(no subject)

Mahler. Is good.

Salad came over after I went home with him and Bill after rehearsal to eat chili. Salad is very reasonable. He doesn't have to be too drunk to give good advice. He is very good at not speaking from a certain perspective, but explaining his own objectively and other possibilities.

Juries tomorrow. I go to bed with no new numbers, but I have all day tomorrow after juries. Except maybe Sean will want lunch.

(no subject)

That was certainly the worst train wreck I've ever had.


Hummed in the shower, drank a cup of tea with lemon for the morning gunk, contemplated what an arbitrary time 11:04 is for a jury time. Called Sean, and he didn't answer till the fourth try. We agreed to meet in front of the black couches at 10:15. The bus doesn't go on weekends, so I walked in my fluttery chiffon from Jones to Shepherd (about a mile, I think) and it only started pouring when I got out the door. I looked like a wet poodle by the time I opened the door into Shepherd, so, since it was 10:10, I went and squoze myself off in the bathroom and used up a lot of paper towels. Marginally less wet, I sat on a black couch and waited for Sean.

Come 10:35, I had started to panic, not because I really needed the practice time or even the accompanist (Tom played for the people whose pianists didn't show up), but because Sean is prone to bike accidents and has dislocated his shoulder, broken his clavicle, and scraped the skin off his palms on three separate occasions, none of which injuries is conducive to playing the piano. I called him four more times, no answer.

It was a relief when he showed up and explained that no, he wasn't dead on the road somewhere; he'd lost his keys and then forgotten after he'd found them that the bus doesn't run on weekends, so he walked all the way from the grad student house. He had an umbrella, though, so only his sleeves were wet. We practiced amiably for awhile, one break while I went to go get my dress shoes from my mom (she brought them to Shepherd), and deliberated over whether to start with my most familiar Mozart or the Rachmaninoff, because he says I sound really good on the Rachmaninoff but I don't know how presumptuous they consider me for even listing it on my rep sheet.

Now, 11:00, we head to Hirsch to the juries. The juries aren't in Hirsch. Interesting. I have no idea where they are. We have four minutes and they're usually running about 20 minutes late. Sean remembered Dr. Farwell had said where they were, so we went to room 1131 and lo, there they were. And they were running 20 minutes late. So we sat and chatted with some other voice students. Lalala.

My turn. I completely blanked on the words to my Mozart, not just once, but twice, and they fed them to me from the back of the room where they sat writing furiously. In the same song, Sean had his page sin the wrong order, so we stopped for a few seconds for him to rearrange them. They ask for Elgar second. It was both a relief and a bad sign that I don't remember singing it, because that means I made no obvious mistakes, but I was on autopilot with no expression, and it's a very expressive song.

So here I sit in the body sock that goes under my soaking dress, truly regretting the lack of dinner on Saturdays and not taking my vitamins and not writing. Urgh. Oh, well. It's over. I don't think they'll kick me out.

(no subject)

It's not that I had forgotten there was magic. I just wasn't using it.

Knowing and doing are two different things. I haven't read a book (a real book, with a story; not a school book or a book describing the connections between the Romantic Circle at Jena and the festival at Beyreuth) since I started school.

Time disappears, and the day is gone while there are love and war in another world, crying at how similar we are and how much clearer it is there. And the serenade in b-flat major suddenly has a play count of 39 and the salt has dried in tracks on my face. I remember Empyrion in a practice room over days, only alien until the experience was finished and everything explained. They don't explain life for you like that.

It's like music. Why do we want so much to hurt for someone else? Or is it all for ourselves? Or is it so we can feel, because we aren't really feeling the rest of the time and we want to get drunk on it? It's rich. To lose not yourself, but your self in the struggle you can't realign to tie off so lucidly in life, is at best the attraction of escapism. But it's not really taking the easy way out, is it, when their pain is so much greater than mine? Why?

Chords roll and people in books are more real than the people I know, except for you.