmmmmm

Patriotic Zeal

Hi! Happy holiday, it's the Fourth, hooray for independence and freedom! I just rolled out of bed--it's 7:45 in the morning. The lovely thing about being a couple of time zones ahead of everyone else in the family is that they should all still be asleep (even the Boy is visiting friends a time zone away). So I'm resisting the pull to be terribly evil.

When we were kids there would be a pancake breakfast at the church every July 4. And a sunrise raising of the flag. The choir would sing some patriotic songs, it was all really quite lovely, but it did mean getting to the church early enough to call it sunrise. Which is really early in July. So dad would sneak his gigantic early 80's stereo (which, I must admit, I thought was so cool and called a ghetto blaster at a certain point in history when kids who wanted a stereo of their own really did call those things ghetto blasters) downstairs, plug it in in the hallway, crank it up full blast, and jerk us into consciousness to the tune of Stars and Stripes Forever. One year he even did it to the neighbors.

So, of course, right now I want to put on Stars and Stripes Forever and call everyone in the family. And maybe even the neighbors, who moved, but are still within telephone range.

Or maybe I'll let everyone have a nice sleep in and I'll just play it for myself and make some pancakes.

Holding Back Gale-Force Vindication

Let me tell you all what a good little lawyer the Kiddo is going to be. Today I went to my car, which I had parallel parked before class, and there was someone parked in my back bumper. I was livid. I wanted to knock in all their windows and doors. I wanted blood. The freak shouldn't have been parking there anyway--more than half the car was in a no-parking zone. I wanted to let the air out of the tires. I wanted revenge.

So I called the Kiddo to say hey, what's the deal, because I figured the police wouldn't really have to believe my side--I could just as easily have slid into that car. So the Kiddo asked me what damage I had sustained - none, really, as the back bumper is still messed up from when I was rear-ended in January. So really all I could do was call the police and see if they would ticket the idiot.

Remember. I want blood. If I had had a machine gun, I would have shot up the car.

But Kiddo the Lawyer was so calm about it, and all "Well, you could get the police to give him a ticket, or you could drive away and in a couple of hours be fine."

Well.

So I took a picture. I admit that I very much want to post it here with a "When You See This Freak Car Hit It" message, but who knows how many ways I could be held liable if anyone did. (I didn't bother asking the Kiddo about that. I like to think that I only have to be told to be a decent human being once a day.) What a good little non-bloodthirsty lawyer the Kiddo is.

I did leave a nasty note on the windshield. The jerk probably laughed and then threw it on the ground to litter the world up. I still wish I had smashed in a window or two. Hopefully Karma will do that for me.

Festivals

I am the type of person who hears the word "festival" and usually runs in the opposite direction. A festival is just one more reason why it's hard to park, one more opportunity to bump into people who aren't using their brains, a time of standing in line forever for a little bit of "fun". No, I much prefer being at home or going out to find the anti-festival, a place that is beautiful and isn't packed with people.

Not to mention that when I was a kid, the annual torture of having to go play piano in front of a judge was called "Festival". I never understood that one, as it always racked my nerves so much to play in front of a stranger that I was millimeters from tears (and the tears usually ended up falling after the performance, perfectly executable at home, fell apart with my nerves). That festival was certainly a misnomer.

I explain all of this so you can understand the significance of my saying that I would do just about anything to attend the Venice Biennale. Yes, it's contemporary art when I much prefer something older, but Venice is so amazing anyway and then to make the whole city host art from everywhere, as a matter of course, it must be beyond wonderful. (And it's not like the masterworks get dumped in the canals while the newer stuff comes in....) I imagine sitting on the Grand Canal in front of Santa Maria della Salute drinking in the view after having seen some strange but oddly likable piece of contemporary art somewhere (wish wish) and anticipating an afternoon in the Academy in front of some Tintoretto frescoes to wash my soul and set it free to fly. I imagine staying in a hotel away from the main walks of the city, getting to wander and see Venice at night, and being there long enough that on one day I even find myself escaping to one of the smaller islands for a breather with relatively fewer people milling about, then, once I am fortified by the away time, rushing back in to the excitement and buzz of thousands of people out to see the new, the curious, against an antique and venerated backdrop.

Of course in this dream I am also there long enough to visit other cities: Genova, Firenze, and finally Assisi, Rome, Capri, Palermo...

Off Task.

Right now I'm supposed to be writing one of two final exams I'll be giving in the next two days.

I'm supposed to be writing them so I can get to bed so I can get over the cold that has attacked me to the very core and made me so exhausted I can't make it through the day.

I'm supposed to be eschewing the Internet and the television and concentrating on the task at hand. I even tried going to work on the exams at a location without Internet or cable. Of course, though, since I'm sick and out of my mind, I didn't take the proper books, so here I am at home where there is Internet and cable and I just finished watching a documentary on Tianenmen Square and the changes in China since 1989. Last night when I was supposed to be working I was watching a documentary on being a nightowl and insomniac. I love documentaries. What a fantastic medium--to make your point with experts and witnesses and pictures, sound and motion. Viva la revolucion!

Hooray for PBS and independent filmmakers! Hooray for freedom of speech! Hooray for information so easily available, so nicely digestible, so incindiery and wild!

Yeah. I should get back to the test.

on Work and More

All right, for anyone who has been in suspense since my last post, I decided to take the summer job. Which we all knew I would do. There's only one word for me. Spell it with me:

S-U-C-K-E-R.

When I have been stealing time from the piles of work that surround me and make me feel guilty for doing anything but pay attention to said piles of work, I've actually had some lovely little things happen in the past couple of months. Dad came to visit for spring break, and although I made him sit around while I worked for much too much of the time, we did fit in some fun things, including catching a show of orchids (which Dad thoroughly enjoyed, especially as they reminded him of the beautiful island of Zamboanga in the Philippines) and seeing the National Cathedral, and driving out to Assateague Island to see the wild ponies, or the "Fat Salt Ponies" as Amilynne has named them. (She apparently saw a special on them which stated that they are plump because of the extra dose of salt in their sea-island diets.) They were really cool. Dad also got his first visit to the Atlantic. Here are the pictures to say the thousands of words I'm too impatient to write:

In other news, I also discovered the amazing poetry of Mary Oliver. The poems are the most real and powerful and spiritual descriptions of the natural world that I think I have ever encountered--I can only read so many before it is too much and I have to set it down for fear of my soul bursting out of my skin. So I'm reading the books slowly, and re-reading poems several times before moving on. Amilynne is mad at me because I told her I think Mary Oliver might be my poet (meaning Billy Collins may have been bumped from the top spot). I don't know. I love them both, but I can't argue with the power of this. Here for your pleasure, a link to several of her poems.

The joy is that this has me writing poetry again. (Yes, Billy Collins, I know that doesn't necessarily please you.) Not that any of it is good yet. But if I'm not writing it's never going to get any better, and it feels good to be in a creative moment, because I've been out of one for a long time.

And it feels good to shake my little fist at the piles of work and say, "Yes! But first this!"

So I'm still up

and it's almost 1:00. I should really be asleep, but I'm not.

I'm trying to decide what to do with my summer. I had declared that this would be the summer of peace, and that really I would refuse anything that came my way. Now I'm faced with the opportunity to teach a class at the university and I am torn. On the one hand, who turns down decent income for a 5-week stint? On the other hand, I had promised myself a summer off. I keep going back and forth on it. There are a lot of things that normal people do to take care of themselves and their interests that I just haven't had a chance to do since September 2003. Not to mention that I have side projects (stained glass, painting, books to read) that could easily fill ten summers. I haven't been really truly creative since I started my master's and I really need to give that an outlet. Anyway, I have to decide by Friday. And I am absolutely torn.

And losing sleep.