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My new GRE book sucks.
I awakened in an utterly austere room. I was lying on a cot and bare lightbulb hung overhead. I tried to sit up, but fireworks exploded behind my eyes. Afetr a minute, the fireworks abated. I swung my legs around to stand up. Standing was arduous but I stayed on my feet.
The door at the end of the room opened and a man who looked quite a bit like me walked in. “Jane Smith, we meet at last.” he said, “You’re lucky some of my agents were aboard Dr. Cool’s hovercraft, or you would be dead from astringent gas.”
“You have my approbation for that.” I replied. “Are you, by chance, Mr. Anderson?”
He smiled. “You demonstrate excellent acumen.”
“Thank you for your accolade. Why is everyone looking for you?”
He smiled again, but this time it was acerbic. “They say everone wants to be wanted. But it’s an axiom not to give away too much to your enemy. Ironically, my henchmen saved you because they thought you were me. If you’re amenable you can remain here alive, but imprisoned. Otherwise, it’s really the end for you.”
“Where’s Shelia?!” I demanded.
“Fine. Safe. She’s practicing being an ascetic, as are you. I must say she had a bit more alacrity than you’re demonstrating.”
“Why do you want us imprisoned?”
“Because I’m guilty of avarice. There’s a great fortune to be made out in the dessert, as JK, Dr. Cool and I all realize.”
Just then, there was a large explosion in the hallway. A section of the wall collapsed, opening up the hallway and my cell to the outside. Mr. Anderson umped out of the way and two gaurds hustled him to safety. “Sieze them!” he cried, as he ran to safety. Shelia appeared in the hole grabbed my arm and we ran together outside, where we saw the hovercraft. “Jump in!” She said.
She got behind the controls and piloted us away. The gaurds shot, but their bullets ricochetted off the armored hull.
“How on earch did you escape and blow up the wall?” I asked, filled with adulation for her.
“Oh, just a litle alchemy. I realized that my soup, when compined with bird droppings that I scraped from the window and some household cleaner would make a powerful explosive. Anyway, we must get to Dr. Cool’s hideout right away!”

I lost my GRE book, so I’m working on a different set of words now…

The 15 GRE Words of the Day

  1. abate (verb) To lessen in degree. After three days, the hurricane started to abate
  2. accolade (noun) An expression of praise. The movie has released with great accolades from the critics.
  3. acerbic (adjective) Having a sour or bitter taste or charecter. Although she praised her competetion, her tone was acerbic
  4. acumen (noun) Quick, keen, or accurate knowledge or insight. Ideally, you want a leader with accumen, not a trained chimp.
  5. adultation (noun) excessive praise; intense adoration. J-Lo enjoys the adulation of millions.
  6. alacrity (noun) Eager and Enthusaistic willingness. Bush has an alactrity for warfare
  7. alchemy (noun) A medieval sceience aimed at the transmutation of metals, especially base metals into gold. Although alchemy is impossible, alchemists accidentally invented chemistry.
  8. amenable (adjective) Agreeable; responsive to suggestion. I asjed her out, and she was anemable, so we went bowling.
  9. approbation (noun) An expression of approval or praise. I received approbation from my boss for the project.
  10. arduous (adjective) strenuous, taxing, requiring significant effort. Taking the northern trail to the top of Mt. Witney is more arduous than the south.
  11. ascetic (noun) One who practices rigid self-denial, especially as an act of religious devotion. The ascetic rose every moring at 4:00, after only four hours of sleep, to say morning prayers
  12. astringent (noun) Having a tightening effect on living tissue; hasrsh; severe The IMF reccomended measures were astringent, at least to the peasents, the foreign investors found them to be pleasent.
  13. austere (noun) Without adornment; bare; severely simple; ascetic. The monk’s dwellings were completely austere. In his room was a hard bed and a crucifix upon the wall and nothing else.
  14. avarice (noun) Greed, especially for wealth. It was Martha Stewards avarice which lead to her downfall and her insider-trading.
  15. axiom (noun) A universally recognized principle; taken as a given; possessing self-evident truth. The divitinity of Jesus ius an axiom of Christianity. axiomatic (adjective)

You’ll be happy to learn, loyal readers (yes, apparently I have readers. Don’t you have anything better to do with your time?), that so far I am keeping to my resolution of flossing my teeth. You haven’t lost your five pounds yet or written your statement of purpose for grad school yet or prepared for the GREs or made an appointment to take them or put together a portfolio or even compiled a list of schools yet even though deadlines are looming on the 15th for most schools and that’s less than two weeks away. No, but last night, my teeth were flossed, despite me feeling like crap.
I feel better today, but pretty tired actually.
ack i’m not going to get into gradschool cuz i’m too far behind and all i want to do is take a nap.
Stop reading my blog. It’s boring and it will just piss you off.

Happy new year.
I think I have the flu. Bleah. Yesturday, I just thought I was hungover, despite the rarity of being hung over after one beer and one glass of champagne, but you never know. I really doubt two days of hangover could be pinned on that. Luoi told me that there’s a flu going around.
I skipped on resolution mkaing pretty much completely this year. I still remember all my resolutions from last year. I had a plan, I was on track, then things went suddenly awry. I think John Lennon said that life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. So anyway, I decided “no resolutions.” But that in itself is kind of a resolution and thus self-contradictory, so here’s my list of 2003 resolutions.

2003 Resolutions

  1. Floss my teeth

Hopefully I can keep to it this time. For some reason, when I get stressed, I just stop flossing my teeth. So I’ve decided to start flossing again and not just quit when the going gets rough. Otherwise, I’ll get cavities!
I’ll make more resolutions vis a vis my five year plan after I recover from last year. Anyway, I finally submitted something to the Jack Straw call for scores, so I’m not 100% off track. I called it No No Nonette.
Ok, now I’m going to go back to sleep.

Well, it’s a new year and Oakland’s homicide rate reset to zero at midnight and is probably at least below five right now, definietly in the single digits. A news article yesturday said there were 113 homicides last year, so it’s probably right around there. I imagine if a nunch of people got killed on New Years Eve, it would have been in the paper this morning.
Anyway, I have a solution for this. This isn’t one of those “after the revolution” sort of solutions either. I mean, it’s very easy for liberals to say that people kill each other because they’re stressed and then point at the usual suspects for causing stress. Unemployment, ecenomic stress, lack of health care, etc. Yeah, I could tell you that it’s stressful being fearful that you’ll lose all your savings and end up being homeless if you get sick, because of lost wages and hospitals bills. And then I could tell you that we really need socialized medicine, so folks wouldn’t have to be so worried and so they would have less stress, and if they did get super stressed anyway, they could go to talk to a shrink about it and maybe figure things out and not kill somebody. Yeah, I could sip my latte as a very pious liberal and tell you that. But let’s take a hard-nosed, conservative look at things. Paying for everyone to have decent healthcare is expensive. Funerals are expensive too, but a hundred or so a year is a lot cheaper than insuring all of Oakland. Plus, where’s the profit motive? Nobody gets rich off of resource equality. Only inequality creates unequal wealth and thus richness. This sort of expensive, liberal, non-punative approach is simply not feasable under our current system. Only after the revolution can we . . .
But I promised a solution that would work now and not be dependant on the armed struggle of the proletariat and I have it. Bring in Jessica Fletcher. Her little town of Cabbot Cove had a tremendous muder rate. More than one a week and a population much smaller than Oakland. It’s true that catching those responcible didn’t seem to diminish the murder rate in Cabbot Cove, but police in Oakland beleive that some of the same people might be responsible for several homicides, so in Oakland, it might make a difference. At the very least, it would get the murders off the street once they comitted a crime, which is better than nothing. Only a Hollywood solution can solve complex social problems while maintinging the stus quo, spending no money and being entertaining all at the same time. So a Hollywood situation is obviously what we need.

It doesn’t matter who I’m trying to kid because all the applications are due January 15h and I haven’t taken the GRE yet and I don’t have an appointment and I don’t know any vocabulary or highschool math. And more importantly, I don’t have much of a portfolio, especially in regular composition, which is what I want to study, I think, or not. Maybe I want to be more electronic.
christi keeps telling me to apply to Mills. But all of my academic reccomendations would come from Mils people. How would that work out? and I wasn’t very serious as an undergrad and wasn’t very sauve or polite and there are plenty of peope around who probably still don’t like me or think I’m a trouble maker. the old head of campus computer services thought I was compromising security on the netword and was convinced I was behind every computer misdeed that occurred. (It didn’t help when the Mills Weekly quoted me out of context when I was answering questions about denial of service attacks. It ended up as looking like a how-to manual, which is stupid because even though I know how to do stuff in theory, I have no practical computer cracking skills.) I only caused a minor system disruption once and it was an accident.
Anyway, I’ve already gone to Mills. I’d feel like a loser going to the same college forever. If they’d even want me back.
My plans are all in conflict. I want to stay here. I want to go away. I want to study regular composition. but I don’t know anything aout it, there’s nothing to reccomend me to the program. I want to use my degree to get research appointments. Appointments are for people who do electronic music. I already know how to do electronic music, I don’t need to go to more school. Research locations only want people with advanced degrees. Yarg, if I knew how to do everything they seem to want for me t get in, I wouldn’t need more education. How does that work?
whine whine whine. I’m so privledged. My whines ought to make people want to kick me. A freind of a freind is making lists of people who will be killled in the revolution. I’m probably on hiz list. I don’t think I want hiz revoltuion. (Hiz is a new genderqueer pronoun I just made up even though I’m not genderqueer. Yet another reason to be targetted by that sort of revolution.)
I just reread Ecotopia. I don’t have a single original idea in my whole head.

Jack Straw Productions has a call for scores out for a sort of a nine toy piano jukebox. People coming around put in a quarter and pick out a score and it gets played over nine MIDI-ified toy painos. My thing for this is written but it needs a name. It seems to me like a cute name could make a big difference for how often it gets played. Untiled #47 might not be as enticing as Bongo Slugs or something. As you can tell from that example, I’m terrible with titling things. The thing I wrote started out as a normal, boring, four part choral, but then I started adding 16th notes and then got modified for nine toy panos. It sounds sort of fanfarish to me, but that might be because I’m using a Quicktime MIDI trumpet to listen to it. (that means crappy computer synth trumpet.)
Some of you might wonder what a toy paino is. Well, some of you maye have seen the very baby grand paino in the living room of my abode. It’s the kind of piano Linus plays in the Peanuts specials. A lot of people want to call it a “Linus Piano.” But it doesn’t sound like a real piano either. It’s plinky, high-pitched and out of tune. I’ve just looked at toypiano.com and it’s not a porn site, so I’ll send you over there for more information. somewhere near the bottom there’s a link to pictures and another to sounds.
Sibelius, otherwise the best music notation software ever seen, does not have support for toy pianos built in! How can this be? They have Odnes Martenot built in. How much more obscure is that? Everyone who has seen Peanuts at least has an idea of what a toy piano is. But few people except Messian fans and antique electronic instrument enthusiasts know what an Odnes is. There weren’t very many Messian fans around here until the SF Opera put on Messian’s opera about St. Francis of Assisi. Then there were tons of Messian concerts. People got very excited about the opera. It got rave reviews. I had tickets to go see it, and I kept putting it off, because my mom was sick, so finally I went to see it on the closing night. She died that night, apparently right as I was getting home. The opera wasn’t very good either.

A few days of sun and rain and de-snailing and de-fungussing (is there one or two ‘s’es in fungusing?) improved the state of my xmas tree greatly. It’s in the house dropping needles everywhere, even flinging them across the room. The cats keep trying to explore it, but the dog wants to explore them, so they’re not interacting with it. They probably think it’s a pine scented litterbox. Or is it fir scented? When your father-in-law is a forester, knowing the diference between pine and fir trees can be very important.
I was putting up ornaments yesturday and realized that my mom gave me almost all of them. The last candle that was burning when she was alive burned out yesturday. The holidays suck suck suck. Oh my, do they suck. If you see Santa, please tell him where he can stick his holiday cheer.