Summer Summary

Started job, bit tongue regarding mean girl deskmate. Storm abated on its own. Started nonprofit organization (see www.utopiaearlymusic.org). Broke in the apartment, painted the piano red, acquired one lovely student. Inadvertantly stole crockpot from yard sale while drunk, subsequently paid for, frequently use. Not enough yardwork, too much pizza, great time!

I'm in Macbeth (opera) downtown. The principals are off-the-rails fabulous, but it's a rather conservative production. Here is what I would do if I were the director: The witches would be part of a conspiracy to overthrow the regime, using Macbeth as their tool. They would have some kind of physical signal to prove affiliation, which we would see in the first scene. Later, when Duncan is murdered, most of the court would look horrified, while a couple of people would make the secret signal in satisfaction. Then we would see a witch or two protecting Fleance from the murderers. Stuff like that.

Biological Imperative

Some people think it's terrible that we are, to one degree or another, slaves to our genes, but maybe it's wonderful. Morality is sticky and confusing, but nature in all its wildness and cruelty is orderly and beautiful. (And also awful, yes.) So we humans have our lives. We tend to resent our natural phases, wanting to be at some other stage of life. But isn't it kind of nice to have at least a few chemical signals telling us what to do? Isn't that why we marvel at the birds and cats and trees? I mean, they know what to do! All the time!

A Slow Slurp

I am slowly being slurped into the bosom of the University medical community. True, I am but a humble support person, but I am rather handsomely paid and will use the first of my handsome earnings to buy a dictionary of medical terms. Eventually I will understand. Oh how exciting! In the meantime, I am relieved merely to have access to the damn library again. I really feel like a crappy that has been flopping uncomfortably on the dock for the past couple of years in the terrible state of not having a university library card. Indiana flung me into the richest waters I have ever known, but since then, I have been stranded. Little did I know that I would one day come right back to where I started. It feels very funny being back here in some ways, but some of that might be due to the fact that summer session always feels a little funny. At any rate, it's not something to waste time on. This time, I must bypass wondering if I belong and skip straight on to being grateful for the Fine Arts stacks.

Penultimate day at Company X. No more will I sneak my quiet, quiet music at the front desk. No more will I impishly double-dose the coffee or hear the hoarse, woofy tones of the mid-office lasses. Never again will I weep silently and secretly to the barely audible strains of "Unbreak my Heart" in the fee group. It hasn't been fun, exactly, but it has been amusing. This is a respectful office, which is wonderful. But I do wonder if the starched tone is the result of fear of retribution. The thing is, there are just so many lawyers. So our culture is getting a little sterilized, right? So I can't help but surmise that the concentration of lawyers in this very room might have something to do with the bland interactions that are the norm here. I still believe that we all posses personalities.

In other news, yesterday I had the unexpected pleasure of taking a drug test for my upcoming job. At first I was unhappy that I had to do this, but I must confess that the test itself was fun. The office had a temporary look, as if someone were covering up another business with a row of chairs and a card table with a sign-up sheet. I think that the solitary employee felt self-conscious about dealing with pee all day, because she had so many air freshening crystals scattered about the place that it was hard to tell if one were in a pine forest or standing in the midst of some drying linens.

In closing, I would like to point out the advertisements that now festoon my ramblings. Note our demographic, friends: glass paneling and air fresheners. They're not really getting this, are they?

How Things Smell

The lion of summer has padded in at long last. It was warm as blood when I rode home after the opera last night. A welcome feature of this configuration is all of the open car windows. Cars are like little floating islands. Riding among them in the open air, one catches drifts of cigarette smoke or vanillaroma car fresheners. One hears Mariachi music or a few thuds of hip-hop or snatches of conversation sometimes.

Most of the smells come from the trees and cut grass these days, but downtown smells like hydraulic oil (from busses, maybe?) and fresh wood planks from all of the construction. I hate to say it, but my new apartment smells like Ikea right at the moment.

Of all the plexiglass panels in the office of Company X, there is one facing the front door that bears a frosty etching of our esteemed logo. I had wondered about the factory that made these special panels and about the box somewhere that must be full of them. I had thought that here was the scant remnant of proud architectural identity: a mere panel of etched glass, but a little stamp of authenticity nontheless. Today as I was faxing a stubborn invoice to Bermuda, I glanced up at this thing and noticed that IT IS A STICKER. One more reminder, darlings, that in the world of finance especially, nothing is real. As if we needed to be reminded of that.

In other news, great changes have been afoot. In the space of a couple of days, I landed a cute apartment and an even cuter job. The opera has also been in the ON position, absorbing every drop of evening I've had for the past couple of weeks, so I am predictably overcaffeinated and ready for sleep at all times. It's fun though. The tenor has to sing one of his arias in a bubble bath, and Ashley, Angela and I get to dress up as old west bordello girls and scrub his back and feed him whiskey and sympathy. We don't have to sing, which is good because of the corsets (eighteen inches, Mammy!). Anyway, one of my favorite parts of hanging out in the theater is passing through the corps de ballet locker room. The ribbons of their shoes slither out of the bottoms of all the lockers and there lingers the faint scent of cigarettes. They post unabashedly self-affirming notes and photographs of handsome male athletes. (The techies post witty things of the shocking/European variety and the orchestra folks tack up cartoons from The New Yorker.)

The Language of Fees

You're so cute! = You moron, you did it wrong.
She's so cute! = What was she thinking?
What are you doing? = Hello.
Wanna do something fun? = Please drop the tedious task and do this one instead.
Do you love me? = Go get me something from the kitchen.

Do you know why you're not supposed to ask a temp to pop your popcorn for you? Because she can't really say no, and it actually is a little bit demeaning. Sigh. But I do have some new survival tricks that are making my life in fees just splendid. Behold the miracle of gamelan music in the afternoon! Clears the mind of everything, really. Also, I enjoy massaging my face with Neutrogena hand cream. I wonder if people can see me from the conference room...

Contingent though I may be, today I took an online course about protecting confidential information from thieving jerks. It seems that the exemplary employee is, unfortunately, a total d-bag. The dialogs (assisted by wonderfully awkward photos of poorly coiffed actors) went something like this:

Hey, Greg! That was a great marketing meeting. I'm starving! Want to go get some lunch?

Sure, Bridget! Let's go.

Aren't you going to put those client files away?

We're just going around the corner. I'm sure it will be fine.

Those files have confidential information, Greg. You know as well as I do that it's our company policy to lock things up.

You're right, Bridget. Let me just lock these in my file cabinet, and then we can go to lunch.

So perhaps I'll claw my way to the top of that itchy corporate hemp ladder by chastising my coworkers at every opportunity. Worth a try!

Good Church

This morning, some Episcopalians purchased a couple of high Cs from me, which I happily supplied. It was delightful, actually. There was an older woman in the tenor section and a giant wad of tissues in the pocket of my borrowed cassock. The good church things. A little gem from the sermon that I want to pass on and remember: someone asked a rabbi why it says in the Torah, "write these words upon your heart." Why should we not keep the words inside of our hearts? The rabbi replied that our hearts are closed. Our hearts are not open enough to let the words in. But we place the words on the surface, and when the heart breaks, the words fall in.

There were two little altar girls on either side of the steps, offering assistance with their little hands to help people up for communion. It was good church today.

In other news, I sang backup at the Pride Center for my buddy Bronwen, and that was fun. Her stuff is wonderfully personal and good, and it's nice to surrender myself to someone else's vision for a change.

Can you hear a lark in any other part of town?

Two things happened this week. I found the apartment of my dreams, which also happened to be within my budget. Then, someone else was chosen to dwell there. This has been more jarring than I could have imagined, mainly because the place had every particular which I had formerly written in my little book of hopes and dreams, right down to the gas stove (also balcony, hardwood floor, fireplace, high ceiling with fan, air conditioner, roomy kitchen, etc etc...) I believe that I might actually have created this apartment by force of will. So why was my will not strong enough to seal the damn deal? AUGH!

And the thing is, I still love the place, even though it shan't be my own. I ride past it on my way home from work, mooning over it, sending it my best wishes. I kind of want to live near it, even if I can't live in it, although I just can't think of looking at another apartment so soon. I think it loves me too, and the landlords are cruel to separate us this way.

What happened today

This morning, the foothills were grey and green. Then the clouds formed a broody curtain to conceal them, as a massive swarm of cold white bees came and wheedled at our windows, trying to find entrance. Then the clouds lifted the curtain, revealing the newly whitened foothills.

In other news, the copy machine (on double-sided setting) makes the most intellectually challenging rhythmic textures I've ever heard.

Fees. I have a window here, where today I observe the stormy foothills and imagine Catherine and Heathcliff running through the grasses: hems soaked and filthy, locks of damp black hair clinging to flushed cheeks. Lord, it is boring in fees.

I have been riding around on the bike Betsy gave me. I like how my heart feels when I ride it and my blood feels hotter in me somehow. Last night I was coming home from an opera chorus rehearsal, and the air felt almost as soft as a summer night. I noticed this at a stop light. A truck pulled up near me, and it smelled old and greasy, but it smelled good. I polished my glossy new bell with the palm of my hand.

Stank Gets In Your Eyes

The no-smoking-even-in-bars law is not all that great, and the reason why is this: Hipsters smell absolutely dreadful in close quarters! Especially when crammed cheek by jowl in an effort to more closely see or hear the waify temerity of some cutie-pie hipster band. They smell like beery perspiration, which is what you'd expect, I suppose, only I never knew it before because of the cigarette smoke.

Rosebud!

When I was in the fifth grade at Wasatch Elementary, I sang "Lullaby of Broadway" in the talent show. As I recall, Mrs. Farman (one of my favorite instructors of all time) was on the keys and I was in a gold hat, seated on top of the piano. Today I went to a rummage sale at the school and bought that piano.

Last night, mom and I went to feast our eyes upon the Treasures of the Ballet Russe. The Polovetsian conquerers leapt and their Persian slaves whirled, rife with the sweet innocence of the ballet, where you don't have to think about the meaning of slavery and conquest, of the slaves being ravished or forced to milk the goats, where they all simply dance, are gently lifted by the virile Russian swain. And certainly no worries about how the Russian wives feel, only that there exist two generae of beauties: the wholesome Betties, who leap like men and probably know how to fix a plow, and the diaphanous Veronicas, trilling and exotic. And of course no body odor of any kind in all the prehistoric, velvet-clad Baltics. That is why I love the ballet. Because even I can, for a moment, stand starry-eyed...which I hear is a danger in paradise.

Night-before-last, I attended a lush gala performance in honor of Doug Wolf's 30th year as director of the U's percussion ensemble. Colorful baloons with long strings were tied to the music stands, and they hovered and danced like a banner above the stage. My favorite moment was during the high school ensemble's rendition of "Nessun dorma" from Turandot. There was this kid with floppy red hair and gangley limbs sitting at the drum kit in the back, and it was he who struck the climactic gong...which overpowered the army of marimbas and, indeed, all of the senses combined.

OFFICE REPORT: Two birthdays have yielded some loosely formed rice krispy treats with peanut butter, some kind of hearty, wet granola stuff with applesauce, and....a whole mess o' chicken wings in a ziplock bag!

Barnyard Serenade

How many sopranos does it take to screw in a light bulb?

None at all, because the soprano doesn't need the light bulb; she is the light bulb, powered by breath, high pitches, white teeth, creamy skin and bright bright energy!

Today, I went to rehearse with some opera types I used to know in school. They are nice people and my enjoyment in just seeing them was compounded by the greater understanding it gave me of why I felt like such a weirdo around them before. Please don't take this the wrong way- I think it's important to spend time in the company of one's own flock, but singers tend to be obtuse and overpowering in groups, and I have not spent much time with my own species for quite a few years now. So the loud laughing and general clamor was a sweet and amusing reminder of the way things used to be. I could almost see myself of ten years ago, shrinking in the fringes and thinking there was something odd about me.

In other news: the mountains! How did I ever get used to them before? They are wildly beautiful, so exotic and near. I had an audition last Thursday after work, and I rewarded myself with some chocolate soft serve, even though it was cold outside. The sky was this aching peach bruise, blooming across the whole sky, bursting the capillaries of the clouds and eliciting voluptuous agreement from the snow-covered mountains. My ice cream somehow made the coldness of the air itself delicious, and I relished breathing.

The soup of sadness

There is a small cafeteria downstairs, where people in suits go to buy sandwiches from a girl with pierced cheeks. It is she who chooses the music. Today, we sat with our soup and listened to the strains of some young woman whining sparsely over a piano, and it made the soup and the businesspeople seem so sad and pointless! The soup and the suits of sadness. Such is the power of music.

Week four temping at Company X. Last Friday, I discovered a horn player in the office. We were almost the last ones here, and even though we don't have heaps in common, discovering a fellow musician in the business-casual wasteland is kind of like finding a long-lost tribe member, always. As she told me about her situation and her hopes of one day returning to London to play full time again, her hands kept taking apart the panelling of her cubicle and pressing the pieces back together. I thought this was wonderful. I mean, don't we all want to disassemble the cubicles and see what else could happen here? I know that all furniture is temporary, but when I look at all these modal panels, I can't help but imagine their destruction. Someday maybe the plants will take over this building, mulching the upholstery and bursting the particle board in the slow, obstinate way of plants. I wonder if weeds could find something nutritious on which to feed, and how long it would take for them to find purchase in the carpet; how much sediment they would require.