it’s not as easy as i make it look.
Ξ Wednesday, 21 Sep 2005 at 19:01 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Normal |
monday night after all the fallout, i surprisingly slept like a baby. i went to sleep at like 01.30 tuesday morning, and then I slept (like a baby) for almost 11 hours, until just about noon on the dot. unsurprisingly, i ended up spending most of the time updating this gem of a blog (*smiles*), and i then found myself at a strange juncture: it was almost midnight and I hadn’t eaten at all that day nor done any homework. hence I, iners though I was, managed to pull myself out of the dimension of sluggishness I was entrapped within, and ran across the way to the market. actually, i walked, but it’s inconsequential. got some pizza, a juice, munchies. shouldn’t have gotten any of that except the juice, since I have boxes of food here from my previous grocery run, but oh well… juice is good.
i finally started my Latin and Greek homework around 02.00 or so this morning. Ryan was working on physics homework on the couch, and so I brought out my books and notebooks and everything school-related and set them out on the table near the window, which is generally where I sit and do homework these days. wanted music. ended up taking 1/2 hour to add new shit onto my iPod (a lil over a half-gig worth of shit), and then I finally settled into my homework. I’ve found that the best study music consists of either:
- electronica
- movie soundtracks
- game soundtracks
- classical
- jazz
well, Air seemed an obvious choice then. I’ve written about their harmonious, mellifluous electronic dance music before, and hmm… it always ends up cheering me up. In fact, every single track on Moon Safari cheers me up and makes me happy, even lesser-played tracks such as “Talisman.” I guess a couple of my personal favourites have to be “Kelly, Watch the Stars,” and “Ce Matin La” (This Morning), of course, as well as “Le Soleil Est Près Du Moi” (according to Babelfish, The Sun is Close to Me). after I listened to pretty much that entire album, I decided a shift in gears would be apt.
I threw on Gustav Holst’s The Planets, which, over the last three years or so, has become very dear to my heart. I’ve mentioned it before, I’m sure — Jenn introduced me to the classical suite, apparently composed during WWI, each song attempting to capture the ‘spirit’ of each planet it represents. of course, it only counts up to Uranus — Pluto wasn’t discovered until after this suite was composed, which is an interesting fact in itself. The grand, sweeping epic starts out with the hellishly bloodthirsty Mars, warlike as his Roman namesake, obviously an inspiration for John Williams’ “Imperial March” and much of the rest of the Star Wars score. well, I’m not going to write a full review, I know I’ve talked about these all before.
what’s significant about this whole suite is that it is something that has always connected me to Jenn, and gives me good memories of her, especially the Jupiter theme, which was always Jenn’s favourite track. I listened through to “Venus,” which always makes me think of a starry, moonlit night, and then came to Jupiter, which actually made me almost feel like crying. If you listen to the piece, you may hear the utter majesty of it all, seeming to expound upon the glory of Rome as well as Jupiter, the king of the gods, and it almost makes one want to shout out in triumph. well, maybe I’m insane… I don’t know. “Jupiter” could stand on its own as an entire epic piece, but taken amongst all these other glorious songs, it is truly amazing. And “Fantasia,” a track not even part of the Holst canon (but still on the album as a bonus), will always hold a special place in my heart too… a track that sounds like the solitude and beauty of deep space, but also like the wonder and glory of nature at the same time.
A very important piece of my life is gone now, and I don’t believe it will ever return, but I won’t say never. surprisingly, Jenn couldn’t let go fully, and she called me last night. I’m not saying that to gloat or anything or make fun, but I just thought it was interesting. I’m pretty sure she still wants to be friends with me, because both of us know that we can’t disappear just like that on each other. She loves me and hates me at the same time, which is understandable, and I can live with that. Hopefully she will want to be friends, and if not, that’s alright too. everything is right with the world now, in a strange, weird sort of way. I talked to her for an hour or so (?), and then I finally got back to my homework, finishing it around 05.30. went to sleep close to 06.00.
had to wake up for class, as always, and I woke up right around 11.30. i woke up on my stomach, with a horrible case of heartburn, almost feeling like I was going to puke. I think I almost did, though for what reason, I really can’t fathom, yet I shook it off and was alright. collected my things; booked it out the door to class. in Latin today, we had to write a sort of mini-commentary of our own on one of the sections we read for today, and I worked with a girl named Margaret in class on it today, and it was pretty interesting. I always like meeting new people too, so that’s good as well. the passage we read in Cicero for today talked about Achilles’ tomb, Alexander the Great, and all sorts of dope shit like that. Cicero remarks that Alexander once said (Pro Archia Poeta Oratio 23.14ff.):
Nam, nisi Ilias illa exstitisset, idem tumulus qui corpus eius contexerat nomen etiam obruisset.
”For if that famous Iliad had not existed, the same tomb which had buried his [Achilles'] body would also have buried his name.”
That’s fucking kickass. Any time someone mentions the Iliad or anything Homeric in literature, for some reason, that shit trips me out. Call me crazy, but I am a huge fan of epic — which is why I want to study ancient epic for my Master’s and most likely PhD as well, especially Homer, Vergil, Lucretius, Ennius, as well as any other epic poets I’ve forgotten. anyways, I was happy about all that, of course.
Greek was fairly nondescript today. We went through the section of Lysias which we had prepared for today, and typically, I ended up fucking something up again. My professor asked a question, which I paid attention to (I thought?) but obviously forgot it, and he asked me directly — I said, “uh…” and a second later asked sheepishly, “Could you repeat the question?” I felt like a fucking third-grader at that moment, and I apologised, and he simply asked someone else. Fuck. Oh well, it’s not the end of the world. I’ve got plenty of time to prove I’m not an idiot. It was a relatively painless class though, and went by quickly (unlike Aristophanes, unless I’ve prepared my work, which I should be doing all of anyways). after class, Donni had said she wanted to work on the meter of Aristophanes, but first she had to go talk to our Greek professor and ask him some questions about the test we had just all gotten back. I told her I had to get my Aristophanes materials anyways, and so I said I’d be back in a few, planning on meeting her in the Trapp Library or so.
went to go get my books, and I also remembered that I had a package waiting for me! apparently my Dr. DOOM mask and costume came today, so I was fucking psyched about that, and so after I got my Aristophanes shit, I booked it over to where I needed to pick up my package. grabbed it, raced back to my apartment, and opened the package. For some reason I actually expected a metal mask in there, but it was latex — oh well, it worked pretty fucking well. I put on the mask (the one from the movie Fantastic Four which I bought separately), and it looked fucking awesome. I didn’t open the package for the actual costume and mask, however — I’ll check that later.
Went back to Humanities to meet up with Donni, and I waited for a few minutes while she talked to our Greek professor before we started studying meter for Aristophanes. The fucking meter is hard as hell, and varies like crazy, and so we ended up looking at the commentary to determine the metre for each line, and everything started to make sense amid all these crazy dissonant rhyme schemes. It’s a far cry from the lovely, golden hexameters of Homer, Vergil, and Lucretius. oh well. We had fun studying it, and talked a lot about everything relating to classics and all, which was nice of course.
I got done studying around 15.00 or so, and then I thought I’d go over to get some lunch and shite, of course — hadn’t eaten all day. got some lunch, then I came back home and turned on the tube. oh, yeah, and what do you know, Disney Channel is the fucking shit in the afternoon, wahaha. i must have watched that for about an hour and a half, and before I knew it, it was like 17.00 or so. now, if you remember me talking about my plans to go as MF DOOM for Halloween, well, I decided to test things out a bit. so I put my F4 mask on, put my hoodie on, zipped it up, and put the hood over the mask and started dancing in my bathroom mirror. wahahaha… and it looked pretty fucking dope. add a boombox and it’d be the fucking shit, just like maeygan said.
anyways, after that, I pretty much just started writing this, chilled and shit… talked to Jenn on the phone, surprisingly, since she called me from wRk, and then I watched Simpsons with Ryan — and now here I am, sitting here and talking to my dear lovely friend Bekah. otherwise, nada de mucho going on tonight — except more transcription or rather, transferring, from Xanga. peace and love.
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