saturday night/sunday morning

Last night I cooked my first legitimate meal in my new apartment. Nothing special-just a stir fry. I've been having a strange time adjusting to this place; not out of regret or uncertainty, just...it didn't feel exactly like I thought it would. It didn't feel like "that place" I'd slowly make my own.

My kitchen is a bit cramped so, naturally, cooking in these new dimensions will require some new maneuvers and counter top space rationing skills. Balancing spices on the coffee maker, knives balanced just right on the rim of the sink for easy access, ingredients tightly assembled like an infantry awaiting orders—nothing new, I suppose, for anyone in a new kitchen who thinks they know what they're doing.

Somewhere between taking notes on how to manage this new space and tossing cuts of chicken and pepper in a pan, something marvelous happened. I cut into an onion. A big onion. Typically, cutting into a small onion in a big kitchen, unless one is prepared, would result in fumes stinging one's eyes and the general facial spasms associated with crying and yawning at the same time. Therefore, cutting a big onion in a small kitchen fucking hurts.

Right after the regret of the fumes came the revelation of the smell. The smell brought me back to my apartment in Milan, helping my Italian roommate cut up vegetables for dinner, the opening bottles of wine, the billiard-crack bubbling of salted water. That time before dinner when everything was just smells and promises made me feel distant and comfortable, that once I got through dinner I would be fully prepared to handle anything (or too full and euphoric to really care). The diced onions, the searing chicken, the oils sweating out their flavors, none of this provides any armor to the next day or the next term paper, the hassle of things breaking or expectations to meet. They provide acceptance and encourage wisdom, the blissful realization that it's all one thing after another, each random and logical consequence following as it may.

I like my kitchen.

lefsetz seems cool with first drafts, so i will be, too.

My head is full of useless information, useless in that it doesn’t pertain to anything dire to the inner or outer workings of my everyday life. I can completely get by and live a happy, full and (preferably) meaning existence without the ability to quote entire bits of Eddie Izzard’s “Dressed to Kill”…but I can do it. No one really cares about the conflict between classical guitar titans Andres Segovia and Agustin Barrios, but I’m still as fascinated with it today as I was when I first heard the two didn’t get along so swimmingly. I can dance around the social implications of guitar neck widths, how Kerouac’s contradictions fed his mystique and Debussy’s yin/yang nature, and I can virtually guarantee that no one else cares. No one signing paychecks in my future, anyway.

It’s this kind of information that means nothing and everything. It doesn’t indicate work aptitude or ___, but it does indicate a pulse. I’ve been thinking lately that if you’ve never been fascinated with anything in your life, truly and unapologetically fascinated, you are damn boring. If you wake up, do what you need to do, go to bed and repeat without variation you’re probably the same kind of person who claps on one and three, content to a bland bread and water existence devoid of any resonating color or tone.

You’re also probably terrible in bed.

And it’s entirely your own damn fault.

There’s no intrinsic human need to like anything. It’s not essential to our development as a species, but it is sort of really, really important to how we define ourselves. It may be nothing more than the facts and arguments we can spout off at a bar anytime past the witching hour, but it shows a sign of life. True, there’s a consequence of overdose (i.e. watch Zooey Deschanel in any movie), but even then it’s an overload of personality, and I’d rather be bombarded with a million different shades than suffer through the monotony of a static grey.

Be crazy. Be conflicted and complicated. It’s far more fun than boring.

nick hornby is grand, just grand

I’m at one of my favorite places with two of my favorite things. I’m at a coffeehouse with a book and an espresso. I planned to come here, to this coffeehouse, to read this book while drinking this espresso. It’s a simple duo of actions in a setting I’ve engaged in and valued for years. Except, right now, I don’t want to read this book. Instead, I’m typing on my computer.

Backtrack.

A few weeks ago I watched I’m Not There, the movie based off of Bob Dylan’s life/songs/mythology. The plot of the movie jumps around six different vignettes, each one featuring a different actor playing a figure or a theme derived from the grand spirit of what enthusiasts and historians consider the Bob Dylan. Each one is different, lives a different life, tells a different story, but it’s all Dylan.

In a way, it’s kind of like the different lives we have, separate segments telling the story of the same person. Who you were in high school is different from who you were in college, the you with the first post-college job, the restless period you might have, all the way up to you now, the you who likely won’t be the same person you’ll be in three years. You have different goals, different values, opposing outlooks, separate ideas…but in a way I guess you are the same person. Who you inherently are never changes; you just lead different lives from here to there, dropping off your old life for the new one, hoping it will hold out until the next one comes along.

The thing you occasionally do is look back on your past lives as if you just bit a lemon. You sometimes cringe when you think about your old clothes, how you cooked, the music you listened to, the things you’d laugh at in another person today. Then again, you look also look at your past lives as what you knew and experienced, the things you learned and how you interpreted them, the culmination of your “everything” of that day and how it made you you.

Back to now. I’m not reading my book. I’m not reading it because I don’t want to. I’m not reading it because I know it’s too loud here for me to really appreciate and fully grasp what’s going on. A few years ago I would have soldered on, likely missing bits here and there while I subconsciously picked up on the conversations and clanking plates around me. Today, I know I can’t really do it and enjoy it. So, I turn on my computer and type. It’s what I’ve learned.

thoughts derived while apartment hunting

-Is it normal to visit another college, particularly one you’ll soon attend, and see people who look identical to “that one guy/girl” you knew at your own/past college?

-Damn it all, I’m really getting into Country Music. Country Music should always be capitalized because it can be so damn fun. I guess it really is acceptable in some (southern) cultures to have whiskey for breakfast.

-I will absolutely, without reservation, take hot and humid weather over snow and bone-chilling temperatures any day.

-The longest, most difficult path to a new friendship is through a bruised ego. The quickest is owning a puppy.

-I fear that airlines that offer wi-fi midflight are a coming sign of the apocalypse.

-Lugging a washer and dryer set up three flights of stairs seems like an activity reserved for a certain circle of hell.

-“No rest for the wicked” truly is a lesson for the quick-witted teenage survivors in any horror movie, particularly for the moment at the end when they’re gazing in awe at the monster they’ve supposedly just slain. Trust me, it’s just a fucked up game of peek-a-boo. Best be runnin’.

-I get bored on airplanes. That last bit explains that nicely.

monday

It rained this morning. It rained this morning and I'm at Java's, drinking coffee, reading travel blogs and cracking open a new book. Around 11 it got better and the sun came out; the inside of my car is an oven but the air is still cool and comfortable for the most part.

This new book takes place in Vietnam, and between that and the travel blogs I'm feeling this feeling somewhere between "you're missing out on something big" and "what's the difference between wasting time and spending it?"

I'm restless. Last year I was on the Noordam, in Europe, in Spain and Italy and everywhere I swore I'd see with the job. This realization was a cold slap a few weeks ago when I looked at a calendar and realized that exactly one year ago today I was in Lisbon with the elegant sidewalk designs and bandoneon players on the street. I know that I'm spoiled in that sense, but it is what it is, and I'm grateful and unapologetic about it. I'd give anything to peer down that one corner in Barcelona or go back to that one place in Mallorca. I'd get as lost as I could in Santorini and climb that fucking monster hill again for that restaurant in Florence.

But, really, I'm debating the difference between wasting time and spending it.

ka-boom.

Last night I knocked over a stack of books. I do this often; I try not to, but it happens. It's usually an accumulation of things I've read and set aside. I tell myself I'll put it on a shelf, but it gets hidden by the next thing I've read, then obscured by something I look at once, they buried by two books I just bought, all the way into becoming a base to my mountain of procrastination. Happens.

Somewhere in this stack was a songbook for Lalo. Lalo is a vibe player; she's modern, multi-influenced, chaotic, childish, organic, sexy and cohesive all at once, multiple facets claiming dominance at random intervals. I saw her at the Rochester Jazz Festival a few years ago and she struck me as the most original thing I've heard in a long time. She was my favorite musical paradox: someone quiet and unassuming who can completely tear the living Christ out of their instrument. Plus, she's pretty cute.

So, she was selling a songbook and I picked one up. I wanted to arrange some of her stuff for guitar but, somewhere between sophomore and junior year, the book got lost in another stack waiting to get toppled over. Last night I found it, and every promise about what I wanted to do but never got to awoke to stare me in the face.

I know that making promises to yourself then forgetting about them is a stereotype of my generation. Still...they come back to haunt you one way or another.

life lesson: accepted

It doesn't matter how good I am at guitar right now; how many pieces I can pull off flawlessly from memory or how clean my scales are.

All it takes is a creative half hour on youtube to discover I know nothing compared to what's out there.

Which is cool, because it means I have that much more to learn.