Funk

::sigh::  Of late, I don’t seem to have any spark at all.  It’s been beautiful, autumnal weather, with golden leaves and blue skies and all that jazz - the best of my favorite season - and I can’t really engage with any of it.  All that would be bad enough, but to add another problem, I have absolutely NO enthusiasm for trying to write grad school personal statements.  I don’t even have much of an enthusiasm for the idea of grad school - or anything - which is not ideal for writing a “why ______ (fill in the school)?” statement.

YYYYYYEEEEESSSSSSSSSSS!

What lovely news to wake up to.  :-)

Unbelievable

Frankly, I find it a bit unsettling, given the global financial worries of the past few months, that my American bank has increased the credit line on my credit card twice in as many weeks, up to $4,500.  It doesn’t seem to send the right signal, to my mind.  Surely the banks should be encouraging people to live more within their means, rather than less so.

::laughter::

Whilst walking back to the house a few minutes ago, I came across a couple of boys (about 11 or 12 years of age), one of whom was crouched down (Boy 1), about to do something to the tire of someone’s car, the other who was watching (Boy 2).  After the watching one communicated to the crouching one that someone was coming, and after crouching one had sprung up with a guilty smile, I had a laughing conversation which went something like this:

Me: “Whatever it is you were about to do, it’s probably not a very good idea.”
Boy 1: “But we’re boys! We have to do things like this!”
Boy 2 (quietly): “Yeah!”
Me: “Just because you’re boys, you want to do something stupid?”
Boy 2 (quietly): “No...”
Boy 1: “But we’re kids!  We can’t go to prison!”
Me: “But you can go to juvie...”
Both boys (eyes wide): “What’s that?”
Me: “That’s what it’s called in the States, but I know that you have it over here, too.  It’s a place where they can lock you up if you’re under 18, like prison, only not with adults.”
Both boys (eyes wide): “Ohhhh...”

A vote for what I want

I’ve just completed and am going to go post my absentee ballot.  I voted for Nader.

In the end, I believe that, for a democracy to be a true democracy, voters should feel that they can vote for what they truly want, rather than tactically (i.e. rather than voting against what they don’t want).  I don’t want McCain and Palin to win.  But I agree, overall, more with Nader and Gonzalez than with Obama and Biden.  I have no illusions that Nader can win, but I still want to vote for what I want.

Wow

There’s a woman outside the front of the house yelling at her kid(s) in *exactly* the same accent as Eliza Doolittle has at the beginning of “My Fair Lady”.  Only roughened some by age/drink/smoking (I don’t know which - can’t see the woman).

::smile::

Saint-Saens’ Symphony No. 3 is a wonderful piece to listen to whilst filling in letter of recommendation forms for graduate schools.  Very cheering and encouraging.  (For those who don’t know it by that title, the theme from the final movement was used as the main soundtrack melody for the film “Babe”.  If that helps.)

::sigh::

The job hunt isn’t going too well.  So today I’ve been taking my CV around to places like Starbucks, Gap, Shoon, Laura Ashley… All I want is some part-time work to keep the bills covered while I work on job applications for other places and also while I work on grad school applications.  It’s quite depressing overall, though - I’ve never had such a bad hit rate, so to speak.  Thus far, I’m batting 0 for 12.  I know that the economy is in major slowdown and all that, but, well, it’s still depressing.  Particularly when I have a £750 visa application to make at the end of this week and only £500 to my name.  I can borrow from A, but, not to repeat myself, it’s still depressing.

New puzzle

Back at the end of August, the Gloucestershire Symphony Orchestra offered me the position of principal violist.  As I accepted it, this means that I’m responsible for attending “as many rehearsals as I can manage,” playing in the concerts (of course, except for the one that conflicts with a CSO concert), and getting the bowings straight for the viola section.  In return, I get paid a small fee for each concert - my first paid musical work (not counting busking at Saturday Market in Portland, although I’m by no means belittling that)!

So the second rehearsal is this evening - in just under three hours, in fact.  I’m sitting here at my desk with the music for Vaughan Williams’ Third Symphony open in front of me, following along as a recording of it plays on my computer, pretending my pencil is my bow.  And it’s really good, for several reasons:

1.) I had never heard this piece before last week’s rehearsal, and it is pleasantly unlike “The Lark Ascending,” a piece of V.W. doggerel that plays about every twenty minutes on Classic FM.

2.) I have a reasonable number of very exposed solos in the piece, so it’s nice to hear what they’re supposed to sound like!

3.) It’s actually a lot of fun trying to figure out the bowings.  I have to balance things like the fact that an up bow (when the strings players push their bow as opposed to pulling it) tends to crescendo, that sometimes the violas need to fall in line with other sections’ bowings, and that occasionally - as is the case for a section of music that prompted this entry - the violas have divisi within the section and the two (or three or four) parts have different numbers of notes, so I have to figure out how to land them all back on the same bow when we finally are tutti again.  It’s a neat sort of puzzle. 

Frankly, though, I’m glad that I’m cutting my teeth on Vaughan Williams rather than, say, Shostakovich or Martinu.  V.W. has significantly fewer notes to resolve. ::grin::

Here we go again…

“--- Félicitations ! ---

Vous êtes inscrit(e) à la 33ème édition du Marathon de Paris qui aura lieu le dimanche 5 avril 2009.”

Best go dust off my running shoes, then.

Apparently not front-page news

Link. After my grandfather sent me a link to this article, I went scouting through the BBC webpages.  I already knew that I hadn’t heard it on the radio, so obviously it wasn’t big enough news for BBC to consider spreading it through that highly-accessible medium.  BBC’s coverage was buried in the regional pages for Kent.  Perhaps they are trying to discourage potential protesters from doing anything similar?

::sigh::

Quote from VP-hopeful Palin: “Starting in January, in a McCain-Palin administration, we’re going to lay more pipelines, build more nuclear plants, create jobs with clean coal and move forward on solar, wind, geothermal and other alternative sources.” Um, “clean coal?” Oxymoron, anyone?  Nuclear plants?  WhywhywhywhywhywhyWHY do so many people INSIST on suggesting that nuclear power is at ALL a clean power source?  (Note: personal bugbear in play here.) Any energy that produces waste that lasts tens of thousands of years and that is so destructive to all aspects of life that it has to be locked up in special underground chambers - which it eventually eats through - is not a solution, long-term, short-term, any-term.

::shaking herself by the mental scruff of the neck:: Anyway, this was just one quote from a speech that was filled with all sorts of disturbing things.  One little frosting on the cake: weren’t the two main candidates (McCain in particular, as I recall) talking about having a respectful, intelligent, debatory sort of campaign?  Why has it descended into mocking and smear tactics so damn quickly?

Evil is the new good

Link. Read at your own risk: whether you are liberal, conservative, or “meh,” this article (forwarded to me by my grandfather) is likely to raise your blood pressure a few notches.

::cue “Twilight Zone” theme::

Hee hee hee - I love things like this!

Three facts about me:

1.) I’m a big “Highlander” fan.  The TV show, not the films, and I’m not as big a fan as some out there, but I will quite happily while away hours - days - watching the series.  I’m such a big fan that I used to date an Adrian Paul look-alike.  (Okay, my fandom and my dating history aren’t actually causally-related, but it’s a nice coincidence.)

2.) I used to play on Reed’s history department softball team, The Dead White Men, every Renn Fayre.  I always chose Sir Francis Drake as my dead white man - who better than a state-supported pirate?

3.) When I lived in Boston, I would occasionally help Berklee School of Music students desperately searching for violists to help them record their new compositions.  I helped one student, Lucas Vidal, several times, including the recording of his score for the film “Cathedral Pines.”

Lucas Vidal’s most current composition work, according to his IMDB page, is the score for ”The Immortal Voyage of Captain Drake,” a TV movie about - who else? - Sir Francis himself.  And guess who plays Drake?  You got it - Adrian Paul!

Wheeeeee!

Ooooooooo - I just figured out that that means that I’m only three degrees of separation from Adrian Paul!  Huzzah!

Classical music mockery

Link. In watching a couple of clips of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing “Der Lindenbaum” and “Der Erlkonig” (I’d highly recommend listening to them both, particularly the second), I noticed a listing for the linked clip.  Dudley Moore is a genius.