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.

Sick as a dog, but half as hairy.

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Jumping through the hoops.

Some things have gone wrong over the last week, and I currently have no idea where I will be living and studying this summer or in the following year. I am pretty freaked out about this, and my "future", and especially scared about the possibility of not ending up doing my year in Japan after all. I am pretty sure, after all, that one cannot do good research on a literature that they can't actually read.
I also have two presentations to give this week and approximately five response papers to write (half of which are already late). All my classes and all my reading is theoretical, averaging about 200 pages per class per week, and my attention span is somehow just not what it used to be. I, rightly, blame the internet.

One good thing makes up for almost all the bad, however: I have a new pair of jeans. They are long enough, I like the color, and they are comfortable and have rather cutely-shaped back pockets.
They retail for $100. I paid $20.

Nothing soothes the heart like a bargain.

To remember Vonnegut:

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”