Random thoughts
1. My mom was one of the first people on the planet to have a car phone. Not a cell phone. A car phone. It was huge, it had buttons, it had a twirly cord. I was, like, the coolest kid in school for a while because of this phone. I think we got it when I was about eight. So we're talking 1986, 1987. The "on top of things" trend morphed spectacularly into the "way behind everything" trend when my mom traded in the car maybe 15+ years later and the people at the car dealership actually had to call in their buddies to look at this ancient car phone. At that point my mom realized that it was time for a cell phone. The Verizon people were somehow able to transfer the car phone number over to the cell phone number.
This means that my mother has been at the same mobile phone number for something like 24 years. That is totally most of my life. Most people don't even have land line numbers that long. It's kind of extraordinary.
2. I got my first teaching assignment. Say hello to your TA for Intro to Directing, first class September 7. I'm both thrilled and terrified.
3. When I lived in France, I lived in a studio apartment on the fourth floor of a little atelier building (which is really the fifth floor because of Europeans' weird ground floor/first floor thing). That's a fifth-floor walkup for those of you counting flights at home. There were two apartments on each floor, a teeny little place. On one floor down from me there lived an extremely proficient pianist. Like, concert pianist level. S/he (I never found out) used to bang out masterpieces on that thing all day long. Liszt, Beethoven, Chopin, other stuff I didn't recognize. It was incredible. I would come home from school literally starving and exercised out, and once in a while there were days where I physically couldn't make it up the stairs because I was so hungry and faint. So I would stop for a few minutes and lean my head against the wall in the narrow, curved stairwell and listen. I could hear it in my apartment, too, all hours of the day and night sometimes, and it was just generally a tremendous comfort to me. I never had the Paris experience, the romantic, glorious, artsy, springtime Truffaut dream, because I couldn't afford to eat and was getting beaten up with a metaphorical stick every single day in school and Paris is a lot colder and darker most of the year than The Little Prince ever tells you. That neighbor and that piano were the only thing that ever let me pretend I was living a life I wasn't. I could sit in my apartment and pretend that everybody in Paris had a concert pianist in their building (and maybe they do), and some days I really did question whether I was dreaming the whole thing because to this day it's beyond my comprehension how anybody could have gotten a piano up into that apartment, let alone fit it into a place and still live there. Dude/dudette must have been almost as poor as I was, but had that piano.
The only other studio apartment I lived in was a few years later in Chicago, though this apartment was significantly bigger and more comfortable than my Paris apartment, and differed as well in the sense that it usually had at least some food in it. This building also had two apartments on each floor, and shortly after moving in I realized that once again I had stumbled upon a concert pianist in the building. This one was one floor up and across the hallway. This pianist was more inclined to play Billy Joel, very well, than Liszt, but I didn't hold that against him/her (never found out in this case either) because the fact that my Paris concert pianist was predisposed to Liszt and my Chicago concert pianist was predisposed to Joel only reinforced what little of the dreamy Paris experience I had. And I don't actually dislike Billy Joel. In some ways Chicago was a difficult year for me too, due almost entirely to the fact that I couldn't sleep the whole time I lived there, so it was glorious to have a musician in the building again.
Now I'm living in Watertown, and I love school and some things are great, but I'm not going to pretend I don't spend my fair share of mornings sitting in my house crying. I live on the ground floor of a converted house; there are two more apartments above mine. The house has no air conditioning or ceiling fans and the average temperature in Boston since I moved here in July has been roughly 138 degrees every day. So I leave the windows open all the time even though I'm not sure it always helps. And since the windows are always open, I have been able to learn that I very clearly have a professional violinist living next door to me. S/he is very devoted and practices quite a lot of the day, first scales, then pieces. It's almost unbearably gorgeous some days. There's also a slightly less proficient but no less dedicated and delightful trumpet player across the street, and occasionally their rehearsal time overlaps and I'm listening to a violin and a trumpet at the same time, and this is a lot less cacophonous than you might think. It's actually kind of fantastic.
The fact that I now have TWO very high-level musicians living in close proximity almost freaks me out. I love listening to it, but I almost worry that something is trying to tell me, oh honey, these next two years are going to put Paris and Chicago so to shame in their misery that you're going to need TWO musicians just to make it through.
4. There's a fair possibility that this entire entry was written in effort to procrastinate reading even more about Brecht than I already have. I've read so much about Brecht in the last few weeks that any minute now I'm going to start speaking German and shitting misogyny. And yet so many people have been so completely fascinated by him over the last several decades that I still have so much more to read. Brecht is starting to endear himself to me in a lot of ways, actually. Which is ten times more disturbing than the dual musicians, I think.
5. I have a vacation in ten days. Praise be to sweet baby Jesus of the salt of the earth of the universe.
This means that my mother has been at the same mobile phone number for something like 24 years. That is totally most of my life. Most people don't even have land line numbers that long. It's kind of extraordinary.
2. I got my first teaching assignment. Say hello to your TA for Intro to Directing, first class September 7. I'm both thrilled and terrified.
3. When I lived in France, I lived in a studio apartment on the fourth floor of a little atelier building (which is really the fifth floor because of Europeans' weird ground floor/first floor thing). That's a fifth-floor walkup for those of you counting flights at home. There were two apartments on each floor, a teeny little place. On one floor down from me there lived an extremely proficient pianist. Like, concert pianist level. S/he (I never found out) used to bang out masterpieces on that thing all day long. Liszt, Beethoven, Chopin, other stuff I didn't recognize. It was incredible. I would come home from school literally starving and exercised out, and once in a while there were days where I physically couldn't make it up the stairs because I was so hungry and faint. So I would stop for a few minutes and lean my head against the wall in the narrow, curved stairwell and listen. I could hear it in my apartment, too, all hours of the day and night sometimes, and it was just generally a tremendous comfort to me. I never had the Paris experience, the romantic, glorious, artsy, springtime Truffaut dream, because I couldn't afford to eat and was getting beaten up with a metaphorical stick every single day in school and Paris is a lot colder and darker most of the year than The Little Prince ever tells you. That neighbor and that piano were the only thing that ever let me pretend I was living a life I wasn't. I could sit in my apartment and pretend that everybody in Paris had a concert pianist in their building (and maybe they do), and some days I really did question whether I was dreaming the whole thing because to this day it's beyond my comprehension how anybody could have gotten a piano up into that apartment, let alone fit it into a place and still live there. Dude/dudette must have been almost as poor as I was, but had that piano.
The only other studio apartment I lived in was a few years later in Chicago, though this apartment was significantly bigger and more comfortable than my Paris apartment, and differed as well in the sense that it usually had at least some food in it. This building also had two apartments on each floor, and shortly after moving in I realized that once again I had stumbled upon a concert pianist in the building. This one was one floor up and across the hallway. This pianist was more inclined to play Billy Joel, very well, than Liszt, but I didn't hold that against him/her (never found out in this case either) because the fact that my Paris concert pianist was predisposed to Liszt and my Chicago concert pianist was predisposed to Joel only reinforced what little of the dreamy Paris experience I had. And I don't actually dislike Billy Joel. In some ways Chicago was a difficult year for me too, due almost entirely to the fact that I couldn't sleep the whole time I lived there, so it was glorious to have a musician in the building again.
Now I'm living in Watertown, and I love school and some things are great, but I'm not going to pretend I don't spend my fair share of mornings sitting in my house crying. I live on the ground floor of a converted house; there are two more apartments above mine. The house has no air conditioning or ceiling fans and the average temperature in Boston since I moved here in July has been roughly 138 degrees every day. So I leave the windows open all the time even though I'm not sure it always helps. And since the windows are always open, I have been able to learn that I very clearly have a professional violinist living next door to me. S/he is very devoted and practices quite a lot of the day, first scales, then pieces. It's almost unbearably gorgeous some days. There's also a slightly less proficient but no less dedicated and delightful trumpet player across the street, and occasionally their rehearsal time overlaps and I'm listening to a violin and a trumpet at the same time, and this is a lot less cacophonous than you might think. It's actually kind of fantastic.
The fact that I now have TWO very high-level musicians living in close proximity almost freaks me out. I love listening to it, but I almost worry that something is trying to tell me, oh honey, these next two years are going to put Paris and Chicago so to shame in their misery that you're going to need TWO musicians just to make it through.
4. There's a fair possibility that this entire entry was written in effort to procrastinate reading even more about Brecht than I already have. I've read so much about Brecht in the last few weeks that any minute now I'm going to start speaking German and shitting misogyny. And yet so many people have been so completely fascinated by him over the last several decades that I still have so much more to read. Brecht is starting to endear himself to me in a lot of ways, actually. Which is ten times more disturbing than the dual musicians, I think.
5. I have a vacation in ten days. Praise be to sweet baby Jesus of the salt of the earth of the universe.