FAQ

  1. Are you in California now?
    Yes, I am staying in Berkeley. I will be here until January 18th
  2. How can I reach you?
    You can call me at my home phone number in Berkeley. You could also try calling my cell phone: 860-301-2508. My cell phone was broken and I grabbed it when I left to come here, with the idea that I might be able to disassmble it and repair it, or trade it in for a phone that takes pictures or something. the picture thing was causing gear lust. I didn’t even grab my charger.
    well, I was standing outside the Oakland airport waiting for my ride, when I suddenly became frustrated with my phone and started beating it savagely. It returned to life. So I have a working phone (that also acts as voicemail), but no way to charge it. so if you also have a Nokia and want to hang out with me, perhaps I could make some use of your charger while we hang out?
  3. Er… ok. so, how was your flight?
    United Airlines is charging for food on the airplane! If you want a sandwich, you better have a ten bucks. What’s more, all of the food options have meat in them. Contrast this with AirFrance, which serves good food (that would be good even off of an airplane) and wine. Plus the steward types on airfrance are much more polite and unlike United, do not give you the silent treatment. On the other hand, one of the people in my row (on United) started berating the steward about how crappy the inflight movie (Seabiscuit) was, as if he could do anything about it.
  4. Okaaaayyyy. So why aren’t you in France anyway?
    Christi has 60 hours of class per week + homework. apparently, she got somewhat behind when I was there before for just a few days. she called me up and said, “I love you dearly, but you can’t come for a month. I have a week off around Christmas, can you come then?”
    Alas, it was too late to do anything to my tickets, so, in order to avoid derailing christi’s educational experience, i have come home instead. also, I really wanted to see you.

book deals

The top thing on blogger.com right now is people getting book deals based on their blogs. This, of course, causes me to become starry-eyed. Would Random House be interrested in the ramblings of a neurotic grad student who hasn’t changed her sheets since October? Then I remembered that I only post tired Marxist political rants and papers written for classes.

(I wear pajams. it’s not that bad. i’ve been busy. Like you’ve never done it.)

Elephant sounds on the web

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Lou Harrison biography

There exists a biography of Lou Harrison, which was written during his lifetime. It makes him out to be something of a saint, but this is perfectly alright because everyone makes him out to be something of a saint, and with good reason. the biography has an extremely good articles about his tuning systems and how he built gamelans and stuff. when I did my presentation on La Koro sutro, I borrowed the biography because I knew it would contain information on the tuning system of the piece and indeed, it did, which I then used in my report.

Well, at the beginning of the semester, i was assigned to read the biography and report back on it. The teacher told us that when responding to an author’s viewpoint about a work, we should “take them on.” So my report was about the weakest areas of the biography instead of the strongest areas. apparently, I misunderstood what it meant to “take them on.” but, despite being somewhat off-track, this was ok and I got to educate my fellow grad students on Esperanto.
The teacher of the seminar just sent me email saying that he’d talked to Lou’s biographer about what I said about Esperanto and she wants my notes.
pretty cool, if you ask me.