Stupid LJ just deleted a long and meandering post about how I'm simultaneously happy and introspective.
I'll have to give an abbreviated version:

I just got back from an exceptionally infectious jazz concert, where I went with this lovably nerdy girl that apparently has a crush on me (says people who should know).  I'm finally feeling as though there's some sort of direction in my life and that, despite its shortcomings, I'll actually enjoy this next eon that I'll be spending here and at university in general.  For instance, this is what we covered in some of my classes the other day:

Logic: Analogical and Causative Reasoning

Music History: Early 16th Century Italian Secular Song

Calculus: Riemann Sums

Okay, so only I could enjoy most of those, but that's what makes all of the difference.  Still, there's something missing.... well I guess there always is, but this time it seems as though there's actually something I can do about it.  Whether or not I act on that feeling will doubtless be on the basis of some random decision that I'll make in the not-too-distant future, and not likely by very logical means at all.   Sorry about subjecting to this rambling, if any of you actually read it.

Rules
1. Put your music player on shuffle.
2. Press forward for each question.
3. Use the song title as the answer to the question even if it doesn’t make sense. NO CHEATING!
(Additional Rules by Nathan)
4. Don't count songs whose titles aren't in English (since no one will get it and it couldn't possibly be ironic.
5. Don't count classical pieces whose titles are very abstract (like concerto #4 in D, etc.)

My personal style:

• Avant-sleaze
• Neo-slob
• Post-sloth
• Meta-slack

Ok,

I've decided that I can't continue refusing to acknowledge that I have a right to be happy, whatever that means.  Sure, the way it is now makes for a lot of jazz (in combination with late-night walks), but for once I have to address the source of the emotional energy that makes me a composer and throttle it (just the figurative source, not the actual one; that's the complete opposite of what I'm going to do).  Maybe it just means talking to you with a bit more assertion, making it clear that I'm interested, but I need to stop you from dashing away awkwardly like you normally do and get a clear conversation out. That needs to happen before anything.  This is based on the assumption that you run away because you're too embarrassed to talk, which I hope is true, and I refuse to acknowledge any of the other possibilities, since that would be admitting defeat from the start.

I'm determined not to let this slip out of my hands, even if that would mean finishing my songbook well ahead of schedule.  A half-dozen pieces written from bliss are better than sixty written from despair, at least in my books.

Let's just hope I can withdraw from my unfortunate Hamlet-like nature...

I'd never seen a hookah in my life before...

In the past twenty-four hours I've seen two...

I'll let that speak for itself.

This has been a truly monumental few weeks, crowned by an even more important moment, one that should be defining my life's direction.  It really hasn't amounted to much yet.

I am in a room of approximately 8' x 12'.  With my electric piano, there is little if any room to do much of anything.  I have no idea how I'm going to fit my fridge in here, presumably tomorrow.  Thank goodness I managed to get a light bulb with no hassle.  There is a strict no guests policy for the next week in all building except mine, evidently.  I haven't even seen my RA yet....

Tomorrow is literally empty for now.  I think I'll end up practicing in order to make up for the hours I should have spent on the clarinet that I spent packing and moving boxes.  Maybe I'll have a chance at the orchestra?  At this point I have no idea.  At least I don't have to get up early to go on a tour of a city I know well already.

I'm sitting on the patio outside the first KlezKabaret at 1:30 in the morning,  The temperature is hovering around freezing despite it being August and I played clarinet for more than 6 hours today.  This is typical this week.

Another interesting day,  I feel a bit more confident, especially since I learnt about 7 tunes entirely by osmosis today, which pretty much quadruples the number I know,  Ok, well most of them aren't entirely solidified in my memory yet, but that should come tomorrow,  I have this crazy Moldavian guy teaching me clarinet who needs this accordionist to translate from Russian to English and vice versa for him.  I'm in this massive group led by Frank London that takes about 5 tunes, breaks them up and makes a massive funky piece out of them.  We didn't get a chance to read through my only finished klezmer-jazz tune yet, but that should come tomorrow too.  Hopefully they won't be overwhelmed by the D minor flat 6/9 chords and the like,

So not too much new yet, but it will come sometime soon.

How quickly I forget that I'm not really a klezmer musician at all... I'm just more of one than anyone else in BC really...

I found myself in a cabin with some of the friends that I made last year and came to the realization that I have an entirely different mentality than every musician anywhere near my age I've met.  In that cabin was a klezmer performer, a jazz performer, and three players who mostly just played back random stuff they listened to, all with extremely short musical attention spans.  I couldn't relate to any of it: basically I'm just a classical musician, but more importantly a composer of both classical and jazz.  I realized again that I'm not a real performer of any kind (except when speaking in public).  Looks as though the jam sessions and so on here won't be as good as I had hoped if I can't find anyone more mature to play with that can understand my mentality.  Luckily there are some great workshops that are really quite compositionally-based, so I'll have something at least.

And that reminds me... I'm still continually shocked by everyone who's here... the real klezmer celebrities, that is.  As I'm writing this, I'm right to the side of a rousing conversation between yiddish scholar Michael Wex, Frank London and Josh Dolgin (aka DJ SoCalled).  Earlier today I actually bumped into all four members of Brave Old World (Michael Alpert, Alan Bern, Kurt Bjorling and Stuart Brotman)... I guess you really have to be involved in the genre to really know what I'm talking about, but this should be more universal: I also bumped directly into Theodore Bikel, the grand old man of folk himself, peer of Pete Seeger and one of the strongest influences on Bob Dylan's early period.  Oy vey!

Anyhow, nothing has actually happened yet, just settling in.  My actyual cabinmates are much more mature (mostly because they're all in their 20s) and the food is exceptional as usual (vey!)

More to come later,

Nathan

While driving between Moose Jaw and Regina today I saw what is probably the best business name ever:

Free Spirit Taxidermy

Just a thought.  Not much more to say on the trip, at least not yet.

Even though I got decent marks on all of my provincials, I'm still a bit annoyed, given that they all either made my mark stay the same or go down (but no one else cares, so  w/e):









Course                                    School Mark           Exam Mark               Final Mark

Chemistry 12                          94                              94                               94
English 12                               97                              92 (!)                           95
Français Imm. 12                  92                              86 (!)                           90
French 12                                99                              98                                99

Not that I was expecting too much better in good old French Immersion, but the English is a real disappointment.  Maybe I really freaked out the marker with the far-out comparisons of myself to various eccentric characters in literature...

But I got a scholarship, which is what I expected, so now the only thing that I don't know is if it's for $1000 or $2500, though being in the top 20 in the province could be a bit far-off for me, though I do have a 99, a 98 and few 96s, so we shall see.  I wish they still had the SMS things so I could see how well I did compared to everyone else, but w/e again.  I'll find out in late August.

After making tea, I started reading at 2:10PM, after the hourly news on CBC Radio 1.

I finished reading at 9:16.

That's 7h 6m.  Not counting tea/bathroom/internet breaks, it comes to about 6h 30m for 607 pages.

That's 93.4 pages per hour or 1.56 pages per minute.

No details forthcoming.  Just thought you should know.

Like I said, interesting.

While I was waiting in line for HPatDH, I picked up a copy of the complete Oscar Wilde, the kind that they make just to look good on the shelf of the average person, but is actually chock-full of some of the greatest work available today.  I alternately used it as a card table and read excerpts from it so as to prove that De Profundis is possibly the greatest piece of literature of all time.

My sleeping schedule has been a problem lately, seeing as I didn't fall asleep until after 4:30 last night, and I've woken up as late as 2:30 a few times this week.  In order to solve this, I'm going to stay up reading the aforementioned HPatDH all night.  At my pace, I should be definitely finished by 9, most likely by 8 tomorrow morning.  I can then try to keep myself awake through the Bar Mitzvah I'm attending tomorrow and go to bed at a reasonable hour without too much problem.

I'm currently brewing a potent mixture of chai, green and orange pekoe teas in order to keep myself awake and reading, and I have a mountain of generic diet cola to aid me in that task.

Wish me luck.

Apparently by downloading the complete Frank Zappa, J. S. Bach, Tom Waits et al, I've violated Shaw's acceptable usage agreement, namely that I've taken up far more fair than my share of bandwidth.  The limit is supposedly 60GB a month and I've already had over 85GB combined downloads and uploads since Canada Day, so I'm going to have to lay low internet-wise for the rest of the month, or Shaw could cancel all service for my family.  Come August, however, I'll finish everything up, given that it'll be my last month with a commercial internet connection for quite some time.

On a similar note, I've been reduced to splurging by watching a whole bunch of tv show episodes I've downloaded, while offlline.  It's really very sad and I think I may need some sort of contact (ie, eg, whatever: I started watching season 1 of 24 last night, and I'm already at 3:00PM.  That's right, it depresses me too.)

At least I'm enjoying some really good music.

Seriously, I feel like Eliot sometimes. So much allusion... except that most of mine has everything to do with nothing and something to do with anything, or at least something to that effect.  Ye gads, I wander around with everything in my head and try to piece it together, and most of the time everything just laughs at the futility of what I'm trying to do, like trying to absorb the universe into my brain via some twisted form of osmosis with the aether.  When it does work out, I generally can't believe or accept the results.




See what I mean?  In the course of that poem (I am proud of it, even though I don't quite understand it or believe it or accept it) I manage to allude to ancient Greek myth and philosophy, the notion of race, modern art, geography, meteorology, the Bible, more Greek myth, medieval German myth and Wagner, while quoting myself and alluding to my friends as well as to various imaginings of mine, all bound through several events in my life.

If I create anything of value it's only through a sort of psychosis, to quote an obscure book by Anthony Burgess.  Only if I obsess over something can I do anything, and even then, nothing is guaranteed.  So far, I just try to live life and WHAM! ; stuff happens and I can write/compose something, but only then.  Maybe that's why all really great composers were so crazy;  they had to be or they couldn't write anything at all.

I have to go to bed earlier, and I mean a lot earlier.  Especially when I have a Chem exam tomorrow.  Gah....

...that's what today was. Why do I bother. I just made more pitiful efforts at cleaning, didn't go for a real walk, and sat around.

I did manage to write my first real jazz tune, mind you. The first of the massive set that I'm writing that should take me forever, based on obscure historical geographical regions, this particular division of 30 or so based on the satrapies of Achaemenid Persia. The first one being Yaunā in Old Persian, also known as Ionia in Greek. Wow, I attach random names in Old Persian that have nothing to with anything to my vaguely Jewish-sounding jazz melodies that I haven't even fully worked out yet structurally or harmonically. That's like the ultimate nerddom, writing music and knowing extremely obscure historical facts and then writing about it here on LJ. All that and I managed to switch fonts halfway through this paragraph. I don't know how I did it and I have no clue how to reverse it. That about sums up everything.

There... managed to fix the font thanks to my sparse knowledge of HTML.  I really am a n3rd.

I've decided that this might be a good venue to share some of the cool stuff I read with my friends, considering how influential they are to me (this sentence deliberately ambiguous).  I'll try to write something interesting about everything I read, provided that it's not too specialized or technical.


I should probably say that I started reading this book a little over a week ago, just a few days before project completion day.  That morning, I decided that it was either finish reading the book or finish the novel study on it before 3 that afternoon, effectively the final cutoff, so I did the novel study after having only read something like 270 of the 431 pages.  I think I did a pretty good job considering.  Anyhow, I finished the book, and no matter my truthfulness, it's an amazing read, and Canadian, at that!

I confessed to my knowledge and presence here... probably an understatement.  I'm actually surprised that she wasn't particularly upset (or at least she didn't admit it to me if she is).  I invaded her privacy, and I am sorry, in fact, I have been since I first found it.  This account is partially as a pitiful attempt to somehow make up for that, though I don't really have anything sordid to confess.

So it's done.  All the loose ends are tied up, and things can go on as usual.  At least, they can go on as soon as I find a medium (aka person) that I can hold onto so I can let go.  That is my conundrum.

In other news:

We just bought a house in Lower Sahali for something like $600K... all based on the assumption that we can get double for our house than we paid for it 9 years ago, which is reasonable, I guess.  This means that our house is going on the market next Tuesday, and everything has to be cleaned and cleared, especially my room.  Guess what I did for most of today?  Yup, I cleaned quite a bit of my room.  It would be nice if I could unearth my keyboard driver cd and then be able to actually use my laptop for composition... and it would be good if I finally sent those CMC things back, only 10 months overdue.  They probably hate me there now.

I haven't gone for a walk yet, so I guess it'll be one of those long ones in the dark when it's just the right temperature, but it's probably still too cold for that.  Jade promised me we'd go for a walk, but as soon as she gets here she disappears, what's with that?

I complain too much.

Anyhow, thanks for bearing with me, whoever you are.  I wonder how many of my friends are seriously creeped out that I'm on here...

I learnt a fair bit about horses today, just from watching the show.  Green lather is quite fascinating, and Krystal has quite a way with them.  Though she'll tell me otherwise, Jenn did quite superbly, I thought, despite the fact that I still know pretty much nothing at all, but it looked good, which I seem to remember hearing her say was what counts.

Anyhow, indiscretion breeds indiscretion, and when I hope for advice I usually just get anger.  I hope tomorrow ends up better in that regard.

I've been debating whether or not I should try and stay single now for the summer, which might lead me to staying depressed for some time, or trying to pick up where I left off, but with someone else.  Whatever might come of that would almost be over before it started, due to my (and most likely her) leaving.  I've been testing the waters, and though there is pretty much no one for me in town, I know, I think I may have picked right.  We shall see.

I begin this.... this endeavour at an interesting time.


So with school and that over, I feel incredibly lost.  I've not been using my time properly at all.  Studying is out of the question.  I haven't worked on composition, though my laptop's extraordinarily bad sound card may have something to do with that. I went for a long walk yesterday, but that's just the beginning of what I have to do in order to reach my goals.

This is just an introduction of sorts.  I'm going to try to post something meaningful every day, if I can, so my formal entry for today will come later.