The thing about blogging on a regular basis is that if you only do it once a week it's not really a regular basis. Getting out of the habit is sometimes problematic. I'm going to try to get myself back into the habit and then let things move from there.
Yes. Things here have been whatever. I dropped Tim off at the Buffalo airport last Wednesday and things since then have been weird and sometimes lonely. And then really busy. How am I this busy?! I have a non-paying internship and a maybe-four-times-a-month hourly-pay job. That doesn't sound busy to me. But it IS! The internship is actually pretty great. It may be non-paying, but those people, they LOVE me, because I'm coming in and doing whatever they want/need on my OWN TIME. Also, the experience. Also, the company.
So, this entry will be in three parts: 1) Things What Are Broken 2) Things I Am Listening To 3) Things I Am Enjoying
1) The freezer. It's broken. The ice-cream is not frozen. The meat is barely frozen and must be thrown out. The fruit is semi-frozen. The ice-cubes are frozen. But only the ice-cubes, and only after hours of sitting and chilling in said broken freezer. Also, the wireless router. I guess it's not really broken, but man is it not functioning. That thing was just bought last year! What. Okay, that's all I can think of.
2) cLOUDDEAD. The Dirty Projectors. Black Moth Super Rainbow. Stereolab's Mars Audiac Quintet. Carla Kihlstedt.
3) Knitting. I'm knitting! And I'm not terrible (though I still have problems changing yarn colors)! I've mastered the knit stich and the purl stich, and stockinette and RIBBING and soon I'm going to start a real project, even though sometimes I still have issues binding off. And come winter, I will have probably too many scarves. The Harry Potter movies. In preparation for the 6th one, I've been watching them (some of them with my pal Kayleigh), and...man. I gotta say. The fifth one is probably my favorite. And the casting of all these movies is just amazing. I mean, come on. Alan Rickman? Kenneth Branaugh?! DAVID THEWLIS?! CRAZY GARY OLDMAN!?!? And don't forget Helena Bonham Carter. The first two movies are big rounds of cheese with amazing casting in the middle. The rest contain occasional cheese with amazing casting. Win-win. Infinite Jest. I am behind where I should be for official page-count, but whatever. I'm reading it and doing okay and actually reading the 6-page filmography footnote. See?! I'm taking it seriously. Not being crazy. I'm starting to feel like a grounded, normal, excitable, not-dreading-things Talia again. Everyone likes this Talia better. It's a proven fact.
Man. It's almost like...the Dirty Projectors decided to sound a little more like...something! Something specific! A genre, maybe! And that something is...almost...early-90's pop-ish? And I like it. I LIKE IT.
Sometimes it's hard to blog about things. I feel like I've been wildly swinging back and forth this year between not-caring and gut-spilling to meek and really really lazy. This doesn't help.
Something I'm only beginning to realize and put words to this year is how damn DEPRESSED and SAD I've been. Man, has it sucked. I haven't even really been able to identify what it was until more recently, after a good deal of retrospective thinking. I've just thought I'd been having an increasing number of "off-days" over an extremely long period of time. Just thinking I was abnormally cranky. Just thinking that the weather was really depressingly bad. Just thinking maybe I wasn't totally happy with school. Thinking all these things were causing me to have increasing number of sad thoughts. Thinking they were the cause of my lack of motivation or creativity or energy.
While I'm certain that those above-mentioned issues did not help me to keep my jovial cool, I am just about 99.9999% sure that this hormonal birth-control crap is the cause of my inability to handle life. I switched brands of oral contraceptives about two months back, and while things have been better, it's not enough. I'm getting off this crap, pretty much now. I now have multiple and more natural options for dealing with the cramps-from-hell. I'll take those, thanks.
Being depressed, though. I want to talk about it. I think it's something I need to talk about in order to clear my head and maybe recognize what feeling good and happy is. Because it's not like I thought it would be. It's not like what I thought people have to deal with. The first and foremost thing I've been experiencing, the thing I refuse to put up with anymore, is lack of drive. In anything. My scholarly interest, diligence to work, and most important to me, creative energy have been muted. Quashed. Lately I've been recognizing that my creative energy exists, and that in itself is a huge improvement. But again, it's not enough. And this has been the thing that distinguishes that this crap isn't all in my head. Because when the weather has sucked and school has left a hole in my head, my creative energies with their tendency to persevere and at least allow me to focus my insanity on something, never made an appearance. Photography, blogging, evening listening to music as an OCD past-time was lost on me.
And on top of it all have been these thoughts -- these SAD thoughts, regarding how the future is so bleak and how there's nothing I can do to help people and why bother? Bad thoughts. A concentration on morbid, bad, lethargic, useless things.
As I said, the weather and living in Rochester and school not being my favorite thing in the world did not contribute good to my life, but my imagination and my creativity and my brash ENTHUSIASM and my belief in good should have persevered in the end, as they have through my life so far.
I can pretty much only equate the past year to how I felt when I was touring through Europe with an orchestra while plagued with mono and not knowing it. Lethargic. Sad. Miserable. Useless.
As I said, things are better now. But I still feel like I'm a muted version of me. And that's just not okay with me anymore.
So screw you, modern medicine (in this instance, anyway), on behalf of any girl who's ever been on oral contraceptives, felt miserable, and NOT BEEN ABLE TO FIGURE OUT WHY. SCREW. YOU.
I did not blog for two entire days! I sorry, one reader.
In those two days, I...
1) Made gyudon. I don't want to toot my own horn or anything, and maybe this actually points to how inexperienced I am with cooking, but I have to say it was the most successful thing I have ever made. Also the tastiest. I made gyudon following Cooking with Dog:
Yes. Yes. It was most delicious. Really. Tasted just like any authentic gyudon I've eaten before. The only real issues? Beef not sliced thinly enough. But that's tough, even if the beef is frozen when you try to slice it. I think it must take practice and a much sharper knife than I have. I also didn't cut the onion wedges thinly enough. The rest was awesome. Onsen tamago?! Hells yeah.
2) Watched movies. More that have made me cry than I would like to admit. Sooo, okay. Movies watched in order of the amount they made me cry: The Orphanage, Revolutionary Road, Dark City, Drag Me To Hell.
Dudes. Don't be fooled by those first two movies. Suuure, The Orphanage is labeled as "horror" and you will likely find it in that section of your video store. But it's just really fucken sad. I cried about an equal amount to what I have cried in the past watching Dancer in the Dark. No. Really. And Revolutionary Road...oh boy. Yes, Kate and Leo reunite, but.....agh. The angst. The pain. The FIFTIES! It hurt, man. Dark City didn't make me cry, though I would say that it is the Neil Gaiman-approved alternative to The Matrix, and came out a year earlier to boot. Really liked. Drag Me To Hell, the more I think about it, was just awesome. It took a few minutes post-movie to truly grasp the ways in which the awesome came together, but they eventually did, also with this secret message that stuck to me which was: sometimes really crappy things happen to completely undeserving people, and somewhere in there lots of unnecessary vomit occurs and finds its way into other people's mouths. The End.
I don't want to share what I ate today. I'll just let you know there was ice-cream and it was good. But the rest, only I will know.
Today I sat at the RPO booth for a career fair at an elementary school. By jove, that stuff is tiring. We usually do an instrument petting zoo that includes about five thousand hand-held percussion instruments and a crappy violin and viola that I'm the one to teach kids how to play even though, um, clearly a cellist here. Thank god we didn't do that today. I have no idea how I would have survived that. This in itself was pretty exhausting. Bringing my own instrument and attracting way way unnecessary attention of many children due to size alone.
So we explained the RPO! And we showed them a big blown-up photo of the Eastman Theatre! And we told them to keep playing instruments, or start playing instruments! And we played our own instruments! And it was exhausting.
Two things worth noting:
1) The random chaperone/guy who half-assedly hit on myself and my booth-partner, after I played pretty much 10 seconds of the beginning of a Bach Suite. He told me I played so beautifully. And then asked how he could get a recording! And I was like "uuuuh...you...can't?" And then he said that, hey, we should collaborate, since he played the alto-sax! And that I should give him my number! And so he could check up on me! And I was like "um....no. sorry." And please keep in mind that a) I couldn't really understand what he was saying and b) he was holding a plateful of food, and food was kind of being spit at us and on the table. I feared for my cello.
2) Some kid approached me with moderate concern and said "isn't the cello the one that makes your fingers bleed?" And...well...I'm so meta:
Yes, I finally booked my flight to San Francisco in August for Rebecca and Bryce's wedding! And while I now am nearing negative dollars in my bank account, I know the ridiculousness will be well, well worth the money. Oh yes, oh yes.
I am also planning on spending an extra day in SF. Do you live in SF? Do you know me? Let's frolic, please!
I'm trying to get back into all these intarweb projects I started and then forgot about because school and moving was hard. But this has proven difficult because my computer apparently hates me.
Tomorrow I'm going to go drop it off so it can have that happy 'ol superdrive replaced.
Aside from that, though, I've been having really really weird issues with connectivity to the internet for pretty much almost a year now. The biggest issue is that my laptop (MacBook, late 2006) seems to drop network connections very easily. Especially when a router is further than maybe one room over. Hell, I couldn't even leave the same room as the router all last year because my computer wouldn't get a signal, and that's saying something as our router is one of those whole-house coverage dealies.
Does anyone else with a MacBook have this problem? I can't tell if it's a hardware (i.e. wireless card) issue, or a software thing. I'm starting to suspect it's a software thing, and I'm starting to suspect the only way to really seriously fix the problem is the upgrade to Mac OS 10.5. And...sigh.
Not to mention this thing where Movable Type won't and has not let me log in to their site since...I don't know. The "QuickPost to MT" link is the only login that will actually register my username and password. The Movable Type system won't even acknowledge one single email address I could possibly have used to sign up. Arrrrgh, problems!
So anyway. I'll be computer-less for a day or two. But I'll fortunately still be able to check stuff/do things.
I'm also pretty sure I need to start practicing again. Like, for real. I keep having dreams about needing to get up and play a recital and then realizing, oh, hey, I don't know how to play this difficult thing!
It's hard, though. I'm pretty sure I'm burnt out on cello-performance related things for life. I'm pretty sure that's not an exaggeration. Pretty sure.
I guess I should just go ahead and get this story out of the way.
I was at Wegmans with Tim. And we were in the cereal isle because why not?! And though I am currently stuffing my face with bread-products, I am still fascinated with all things gluten-free, and actively making mental notes for the future when I most likely return to being gluten-free. And so a little while back I received a tip-off that Cocoa Pebbles are actually safe for consumption by celiac peeps. This really wasn't exciting news until just now, when I rediscovered just how awesome cereal can be as a late-night snack (note to self: it is not okay to consume an entire box of cereal within 24 hours, and if this starts to happen you must cease and desist).
So there I was. At Wegmans. Babbling at my companion about the Wegmans brand of Cocoa Pebbles and the original brand, and how there is that ONE ingredient difference which makes Wegmans brand inedible for celiac people but the other brand miraculously okay. And I was talking and talking while moving up and down the isle, at a person approaching me with a cart. And being like "hey, so guess what, they're totally not both gluten-free! This one has blah blah blah blah blah which makes it not gluten-free, which is kind of lame and yadda yadda" and then I look up and it's SOME RANDOM DUDE and oh, the horror. So I apologized and almost walked into the shelves of cereal and was embarrassed. The. End.
Just in case you were curious, the highest concentration of driving douchebaggery to ever exist has got to be within a 1/4 mile radius of the Rochester Public Market. Seriously.
Also, my digestive system seems to hate me a little bit again today. Gluten?! Gluten??! Maybe. I don't know. Maybe one day I'll figure it out.
I'm currently in the stage of "eating gluten and enjoying that shit." It's good. How did I live without crusty breads and battered and fried shit for all that time? I don't know.
It's hard, though. I'm not sure periods of extreme stress a la moving are the best times to embark on major diet-change journeys. Avoiding gluten isn't simple as avoiding all bread products and general fried things. In order to avoid gluten, one must not only for-go all food containing wheat, rye, barley, but also additives that contain that crap, like Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein, malt or malt flavoring, modified starch/food starch. This means that one has to be pretty proficient and at least somewhat patient with reading labels. It also makes eating out at restaurants rather difficult. In case you were also wondering, soy sauce contains wheat. Yes, yes it does. Check the label of any Kikkoman's and the second ingredient is "wheat."
Then there's also the whole cross-contamination thing. Oh yeah.
So anyway. Gluten-free. I don't think I did the most thorough job of staying gluten-free. I was a little thoughtless with it. And during the last couple days of moving I definitely didn't give a crap about what went in me, just that something did. So I don't know. I don't think I was actually gluten-free long enough to see a difference, anyway. I really want to try again at some point this summer, when I know I have the time and will not be super stressed-out about life. But for now, I am going to go to Sticky Lips and eat the damn beer-battered Haddock on Friday nights.
Saw Up. Very good. The sequence of emotional events for me took place in reverse order from a lot of movies, starting with me being sad and all wanting to cry, and ending with me being feeling jovial. And stuff.
Aaaaand, I officially fail at blogging.
For the first time in quite a few days, I touched my cello today. It was kind of nice, actually. Who would have thought!
