Alas, I am filled with woe and at a loss as to what to do with myself. Why did I break up with christi if I didn’t want to breakup with Christi? after she told me not to come to paris, my feelings got hurt with a high percentage of the phone conversations we had. then she announced she was showing up suddenly. i wanted space from all of it. i wanted it to stop. i didn’t know what to do. i was worried about things that we hadn’t dealt with from the past. i needed time to think. i told her we were breaking up and then didn’t speak to her for three weeks. and thought about it. and thought about what i wanted from a relationship. and realized that christi and pretty much wanted the same things and that i love her and she sent email saying she loved me.

but, of course, love conquers nothing.
I was picking up cues. i thought she’d want to work it out. who wouldn’t want a low stress, low-drama relationship with me, where reliability was stressed and there were good boundaries and space and stuff?

of course, getting there would be a bit of work. it seemed possible. we had similar goals in mind. after thinking for three weeks, i understood more of what was going on. i felt guilt. i had told christi i would always be there for her and she was in distress, which i had caused, and i wasn’t there for her. i always wanted to be more of an ameloriating factor, rather than a stressing factor. I thought about family. family is very important to me. i felt like a member of her family. she was accepted as a member of mine. a couple weeks before she died, my grandma told christi that she thought of her as granddaughter. how could I just walk away from that? what about responsibilities? what about marriage vows? what about nine years together? what about love?
not that it matters anymore, but i think it might have been better to tell her that i was distressed by our phone onversations rather than not speaking to her for three weeks. hindsight. alas alac woe
although i didn’t act it, i did have a lot invested in this. my heart for example.
there’s so much i wish i could take back or that i’d done differently. all is for naught. the past can’t be changed. the future can’t be fixed. if you make bad decisions, you have to live with them forever. it’s very cold here. there’s piles of snow on the ground. it can be below freezing and snowy for ten days in a row and then four degrees above freezing for one day and then ten degrees below freezing for the next month, but in that one warm day, all the snow disappears. what happens afterwards doesn’t change the damage that’s already been done.
everything is essentially hopeless

Yesterday

I stayed up late the night before working on my symphony thingee, which nobody commented on, which must mean that you all hate it as much as i do. I’m thinking maybe i should move some of the brass stuff over to the bassoons or something, cuz brass is loud.

Got too early (well, actually, late, but it seemed too early), to go to the extra session of Ron’s Recoridng Culture seminar. He’s gone for two weeks, going to china to adopt his daughter and maybe do some skiing. Apparently she’s right next to China’s largest ski resort. Anyway, I crawled, slug-like to ron’s class and than aftwerwards met with Ron and Jascha to discuss TA duties for leading workshops in ron’s absence. I’m not at all clear, but I think Jascha is. Spacey normally, now spacey and tired. I think they’re supossed to do a mix of some sound file to come up with a CD that they could shuffle play in their room for 24 hours without being driven to suicide. Jascha and I gave them sound files of a german guy playing billiards and some Maggi Payne and Brenda Hutchinson sounds. Maggi’s sounds were BART, filtered BARt and something airplane-ish. Brenda’s sounds seemed to be a maybe a close miced vacuum cleaner, perhaps and what sounded like it could have been a field recording of the exploratorium, which would be logical, since she works there.
Then, after that and doing some other non-essential stuff, I took a nap from 2:00 pm till nearly 8:00. It took me a long time to wake up. My neighbor knocked on my front door to complain that there was dog poop “all over” the back yard. My front door is broken and will not open. I called the landlord a week ago. She called me back. I didn’t return her call. (ok, I just returned her call) Nor have I paid the heating bill, the phone or the electricity. I did however go out a few days ago and fix my cell phone and buy my textbooks. But I haven’t read the textbooks enough. I’m behind on my reading for last wednesday, for a class that I skipped. I’m so not on top of things.
[you may wish to skip this paragraph] So I went out to the backyard and found one small piece of neglected poop. Xena is evil. If you walk up to her while she’s pooping, she’ll stop and then wait until you aren’t looking and go someplace else. This is more than you needed to know about poop. As Renee once said, if you’re talking about poop, you’re a mom. So I went to pick it up and damned if wasn’t completely frozen to the ground. I’m not a fan of this “winter” thing. I dug it out with a snow shovel. I’ve been peering around the backyard today in the daylight, and I’m not sure about this “all over” claim, all though there are a lot of chunks of frozen mud wich might confuse you if you need glasses.

Gay Bar

[This paragraph is ok again] So I ate all the leftovers and some canned soup and then went to Angela’s house and then we went to the Polo Club in Hartford. The Polo Club was reccomended by Tom. He’s het, but his girlfriend is bi and he’s the only person I know who is actually from Connecticut and exists at all outside of the tiny grad community. He’d never been there. He’d go with me, he explained, but it was his 8 month anniversary with his gf and they had to have sex.

Male strippers

So angela and I show up and there’s thumping techno music and the guy charging us the cover explains that the drag shows and male strippers have three shows at 11:00, 12:00 and 1:00. oic. The woman checking IDs is clearly a dyke, but the bar is full of boys (duh) and the woman who gets us a table and beers (budweiser) is not a woman.
Gradually, the place begins to fill up and the percentage of females starts to increase. I look around and decide they’re either fag hags or straight girls who want to see naked gay boys. I go to pee and there’s a conversation about whether getting your stomach surgically reduced is a good diet strategy. “Yeah, but she looks great!”
Angela is getting increasingly excited. It’s her first drag show and mine too (unless you count Fairy Butch). Finally, the show starts and out comes a big, bitter, middle aged drag queen. “I’m in so much spandex that if it blows, it will take out the front two rows.” she explains. “Four rows!” somebody shouts. “fuck you.” she replies.
She starts making fun of the het boy in the audience and then turns to the women I had pegged as het. They’re not het. They’re all lesbians. I have no gaydar in CT. There were actually a lot of lesbians around. Who knew?
After mocking everyone who is not a gay man, she disappears and the first stripper comes out. He’s wearing a police shirt, dark blue pants with handcuffs on them (definitely not police pants, tho), designer sunglasses, and bright, white tennis shoes. He undulated for a while and finally stripped down to small black boxer briefs. Angela kept whispering to me that he was crappy dancer. then he disappeared. The next performer was a man in a gold sequined dress lip synching some song. Angela was so moved that she had tears in her eyes. Actually, I saw many people with tears in her eyes. People kept comming up and tucking dollar bills into her dress or handing them to her. (and by “her” i mean the man in a dress, not angela. pronouns are slippery in drag.)
Then a guy came out in tiny white boxer briefs with a big tub and sat in it and pretended to take a bath while the song “rubber ducky” played. Then her got out of his tub and started stretching and squeezing a big sponge over his head to “rinse off.” He removed his briefs and was wearing a white, not quite opaque, g-string. He was happy to see us. I shifted uncomfortably. Guys were stuffing dollars into his g-string, as this was a stripper sort of thing. He held up a towell to his waist and off came the g-string. He was sort of flapping his towel around, tittilatingly. la la la
Then the MC was back, in a blonde wig, wearing several layers of tutu, lip synching to Cindy’s Lauper’s Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. She strutted around and revealed her grandma underwear. She caught sight of me and jumped in my lap to give me a lap dance. I was a bit taken aback, so she ground my head into her fake breasts. ack. Angela was falling over laughing. I gave her a dollar afterwards. then the 11:00 show was over. angela wanted to leave to go to the grad party, so we left and did not see the subsequent shows, nor did I talk to any lesbians. alas.

Grad Party

We showed upa round midnight. Everyone was pretty drunk. this one guy was very drunk. I hadn’t talked to him since the start of the last semester. He went to wesleyan as an undergrad. Wes boys want to be sincere. They want to be your friend. So he touched my arm gently, perhaps to steady himself, and slurred that he was very sorry to hear of my recent breakup. I explained that I needed a beer right away and got a can of budweiser. It was a budweiser kind of night. I eventually caught up to the party’s level of inebraition and was dancing to Abba’s Dancing Queen and then It’s Raining Men. campiness was all around me, everywhere I went. So we danced to 2:30 in the morning and Deborah explained that one of the astronomy grads, who was not at the party, wants to sleep with me. I have my own pimp now or something.
Tom just emailed me today asking if I want to go to the Polo Club with him tongiht. I think I’ll say yes.

Problems

As I see it, there are two kinds of problems. One is right-now problems and the other is past problems. Right-now problems are ones that areoccuring right-now. Example:

A: does this make my butt look big?
B: no, your butt is already the size of Romania
A: that hurt my feelings
B: I’m very sorry.

I think those should be addressed as they come up, like person A does in the example.

Past prolems are things lurking from the past. Example:

A: It hurt my feelings last year when you shot my dog.
B: It was rabid!
A: You don’t know that for sure. We should have brought it to the vet.
B: It was chewing on a human baby!
A: That dog was very important to me!
B: You’re a lunatic!
A: you’re an insensitive jerk!

Past problems are lurking around and they must be addressed or they will erupt in bad ways, but as we can see from this example, bringing them up can also be dangerous. I think that in some cases, past problems require a professional referee to help people sort them out.
there are my thoughts about problems. thank you

Symphonic

I decided to a symphony arrangement of the piece that I did at the very start of my winter break that was so popular among my 4 blog-readers. The Wesleyan Orchestra is doing a reading soon and the American Composers Forum has a reading opportunity as well. which means it will get read by at least one orchestra (go me).

I’m not sure about the end. Also, I’m not using any oboes. Several instruments get to stay home. I dunno if that’s ok for symphony writing, but fortunately, there’s people around here I can ask. christi told me that a common mistake for beginners is to have the whole orchestra playing at once. (And this is one of the reasons I love Christi, cuz she tells me things like that. and because she likes Phillip Glass.) I hope it’s ok to have brass and strings at the same time. When I saw the SF Symphony over break, on either the Hindemith or the Berg violin concerto, or both, I don’t recall, the whole orchestra was playing, but quietly. It was super-intense. I met MTT afterwards and exchanged a few words about composition. He said that if you were writing for orchestra it was like you had to be historical or get back in time or something to that effect. It’s a lost art, kind of. Maybe this is why so little new music gets programmed: because conductors think writing for orchestra is a lost art. but it kind of is. Very few of the composers here are interested in writing symphonies. Most composers in real life get their own pickup bands together, more or less.
anyway, Et sonnera le baffroy de la ville sans cesser durant l’assault is the midi file, which all of you can listen to. If you are a musik geek, you can look at (and listen to) the score, if you download a plugin from http://www.sibelius.com/cgi/plugin.pl.

Stuff

I read Christi’s blog and then sent her email asking her to define “yelling,” cuz I’m not sure what she means. But maybe this is a conversation we should to have until we’re in-person and with a professional counsilor, if she decides to go that route. She said that she would wait a week and then get back to me. Maybe I should leave her alone and let her think. Clearly, I should leave her alone and let her think.

Communication is such a mess right now. How did it get like this?

Just skipped class

I just called Christi and asked if she wants to work it out.

I’m concerned. Previous post is nice introspection, but it’s mostly about my errors. We cannot focus solely on my errors, but alas, this has been something of a pattern in the past. It’s what comes of being raised catholic. I was trained at an early age to do examinations of conscience, where I would ponder my errors, confess them and then recieve pennance to atone for them. This does not work in a relationship if you’re dating a protestant.

How can I fight the past and make it behave? How can we do something radically new in the future? Radical newness is what’s needed. Stop and reboot.

Introspection

My relatsionship with Christi had many problems. We had different methods of dealing with them and different ideas about what they were. What we were agreed upon was that June 2002 – the end of 2003 was a messy, bad time. My way of dealing with this was simply not to deal with it. I wanted to focus on loving each other and hope of the future. Christi wanted to directly address these lingering issues. Neither of us has especially good communication skills, so when she would try to address these problems, I would not get what she was talking about and be upset and not want to think about the bad past.

She, however, wouldn’t let go of the past and so the past rose up and bit me at the start of winter break. I spent the winter break contemplating the past and patterns in our relationship that had not changed since we were 19 even though we had changed and the patterns weren’t good then and had gotten less good over time. The past was a huge ocean, rising up and threatening to drown me. It was too big. I didn’t understand what Christi was talking about and it hurt me. The way she said it hurt me, but I didn’t tell her that. If only we would just focus on the bright and hopeful future, it would all go away and everything would be ok.
The magnitude of past hurts, when I couldn’t ignore it anymore, was overwhelming. How christi tried to talk about it (and I resisted) hurt in a correspondingly overwhelming way. Not only was it huge and horrible, but she wouldn’t let go of it. I couldn’t see a way to let go of it without letting go of her. It was the only thing I could think of to do. Trying to talk about it would just hurt me further. It would hurt her. There was no point in drowning ourselves in an ocean of woe. I stopped talking to her to avoid having to talk about this. I was frustrated by her unwillingness to simply embrace my vision of a future disconnected from the last 2 years.
Today, Alvin told a story about a guy explaining his compositional style by writing the word Beethoven on a piece of paper. then he wrote “19th century.” then he wrote “minimalism.” He drew an arc from “Beethoven” to “minimalism,” bypassing the 19th century and then wrote his own name next to “minimalism.” It’s a nice notion to think we can ignore the 19th century, and indeed we try, but it’s foolish to assert that it hasn’t changed and affected us as composers. Lou Harrison editted Ives, who took all of his ideas from the 19th century. I listen to Lou and get ideas from him. I come from a 19th century musical heritage which I cannot escape from.
But I wanted to escape from the last 2 years. I wanted to draw a line from returning from Europe in 2001 (full of ideas and enthusiasm) to the present. And maybe this composer in Alvin’s anecdote could make a reasonable claim to being unscathed by the 19th century, but I couldn’t make a similar claim about 2002. I didn’t want to talk about the last couple years. I didn’t want to think about them. But with Christi arriving and the sort of introspection one engages in around the New Year, I did think about them. It was a deep chasm from which there seemed to be no way to get out. I told Amy later, “how much can two people hurt each other before it’s enough?”
So I stopped talking to Christi, but I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I got back to school and thought, “I want to run away from home.” but I already had. running away from home doesn’t help. Problems have an uncanny way of following you. Trying to ignore things doesn’t make them go away. focussing soley on the future is not a way to fix problems of any kind. My denial of the past was as useful to our relationship as Dubya trying to fix the deficit by setting up a lunar base. Both ideas are fueled by a sort of optomism, but a ludicrous way to deal with any sort of present problem. Both require a solid foundation that needs/needed repairs before it support such a project. My refusing to talk about the past or deal with it was like Dubya ignoring WMD stuff in the State of the Union. It must be addressed. (I must stop comparing myself to Bush!!)
I never told any of this to christi. It didn’t fit in my world view of “if we just ignore this it will go away.” It certainly didn’t fit with fleeing tidal waves from the past. and it was a tidal wave. The past had been steadily collecting behind me, waiting for me to examine it. It’s like the reading backlog I’m already generating in my Mystic Voices class. (alas) I cannot explain how overwhelmingly huge the unexamined past was or be less metaphorical in my description. What is true is that I needed/need space to deal with huge personal demons. I could not discuss them with Christi then. It looked like I would never be able to. Breaking up with Christi seemed like the most sensible option and the least painful for me and for her.
Obviously, breaking up with Christi and fleeing to Connecticut did not make these demons disappear. I took with me two carry on bags, one checked bag, and the maximum limmit of emotional baggage (one day in therapy and I’m already in cheesy metaphor land). And I’ve been examining the recent past. And suddenly many of the seemingly hurtful things that Christi said seem to make sense. Suddenly, it’s clear that she was trying to slay some demons instead of having them creep up on us forever. That our 19 year old patterns didn’t fit anymore. That we had to talk about the future not in vague, hopeful terms, but in the concrete and rooted in our experience. She also hurt my feelings. Neither of us is good at this communication thing. It’s hard to do over the phone. She may not have hurt me on purpose.
I love her
So now what?