Twelve states later

I have returned to the ancestral homeland--New York State. I am luxuriating in the feel of an honest-to-goodness mattress against my back instead of the train seats on which I have slept for the last three nights. Not that I have anything against train seats (at least, not anymore! Rim shot!), but this mattress and I go way back, and it is both long enough and wide enough to support me without digging uncomfortable metal protrusions into my fleshy bits.

Tomorrow: the great unpacking begins

Monday: the first visit to the parents in two months

The future is busy this Fall. I hope it is as enjoyable as it is frantic—first conference paper, last seminar paper, first (only, I hope!) dissertation proposal, two weddings (neither the first nor the last) and a visit to LA, on top of the standard seasonal requirements and the finding a new chorus and possibly a string quartet to keep me sane and in practice.

And oh boy howdy do I need practice. My voice has acquired, I estimate, a six-inch-thick layer of dairy sludge on all sides. My intonation on the cello is in the neighborhood of amateur saxophonist tries playing a theremin for the first time. Left-hand calluses: gone. Breath support: ditto. Personal goal #1 for my New York year: musical fitness. I don't need to be a professional (newsflash: I will never be a professional performing musician), but I would like not to embarrass myself.

That has to be the most colons I have ever used in a single paragraph.

Personal goal #2 for my New York year: better daily scheduling habits. It is 3:30 AM and I am not asleep. This is a very bad start to personal goal #2, and I will get right on it starting Monday. I will attempt to get out of both my bed and the apartment within two hours of waking up every day. Every day! Hopefully that will lead to earlier falling-asleep-ness. Also, regular exercise early in the day, no gross candy binges (except in extenuating circumstances like visiting my parents) late at night, and no more blogging in bed.

That last bit starts right now.

Miles to go

Harold Gould is dead. He follows Rue, Bea, Estelle, and, much earlier and far more quickly forgotten, Herb.

Of the regular cast and the only two truly recurring guests, that leaves only Betty, who played opposite Harold's Miles Webber, carrying the Golden Girls torch for the fans. Goodbye, Miles. You made a drab college English professor something adorable—and worthy of dating Rose Nylund.


And speaking of miles, I'm about to travel the thousands of them between LA and NY. See you soon, jaded northeasterners!

I'm still here

I promise you that I am still around. It's just that I've been teaching the summer class that I wrote about in July, and it is mildly to moderately (completely) exhausting. However, I have now completed five out of six weeks of it, and I can see the glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel! For the first time in 5 weeks, I did not need to work on my lecture the morning of class; it was done by 9:45 PM the night before! Success! I got to sleep in until 7:45 AM! Miraculous! Exclamation points!


In five weeks, I have taught about manifestations of gender in (in order):

20th century USian jazz
16th century Italian pantomime
18th century French ballet
19th century French ballet
20th century Brazilian samba
20th century Puerto Rican salsa
20th century USian disco
19th century Chinese opera
18th century Italian opera
19th century French opera
20th century USian musicals
21st century USian musicals
18th century British ballads
20th century USian blues
20th century Algerian raï
20th century USian country
18th-21st century musicological canonicity
18th century German chamber music (on Moog synthesizer)
19th century German and French chamber music (on acoustic instruments and on theremin)
20th century Austrian chamber music
20th century Greek-American performance art
20th century Beatles
20th century Indian raga


All I have left is gender in:

12th century German (Latin) chant
19th century Austrian piano four-hands music
19th century Austrian piano etudes
20th century USian girl groups
20th century USian rock bands
21st century USian sing-alongs


Thank heaven for my wonderful TA, who has taught 80s-00s dance pop and heavy metal so I didn't have to, plus has shared the teaching with me on many of the above topics.


I will be back on the internet soon to tell you about the paper topics my students have chosen. I'm sure they will be as oddly varied as usual. I guarantee that this time around there will be exactly zero papers on "If I were a Boy" by Beyoncé and zero papers on "I'll Make a Man out of You" from Mulan. How do I know? I taught them on the first day of class and forbade anyone from writing about a song we'd covered in class. Just so that I wouldn't have to read any more papers about them.





And in unrelated news, a beloved dog died today. In the interests of maintaining my tenuous anonymity, I will not share her name here, but she was a wonderful canine companion for nearly two decades, and she will be sorely missed. She wasn't my dog, but she was at least a dog-in-law of mine, and I will miss her--the Christmas ornament sheep made of her fluffy undercoat, the sudden and seemingly endless foot baths under the coffee table when you hadn't even known she was there, and even the long-since-outgrown savage protectiveness of her dinner. I watched her grow from a snappish, mistreated young shelter dog into an affectionate, dignified old lady in one of the most loving homes a dog could ever have. Goodbye, old fox, and thanks for the sweetness you brought into everyone's lives.

More on summer teaching

Dear course webpage,

Why did it take me multiple hours just to upload approximately ten songs and a course description?

Also, why did several of your default category headings vanish without warning? Not that they were useful headings, but I don't like when the webpage makes its own decisions without me.

While we're on the subject, have you considered a makeover? Your plain black text on a white background is sort of hip on WordPress, but it really isn't the most exciting thing I've ever seen.

Yours,
An instructor who knows the internet doesn't need to be that complicated and awkward

PS: I promise that my next post will not be in the form of a letter. I am starting to feel like a Victorian diarist.

From the mailbag

Dear Student Enrolled in my Summer Class,

No, you may not miss one third of the class because you want to go to Europe.

Yours,

Instructor

Moving and shaking

This weekend I turned my childhood bedroom into a sitting-room-cum-office for my parents. That's the Latin cum, not the vulgar English cum, for those who are prone to indelicate thoughts. It now houses my father's desktop computer with various accoutrements (if you put it in italics it gets the funny accent it requires), my mother's cough assist machine, the television and all six DVDs my parents own, and several comfortable-but-firm chairs. It also houses a bed, of course, since Mom refuses to give up on the notion that my sister and I are really still living there. The room's change of function required drilling a hole in the side of the house to run the cable to the TV, as well as moving the desk and giant bin of LEGOs into the garage.

Related: does any one of you want many, many LEGOs?

Each time I visit the parents, more and more of my childhood slips away. I relish this change, though of course I bitterly resent the reason for it. I have been thinking rather a lot about the process of growing up, of "maturing" as they say. In the immortal words of Marx—Groucho, not Karl—whatever it is, I'm against it. It may be a peculiarly Southern California affectation, though I doubt it because of the brevity of my tenure there and the relative consistency of this attitude, or it may be a result of my hippyish upbringing, but I believe in constant evolution and change without a defined endpoint.

(Have I written of this before? I have meant to, but I can't recall, and I am far too lazy to scour the archives.)

I heard someone say recently that he couldn't possibly do something new because he was in his 60s. I think it may have been my father. I find that appalling. I have heard many people say that they are too old for certain aspects of life that are related not to age but to financial situations. That is differently appalling, but appalling nonetheless. Age is very frequently associated with stagnation, with a stability that is by no means necessitated by growing older. People who have reached a certain age without "settling down" are considered, by USian society at large and often by their most intimate associates, to have, in some ways, failed to age properly. If financial stability is out of reach, for those who have been brought up in the upper economic classes, then one is immature, childish, not yet there.

In this case, italics do not indicate a funny accent.

These assumptions are, frankly, bullshit. Many people never attain financial security, and they are not "immature." Many people are not aiming for six-figure salaries at all. Ditto long-term romantic partners and children. The latter is more accepted than the financial angle, I think, within certain circles. A life of change, of continued development, of growth unrelated to aging, is not a sign of having failed to reach the appropriate endpoint for growth. It is a necessity for avoiding the quiet desperation Thoreau pointed out, lo these many decades ago.

This doesn't mean, of course, that achieving financial stability, romantic stability, or even literal stability (not moving around so much) is in and of itself a bad thing. Those don't necessitate stagnation. They merely have the capacity to lend themselves to an acceptance of who-you-are as who-you-must-always-be, an acceptance that can forestall continued personal growth.

I like to think that I will be different in the future, and that I do not know how. I know that I am not the person I was three years ago, when I moved to LA. I know that living in NY will change who I am again. This is good, necessary, and, in a non-pejorative sense, immature. Call me Peter Pan—or, better yet, call me Mary Martin—because I have absolutely no intention of growing up.



But that doesn't mean I need to keep all my old LEGOs.

Remiss

Hello internet friends. I am sorry it has been so long since last I posted. New York life has been busier than anticipated, what with several trips back and forth to my parents' place and to the post office. Fun fact: packages don't so much get "delivered" in my neighborhood. They get brought to the post office and hidden in a giant room full of other packages. There are two very small women who then hunt around the giant box room looking for the right one(s), and if they find them they push them at you through a plexiglass airlock. If they don't find them, they are sorry and there is nothing they can do about it.

My bedroom is shaping up to be a bedroom, with the addition of an all-important item. Yep, you guessed it: a bed. Actually, it's a mattress on the floor, but it's better than the floor by itself. I have also added a dresser, a nightstand, a fan (yay, high of 100 today! In Celsius, that's like a million or something. Or 6. I can't remember my Canadian units anymore.), and an hedgehog. The hedgehog in question has been busily exploring the new digs, and seems to have decided that he likes this place. He has yet to investigate anything outside my bedroom; we will see what he thinks of the or rooms.

I will try to post more regularly, but for now that must be all. It is too hot to think of full sentences.