insomnia...

...is no fun at all.

So I decided to make a list of, well, some pretty random things, actually, while I lay here in the glow of my ancient IBM thinkpad, snuggled under my big, fluffy, white blanket with my ragged Teddy (who is, incidentally, a polar bear, and not a teddy bear at all) & my freshly-heated rice bag (which is, incidentally, a cushy oven mitt filled with rice & cinnamon & heated a la microwave, and is not really a bag at all). While writing overly-detailed run-on sentences. And overusing ampersands. And apparently writing sentence fragments. And being a geek and knowing what an ampersand is. Sigh... oh, the mental senselessness of sleeplessness. I make myself laugh a little when I'm this sleepy. :)

Without further ado, the random list:
1) I love the warm cinnamon & rice smell of my rice... oven mitt.

2) My room is super clean at the moment. And all of my laundry is clean, folded (to my way-too-strict standards, haha), & put away. Tidiness compliments of my sleepless night two nights ago.

3) My two favorite words at the moment are "vermicious" & "screed."

4) I love water.

 5) Sym Winds tour was postponed. We have tomorrow off now, & we won't start until Friday. I feel sad for the people whose diligent planning got squashed, but I am thrilled to have at least one day of break to actually relax.

6) I love playing the contrabass clarinet. Especially the low notes. They rattle my eyes, no lie.

7) I'm in the midst of reading several books right now - in between class reading, which has made outside reading difficult lately. Books in process: Eats, Shoots, & Leaves, by Lynne Truss; 1984, by George Orwell; and Watchmen, by Alan Moore (no, I still haven't finished it since I read the first half of it in the fall because I've been so busy... poor excuse, I know. & before you judge me for reading it, read it, & be pleasantly surprised, I promise... many of the more recent graphic novels actually prove to be quite impressive pieces of literature/art, and I have my adolescent lit professor to thank for opening that door).

8) I'm taking a lit class called "Modern & Contemporary Drama" right now, and I absolutely love it. We're studying the realism of modern drama and the absurdism of contemporary works... and I'm falling in love. Just like I fell in love with the Beat Generation of the 1950s last semester.

9) With every passing addition to this list, I just seem to be revealing more and more just how geeky I really am. And I'm okay with that. :)

10) Current music obsessions (yes, obsessions... are those still okay when you're 22?):

"Snails" by The Format
"Paris 1919" by John Cale
"Laughing With" by Regina Spektor
"A New Law" by Derek Webb
"Nobody Knows Me at All" by The Weepies
"Jump Rope" by Blue October (the video link to this one is Houghton!)
"Float On" by Modest Mouse
"You Really Got a Hold On Me" by She & Him 
"La Valse D'Amélie" from the movie Amélie

[...among about a million others. Sigh, music.]


So that's good for now. I hope sleep will come soon.

melancholy

I know just posted early this morning, but I'm just going to go ahead & consider that yesterday... you know, since it was before I went to sleep & all. I've been sitting down here in the campus center computer lab checking email & such for a little bit, and I felt the urge to write something somewhere. So I came here.

I've been thinking a lot about melancholy things lately... the word itself, the concept, and things that are themselves considered "melancholy." It sounds a whole lot more depressing than it is, actually - it's just that I've been surrounded lately with melancholy things. So it's only natural. If I were at my apartment, I'd find the program from the Philharmonia concert the other night and copy for you the description of a melancholic composer/composition that it had in it. It was beautiful to read, and I think it's what perpetuated my near-obsessive thoughts on the subject. I remember it talking about the characteristics of a melancholy person, which, as I imagined, were so much more than just "an all-around depressing person & a general downer" or something ridiculous like that. It was something like one who spends time deep in thought & (I know it didn't say it like this, but I can't quite remember...) one who feels deeply the things of this world. I guess that I sometimes think of myself as a melancholy person - which may seem an ironic word for someone who can be as silly as me - in the way that the program described, & I suppose that's why I find it so fascinating. I love to feel deeply, to love deeply, to think deeply, to find joy deeply, even to cry deeply, & to see the beauty in the world through eyes that aren't afraid of pain, but can somehow see the beauty in it. If you know me (& if you're reading this, I assume you do), then you know I'm also a rather joyful person... but I delight in forcing two seemingly opposite things to live in tension with one another, because I think that's part of what it is to be human. So many things that we think are opposites are really not opposite at all, but two halves or two faces (or something) of the same. Of course, that's just my opinion.

Hmm, so I know there was something else I was going to say, but I forgot somewhere in the midst of my tangential ramblings up there. I do that often, I promise you. I figure you might as well get used to it now. :)

OH! I remember - it's nothing fancy. I was only going to mention another, I don't know, quirk (?) of mine. As is evidenced by this random little post of mine, I often get words and/or concepts in my head, and try as I might, I can't easily get rid of them. Sometimes it really is as simple as just getting a word stuck in my head - the same as when you get a song stuck in your head. It's actually kind of funny (in an exasperating sort of way), because it gets to the point where I'll just start saying the word. So if I ever walk up to you & say something out-of-the-blue, like "fragmentation" or "rapidity," it's just because my silly brain has, for the day or so, latched on to that word for one reason or another. As for the concepts, I'll just be kind of distracted by something for a day or two until I finally realize that my mind keeps coming back to the same idea or bunch of ideas. Once I realize there's a pot boiling over on a front burner, I can move it to the back burner & let it simmer until I have chance to work with it... if that makes sense, haha. This is why I love writing so much... paper & ink make for a pretty permanent back burner, but as soon as you have time, the words are right there waiting to be read & mulled over.

So. C'est moi. I like my quirks. And you might as well know them if you're actually going to read my ramblings. :D

i. love. words.

under pressure (think David Bowie & Queen)

So much to do. So naturally, I come here. ;)

Lately, I've been spending far too much time pining for a laptop & OS that can handle photo-editing, video-making, and, well, really I'd be pretty happy with more than 32 gigs (or whatever this silly little Houghton thinkpad has) so that I could actually empty the camera I've been using once in a while. [run-on sentence, mhmm. you will learn quickly that I love them when it comes to accurately relating what happens in my brain]. Speaking of cameras, whinewhinewhinewimper I miss mine, mediocre as it was. I do, however, owe Luke a great big hug for being so generous with his for the last... gracious, 8 or 9 months, off & on.

And a side note: I'm rather proud of myself for having enough technological prowess to have used the term "OS" properly. I'm serious. This is a big deal.

Before I leave you for more constructive things [read: cleaning my poor room with the help of The Weepies & Regina Spektor; reviewing realistic & absurdist theatre/playwrights for Tuesdays exam; and finally, attempting to fend off my body's latest trick, sleeplessness, with some relaxing yoga], I thought I'd leave a little tribute to my much-loved dwarf hamster, Ava, who died during the night last Wednesday/Thursday. I got her almost two years ago, at the very end of March 2008, during a very trying but growth-filled time in my life. She'd been sick off & on since just before Thanksgiving 2009, and as silly as it may sound to say a thing like this about a little rodent, she fought hard. I've felt completely ridiculous crying over something that seems, in the bigger picture, so insignificant, but today I decided to stop being apologetic for being human about this. She meant a lot, tiny though she may have been. That should be enough, right? I think so.