Ok, so there must be both sincerity and an appearance of dignity. sincerity, obviously, must be felt in the heart. But the dignity is something in between. To put on dignity entirely for show, would lack sincerity. However, the feeling of dignity in the heart is not specifically called for. What is called for is merely the appearance, but mixed with sincerity.

There is also immaturity, “the looking of a lad.” Perhaps maturity would mean dignity felt in the heart. Perhaps for the immature, it is enough to work sincerely to appear dignified, which is to try to be dignified, but fake it when you have to. In any case, it’s a call to grow up and to approach things maturely. Hildegard of Bingen (who I’m studying in Medieval Visionaries class) had a vision of seven vices and seven virtues. One of the vices had the appearance of a dog and said that it would run dog-like towards everyone and be playful and happy forever. The virtue responded by condemning the vice’s immaturity. Running dog-like towards people both lacks maturity and dignity.
Therefore, the solutions called for are sincere, restrained and mature. Romantic comedy-type actions are therefore not called for. The failed actions of the past are similarly not called for. They don’t work. And they’re not mature: they are patterns formed in youth that have not been modified. They are regrettable in grown-ups.
The situation will be slow to change, but will end well. Taking action is advised. Even drastic action (presumably as long as it is sincere and mature and appears diginified) will lead to good things. However, it’s presumable that the slow change along with the necessity of dignity means that any drastic action must be thoughtful. Large actions must be weighed carefully, as impetuousness is immature, even if it is sincere.
I explained this to my shrink and she asked if the appearance of dignity was a large concern of mine. I said I wanted to do the right thing. Of course, there are many right things rather than a single correct course of action. Indeed, there may be advantage in every movement undertaken, although there may be varying degrees of advantage and different kinds of advantage in different life arenas. My shrink points out that crises can lead to a lot of growth, for example.
I’m using this as a platform from which to try to maintain my mood of cautious optomism. It looks more dignified than despair.

Grasping at straws

Christi’s blog says “not now.” Which means “maybe later.” Right?

I was reading about John Cage’s use of the I Ching. As soon as he could, he used a computer program. So I found one on the web. At least it’s using the right algorythm, whereas I was not, since you have to toss a coin 18 times, not just six.

The present is embodied in Hexagram 20 – Kuan (Contemplation): He should be like the worshipper who has washed his hands, but not yet presented his offerings. There must be sincerity and an appearance of dignity, commanding reverent regard.
The first (bottommost) line, divided, shows the looking of a lad – not blamable in men of inferior rank, but matter for regret in superior men.
The situation is evolving slowly, and Yang (the active masculine force) is gaining ground.
The future is embodied in Hexagram 42 – I (Increase): There will be advantage in every movement which shall be undertaken, and it will even be advantageous to cross the great stream.

Appearance of dignity, well, um, moving right along . . . “slow evolution” and “great advantage” are sounding good. Polly told me that Jupiter is in retrograde for the next three months or so, which makes starting new projects difficult. I’m mixing astrology and the I Ching . . . because I am a hippy new ager with an appearance of dignity.
Anthony Braxton came over today and left his laptop behind for me to install stuff on. He’s in the supercollider tutorial and it met at my house today because Ron, the teacher, is off in China.

Misery. woe. despair
I got up this morning. I co-lead a workshop on digital performer for two hours. i went to class and participated in a possibly intelligent manner although i had not done the reading. (apparently the paper due next week is about the class discussion i skipped last wednesday). i turned in my add/drop form. I purchased food. I opened all the bills and wrote checks for them and called on two of them to check the balences. and signed all the checks andput them in envelopes with stamps and return adresses. I found my missing sweater. I found a flyer i promised to post. i want a fucking medal. i’m not kidding.
will i flunk out of school?
doom. pain. weeping.
I told myself that if i paid the bills, i could take a nap. and the heat won’t get turned off. i’m napping.

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.