I admire Inigo Montoya.

I mean, you spend all kinds of time thinking up a line to say to your enemy (or friend, whatever), and then you get the perfect moment to say it…and then you say it. And either it works, and you feel good; or it works, but you somehow feel hollow; or it doesn’t work, and you feel stupid. Inigo actually had his enemy fleeing in terror after his line (cutting the guy’s men to ribbons first didn’t hurt).

Usually, that would be the end of it. But not for Inigo. He said his line again. (Why waste all the effort of thinking it up on something you’ll only say once?) And then again. And kept saying it…and it continued to work.

Bravo, Inigo. I have considered you a hero since my childhood. (Though I can’t say I approve of revenge in general…if I were to go on a revenge quest, I hope it would be as perfectly conceived and executed as yours.)

Oh, Muut! Muut!

How could you?!

Even if it was the “rules”–I bet you didn’t even warn her, explain it, give her time to prepare!

Traditional Fantasy Quests Mirror Reality

I’ve heard it many times: fantasy is escapism. There’s not a hint of reality. Blah blah blah. Some people acknowledge some fantasy as reflecting reality, but say that the older fantasy style (quests,etc.) need not apply.

But you know what? I think that the traditional quest–with no apparent logic, arbitrary rules, and no real human reasons–is a perfect reflection of reality. (I’m not saying it makes good fiction–that’s another bowl of fruit.)  I mean, that’s what we do all day, every day. (Maybe me more than some, lodged now in corporate america…) There are mysterious, 1-dimensional figures–often you never meet them, you just get their voices floating to you with instructions, or cryptic messages in your e-mail–who “guide” you, and you must follow the apparently arbitrary guidelines to the letter, or face catastrophic consequences. There is strange importance placed on seemingly worthless items (that may or may not be “real”) for no apparent reason (Purchase orders, vouchers, anyone? Bluetooth headsets for desk phones? Post-its? Business cards? The last cup of coffee in the office pot?). There are processes that occur with no explanation and seem to affect the protagonist with no link to said protagonist, totally twisting the quest from its original path, no foreshadowing. And all along you have the lurking suspicion that at the end of the chain (I have to go after annoying details because someone is asking me for them, but that someone is only doing it because someone else is asking him/her, etc…) is Satan. (Okay, maybe that last one isn’t a traditional fantasy staple, but maybe it ought to be…)

Overextended

I am so overextended I have actually downloaded some to-do-listish organizey software in order to try to help me cope :’(. 40 hours a week of work-work; not-enough hours a week of my full-time master’s program; trying to (oops, not really supposed to talk about that, I suspect) do something very time-consuming in my spare time; no time to play guitar; I feel really guilty when I read; I have been falling off the fitness wagon and simultaneously telling myself it’s okay to comfort myself with whatever food I want at any given moment because after all, I’m working so hard; dealing with all of my car issues; trying to fit in some meditation so I don’t actually go bonkers; cooking scarborough fair shortbread (which I first saw at a million words and have been wanting to make–though I forgot what Carolyn said about the square pan and when mine didn’t go into rounds nicely, I modified the recipe a bit so that it would) and brownies for my co-workers because they always buy me lunch and never let me buy them lunch and it bothers me (this is not just one co-worker–the whole freaking office seems to have taken on the “feed Meghan up” duty); picking people up at airports; running countless errands; putting together packages to send to Jessie; trying to get enough sleeeeeeeeeeep…I am soooo overextended.

Guitar; Piano.

A piano is clean and open. Every note you can play is a key. A very pure, straightforward instrument. When you interact with it, if you pay attention, you can track exactly what you’re doing (pitch, length of notes) with relative ease. It turns that tangled mess of music in your mind into something linear, but recognizable: something you can share with others (and something that makes sense to you weeks later, when you’re a bit of a different person, yourself).

Maybe it’s because I had a piano first, but guitar is not like that at all for me. It’s very mysterious. I at first had to learn things very much by rote on the guitar–as a beginner, it’s easy to sound things out on a piano. If the note you want sounds higher than the note you just pressed, it’s to the right of that first one on the keyboard–and if you’ve had basic ear training, by a predictable number of steps. Things are a little less intuitive on a guitar, and you have to literally memorize about a third of the frets to get something similar from it. But on an elemental level, that can work–if you pick a note you like on the guitar,  you may not remember what fret it is, and you may not want to do the counting to call it an A#, you know? You just mess around on the neighboring frets until you get something that sounds friendly to your ear, but is totally mysterious to that analytical part of your brain unless you specifically let the analytical bit out to play. (I am, of course, leaving out plenty about guitars that differs from pianos. You feel very connected to an instrument you tune yourself, by ear, for example, and that beats any warmup for getting you into the right sort of meditative state for playing. And all of the different sounds you can get out of a single guitar–a piano has dynamics, but that’s about it unless you want to damage the piano. Of course, that is enough for me; I love pianos, and the simplicity of working with pure tones and dynamics really works.)

After that experience with my guitar, though (the non-parenthetical part), I came back to the piano very differently. (And it’s very irritating to be itching to play a piano and not have one.) In my piano lessons (so long ago!) I had totally missed the point of memorizing all of those chords, scales, and arpeggios. Yes, I knew they were the “building blocks” of everything, and I could see how they related to the songs I was learning. But to me, “learning piano” meant learning to play songs that my teacher picked out. I didn’t make the leap to improvising arrangements to songs I knew based on those chords and arpeggios. And I definitely didn’t make the leap to letting the piano sort out all of those murky tangled bits in my head that might or might not be songs–or the fact that those chords were in fact merely a lens to view songs through. And I absolutely didn’t get that the piano was a lens to view songs through.

The guitar taught me a lot about those lurking, mysterious songish things in my head, because it seemed very much in tune with them, being pretty mysterious itself. But I’m not finding it easy at all to compose on. Okay, let’s face it, I’m lazy. I don’t have the patience to untangle the results I get on a guitar. It’s not easy to take a bunch of guitar frets and figure out what notes I was playing and put them on a musical staff. Nothing like as easy as the nice clear lens of a piano. Actually, the guitar is much closer to a funhouse mirror, which is unexpectedly discouraging.

I am always looking at the clock

I am always looking at the clock

at 10:02. At 10:03 I am usually thinking about 10:02 and about the clock one minute ago. Tonight I saw 10:03, 10:04, 10:05, and I wondered about quanta and time and about how many 10:02s I had seen, how many 10:02s I had lived. I also wondered what prompted me to break up the lines at 10:06.

Time is strange only because we lie about it. Our dreams tell us how time passes but we lie with our eyes on the clock, with our numbers, our ears training themselves to tick and to quantify. We shape our minds into graphs.

At 10:09 I mended the lines and at 10:10 I wanted 10:02 and banisters. What are you graphing? My own graph mind is visiting the paperclips.

Religion

For someone who claims to be an atheist/Spatuloid votary, I seem to think and talk a lot about religion, as if it matters to me.

I guess it’s belief that is so fascinating. Is there a circuit missing, that I can’t feel belief in various religions, God(s), etc.? Today I was speculating on what I thought was a very different subject, and had a bit of an epiphany about belief in general. Maybe you could say I realized the depths of my own cynicism (though how is it that I seem to fit the profiles of “cynic” and “romantic” simultaneously?). But it doesn’t feel like cynicism; it’s not a negative thing, really, or a conscious thing, or anything like choosing to mistrust things…

Anyway, I went to church as a child (it was just one of those things I did, under parental direction–like soccer practice, except more of the boring and less of the running out of breath). I was inundated by the usual propaganda; I turned out atheist, etc. Old story.

Parallel story, perhaps:

I grew up in a culture where True Love (romantic) is The Answer. It’s in the movies; it’s in the books; it’s in the tabloids. Love gives the world meaning. If you find someone to Love, even if it doesn’t look like a fairy tale, it might as well be.

I read the stories. I loved them. But I didn’t date. I didn’t pine after people. I didn’t, say, passionately pursue anyone, or get passionately pursued and suddenly realize it was Love. People tended to seem confused by this, and in turn I worried about their confusion and felt confused myself. I knew the script perfectly well. It was written into every couple on the street, every jewelry ad…every child playing as their parents watched, lovingly, and their Love for each other marked the lines of their bodies. But it was like I missed my cues. Or maybe my fundamental inability to embrace religions was expressed in a different way on the relationship scene: maybe I am incapable of believing in Love, that rare religion for which belief can, in fact, create reality.

I still don’t get it. I am not lonely. I am not driven to seek another half. Is it one of those things where you just try it until you do wake up and have that wrenching ache of realizing you can’t live without that person? I know what it is to love people–really, I do. I can’t express how I feel for those special people in my lives…the ones my thoughts just can’t help but touch on every day, places of inexhaustible warmth and comfort.

But that romantic love? Choosing a lifelong partner–or even a partner for a few weeks? I feel like I did when I read the bible as a child. The imagery and the rewards and the consequences and the whole story of it are literally inescapable.  The doctrine is all around me; I absorb it in countless ways, daily, hourly. Even so, it’s like…somehow, I don’t belong in that world.

Happy Tacita!

I will speak as little as possible of this splendid holiday.

Happy Quirinalia!

I hope you’re all celebrating!

Being winsome and incompetent at an auto parts store…

…did not work as advertised. In fact, I’m going to have to label it an epic fail. I found myself choosing what to buy at the store and then going home, digging up a power drill, and drilling two holes into my bumper. And installing the hardware, all by my lonesome. [No, I was not putting on the incompetence! I in fact am not friends with the power drill, and persuading it to come out of hiding and do what I wanted took approximately twelve times as long as it might have taken someone competent. Not to mention that I actually started installing the bracket upside down--you know, so that the side the license plate fit into was facing the car. Yes, I knew which side was which. No, I didn't check at the crucial moment, mostly because all my attention was on how to hold it in place while I tried to screw it in, rather than whether I was holding it in the right configuration.]

Other than that, I’ve essentially spent the weekend trying to replace my music collection. Let’s just say I started out on Friday with the 20 or so songs I had searched out since getting this computer; I managed to pull half a gig or so off of my now-defunct, older computer; I’m now up to ten gigs, looking to be 14 by the end of the night. Not a bad start, and a nice clean collection: only music that was crucial to me to replace.

Side note, I’m a little bummed: if I didn’t have such nice sheets etc., I would totally have worn my awesome new birthday boots to bed :D.