Tuesday on My Mind

It's been a rough week, but there's always something better around the corner, right? I think--I hope--that people and lives have astounding capacity for growth and change. To be a little less nebulous and a little more reassuring, everything is okay. But I felt like I should post something since it's been a little while, so here is a photo I found from January 2010.

To quietude and contentment.

Backyard in Platte County, Missouri

Upswing?

Alright.

Okay.

After a cold, two ear infections, a sinus infection, mono, and stitches...I think I'm on the upswing now (knocking on the wooden table as I type this). Really. I got my stitches out today. What's better is that I got to spend my day yesterday with a bunch of my remarkable family, talking and eating and sitting around. My cousin gave me a henna design around my wound, which made it look a hundred times more cool and intentional.

But I have a paper to write, and I've had more than several cups of coffee already today, so I'll keep this very short.

Here is a photo of some sassy polydactyl cats, just because their paws look like they have little opposable thumbs.

Country Life

I went for a walk today, along the road where I grew up. It was delightful. My neighbor's cows, whom I've named Claude and Édouard, were especially friendly today and they kept licking my hand when I stopped to pet them. I never knew this, but cow tongues are surprisingly rough and abrasive and strong. Almost painfully so. Later, when I got up to leave, the cows followed me all the way to the end of their enclosure.
I'll be paying them another visit very soon.

With A Little Help From My Friends

Joe Cocker died today. Considering that for a good majority of my childhood I watched The Wonder Years before bed, here is Joe Cocker's cover of The Beatles' "With A Little Help From My Friends," from Woodstock 1969.

Snitches Get Stitches

...and so do people who faint and hit their heads at the grocery store.

I was accompanying my lovely sister to Price Chopper and trying to find Orangina in the juice aisle. The next thing I remember is waking up surrounded with paramedics with a big puddle of blood under me. And now I have four stitches in my face.

Truth be told, this makes me feel pretty tough, especially since I also have mono.

But I still cried like a baby.

Crash

My sister and I were just at a convenience store when a truck crashed through the brick wall and broke the windows. No one was hurt, but there was a little girl an aisle over from where all the glass and bricks fell. She was okay, but to put it simply, it was scary and unexpected.

That is my Friday in a nutshell.

Goodbye Stranger

Not to be trite and predictable, but...

-"Goodbye Stranger" by Supertramp, from Breakfast in America (1979)

I fly home to Kansas City tomorrow, where my cat and bed await me. My goals for break are, in approximate order:

1. Catch up with my family and friends and cat and favorite climbing trees
2. Sleep and read and maybe recover from mono before getting my wisdom teeth out. Also, it would be nice if this full-body rash went completely away, but I'm not holding my breath on that count, especially since it's calmed down a lot in the past week and I should be less vain anyway
3. Write a final paper on Robert Lowell
4. Finish a final project for my other poetry class
5. Prepare for ESPAÑA
6. And probably some other stuff that I'm forgetting because I'm still pretty focused on packing, to be honest

Stuff.

I'm packing up my dorm room right now, and I can't help but wonder...

How did I end up with so much stuff?

A small sampling of the mess that is my room

Thinking about this, of course, brings to mind...

I'm just tryin' to find a place for my stuff.
This is one of my favorite George Carlin routines; this specific version is from his set at Comic Relief in 1986. What a guy.

Regardless, I am incredibly eager to be going home the day after tomorrow, and am trying to get all of my loose ends tied up and my goodbyes in before that. It's a lot to do in two days, but I feel optimistic and up to the challenge.

Charlotte Mittnacht (The Fabulous Destiny of...)

Surviving.

- DeVotchKa, "Charlotte Mittnacht (The Fabulous Destiny of...)," from How It Ends (2004)

Finals Week

Finals week is nearly upon us, and with that comes a whole slew of emotions and obligations that I can't even begin to process. Mainly I've just been trying to sleep and not scratch my hives while retaining my sanity. I'm extremely excited to go home, but very nervous to say goodbye because a) I hate goodbyes and b) it's very unclear when I'll next see a lot of people here.  That's the way it goes, though, and that's okay.

Anyhow, because I know I won't have time to write a well-reasoned post every day this week, and that most of the things I post will likely be songs, here is the first:

- "Mack the Knife" by Bobby Darin from That's All (1959)

"High on Life"

I have mono and am covered in hives. As you can imagine, I'm pretty whiny at the moment and am therefore not going to editorialize this any more than necessary.

Because this made me smile, and maybe it will make you smile too, here is a nice little video of Lou Reed interacting with some reporters in Australia in 1974.

Shakespeare and Shostakovich

That title was a deliberate attempt to seem sophisticated and knowledgeable, I'm just nodding to that fact up front.

Right now, I'm finishing up a painful paper about Shakespeare's representation of gender within As You Like It, and as such I'm trying to find some good study music. I began listening to some Shostakovich fugues, which were quite conducive to efficient writing. Then I found this amazing album of Shostakovich's jazz suites and now I'm on fire. Not literally, obviously, but this essay is finally coming together.


This specific piece always reminds me of the Nintendo 64 game Mission Impossible. There was a level on that game where you had to infiltrate this Russian palace by finding the sheet music for this song. When the pianist began to play the song, it distracted the ambassador you had to sneak past or something like that. Also, more recently, it makes me think of the end of Eyes Wide Shut, but that's a completely different can of worms that we won't open today.

In the spirit of college and paper-writing and gray rainy weather (and quite frankly, because I don't have time to format/type up anything cool today), here are some study tunes, in case you too are suffering through the uptown problem of surviving finals and the burden of receiving a fine education

 

- "Waltz No. 2" from The Suite for Variety Orchestra by Dmitri Shostakovich

Excerpts from a Sixth-Grade Diary, pt. 1

I was looking through an old journal that I have, and though I realize this is incredibly self-involved and inconsequential (who cares what I wrote in my diary in 2006?), it seemed funny so I thought I'd share it.

From August 1, 2006:

"I'm feeling sort of happy-sad right now. I'm listening to Jazz [a 1979 album by Queen], and reading Fight Club. It's sort of funny, but it's kind of depressing when you realize that stuff like this is going on in the world."

I guess as a twelve-year-old I thought the world's biggest problems were underground consensual fighting organizations and men feeling uncomfortable within their own perceptions of masculinity. If only.

The backside of that page, because if there's
one thing I've always loved, it's stickers.

Keepin' Up

After a weekend of sleep and relaxation, I feel much better, though I still feel like I've been lagging on this blog. Also, I just received clearance from the college to study abroad, so I will most certainly be in Spain next semester. Hooray!

Here's a song I like, because that's all I seem to have time for these days.

-"Lucky" by Radiohead, from OK Computer (1997)

Break (?)

A professor in my department just walked by me in the hallway and told me that I "need to take a break." And maybe he is right. So I'm trying to do that with the justification being that I missed no class or work this semester and that perhaps I need to. Hell, maybe I don't need to. Maybe I just want to and deserve to. But that's a hard realization (for me, anyway).

Because I bought my plane ticket home this morning (I'll be back in K.C. in thirteen days!), I'm in the midst of packing my room up right now, namely my books. This means that I have to decide which two or three books I want to take with me for the next few weeks, and this decision has become much harder than it needs to be. I'm in the middle of Another Bullshit Night In Suck City by Nick Flynn right now, and his writing is fairly remarkable. He doesn't overwrite or try to compensate for anything, which I like quite a lot. So I have that, but seeing how I ended up sleeping in the Charlotte airport on my way home two years ago, I'm not taking the risk of being without another book.


Regardless, and because that rant was fairly self-indulgent and unnecessary, here is a beautiful piece of music as recompense. The piano in this song couldn't be better.

-"Miles from Nowhere" by Cat Stevens, from Tea for the Tillerman (1970)

Wedding Bells

True country music reigns supreme (over country-pop, anyway, but let's not get started on that).

-Hank Williams, "Wedding Bells" (1949)

Illin' Like A Villain

I'm the sickest I've been in four years and milking it for all its worth.

Basically, I have two ear infections and a sinus infection, which is kind of a relief considering that I was chalking up my sadness and discomfort to a common cold. That said, I'm on antibiotics and I already feel as though I'm on the upswing. I should be feeling much better in a day or two. Most importantly, there are also people who might as well be angels or something like that looking out for me, because I have been feeling the love from a lot of my friends and family. Thank you!

But I should keep this short, because I am at work and that seems kind of important too.