I just started reading Covering by Kenji Yoshino, and I'm sure I'll want to write about it later. But I did recently read Snow Falling on Cedars, after years of hearing what a good book it is. I liked it... but most of the best elements reminded me of other books, like Farewell to Manzanar or To Kill a Mockingbird. I did love the setting though, which was beautifully described and made me lust to eat strawberries.

I recently watched two romantic movies, one that made me feel lovey and happy and one that made me really depressed. The one that made me happy was Before Sunset (I watched Before Sunrise last summer), and I immediately ordered Before Sunrise to make Ben watch them both. :) Such unique movies, and really romantic. We watched Conversations with Other Women last night, which was excellent in a lot of ways. In the end I found it really depressing though, I think because it tapped into a fear I've mentioned before that relationships can end even if people really love each other, for complex and tricky reasons (see: my parents). This has got to be my biggest fear with marrying Ben, not that he is somehow wrong for me, but that I will somehow manage to lose him anyways. It's not a very rational fear, and at this point we have analyzed our compatibility far beyond what's necessary anyways. I think the strongest impetus to take marriage seriously is to watch people very close to you get divorced. Anyhow, the movie was excellent but sort of disturbing because of how it made me think of that. I'd still recommend it, though.

Awhile back I loved the PC games Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic I and II (though II was obviously not really completed). Ben played Mass Effect a couple months ago and loved it and kept telling me how it was like KotOR but bigger, with better graphics, better storylines, and overall a lot more innovation and enjoyable gameplay. I finally started playing Mass Effect recently, and it is a lot of fun: a huge universe to explore but in a single-player game. I am maybe halfway through? There's a huge number of side quests, a lot of good gameplay, though some flaws in the game. I also recently played Portal (I got it for Ben for his birthday), which is a much shorter game and in my opinion, a nearly perfect game. It is clever, interesting, has very innovative gameplay, and is incredibly funny. I can't overrate it; it is so fun I wish it had been longer, but that is part of its perfection. Especially the very last scene, with the cake.

And I bought three CDs recently and overlistened to them a lot. I continued a fine, storied tradition of mine of stealing music recommendations from other people and loving them so much I spread the music to my friends. I got CDs of Ekova, Octopus Project, and Federico Aubele and have been loving them. Spread the love!

I have very broad taste in music. This is partly a result of loving it so much, partly the wide variety of genres that my parents exposed me to, partly a habit of voraciously consuming the musical tastes of others, from anyone who will share their tunes with me. But if you go back to high school, almost the only music I listened to was ( alternative rock )

Most symphonies/operas/classical ensembles have some kind of student rush ticket, where you pay not very much and get seats that no one is sitting in, usually near the front. If you are a student and don't take advantage of that, you are a fool! I have been a lazy fool for the last year and a half, but I finally looked up the concert schedule for the Philadelphia Orchestra, picked some that sounded interesting with Ben, and got advance tickets (advance student rush tickets! I have never seen that before). So tonight we saw the last concert in their Leonard Bernstein festival, with guest soloist Joshua Bell.

Interjection about Joshua Bell: I love this violinist. He is to date the only classical musician I have been able to identify by ear. I used to play the violin, and I love listening to it, but I can be sort of picky about what I want it to sound like. Bell plays it exactly the way I like it, with perfect tone, perfect expression, perfect levels of vibrato and drama. As far as I am concerned, he is an ideal, the Platonic violinist. I have always wanted to see him live and now I have! Eee!

Anyways, the program was two pieces by Leonard Bernstein, which were both very fun, a violin concerto by Samuel Barber, and then a short scherzo and the ballet 'Petrushka' by Stravinsky. What I loved the most were probably the Bernstein dances and the third movement of the Barber concerto, which was amazing and surprising given the first two movements of the piece. 'Petrushka' really made me feel like I should revisit Stravinsky, who I haven't listened to much in a long time; I really enjoyed it, though not seeing the ballet made it a little more random (it helped a lot to have read the program notes before that piece).

I love classical music, and someday when I am making a real salary I wouldn't mind buying expensive symphony tickets to support this kind of art. But until then, I am really glad that I can go to the symphony for the same price as a movie ticket.

Book: The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss. It is a book about... a book called "The History of Love". It's really beautiful, interesting, well-painted, and painfully sad. I read it basically in one sitting today and was moved.

TV: The Wire. We started watching this in the fall, after a stellar review in the New Yorker and hearing a lot of good things about it, and now we're halfway through the second season. Wow, what an amazingly well-done show! The acting, the story, the music, the realism.... I can't recommend this highly enough.

Music: Did you know that Yo Yo Ma did a series of recordings of Central Asian/Turkish/Silk Road music? I found out about this recently, after loving his album Obrigado Brasil for a while, and I just love what he does with the music. The recordings are When Strangers Meet and Beyond the Horizon, both listed under Silk Road Journeys.

And there are some things you can keep yourself busy with if your tastes are anything like mine.

Berkeley was hectic but nice, which is also kind of what getting back to Philadelphia has been like.

Basically, in Berkeley I ate delicious food and saw a lot of people. I had some time with Daria, Hollis, Sherri, Jessica, Rich, Kyle, and all the LBL people I used to work with (I walked up there two days I was there). I also had a lot of time with Joao and Gersende, since I was staying with them, and it isn't an exaggeration to say that I spent most of my time there talking to people. I didn't quite catch everyone I would have liked too, both due to time and availability constraints, though. But I did manage to eat at the Cheeseboard, Cha Am, Gelateria Naia, La Note, Gregoire, and a new place I had never been to before but really liked--Taste of the Himalayas. I miss the quality and price of Berkeley food very much.

It was rainy most of the time I was there, but it was beautiful and quiet, and reminded me of the things I liked about living there. Because it's the rainy season, it was quite green, especially up on the hill where LBL is. And it was warm, at least compared to what I knew I was coming back to. And how nice it is to be somewhere that isn't all flat when you're walking around!

I was so happy to see everybody, and it's nice to still have a single place where I can visit lots of friends. Actually, Los Alamos at Christmas used to be like that, but it occurs to me now that I saw a greater number of friends in Berkeley than I did in Los Alamos.

Two things of particular note: firstly, a friend of Joao's (and indirectly of mine) had extra symphony tickets for Thursday night, so I went with him to see Deborah Voigt in concert. That was amazing, because I am no soprano connoisseur nor do I listen to lots of vocal classical music, but her voice is so lovely and mellow, well-rounded and powerful, and overall very impressive. They picked nice things for her to sing, the four last songs of Richard Strauss and a piece by Samuel Barber called something like Andromache's Farewell. The symphony also played Beethoven's fourth symphony after that, which I had heard a few times before but never listened to so closely. I liked it a lot more when not trying to compare it to other Beethoven symphonies, which are less whimsical and more powerhouse-like. But anyhow, the evening was great and the seats were amazing. The other thing that was fun was having brunch with Hollis, which ended up being a long discussion about WoW. He was in the same place I was a few months ago with his main, wanting to get into raiding but not sure how to do it, and it was fun to talk about. And he agreed to officiate our wedding! :D

Overall, it was a great way to end the vacation.

One great aspect of everybody visiting last weekend was actually getting to go running with people. Ben isn't really into running, but on Thursday Andrew, Jeanine, and Steph went running along the Schuylkill with me, and on Saturday Jeanine did again. It was really fun to have people to talk to, and it made the run seem short and easy.

BUT, they are all gone now and it's back to running alone. I usually have my ipod, and like to listen to energetic, zippy music. For example, ideal running music that I already have includes tracks from DDR, Natasha Atlas, Gwen Stefani, Frou Frou/Imogen Heap, and Kylie Minogue. Less optimal running music but that still works alright is things like Linkin Park, Garbage, Veruca Salt, and the Mars Volta. But I've done this all to death now, and while I have a big music collection I can't exactly run to opera or Amalia Rodrigues. So I'm asking you, friendly readers, what is some trashy energetic music I could get that would be good to run to? Something upbeat and enjoyable, not necessarily great music but good for keeping you going.

On a side note, I have this DDR extended mix that's an hour long, which mixes in things the guy says while you dance with the actual dance tracks. Sometimes it is helpful, like saying "your dance is amazing! your dance will change the world!" And sometimes when I'm tired and barely chugging along, it starts booing at me and the DDR guy says, "I can't stand watching you!"

I'm designing parts and ordering materials for work! It's more mechanical engineering than stuff I've done before, which makes it interesting. I've also never designed such a complex mechanical system from scratch (the cold finger plus the mount for the AFM sample, which has to be thermally insulated). It is actually pretty fun, though I have no idea whether I'll do things right or not. I got to hear about how the machine shop's entire store of copper was stolen a few months back, potentially by a disgruntled machinist, so we have to buy our own now. OFHC copper is expensive!

The dinner group last night met at Eulogy, a Belgian tavern with an impressive beer list and glass-fronted coffins for tables. I ended up meeting a lot of cool math grad students and a law student who was really nice and loved fries; I really enjoy these dinners. It was also a nice walk there and back, maybe 40 minutes each way, and if it hadn't been so humid out it would have been just perfect. With Ben not here for the summer, it strikes me how I've made a lot of acquaintances but few friends, people I would call up to hang out. That is changing, though, and Ben not being here helps me get out more. I don't think I've got the balance of bringing a boyfriend along with friends who don't know him, since I did it so seldom in Berkeley.

Tonight I'm driving up to Providence, to serve as a jumping off point to go to Cape Cod with Steph. I'm really excited about it! I'm a little worried about the drive, since I haven't done any long drives alone out here yet, but it should hopefully be fine. I am going up to the Tappan Zee bridge to avoid NYC traffic; hopefully it will be enough. And I finally got my tickets for Erin and Josh's wedding; hooray for Southwest having random promotions out of Philadelphia that allow me to easily get free roundtrips, but boo for Southwest changing their award policy so that only so many awardees can fly on each flight. Those punks.

I finally gave up on finding my old metronome and ordered a replacement, and while I was at it I ordered some piano music. Some new Debussy, but also, well... jazz. My Los Alamos piano teacher was staunchly anti-jazz, so even though I love jazz piano I never learned anything about how to play it. I got one ragtime book, and she let me play one song out of it and then never spoke of it again. So from habit, I just only play classical... but I'm an adult now! I can play whatever I want! Maybe not well, but we'll see.

I'm in a good mood, after a weekend of reading and hiking, and an unexpected situation yesterday in which the post office did not lose my package. So I'm going to tell two London stories that never quite made it into my entries on that.

( unexpected song )

( small world )

I love, love, looove music. I love playing it, and wish I had more time to take up another couple of instruments, but I also love listening to it and having something on all the time: when I'm walking to school, cooking, reading. At this point I have really broad tastes, largely from asking other people what they think is good and then giving it a chance (or in some cases, convincing them to give me a copy of their mp3 collection to explore). I would love the radio, if it wasn't so often repetitive. But in a lot of ways, my musical tastes cleave to those of my parents, because in spite of music lessons, they were really the ones that taught me to listen. Here are four of the pieces that I remember them introducing me to.

Copland - Rodeo/Appalachian Spring: My mom had a CD of these which she loved to play on weekend mornings, and the sound of them is perfect for living in the west. I liked the way the pieces sounded before I could name why I liked anything, and when I hear them it's easy to picture my living room, the big window looking out on the canyon and mesas behind our house, sunshine and a morning paper. When I was in high school, in the orchestra, we had one concert where we combined with part of the marching band and played Hoe-Down, and it was really amazing. I'm sure we sounded awful, but it was a really enjoyable experience.

Dave Brubeck - Take Five: My dad loves Dave Brubeck, to the point that I almost felt guilty about telling my dad how I got to see Dave Brubeck in concert. He doesn't have any musical background, unlike my mom, but he loves listening to music and singing, and I remember him trying to explain to me why a 5/4 time signature was so revolutionary, and counting out the measures so I would hear it. I also remember later my mom telling me you could dance a mambo to Take Five, which I disagreed with, and we found that she had a version of Take Five with a similar melody, but a couple of beats inserted to make a more regular tempo.

Beethoven - Fifth Symphony: Yeah yeah, everyone knows the beginning, but have you listened to this the whole way through? It's a really amazing symphony, one of my favorites. When I was little, I loved the third movement of it, because I loved things that were minor and haunting; as such, I didn't like the gradual build into the triumph and majesty of the fourth movement, which is in a major key. That is, I didn't like it until one of my parents (I no longer remember which) listened with me and talked about how at the time, you didn't permanently change keys in a piece like that, and you never ever switched between a minor and major key. You could do it for a short stretch but not permanently, but Beethoven did it permanently anyways, and it was revelatory. I listened to that passage a million times, the transition, and I remember putting it in a sixth grade project that had a bunch of hyperlinked pages.

The Beatles - Abbey Road: Sometime during eighth grade, for whatever reason, I became a huge Beatles freak. My stepdad had all their albums, and I listened to them obsessively, and read Beatles histories, and became able to sing along to pretty much every song (save the ones on the Yellow Submarine album, which I never had). But before that, when I was little, my parents had the White Album and Abbey Road. I liked some of the songs on the White Album (I still have a stuffed animal named Rocky Raccoon, which I've had longer than I remember), but what we really listened to a lot was Abbey Road. I don't know why, and I also don't know why I remember some songs from when I was really young, but not others. And I'm sure I would have still loved the album had I come across it later, but now it's linked to what I remember as being happy times.

Rodeo and Abbey Road especially are linked for me with Saturday morning sunshine and time with my family. My parents helped me love this music so long ago that I can say it like that, "my parents", because they weren't divorced yet. And even though I've had big fights with both of them, and am happy to be living on my own, it makes me happy when I'm making sourdough bread and I hear the jubilant opening of Buckaroo Holiday, and think of my family when I was little.

westminster cloisters, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

My favorite thing we did in London, before you ask, was attending Evensong at Westminster Abbey and also at St. Paul's Cathedral. Evensong is a type of service in the late afternoon that consists almost entirely of singing, so if you love choral music and looking around in old, lovely churches, it is a perfect way to enjoy yourself. The service in Westminster was quiet and personal, with the guests sitting in the choral area with the singers. At St. Paul's it was a much larger service, but the big choir and amazing acoustics made the music itself stunning. I love churches because they are things of beauty, crafted by people, designed to tell you about the awe in things greater than ourselves (but which we ourselves have built). Music is very similar.

( Read more... )

There will be more London entries, trust me.

Huge props to castallia for finding this article, from the Washington Post, about one of my favorite violinists performing in a subway.

( Pearls before Breakfast )

On the advice of juhi, Ben and I got tickets to see Vienna Teng perform tonight. Neither of us knew much about her music, but I seem to know a lot of people who like her, so we went. The venue was nice but it turned out to be a jazz house with not enough seating, so we had to leave to get dinner and then come back and stand through the show. It was worth it, though.

The two things I liked the most were her amazing voice, which I liked all the better for it being so low, and the wide variety of musical styles played. I guess most of the songs were somewhat close to the piano ballad, but some were jazzier, some less melodic and more harmonic, and some more energetic. I don't remember all the songs, but my favorites were Blue Caravan, Pontchartrain, Love Turns 40, Transcontinental 1:30 AM, 1 BR/1 BA, City Hall, I Don't Feel So Well, Harbor, Shasta, Feather Moon, and Soon Love Soon. She's an excellent performer to see live, with a lot of nice stories and chatter, and the audience was especially great because it was a DVD shoot, and apparently lots of her fans made pilgrimages to Philadelphia just to see her record the DVD performance. I really liked at the end, she had the audience sing Soon Love Soon with her, and it was one of those great crowd moments, where you all feel united in a love of music and humanity.

It was great to come out of a concert like that and see snow accumulating on the ground, not a lot but enough to make everything white. I loved walking home with Ben, through Philadelphia's classic, brick-house tree-lined snowy streets, great music echoing in my head, cold air making me feel light-headed and free.

Like I said earlier, I am trying to get to the point that I can play many pieces I know off the top of my head. This also seems inherently rewarding, since I've played a lot of pieces I really liked which I no longer remember very well. This is a list of pieces I'm working with now (or ones I want to in the near-ish future).

Learning:

Chopin, Waltz in E, Op. Posth.

Mozart, Piano Sonata In D Major, K. 576: 1. Allegro

Brushing up for eventual off-the-cuff playing:

Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 8 In C Minor, Op. 13 'Pathetique'

Chopin, Nocturne No. 20 In C Sharp Minor, Op. Posth.

Debussy, Arabesque No. 1

Debussy, Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum

Debussy, Snow is Dancing

Should someday get around to relearning:

Bach, Italian Concerto

Chopin, Impromptu No. 1 In A Flat Major, Op. 29

Liszt, Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2

Should someday learn:

Beethoven, Sonata No. 23 In F Minor, Op. 57 'Appassionata'

Chopin, Fantasy-Impromptu

Liszt, La Campanella

Hmm... looking at this list makes me feel I have a fairly restricted number of composers that I play. There are many, many more composers that I like... I just don't know their solo piano works very well.

You may recall that I play the piano, and you may be wondering, did I stop? I know I haven't posted about it for a while.

I took a break from piano, for practical and time-management reasons, that started when I hurt my knee. That break extended until I left Berkeley, mainly because my last couple months there were so hectic, and also because I knew that over the summer I'd have no choice but to take a break anyways. I was all over the place, and had access to a piano twice. I missed it, and I missed classical music in general, but I was having a ball, so it wasn't too bad.

But I swore that when I got settled in at Penn, I would start playing again. I love playing, and it makes me happy, and I saw music and exercise as two key things which might help to keep me sane in graduate school. So I figured out where there are practice rooms here, and I started going to them. It's always painful to restart playing after a break, because you think you sound terrible and you get very demotivated at first. But I've been trying to play at least once a week, generally more like thrice, since the semester started.

I can't really afford a teacher right now, and this is the first time I've seriously tried to learn new music, polish things, etc. without one. In some ways it's fine, because practicing and improving don't require supervision, just internal motivation, and I've tried to listen to my teachers and learn what to look for, how to find the lines in music, how to interpret dynamics, etc. So I think I can do pretty well on my own. On the other hand, it's hard to tell if I'm emphasizing something too much, or if my tempo changes and I don't notice... the sort of thing that teachers point out to you if you aren't noticing them. I think I need to bring my metronome, and I think I should record myself and listen, to try to disconnect how I sound from the experience of playing.

What I'm doing, though, is trying to polish my repertoire. I habitually stop playing pieces once I've performed them, let them fall into terrible disrepair, and then sigh over how I can't play them any more. And it makes it trying when I'm at someone's house and they ask me to play something, because I rarely have anything prepared. It would be really cool if I could have a small concert back in Los Alamos right before Christmas. I sort of doubt that will happen, though... I'd have to find a place to do it (I have a piano at my house, but it would be weird if I wanted my dad to come to my mom's, and not many of my friends have nice pianos), and I'd have to not freak out about it. I wish there were something here like the music club at Berkeley where students come and perform in a low-stress setting. Ah well.

I'm going on four big dinners in four days; first the potluck with friends, then Christmas Eve dinner with my mom and Kevin (turkey etc.), then Christmas dinner with my dad and friends (turkey etc. again!), and tonight, foie gras with figs, apples, and pumpkin pancakes. Every night I feel like I could never eat again. Happily, the next day the feeling is gone, and I have enough energy to exercise and while watching Stargate, which will hopefully ensure that I don't develop a 'decadent food belly'.

I read Three Junes, by Julia Glass, and it's very intricate and interesting but somewhat hard to get into. The Secret Life of Bees, which I'd been trying to get ahold of for at least two years, is fantastic, and womanly and nature-y and awesome in every way. If I could give a pack of books to all the women I know, at this point it would consist of The Secret Life of Bees, What the Body Remembers, and Woman: An Intimate Geography. And now I'm most of the way through Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier, which is beautiful and savage and brutal.

I'm getting some time for piano, which is awesome. So I'll leave you with this, from a footnote to the Appassionata.

Without keen insight into the Master's thematic work, without a clear understanding of the process of the arising and passing-away of the several motives, an intelligent and intelligible interpretation of his works is impossible. As detailed analysis would swell this instructive edition to an "unpractical" bulk, and oral instruction by the teacher being, moreover, far more fruitful of good than written treatises, the editor must content himself with occasional hints, leaving their exploitation to practical teaching.

I tell you the truth, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for an orchestral adaptation of a piano piece to sound anywhere near as good as the original.

I went to the University Symphony concert with Daria Friday night, and that was really cool. They played "Isle of the Dead", by Rachmaninoff, which I really enjoyed; "Short Ride in a Fast Machine" by John Adams, the guy who composed Doctor Atomic, which was a really cool piece; Sibelius' last symphony, No. 7, which was very beautiful and interesting; and then a set of three orchestral pieces by Alban Berg. Now there's some "modern" classical music that I'm up for, things like Mahler or Prokofiev, or minimalists like Philip Glass. I really enjoy some modern music. But Berg was apparently a student of Schoenberg, and wrote this piece (Three Orchestra Pieces, op. 6) to convince his teacher that he had mastered "dense textures awash with thematic material".

And it wasn't completely Schoenberg-y; there were some parts that were very beautiful. I attribute this to the composer's supposed reverence for Mahler. But there's something about Schoenberg and other atonalists that I completely don't get. I've tried listening to them without preconceptions, without looking for specific melodic arcs or complexity in the manner I'm used to, but all I hear is noise which is occasionally broken by some chord that seems to have fallen by chance out of complete chaos. It actually reminds me of reading the output of those thousand monkeys trying to write literature ("It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times?!").

But I know there are people, sane people, who love atonal music. Do those of you that are familiar with modernist classical music like atonalism, and if so please tell me your secret, or do you feel some other way about it?

Something totally weird about iTunes is how it keeps track of what songs you play. On the one hand, it's cool to see what songs I play the most, and what percentage of my songs are unplayed by iTunes (lots of stuff I got from other people but never sorted through, and some old CDs I ripped but haven't craved in the year or so I've gone digital with my music). It's bizarre, though, to sort my songs by last played and see sometime in February, when I was in the library listening to Swan Lake. But if I listen to Swan Lake again, that information is gone forever! Not that it's especially important... it's also odd to see how songs populate my most played list, like once when I went to class and didn't quite turn off my iPod, so it cycled through my short Franz Ferdinand playlist a lot and now those songs will never come off my most listened to. There's also a huge chunk of songs that I last listened to when we drove my car out from New Mexico. This is all so interesting that it's obvious to me I'll never reset my song count, and I'll be sad when I eventually reinstall my OS or something and lose this information, useless though it is.

Anyhow, that said, iTunes meme.

iTunes Pop Quiz

How many total songs?
6300

Sort by Song Title - first and last?
"'Round Midnight" - Kronos Quartet - Monk Suite
"Zwitter" - Rammstein - Mutter

Sort by Time - first and last?
"desert2" - 0:01 (I have no idea what this is. I listened to it and it sounds like the Sarlacc. If you're ever bored, listen to the shortest songs in iTunes; it's hilarious. Most of mine were opera lines and sound effects.)
"Learn to Speak German" - 1:12:46 (sweet! I shoud listen to this.)

Sort by Album - first and last?
"'Heroes' Symphony" - Philip Glass
"Zoot Suit Riot" - Cherry Poppin' Daddies

Sort by Artist - first and last?
A New Found Glory
Zorica Markovic

Find "sex," how many songs show up?
28 (mostly from the Red Hot Chili Peppers album "Blood Sugar Sex Magik")

Find "death," how many songs show up?
10

Find "love," how many songs show up?
113

Find "peace", how many songs show up?
1 ("Love and Peace or Else", by U2)

Find "fuck", how many songs show up?
8

I think that now I will explore the depths of my unlistened to music. Uh, I mean study.

I drove out to Mammoth Lakes on Wednesday with Hollis, through Tioga Pass and Yosemite. At night, though. Mammoth was beautiful, blustery, wintery, very cold and clear the way I like it. Our Thanksgiving dinner--tilapia filets, wild mushroom barley soup, sourdough bread, wilted spinach salad, stuffed squash, and mocha cakes with lime sauce--was a big success. We played a lot of this game, Racko, which I somehow won most of the time, and I was encouraged to take up cards seriously. ("Are you encouraging me to gamble?" "No, we're encouraging you to win.") Ben and I went to see Harry Potter, which was a fun and well-made movie, but for the first time it was quite evident how much better the books are. There's only so much of a book like that that you can fit into a movie.

The best parts were the food, getting to talk to Hollis so much, and my time with Ben. :) We couldn't return on Tioga Pass because they closed it due to snow in the time we were in Mammoth, so we came back a little further north no the 88/89. When I left, it was still rather warm in Berkeley. But suddenly it's winter and the temperature has dropped. It isn't raining yet, but it's poised to. The sky and the bay are slate gray, and I'm fishing out my peacoat and umbrella, learning how to use the radiator in my room. Suddenly, the speed with which my room can cool off ceases to be an asset.

Oh yeah, and I went with some BFC people to see Fidelio last Tuesday, the only Beethoven opera. The production design was possibly the best I've ever seen in a stage performance... it was helped by the impressive performers and the power and beauty of Beethoven, but it was still a very impressive staging. It was alright that Beethoven's skill in operatics is much less than his skill in sonatas, and that the end of the opera had the worst case of Deus ex Machina I've ever seen. The three images I don't want to forget are the grates in the floor rising open to admit the prisoners into the light, the chasm of darkness out of which Florestan sings "Gott! Welch Dunkel hier!", and the way the walls of the prison fell with a door open over Florestan and Fidelio, so that they burst into daylight.

I had a really nice weekend with a lot of going out, which is unusual. I think it's good compensation for all the time I spent studying for the physics GRE and my QM midterm recently, though it's bad in terms of needing to get grad stuff done. Blah.

I went with Ron to his salsa lesson Friday night, which was a beginner lesson. I only went to keep him company, though, so it was pretty fun. From there we picked up Hollis and headed to Yoshi's to see the Regina Carter quintet, a jazz group. Carter is a jazz violinist, so at first I had some trouble getting around the 'Your tone is too light! Your tune isn't exactly on!' thing that my classically trained brain always does when it hears an instrument that I've only really listened to in the context of classical music. Once I got around that, though, I really enjoyed the show. There were some bits that I just loved, like the Celtic jazz they played, and most of the bass and violin solos. The drummer was good but had solos that were way too self-indulgent for my taste: I'm very unforgiving of long, boring percussion solos. And the conga player was good but a little silly at times, in that it seemed like he was just playing as many random percussive instruments as possible. For the most part, though, the group had a really nice dynamic. I also had a very girly drink, made with vanilla vodka and lime juice and something or othery else. I wish cocktails were cheaper.

On Saturday I did a lot of laundry, watched a lot of Farscape, and went to a party for Cinthia's birthday. She made a lot of Brazilian food, some couscous, this bean-bacon-sausage dish, collard greens, and also ordered coxinhas from Nino's on MLK. We made caipirinhas, a drink with cachaca (sugarcane alcohol), limes, and sugar, and played Mafia (well, really the French version, called Loups-Garous).

And on Sunday I had a great time, uh, building a radio with Juhi. We each ended up building one; hers was polka dot and really cute, and mine was dark purple and only took a third as many components as I expected. The lunch we had was really nice--a goat cheese tart, herb chicken sandwich with really good garlic fries, and profiteroles. I wish I had more money to spend on radios, or that radios were cheaper; we could have built some really awesome ones, but were restricted by cost.

Yeeees.

But I'm starting on grad school stuff now, have three letters arranged, and just need to write my Statement of Purpose. Of which I am deathly afraid.