it's not halloween...

...until my mother sings the song. Luckily she got back from Mexico yesterday (I swear, I knew she was going, but she never told me nor my brother when).

Halloween and out we're going, ghosts and goblins all about.
Halloween and out we're going, out to play the game shell out!
Knock, knock, knock, and then we'll shout!
Knock, knock, knock, shell out, shell out!
Then a gust of wind comes blowing
Blows my pumpkin lantern ouuuuuuut.

wuthering heights roleplay

Heh, heh. I'm getting so. much. work. done.

Wuthering Heights roleplaying game

I remembered this after I saw my friend's bio thingie on the GSLIS wiki that said she liked boardgames and might have a (linked) problem.

who died

and decided everything should be so loud? You can't work in a coffee shop, you can't eat in a restaurant, you can't seem to do anything without having your eardrums blown out. Don't people realize that you can't fix your eardrums? Idiots. I'm going to be the only person in my generation hearing when we're in our 40s, since I use earplugs all the time. Groan. I'm ready to stage a protest in Kopi. Fuckheads.

smelly people

On I Love the '80s--3d, one of the guys said that Lita Ford looked really hot but that she probably would smell like a dumpster. I thought that was hilarious, because my cousin and I used to watch that Van Halen "Jump" video, and we always thought David Lee Roth looked like he was smelly. People always thought I was weird for thinking that someone looked like he smelled.

ok, peter jackson

I don't think the American version had these kinds of images.

weird evening

last night was weird. And then I broke my month-old camera. My dad is worried it won't be fixable. My camera drama has really been major this year and of course it had to end in this. A broken, $400 camera. I sure know how to make a mess of things. First, I took pictures of me and Mr. I and was so delirious when I got home that I erased them. Then I lost the whole camera. Then I collected on insurance and bought a new one and now it's broken.

I think this week has culminated in a realization that I'm never going to get over Mr. I. Yes, it's pretty recent. And I suppose on some level I've always known I'll never get over it. But it's pretty tough to deal with. I spent my entire life looking for my true love. I met him. And he's got horrible issues and apparently doesn't want to be with me. No, this is not an unrequited situation--I know more than I've ever known anything in my life how very much I'm requited in this.

Now I'm thinking again about getting out of this place. Even though I can graduate now, I need another semester to at least look for jobs. If I leave and don't do a music degree, then I'll have a couple of musicology courses (next semester) under my belt and hopefully some papers for applications to other programs. Getting a library job these days is quite a long shot, so I'm probably going to have to get some sort of editorial job again since that's my background. But that's OK. If I can live in a city again, I'll be so happy. This place drives me fucking nuts. It's so parochial and it's full of people who seem to never go anywhere.

spank

spank
Originally uploaded by freyjawaru.

hello.

I think last night was pretty successful. I wish I hadn't been in an odd mood, but I was so pleased that there was such a wonderful turnout and there were some fantastic costumes. S and J are incredible.

thoughts for today

just sitting around not doing much.

1. OK, Peter Jackson. Whatever. Brilliant fucking filmmaking? Have you seen the *Japanese* Ringu? Not the stupid American remake? There is no way that Samara could ever be as creepy as Sadako. Furthermore *I* read the book, and the Japanese film follows it well. Does the American version? Hell, no.

2. College kids are annoying at Halloween time. Especially here.

3. They were showing Sixth Sense. In it, Haley Joel Osment tells Bruce Willis that he should talk to his wife while she's sleeping. I personally have always been a bit obsessed with ghosts and ghost stories and I collect them. The one experience I had was almost four years ago. I had a dream that I was at a picnic and all the people there were my dead ancestors. It was quite surreal because I swear to this day it was a very real experience. I knew that my grandmother was there somewhere but I had this wonderful feeling that time and space didn't matter. I knew she wanted to see me and I wanted to see her very much, but I had all the time in the world and was enjoying talking to Allyn, who was married to my grandmother's uncle. All of the sudden, everyone there started getting excited and talking animatedly. I asked Allyn what was happening, and she said, "Oh, someone just got here. We were irritated with him, but it's not a big deal." And right then, the phone rang--it was my mother calling to tell me that my grandfather had just died. November 30, 2001. The day before my birthday.

My grandmother died when I was two and I always missed her terribly. My grandfather remarried eight months after she died and disinherited all of us right away. My grandmother had family furniture and heirlooms from her side of the family that she'd kept and taken care of, and after she died my grandfather wouldn't allow my mother and aunt to have them nor buy them. My mother has been angry about this for 28 years. I wonder if I will ever visit Lebanon again.

4. Yes! They're doing a run down of scary movies, and the good version of The Haunting (the one made in 1962 that, in my opinion, follows Shirley Jackson's novel to a T) made at least the top 20 list. It should be in the top five, but whatever. I think it's the scariest movie ever made.

the sock fetishist...

I thought the puppy guy was weird for culling puppy photos from all over Flickr. But check this out:

Sock Fetishist

me

Self portrait
Originally uploaded by freyjawaru.

I'm seriously getting obsessed with taking my own picture. What does that say about me?

bldg

bldg
Originally uploaded by freyjawaru.

OK, if you were looking for 1633 would you guess that this is the right building? I guess taken out of context it doesn't seem nearly as confusing as it was, but whoever designed the place is a misanthrope.

whew!

I did it! What a load off my chest. Now if only Miss Mess can get herself fired from the job I got her, which I fully intend to return to when I move back to Chicago, all will be well and good. I'm sure she'll get herself fired, though, because she's a very lazy and unreliable person.

I'm so mean. But not nearly as mean as she is.

Now, onto more pleasant topics. I need to download Monster Mash and Thriller and American Werewolf in London for mixes for the party on Friday. Anyone have other Halloween song suggestions?

grrr

Now I think I can't edit my Friendsters. And here I try to live authentically. While I may not truly be friends with many of my Friendsters, I am at least on "friendly" terms with them. And Miss Latent Lesbian Mess and her mean friend and another ex-friend of mine are clearly NOT on friendly terms with me.

I have a friend who just deleted her whole profile because it wasn't quite accurate friend-wise. Luckily it's just three of mine I'm concerned about. :)

musicals

My mother raised me on them. It's interesting because for some reason, I always neglect to put them on my lists of favorite movies, in spite of the fact that I adore many of them.

Unfortunately, I can't abide most musicals written after, oh, 1970ish. I saw a bunch when I lived in NYC and they sucked bad. Musical composers now don't know how to write a catchy tune.

In no particular order, here's a list of some of my favorites:

Fiddler on the Roof: Love the music, love the story and message--both Broadway cast and movie. Of course I never saw it live. I'm mostly familiar with the movie versions of musicals. My grandmother bought the sheet music for The Sound of Music when it was on Broadway and my mother is most familiar with the Broadway version as well as the Mary Martin recording. While Mary Martin brought Peter Pan, Nellie Forbush (in South Pacific), and Maria von Trapp to notoriety, she always annoyed me because my OTHER grandmother was obsessed with her and I was born on the same day (Dec. 1). I was also born on the same day as Bette Midler, Richard Pryor, and Woody Allen.

Yes I realize I'm using full names here. Big fucking deal--it's a discussion with myself so suck it up.

OK, that was a major tangent.

Thoroughly Modern Millie: One of my favorites ever. It was written as a movie musical original and unfortunately some jerks came along and *rewrote* it to stage in the late '90s. The Broadway version blows. The movie one, however, is grand. And it's directed by George Roy Hill (of The Sting fame). Carol Channing is annoying but otherwise it's hilarious and fabu.

On another tangent from that--the musical Hairspray also blows big time. The movie is so much better.

Kismet. Ah. Gorgeous music. Of course, it was all primarily taken from themes from Borodin's opera Prince Igor, but who cares? It is of course responsible for making Stranger in Paradise a very popular tune (also from Prince Igor, or perhaps The Steppes of Asia?). I don't know who was in the original Broadway cast, but I'm in love with Howard Keel and am quite pleased with the movie one. I saw it staged in Boulder and it was pretty similar to the movie--I'm thinking the stage version doesn't differ much.

Hello Dolly. Is a totally absurd musical. But some of the music in it is great and I loved it when I was a kid. It was on TV recently and I was rather embarrassed by it. Or perhaps I was embarrassed by Barbra Streisand--she's certainly embarrassing me in my old age. God, the costumes are horrendous in that movie. My mother saw it on Broadway with either Marlene Dietrich or Betty Grable. She can't remember which.

Meet Me In St. Louis is one of my favorite movies ever. I admit it. It's so great. I can't help it. My ancestors lived in St. Louis at the time of the World's Fair in 1904, so somehow it feels homey to me. I don't know why. The movie was well-researched--many of the songs in it were actually popular at that time, and if they weren't they were mostly written to sound that way. The woman who wrote the book, which was based on her own personal history, oversaw the screenwriting and the set design. I read the book this summer and it was pretty close to the final version of the picture. And lest we forget, that movie brought Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas to the world.

Of course, I love pretty much all Lerner and Loewe stuff: Gigi, My Fair Lady, Camelot.

Love a lot of Rogers and Hammerstein (and now getting into Rogers and Hart, who wrote a bunch of standards): Oklahoma!, South Pacific, The King and I. I really can't stand Carousel. Most of the music from The Sound of Music annoys me, but I absolutely adored it more than anything when I was a kid, so I'll never get over that.

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is sick and twisted but fabulous anyway.

Cabaret is one of the best musicals ever. I am not fond of the movie but I realize that the same people kept writing the same incarnations over and over. I like the original version best. The music's great, the plot's great, the message is intense and deeply depressing and therefore cool.

OK. This is getting way too long-winded. Signing off now.

Porte patio

Porte patio
Originally uploaded by Leeloo_.

Maman et Papa 2

Maman et Papa 2
Originally uploaded by Leeloo_.

they're French Berners!

this, my friends

Fatigue
Originally uploaded by Leeloo_.

is a Bernese Mountain puppy. I grew up with these guys. They have a lot of health problems, so they're not a wise breed to choose, but I still think they're the cutest puppies in the world. They have to grow into their feet. Look at those enormous paws and pink pads! I can't stand it.

midnight musings

Here I am in the middle of the night. I was awakened by intense sadness and have been crying my eyes out over this broken heart I have left over from the summer. I think it was truly broken, too, because off and on I have these breathing problems and they've been bad the last few days--they started the last day I saw him in June. I started to write him a blog entry/letter but decided, wisely, against posting it. I thought I was a lot better, and I think I am, but sometimes I wonder how I've lived through this and how I will ever fully recover. I honestly don't think it's possible.

Cosmic love totally blows. You know, maybe if someone, erm, "did him in," I could breathe again? :) Just kidding.

Anyway, my upstairs neighbor has been a bit noisy tonight. She's stomping around like a baby elephant. It's hard to hear things through most of the walls and floors of this place. But over the summer, a different person lived there, a guy. He was OK for a couple of months, but through the summer, he kept scraping his chair on the floor. And by scraping his chair, I mean he was sitting with his full weight in it, making it screech. What was particularly unusual about his behavior was that he would screech his chair *every fifteen minutes.* I'm not exaggerating. Furthermore, he would do this every fifteen minutes from about eleven at night until about 2 in the afternoon. Close to round the clock. I had to wonder if he was learning a floor routine with a chair. Ear plugs didn't work for this little problem, either.

One night I got fed up and went up there around 3 AM to ask him if he wouldn't mind lifting his weight a bit out of the chair when he shifted it. I was personally raised not to move a chair with my full weight in it and to lift my weight off of it and lift the chair itself when shifting its position--this was so we wouldn't ruin the floors. Clearly this guy wasn't taught similarly. So I went up there and knocked on his door. He was blasting heavy metal music and yelling some conversation on the phone. He yelled, "Just a minute," and after a good long time, came to the door, at which time he explained, "I'm sorry, I was in the shower." I thought that was very odd, and I asked him to please not screech his chair on the floor. The problem never got better and I reported it to the grad assistant community advisor whose job it is to handle these complaints.

So here's where it gets silly. The community advisor talked to my neighbor and he told her that it must be someone else screeching his chair across the floor all the time, because he was asleep when I went up there (!). Furthermore, he told her that he was going on a walk with some of his friends during the next hour and that I should sit in my room and see if I heard anything from any other neighbors!. Needless to say, I didn't hear a thing. I told the community advisor my side of how I'd asked him to be quiet that night, and she must have reported it back to him, and after that the situation improved considerably. What a weirdo.

to friendster or not...

I'm in a moral dilemma right now. Sure, I have several acquaintances or people with whom I seldom, if ever, communicate as my Friendsters. But I have two people with whom I've had fallings-out and one person who is friends with one of my ex-friends who was never my friend, and furthermore, is nasty to me. I want to de-Friendster all three of them.

But the question is, would that be an even bigger problem? Would I make more trouble for myself? Perhaps I should be generous and let them stay my Friendsters and if they choose to de-Friendster me, then great. Hmm....

mbira and drumming

When I'd finished college and was living at home with my dad in Boulder, my friend asked me to attend a course with her at CU in ethnomusicology. She had this enormous crush on the guy who was a guest lecturer.

He was a white San Franciscan. When he was about thirteen, a neighbor of his, who was from Zimbabwe, told his mother that their respective ancestors had been talking to each other and that he was destined to go to Zimbabwe and become a master drummer. Zimbabwe had been suffering from a very long draught and the neighbor explained that everywhere he would play his drums, it would rain when he played.

Strangely (and I don't know how his mother decided this), it was determined that he would go to Zimbabwe and do what his ancestors foretold. Sure enough, everywhere he played, it rained.

When he came to the University of Colorado that summer, he was in his late twenties and had married a dancer from the village where he spent his teens and young adulthood.

I should Google him and check up on him.

Anyway, he introduced us to drumming and to the mbira, a thumb piano. I loved the mbira. The tonalities and the African scale from that region are so incredibly upbeat and happy-sounding--quite incongruent to the actual state of affairs there.

Feral dogs

Feral dogs
Originally uploaded by freyjawaru.

yes, they are.

East St. Louis, October 21, 2005.

dreams

The eastern European neighbors across the hall have been screaming at each other continually since 1 AM. It is now 6:12 AM.

Thank God for earplugs.

I keep having dreams about being naked in class, or where I'm topless and wondering why everyone's looking at me funny. I wonder if it has anything to do with sleeping in the nude. Things to ponder....

yawwwwwwn--written several days ago but not posted

I am tired and cold and rather stressed. But somehow I will live through this weekend and this trip to East St. Louis. I just hope this time I don't have people coming up to me on the street and trying to mug me for liter bottles of soda.

It was really funny yesterday, because I was talking to my friend in the conservation lab when she mentioned something about the last trip I went on to ESL. You see, I'd heard this story countless times from *one* side, so it was quite interesting to hear the *other* side.

Our networking class sets up computers and labs for various organizations in East St. Louis. I am now the TA for the course, which I took in the spring. However, some groups have lately been assigned to places in Champaign County, and so those groups only go to ESL once during the semester to participate in the community-service project where we give away computers. The second trip involves the actual lab implementation for those groups with organizations in ESL.

My friend and her group had to come late last semester because they had to survey their site here in Champaign County. The three of them showed up for dinner in our hotel looking rather wild-eyed. It turned out that they weren't allowed to drive school vehicles down to ESL because they hadn't registered with the University or something like that, and so a couple of drivers were dug up somewhere. One had just gotten her license to drive in the States and the other just didn't drive very often. Anyway, my friend told me that they all nearly died on the way down so many times, the three of them in her group just started laughing hysterically all the time. And the drivers were mad. My friend and her group offered to drive in spite of the University rules, but were turned down. My friend has had some interesting experiences since she's lived in various parts of Asia and the Middle East, and so I have no doubt that this woman drove like a crazy person. I guess she was cutting across about five lanes of traffic, going 90 mph.

But when I spoke with my friend in the conservation lab yesterday, she mentioned that a friend of hers got stuck driving some students down to ESL on a trip and that they were mean and yelling at her and were just ungrateful in general. But she did admit that perhaps her friend was actually a lousy driver.

Elizabeth and the mascot

Elizabeth and the mascot
Originally uploaded by freyjawaru.

and here is Elizabeth with her stuffed animal.

in the conservation lab...

...Elizabeth said she hates stuffed animals.

To which JHT commented:

"Yeah, she even donated the larvae on the computer."

brasil

hot damn, I need to go. Why am I so convinced that the people there are the sexiest, coolest, hippest people in the world?
Good ole' Stan Getz sure convinced us forty years ago. Is Brazil *really* a third-world country? I don't believe it.

Beth and the stack

Beth and the stack
Originally uploaded by freyjawaru.

of computers in the PrairieNet basement.

Memory

Memory
Originally uploaded by freyjawaru.

me and DIMMs. Together forever.

kitten wars!

After I told Elizabeth about my puppy pics, she said that she and Patrick found this Web site. I didn't believe her until now:

Kitten War

The campus bike path

The campus bike path
Originally uploaded by freyjawaru.

I've *had it* with the roads, paths, and sidewalks in this town. Is it really that dirt poor? No one believes how awful the bike paths are on this campus. Here's the proof. One big problem is that they laid it out with giant concrete slabs instead of continuous asphalt. So when giant tree trunks start ramming up the slabs, you just about kill yourself going down any bike path. This is why I got a hybrid.

Bad Beagle

Bad Beagle
Originally uploaded by cappuccinoguy.

I can't *believe* this....

oh, man

I just can't take this! I was looking through my Flickr account, and discovered that this random guy had made some of my puppy photos favorites. His favorites are ALL puppies. I could just DIE, they are so cute! I really, really have a problem. I love puppies entirely too much. Argh--I'm just rolling around in convulsions over this....

Puppy pics

eating schedule

Crap, Missy Pants, I'm eating at weird times now. Serves us right for going to Hooters in the middle of the night!

beth, however,

Beth knitting
Originally uploaded by freyjawaru.

looks quite right in the head. :)

total ineptitude today

grrr--yarn
Originally uploaded by freyjawaru.

especially with yarn. look at me! I don't even look right in the head!

stevie

I was telling Missy Pants a story about Stevie last night and thought I would blog it.

Stevie started working at Oxford University Press after I'd be there awhile. He was hired by a woman who was the head of our division, who meant well but had pretty much turned into a basketcase and was difficult to work for. She might not have immediately hired him if she wasn't desperate, but he was certainly a breath of fresh air.

He showed up on his first day at work dressed in skin-tight bell bottoms (with enormous circumferences) that were made from a daisy print. Multicolored, of course. He was wearing a 70s-style shirt, unbuttoned halfway down his hairy chest and he always wore one of those Indian hand symbols around his neck. He had long, kinky curly hair. He always got mad because people told him he looked like Kenny G.

And yes, of course, Stevie was quite the flamer.

One day, Stevie was bugging my boss all day about another editor's author, who was visiting from the UK. My boss and the other editor also happened to be English. Stevie thought this guy was hot and was asking Janet where the author was staying.

I couldn't find Janet at some point and asked Stevie where she was, and he said, "I put her in a box, darling. I told her she had to stay there until she tells me where Judith's author is staying!" Not wanting to know anymore about this, I went back to my cubicle. Awhile later, Stevie skipped past and said, "She's out of the box, darling!"

When I went to see Janet, I told her what Stevie had said, and she exclaimed, "I thought he'd gone heterosexual or something!"

Anyway. Just a snippet of a wild person. When I find my pictures, I'll have to scan one of him and put it here.

today's recap

groan. I just got out of rehearsal. We started at SIX and it is now 11 PM. This is of course following the five hours of rehearsal we had last night as well as the two hours of rehearsal we had yesterday morning.

Highlights of the evening:

I didn't have to play The Grand Old Duke of York and stand up and sit down all the time because my ankle is definitely worse than I thought it was earlier.

I suggested to my neighbor that if she wanted to play the bird whistle so badly, she could offer to sleep with the percussionist who is playing it in exchange for the privilege. I realized, too, that she played Paquette in Candide last winter and they did the strangest thing with her--they put her in this enormous Byzantine-esque getup and made her spin around randomly on stage during the Auto de Fey number. Bizarre. *

I enlightened several altos and sopranos on the whole fig issue--do they exist, and are they really in Fig Newtons? They were frightened of my figs at first but came around.

I don't think this whole experience is worthwhile enough to have had to miss the Cecilia Bartoli concert tonight (who, as I heard, wasn't wearing a giant bow on her head this time but instead had her hair in a toptail, naturally).

Oh, and I have firmly decided that our choir conductor is a sexy, sexy man.

When it's all said and done, though, the opera is truly beautiful. I thought it would be more of a bizarre Wozzeck kind of scenario with atonal (or twelve-tone music) that is unpleasant to listen to but musicologists think is brilliant or something. Not so. You can definitely tell that Enescu studied with Faure in the French impressionist tradition and it sounds like Debussy much of the time.

I can't WAIT to move!

*For any gentle readers unfamiliar with the work: Candide is Leonard Bernstein's (of West Side Story and of course, conducting fame) masterpiece. It is a setting of Voltaire's philisophical novel and is considered an "opera" yet is quite accessible and even had a Broadway stint in the early '90s. The Auto de Fey segment is a large chorus number, which is designed to be a witch hunt (and was composed during McCarthyism...you do the math--plus Bernstein was queer and Jewish)--the lyrics were contributed to by Richard Wilbur (a poet laureate of the US as well as an ex-prof at Smith College!), Dorothy Parker, and Lillian Hellmann. The words are along these lines--"What a day, what a day, for an auto de fey, what a sunny summer sky! What a jolly day for drinking and for watching people die! Hurry, hurry, watch 'em die....He don't mix meat and dairy, he don't eat humble pie. So sing a miserere and hang the bastard high."

blue cheek

I am chilling out, finishing my reference homework, and icing my butt. Why am I always falling down? I had to keep crutches in my room my entire first year of college because I was continually spraining my ankle. So I fell down the stairs, completely randomly, at the main library earlier and I swear one of my ass cheeks must be completely black by now. I wonder if it's sort of the tall building principle?

And I love eggs. :)

sob

I thought I'd saved the ram file from thespark.com's theme song a few years back and I don't think I did. Who knew that they'd DIE? No pirate theme song. It's hilarious. It has a guy singing like a total dork and he's saying things like, "Oh, ugly I may be but the Spark still loves me. I have a peg leg, I have no hair...Durk a durk a durk a durk. Durk a durk a durk a durk...."

Well, I guess I'll be momentarily consoled by this still being around:

Moon Song

to i.h.

No offense, but French sounds lousy with an Australian accent, especially yours.

Don't get me wrong--I truly think it's quite adorable when pianists wanna be conductors so very badly. I suppose that's how Barenboim wound up (although he got the CSO handed to him by Solti, over far more deserving musicians), and I guess Ashkenazy's gotten quite a few good conducting gigs over the years, although he's not exactly recommended. Maybe if you hadn't concentrated on just piano for so long, you would be a much better conductor. But then again, you never would have made a name for yourself as a pianist.

And choruses are really inconsequential when you look at the entirety of an opera, don't you think? We are singing an opera that was meant to adhere to the earliest principles of opera--whereby music and drama are married according to the considerations set forth by the artists of late sixteenth-century Florence in order to recapture the great dramatic tragedies of the Classical era. And even though Enescu tried very hard to return to that ideal of the late Renaissance in this setting of Oedipus, I'm sure he didn't mean for the chorus to really play a very large role at all. Surely Sophocles himself didn't think the Greek chorus was terribly important.

So I hope you don't mind too much if I show up just a teensy bit wasted or stoned on Saturday night. It will be National Grouch Day, after all, and I think we'll be celebrating it with bells on. I'm sure you'll understand--I won't mean to be disrespectful; I'll just be showing you the same consideration you've been showing all of us this whole time.

Have a great day!

Sincerely,

me

addendum

I think Mike C. and I about peed this afternoon when I had to take a bunch of pics of John Wagstaff for some library journal or other. The thing turned into a modeling photo shoot!

bugs and things

I rode my bike to the core strengthening class I'm in and several people were looking at me strangely. I went into the restroom and realized there were about, oh, four or five dead bugs smashed on my face!

Maggie's and my crazy instructor was playing this song today in class:

Watch it and pee.

bitten in the ass

my blog has started to haunt me.

I wound up offending my friend with my smelling-like-garlic post. Sorry! It's OK to smell like garlic; it's just not a treat when it infiltrates your nostrils when you're singing for hours on end, that's all. :)


apologies.

rock on

Instrument closet
Originally uploaded by freyjawaru.

Balkan instruments, take two.

Balkanalia

morecloset
Originally uploaded by freyjawaru.

the instrument closet

cilantro

Am I the only person on the planet who absolutely abhors the stuff?

to tb

happy birthday, Squidface.

my third birthday

my third birthday
Originally uploaded by freyjawaru.

this is when I thought that since my mother put my birthday cake in front of me, it was mine and not to be shared.

titillating tidbits

The translation of Skertsopetahto, a Greek song we're singing:

My skipping-dancing, juicy, magic one,
with your coy ways you are driving me mad.

Which, naturally, reminded me of another song I sang in Samoan once ("Minoi, minoi"):

Move, move, move like an ant
Swaying when you dance,
Dipping into rich coconut cream,
As sweet as banana pudding.

Ah, my pigeon, (my dearest)
Crying out to me!
I hope we can keep on like this,
Keep on being sweethearts,
So move, move! Move, move,
Move my darling.

Ummm. Are those Samoans rather...randy?

ooh!

I just love it that I can direct people to my favorite things so *easily*. If anyone is paying attention, that is.

Three of my fave Whitehouse.org posts. My brother says this one is extremely offensive but it makes me laugh so hard I cry:
Terry Schiavo
and one from a couple of years ago:
Mad Cow
and yet another:
Cheney and gays

although this makes me happier...

Pig Calypso
The frog is here to have his say
The pig will never get her way
Bib and napkin, knife and fork
Is the only way that I'll touch pork.

argh

damnit I'm cross today. I'm getting sick. And I can't get sick now because I have to sing this bloody opera on Saturday and have rehearsals galore before then. And WHY the f--- do people write operas in French? It's dumb.

And I can't get sick next week, either, because I have to go be a TA in East St. Louis. Land of Paradise. I'd better take pics this time, though--last time I went, no one I knew believed that it looked like World War III had happened.

grrrrr.

And I think Greek tragedy is dumb, too, while I'm at it. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Being a TA for 451 is a really bad idea when your schedule is like mine. If I am going to get in the way in the labs on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons, I get some free time, but otherwise my schedule is generally from 8:30 AM until 10:00 PM without a break. This is what I get for having two GA positions, a church job, a practicum, an independent study, a class, and three other choirs (for credit of course). Argh. again. I'm so not singing Bulgarian music tonight. My voice is tired.

And what is so very funny about my schedule is that I log in MAYBE two hours a week in the GSLIS building. That's it. Amazingly I'll have enough credits to graduate this semester, too. Otherwise I live in the music building, the conservation lab, and Prairienet. Most people I knew in the GSLIS program before think I already graduated and moved out of the area. Tee hee. It's quite wise to have friends and connections outside of GSLIS, too. I should know.

In the spring, I couldn't WAIT to get the hell out of here. I was going to graduate in December and scoot back to Chicago. Now of course I'm not really ready. At this point, I'll probably graduate in August. I think I might take a class in GSLIS next semester and then focus the rest of my time on a class about Mahler, a music theory course, and my opera course. I guess Urbana's not so bad when you get used to it (and live alone ;).

sound files

I know, I know. It's totally offensive. But I still think it's hilarious.

In case any of you gentle readers have never heard the Delta ad that swept inboxes a few years back:

Delta ad

And while I'm at it, check out my fave TV theme:

wkrp

Oh, and what the hell?

Laverne and Shirley

Me and the Johns Wagstaff

Me and the Johns Wagstaff
Originally uploaded by freyjawaru.

John had a bit too much fun trying to be American and shooting off caps at our Chili Cookoff in the spring. So Marlys made a giant poster of it and we all like to pose with it.

Do not....

Do not....
Originally uploaded by freyjawaru.

'nuff said.

Yes, this is on campus--across the street from Krannert.

silly costumes

courtesy of Ms. Bergstrom:

Pea in the Pod
Whoopie
Pizza
Hot Dog

And these were my favorite dog costumes:

Yoda and Star Wars
Ho Dog

And these are the ones I sent to her to look at:

Christmas Tree
Plug
Spam
Turkey
And my Heidi Ho Costume, which I will wear this year

to clarify (i.e. the lavender/pink controversy):

See I heart joss.

I turn all lavender clothing pink and all light blue clothing yellow or pink. Green can turn white or yellow if worn by me. I've changed my deodorant countless times, changed my detergent, etc., etc.. I've even stopped putting my clothes in the dryer and hung them all over my apartment. Same thing. I must have weird PH. No one believes me when I tell them that I wear pink all summer because then I can't turn it pink. So there.

since I keep talking about it

and can't download it or anything from Flickr, here's the pic.

weepers

Amazingly I got out of bed and had time to see the last thirty minutes of Casablanca before church (which was hell, by the way. I think I need to quit that job).

I don't like to see movies in the theater often for a myriad of reasons, but one reason is that I don't like to admit that, well, sometimes some movies make me cry. I know, I know. It's pathetic.

Casablanca *always* makes me cry during that scene where Laszlo gets everyone to sing La Marseillaise and they overpower the Germans' patriotic song.

Other movie moments that make me weep:

Hope and Glory: London is being continually bombed by the Germans and the mother secures passage to Australia for her children. When she takes them to the train station she can't handle it and runs back into the line to take them back.

In America: Pretty much throughout the whole movie, but especially at the end. Strangely, though, it's not a cheesy weepy Irish movie--the guy who made it also made My Left Foot and In the Name of the Father (damn, that's a good one, too). It was a very good thing that I didn't see that in the theater. I'd have to wear a bag over my head for awhile if I had.

My two favorite movies in the world are High Noon and A Man for All Seasons. I have a list of about fifty favorites, but in the past year, those two have crept to the top of my list. I also only recently realized they are both directed by Fred Zinnemann. A Man for All Seasons makes me bawl when Sir Thomas last sees his family. I seriously need to buy that movie on DVD.

Although it's not a movie, there were quite a few times when Buffy made me cry. I think every Buffy fan cried when she died at the end of season five. One of the principal tenets of Buffy philosophy is that she is a character who carries the weight of the world on her shoulders and has to sacrfice everything because she is chosen, and in that moment, Buffy remembers that her blood is the same as her sister's and they'd thought all along that only her sister's blood could open a portal to another dimension, so in that split second, Buffy chooses to sacrifice herself to close the portal so that the worlds don't collide. It sounds crazy if you don't already know about it.

Hot damn, I'm such an INFP, it's not even funny. These musings certainly prove it.

this is what a caroling gig looks like

this is what a caroling gig looks like
Originally uploaded by freyjawaru.

I always meant to delete this from my camera, but I'm glad I didn't. I think it's totally hilarious. Damn good thing I downloaded most of my pics before I lost the whole camera this summer, too.

Two words...

Corncob and vibrator.

Nice little gift for a friend who left the cornfields, eh?

about the prior post

or rather, going off on a tangent....

There's this great episode of Angel. Joss is really good at spending exorbitant amounts of money and staging and costuming everything to a large extent, all for about 30 seconds of film footage. There are examples of this all through Buffy and Angel. One I'm thinking of on Buffy was where Andrew, a geek guy, is reminiscing about why he and his fellow nerd friends tried to take over the world, and it was all because their leader told them they'd be living like gods and be happy--cut to the three of them hovering over a field of flowers wearing togas and singing.

Angel in its last season had two vampires with souls who had incidentally known each other for centuries, and Spike asks Angel if he was living in Rome in the fifties. Cut to a black-and-white segment filmed with Spike and various other dudes looking just like Marcello there and saying Ciao over and over. Anyway. I guess you'd have to see it to understand the full effect.

yummy

sigh.

I heart Joss....

Now will people start believing that I turn lavender pink?

I went to the amazingly fun history library, as well as the maps library, today. I hate library school. I really, really do. Then I had a drink with Sonya and hung out with some LEEPers. But most exciting was the visit to the movie theater to see Serenity. I was disappointed to hear from a LEEPer that she saw it last weekend and that it sucked, but she hadn't seen the twenty or so hours of prior material. So I was quite happy with it. I have the attention span of a fly, and I must say it takes quite a creator/writer/director/producer to hold my attention for every episode of Buffy, every episode of Angel, every episode of Firefly, and now this.

Naturally, though, I couldn't have had a normal evening without putting my foot in my mouth, in a big way. My friends had randomly invited some other opera people at the last minute, and I wound up having to explain to them why I am no longer friends with Miss Mess, who is responsible for telling these additional opera-people invitees some story or other. Well, anyway, she must have, because I constantly have to deal with discomfort at work when they whisper about me and point at me. I always have to bite my tongue off to keep from saying, "Wow, I am so surprised that you can't even look me in the eye, all because your friend has latent lesbian tendencies and came onto me and can't handle the emotional consequences. Huh." The farther I get from the time this all happened, the more I realize how very much she is Miss Mess. I can't believe I've had to deal, in adulthood, with this kind of behavior from someone who was one of my closest friends. I hope she's enjoying the job I got her in Chicago.

Although, more important than anything, I suppose, is that the experience was a traumatic one and made me realize a lot of things, finally, about myself. I might on occasion be attracted to a woman but the crush usually dissipates within about a week. Maybe I experienced this to show me, finally, that at this point in my life, I'm straight. I think I've known that for quite awhile now, just not consciously. Well, huh (as my mother would say).

And here is the haircut that I hate. ;)

kneejerk reactions

Ok. I haven't investigated this enough, but my immediate gut reaction to this whole terror alert in NYC is that the fucking Bush administration is using the whole goddamned city for its political purposes. The latest news is that Bloomberg and the city police have rather different views of this information coming from the federal government.

The New Yorker published a long story about Raymond Kelly, who is New York's Police Commissioner, in July:
The Terrorism Beat

The article explores New York's own anti-terrorism efforts that are completely separate from those of the fed.

and speaking of feeling ugly

I checked my friend's blog and saw a picture of some random woman who turned out to be....me! My face is so distorted it took me awhile to recognize myself. Harumph. Alcohol begets strange things:
the house of winds

I've certainly made a lot of different posts today. Well, my blog looked lonely, I guess.

Oh--it's so annoying! Friendster has this bloody new feature where you can see everyone who's viewed your profile. I'm going to have to make a new profile and pretend I'm a scuzzy guy or something so I can continue to stalk people!

halloween, and off we're going

ghosts and goblins all about. Halloween, and off we're going, out to play the game Shell Out.

I just tried on my Halloween costume that I ordered online. I've been wearing the Carmen Miranda getup for too many years now. And for a few years before that, I always did a Beauty School Dropout costume. Here's the Carmen goods:



I have the Beauty School Dropout pic somewhere, but not sure where.

Anyway, so I got this Heidi Ho costume. Talk about ho. Apparently the makers of the costume do not factor in the sizing the fact that some women actually grow taller than 5'2. This skirt is so short, it's obscene. I'm going to have to get spanky pants or something awful like that. Sigh. Hope I can go out in public in it.

food coop

I bought this carrot balm for my hands. But I found out it's not for my hands; it's for my face.

frustrations and burnings

Well, I have absolutely no idea how to christen a blog, so I'll just obsess about things, as usual.

Currently I am obsessing over my new haircut. I truly dislike it. It reminds me of that horrible haircut David Bowie has in that profile on that one album from the early '80s or something. The weird thing is that this guy has been faithfully cutting my hair for a year now, and he's been doing it so well that it looks fantastic when I just run my fingers through it. He said he loved the length when I came in and what did he do? Chop it all off. Groan. Although, I suppose it's not nearly as short as it is here:



But I wanted to look edgy then. The look I've been given is totally incongruent with how I feel these days. Damn, I hope it grows out soon. It's going to be hairband city for like, a month.

In addition to groaning and moaning here, I am copying obnoxious '50s and '80s music for my cousin, whose husband determines what music will be listened to in the house, and therefore she is continually subjected to '90s techno. So I'm sending her a little trip down memory lane. From the time we were about seven until we were around thirteen, our lives revolved around the top 40. It was truly exciting to keep track of when and how often our favorite songs were played. This whole recording project was incidentally set off by my very nerdy core-strength instructor, who has a vastly diverse collection of music and played a Hall and Oates song the other day that I knew Meg liked, so I downloaded it. I miss Hall and Oates.

Fred said I should have called this Non Sequiturville. Here's his blog:
Pancakes and Side Dishes
and
I'm Not Thinking About Tennis!