Things I Have Learned in the Past Month [ish]

In no particular order:

- The fact that something is "understandable" won't necessarily make it hurt less.

- When you give a really solid performance, perhaps the defining performance of your career so far, there is bound to be a downer feeling afterward, a lack of energy in the days to come.

- Also, don't beat yourself up if every performance isn't exactly as perfect as the best one you've given. Life will go on, and someone somewhere enjoyed it.

- God puts some beautiful people in your life when you're not looking, in places you wouldn't expect.

- Sometimes it's actually a relief when your D&D character dies...when you haven't put much time into them and you want to move on with another character.

- Shirley Schmidt is perhaps my favorite character on Boston Legal.
- There are few things that a night of Arrested Development and Boston Legal can't cure.

- Don't watch Audition. Just don't do it.
- If you're not careful, history is bound to repeat itself.

- SAI sisters are amazing.

- Matthew Allen? Really not a bad guy. Though he may have at least a man-crush on a certain freshman in our studio.

- Romans is a really freaking sweet book in the Bible.

- Money should not come before friendship.

- Being constantly busy is actually not a good thing.

- Sleep is highly underrated.


I think I'm going to pop in some Boston Legal and eat some lunch. It's going to be a good day.

Add to that list...Schmidt.

It would seem that I haven't updated my blog in over a month, now. I do apologize, for the few of you that read this. I can hardly believe we're already halfway through the first semester here at CMU, and so much has happened. I'd like for everything to slow down, but I'll just have to deal with it.

I'd especially like to slow down this week because mine and Monica's voice recital jury is on Friday, and I have a sore throat. I can still sing, but I fear the condition of my voice this week. At least I know my music backward and forward now!

I've also gotten some semblance of a job: tutoring students in voice pedagogy! I signed up as a theory tutor, but we'll have to wait and see how that goes.

Oh dear, I'm slightly distracted by Boston Legal, as Denny Crane just bust into the courtroom in Revolutionary War apparel. I also just died a little of cute as James Spader hugged Betty White.

It'll take me a little bit to get back into the swing of regularly posting, and getting my creative juices flowing. So to speak. Er.

Denny Crane.

Of Cabbages and Kings

I was going to review Brave New World and Bell Jar, then I realized I only have like 15 minutes and I don't have the books with me for reference. Bah.

At the beginning of the week I decided to start writing everything in cursive. I've just noticed a lot of cursive lately in Monica's writing and in a lot of signatures. As I've been experimenting with it, I've discovered new ways of making my handwriting distinctive, and I've actually enjoyed picking up a pen and just writing lately for the fun of it. I guess it's just a small part of myself I want to improve. I've started using the "Disney D" as my cursive capital D, and experimenting with how I write letters like i and t. It also makes me really think about what I'm writing, like what comprises the words and sentences. It'll be interesting to see where this goes.

Bach. I don't even know where to start with the man. He wrote some fabulous music, and was utterly brilliant, but somewhere along the way he must have been, I don't know, given a venereal disease by a singer because he just seems to have hated them. I imagine if I had to sing the Esurientes implevit bonis from his Magnificat for him, Bach would cackle with glee to see me fall over dead from asphyxiation when he didn't let me take a breath during that second sixteenth-note run. The man wrote beautiful music, it's just all written instrumentally. It would be infinitely easier to play than to sing. And that is all I will say about that.

NOTE: To those of you who saw the CMU choir concert last fall, you should come up again this October to hear us sing another Whitacre piece. We're doing Water Night.

This post was going to be longer, but I have to go to ACDA, so nevermind! This weekend I'll write about having to conduct to Katy Perry and Ke$ha in class this week.

To In[Plath]ity and Beyond!

I sat in Java City on Friday morning, reading the last five pages of Infinite Jest. As I read the final sentence, I leaned back in my chair and heaved a tremendous sigh, like a stale breath that had been kept inside of me since September 13, 2009. I looked at the page, then looked up at the coffee shop before me. My first words upon finishing Jest were:

"What the hell?"

The rest of the day I was simultaneously proud of myself and uncomfortable. I couldn't get it out of my head that I didn't understand the ending, I felt no sense of completion, and I just felt like David Foster Wallace was laughing at me from beyond the grave.

A few hours later, I returned to the apartment and immediately went online to see if I could find some sense of closure. I found a few sites, and finally ended up at a website that I will not link here (you'll find it if you need it, I will not be a spoiler enabler!). It brought together details from the written beginning and end of the book, which happen to all be the chronological ending. Some bits I'd pieced together myself, but as far as who had been sending the tapes of the samizdat, I was floored. Once that was revealed, everything from the chronological end seemed to make sense! I leaned back and heaved a sigh of relief. My roommates asked me what was up, and I replied mistily:

"I just got the ending of Infinite Jest."

My brain is at rest.

I started Plath's The Bell Jar last night, and almost couldn't put it down. If I'd really, really wanted to, it probably would have been finished in the wee hours of the morning. However, we're having a party tonight, and I was getting up at 8 to go to Midland with Josh, so that was out of the question. I did get about 100 pages in, though. At one point I texted Sarah and said "I just reached page 20. This was a major feat in Jest." Basically, I've decided that any book after this will be considerably easier to get through (I was going to make an "infinitely easier" pun, but...well I suppose I just did), regardless of its average level of difficulty.

I plan on finishing Bell Jar by Monday evening, seeing as I'll be busy tonight and tomorrow. So far it's really intense. Plath's voice is so distinct and real; I can understand why the author of the foreword said so many writers and readers hear her voice as a contemporary one.

I hope everyone has a lovely weekend!

More like Finite

Reading Infinite Jest lately has been strange lately, because at this point I am on page 951, and have just finished note 381. I have 30 pages of reading left, and only seven notes. To reiterate: thirty pages out of 981. The chunk of book I have left to read is at this point far skinnier than the Notes and Errata section.

I have had a love-hate relationship with this book since the beginning. I loved the idea of the challenge of reading it, and the fact that there seems to be this very exclusive group of people in the world who have read it; I hated that it seemed so dry and verbose at times and the fact that some notes are five, seven, even eighteen pages long. I love the characters and I feel a real connection to ones I felt alienated from at the start, but I still wish there could be more about the samizdat, The Entertainment, the titular film Infinite Jest. In the beginning, I kept having to think back to the foreword, wherein Dave Eggers reminds the reader that everything in this book is there for a reason: the seemingly random anachronistic chapters (particularly at the beginning), the obnoxiously descriptive tennis matches, the tangents upon tangents from AA meetings, the seven-page invented filmography of James Orin Incandenza, the endless two-page sentences, even the sections written entirely in the dialect of a character.

Many were the times I would gush about some hilarious nugget I had just read, while in the same conversation complain about how rough it can be to get through. I remember one specific incident wherein I was attempting to get to page 800, and I was on page 795. Out of nowhere comes this entirely separate section comprised of merely a footnote number. Out popped a four-page footnote. I told Sarah the next day, "David Foster Wallace is laughing me to scorn."

It took me 500 pages to realize that what I am reading is, in fact, a comedy. I always eyed the blurbs and reviews warily, seeing the words "uproarious," "screwball," and "hilarity." 500 pages in, I realized that most of the phrases I was underlining were things I found funny, along with major plot points. "Huh," I grunted to myself, "I guess this is actually a comedy. Whaddaya know." From that point on I regarded it as such.

I'm at the point now, with only thirty pages to go, that I hadn't really thought about almost a year ago on September 13th, my official starting date; much less did I think I would accomplish this much when I finally reached page 500 on August 1st. This was always my ongoing project, something I could always fall back on. My paperback, back in April, still looked untarnished, almost new; now it looks thoroughly loved, all dog-eared and somewhat worn. I've been at the point for about a week now where I no longer need to keep two bookmarks; I only use my bookmark now, making sure to keep a pencil handy. I'm on the last page of notes.

On the one hand, I'm going to miss this book, and I will be sad that it's over. However, finishing this book means that this chapter of my life will be over, but I can always revisit if I so choose. It also means I can move on to other books I have been meaning to read, but always put off because of this one.

It's been a fairly hilly journey with David Foster Wallace, but I think in the end I will always be glad I accepted his challenge and took a year of my life to read his masterpiece.