a sleepless assassination of character

It's rare now (as opposed to times in the past when it wasn't so rare) for me to have a plague of insomnia. Maybe 1:31 a.m. shouldn't be concidered abnormal for a 22 year old college child, but can I submit to the jury that I have had mono twice? I'd hate to revisit it a thrice. Bleh.

The purpose of our conglomerating this evening is to discuss a million and one things. Or two. I first would like to complain about my further brain decay. I am losing all spelling ability. It is not for any lack of writing, nor am I any longer studying french, nor do I anymore have to spray extremely strong spider killing sprays (as I have moved into a new and lovely home). But the fact of the mater remains that I started off by spelling first "furst" and am consistently forgetting the letter "i" when it follows a "t" in any word that I write. It might be bad karma from complaining so much about the vocabulary of my phone. It is a particularly handy phone, I should just be thankful.

Next I would like to apologize because I swore after my Music Civ class today that I would make my next blog post less pretentious. I got bored as the letter H after listening to high-fallutin' honors students analyzing three paintings of the Virgin Mary and subsequently some music samples. I can't leave off, though, because I seem to believe that words should be played with and utilized not dragged about to explicate soddy...stuff. Even though I will be highly trained in analyzations of every sort of literature, piece of art, work of film, play, etc etc by the time I graduate from this university, it still sometimes makes me gag and I steadily hold firm to what I just read in my documentary class reading tonight: "The late philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote that story telling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.*" Therefore we must conclude that my studies are erroneous.

Thirdly, you should all invest in purchasing me some sleeping pills so that you never have to read such dribble again.

Fourthly, I am rather excited that I am listening to a live recording of a Chopin Sonata on Pandora and I know this because I heard someone cough. They just coughed again. I think that person is one of my favorite people in the whole world. Because you know what their tickly throat does? It enlarges the mind, it paints a picture that leads to a world. Not just the world of the cougher, but the world of the stage and whoever is on the stage playing the piano and whoever it was that adjusted the piano before the preformer walked out and how many people must delight in the touch and feel of that piano and where they must be and and whether there's an ambiance and what happened to give that person a cold so that they keep coughing. Those are things I like thinking about. I also like dreaming about the Yamaha piano that was in our recital hall back at home. And that one blessed day of the every other yearly Chamber Music Festival where I played a dissonant saltarello with the violinist and the cellist and how those entire eleven years were worth it, if for nothing else but for that day, those three minutes.

My eleven years of piano lessons were great for more that just that, though. I remember sitting through recitals watching my dad tap his fingers on his knee to the melody of whatever song was playing. It was also great to be driven down to Saturday morning theory sessions and rehearsals in our 1980 something Plymouth Reliant to be instructed on correct stage presence. I still feel like the world is going to implode everytime someone holds down the damper pedal after they set their hands in their lap at the end of a song.

I should end sometime soon before I write the next great American novel in one blog post.

*Karen Everett, Squeezing Reality into Three Acts: What Documentary Storytellers can learn from screen writers. Release Print magazine March/April 2006