Ohh MAN.

I bought my stupid ticket. The itinerary is pretty terrible, and it was $200 more than I had seen tickets going for only four short days ago, but this is what you get when you procrastinate (as I always, always seem to).
On a potential upside, I have a 4 hour layover in Seattle, during which time I may be able to chill with a friend who is now living there. So, hey, all things turn out for the best. Perhaps!

Also this morning, I attempted to make vision and dental appointments for before I take off, and that proved to be an exercise in folly. Apparently you need to make these appointments way, way before the 3-week mark. The woman at the dental clinic was particularly pissed at me for wanting to, you know, go to the dentist before I LEAVE THE COUNTRY.
This is bad news because I haven't been to a dentist for over two years now (when I had my wisdom teeth out), and I am very sure that I have cavities. Like, 100% sure. And yet I cannot stop eating the sugar, whenever I see it, just pouring it all in my mouth and then running around my apartment like a maniac until the rush dies and I pass out in the middle of the living room floor. Or something like that.

So, anyway, I have to spend the next few days calling the vision people at 12am in hopes of a same-day appointment, and I should probably find some non-university dentist who will take my insurance, and I should probably find a place to store all my things and rent a truck and move out, and finish my 10-or-so response papers that are long overdue. And find an apartment in Japan. And plan to see everyone who I want to see in this area of the country before I leave.

What else? What else is there? I know there must be.

In other news, I have been listening to a ton of Led Zeppelin lately; it has been a wonderful combination of rocking out hard (while cleaning my kitchen, etc) and feeling incredibly nostalgic. I listen to a lot of music, but it's rarely the kind of stuff where you sit back and realize how incredibly good the people in the band are at just playing their instruments. And how seriously they are just rocking out like crazy, completely absorbed by what they're doing, and essentially putting all other people within a 500 mile radius who are attempting to rock to shame.
This is especially important to me due to how much I love sad whiny bastard music, rather than music that tells you to adventure out and seek glory and end up in Valhalla (or just have a large amount of sex).

I am also really into the sort of great gender ambiguity going on in their live performances, in which Robert Plant and Jimmy Page basically have dressed in tight women's clothing, covered themselves in jewelry, with their hair grown long and covering their faces. And yet, even though Robert Plant indeed looked a great deal like a woman up on stage most of the time, and Jimmy Page was incredibly skinny and pale and sickly looking, they were still rock sex gods. It is totally awesome.

Okay, enough about this. I will go back to listening to my emo sissy rock now and leave the Zep alone. If you are anywhere near me, or not, shitfuck please give me an email or a call or something before I have to leave the country.

The death of my study session.

Next to me in the cafe is a guy who apparently is so passionate about flourescent lighting that he has been discoursing on it for literally about ten minutes now. Which is ridiculous in and of itself, but nearly everything he is saying is taken directly from a recent NY Times article on the same subject. Which I have, of course, also already read. At least the barista dude is mocking him a little now (he appears to be friends with the "regulars", of which I am not).

This may not sound like such a terrible thing, but the guy next to me actually used "They pass the savings onto you!" in normal conversation. Burn your television, before commercials manage to insert themselves that deeply into your brain.

Now there appears to be a band setting up to play, which, from my seat, looks to be composed of homeless old men. Looks like I might have to go home a few hours early.

UPDATE: Okay, nevermind; these seemingly-homeless men are rocking out. If you can rock out while playing jazz, I mean. But seriously, this shit is awesome, even if I do have to read about post-modernity while I listen to it. Especially good: it also has made the guy next to me put on his headphones and stop talking.

It's better not to make plans.

This flight leaves and arrives on different dates.
	US Airways Flight 6657	Departs: 12:34p Los Angeles (LAX)		Arrives: 3:55p Narita (NRT)
	Coach | Aircraft: Boeing 747-400 Passenger | 11h 21m

So it looks like my total lack of ability to make any plans for the summer has paid off, kind of. Paid off in that by doing nothing, a spot in a program in Japan has opened up for me without me having to do any additional work. Kind of, in that I now have to MOVE TO JAPAN in a month. That's right, one month. As well as finish up all my coursework for the quarter, and the stuff I still have to do for last quarter, and a million other pleasant little things. Save me, zombie Jesus!

In less panic-ridden news, I went home for my sister's high school graduation, and it was actually quite nice. I did not have a fight with anyone, except for a Delta rep curbside at LAX and some businessman who claimed to be in line in front of me. And once I was home, there was a lot of picture taking, and food eating, and observing my sister's friends from a short distance. There was also a wee bit of shopping and beach-going, just enough to allow me to forget momentarily that I had to return to school life and that I was woefully, painfully behind on my work.

I left home with a bunch of stolen/borrowed pictures of my various parents in their states of youth, as well as me as perhaps one of the most adorable children ever to walk the face of the earth. Seriously, you should see these pictures. In some of the pictures I have of my mom and (actual) dad, they are most definitely younger than I am now, and I have a hard time really grappling with that. But I took the pictures to have reminders of my mom and stepdad and dad, and a wee myself, as happy people who are glad to be with each other. With the hope that it will fill in some memories of my past, and pre-history, that are sorely lacking.

I also now own a picture of my (6'4" tall) father in which he is wearing a shirt that I gave to George, and which he seems to wear almost all the time. This one is going to go in the mail.

Mother's Day.

On the phone today, my mother informed me that if/when I came home to reclaim my cat, she and I would have an "anime-style" fight over who had claim to him. "Swords and everything", said my mom.
A few hours later, she sent me a big picture of my cat's furry little face. Perhaps the most successful mother's day phonecall of my life, thus far.

The Dinner Party.

My dinner party was not one. Not that it was ever supposed to be -- the original idea was that I would make dinner and have two friends over to drink wine so that we could drink and talk and have a lovely evening of it. Then I thought, I could invite one more person, and maybe one more. And it would be sort of nice and comfortable, and I would cook for once, filling all my array of little bowls with various chopped vegetables, mixing and measuring, listening to music and basically enjoying being a sort of hipster/academic/domestic hybrid. I like hybridity.

However, filling the requisite 5 peopel total was somehow impossible. I'd invite someone, and they couldn't come. Or I'd invite them, and they'd say maybe, and I'd ask again, and ask someone else, and try to remember what friends I had that got along with each other and which did not, and it was all quite complicated. Early on Friday, I thought perhaps 6 people were coming. Then 5, 4, 3...

In the end, it was 3, all of whom were late, one of whom I didn't actually know. When the first (and favorite! as she now reads this blog...) arrived, she told me she had also thought about cancelling. I told her if she had, I would have punched her in the face. Violence!
We ended up waiting almost 40 minutes for the other two kids to show up, playing Trivial Pursuit to growling stomachs, before we gave in and started eating. They show up later on, eat dinner, and basically leave right after. One, the one I like, brought a bottle of wine and tried to make conversation. The other didn't make eye contact with anyone else, talked a little about a cult he wanted to start, and I am fairly sure judged my musical taste.

After they left, we remaining two ate cake and drank wine, finished our Trivial Pursuit game while listening to the Beatles (I won, forever), and then she also left. I cleaned a little, read online comics I have read many times before, and then I went to sleep thinking about how many people had either not been able to come from the beginning or had cancelled or no-showed. Seven. The number was seven, I think.

This whole community-making thing is kind of bullshit sometimes, yes?

Word(z).

319 of the songs in my iTunes playlist contain the word "love", including few dozen by the band Love and a few intersperced "lovers" and the like. I'd try to figure out what percentage of the total that was, but at some point I seem to have managed to delete the 'calculator' program, possibly in an attempt to make room for more music.

The best title, perhaps, is "Love's A Fish Eye"; I'd like to think it's taken from this poem:


You fit me like
a hook to an eye

a fish hook
an open eye.

(margaret atwood).

Rock music and me.

It is after 2 am on a Monday/Tuesday, which is a terrible time to be awake doing nothing important if you are in grad school. Especially if you are sick, and behind on your reading, and hoping to wake up by 8:30 at the latest on the next day. Despite all this, here I am, awake and happy, writing a letter to the internet.

I am happy because I am listening to new albums, many new albums actually, obtained through this very same medium of the internet. I'd like to tell you that the new Dinosaur Jr. album is a Dinosaur Jr. album still intact after 20 years of rock, that Hi Red Center is math rock which is delicious, that you will probably really like the Panda Bear album. And I am also sad that I am stuck using the medium of the internet to let you know about this, because one thing I truly miss since moving to camp is "music" friends.

I have tried now and again to sort of spread the love of music around here, but it's very hard for me to explain why the things I love are worth loving, why weird music is so satisfying. I don't even know where to start, to be honest. It feels exactly the same as an experience I had yesterday. A friend here, who is someone I am not very close to but nonetheless like very much, told me that he and his wife are having a baby (or, in his terms, that he is "going to be a daddy"). For a reason I can't really explain, I have been incredibly happy and excited about this fact almost nonstop since then. Yet of course, for me to tell anyone who hasn't met this friend that he's having a baby is, well, not very exciting to say the least. This is approximately how I feel every time that I listen to a new album that I like: that the world is so SO good, but no one is going to be convinced of my argument. It is a difficult position, because no matter how much fun it is to be a hermited nerd with itunes and an internet connection, it is much better to be that same person with someone else geeking out in the room with you.

I did, however, have an experience about a week ago of listening to the Danielson Family through a friend's car speakers as we danced around outside and repeatedly mentioned to each other how the music was "SO good", especially the part where it sounds like they are marching, and then the other part where they make crazy religious allusions, and all sorts of things that sound like nonsense now but are definitely one of the best kinds of nonsense ever. I just need to repeat that experience, many times over, somehow or other.

Right now, when I think of these things, I also really crave yerba mate and a crew of folk to drink it with, and the beginnings of fall, and all these vague things which mean "friends" and "community". Another world is possible.