I Just Wasn’t Touched Tuesday, May 13 2008

1) Today was the last day of the SMART program.  I got a thank-you letter from Julio, written in a language that bore no orthographical resemblance to English.  He either told me that I was a nice person and he enjoyed his hour with me, or that I was a knife peon and he interred whores with me.  The program director presented me with a candid snapshot of me reading to the child.  I believe I was intended to grow misty and sentimental.  Thank God this is over, I thought, followed shortly by I wish people wouldn’t take photos without asking me; I hate having my picture taken.

I think I’m supposed to clasp the child’s expression of gratitude unto my heart, and sign up again for next year.  But I’m not going to.  I just wasn’t touched.

2) This evening I went to hear a piano recital.  I’m not going to say who the pianist was, because the last time I criticized a pianist on this blog, he found me via Autogoogling and left a large number of comments chronicling my unrepentant ignorance and assholery.  I get enough of that during the course of doing my job, so I’m not going to invite it here.

That being said, this fellow played the most extraordinarily leaden Chopin I’ve ever heard.  I’ve heard Chopin played badly, but usually the fault is of excessive flamboyance, rather than the interpretational equivalent of having swallowed a sackload of bowling balls.  What puzzled me is that I can’t imagine anyone thinking that Chopin is the right match for this pianist, so I wonder why he bothers … it’s not as though it’s a law that every pianist has to play everything in the repertoire.  Benedetti, for example, was a brilliant Debussy interpreter, but played the most horrifying Mozart ever heard on this planet.  He just shouldn’t have done it.  And this very nice and musical gentleman shouldn’t ever play Chopin.  My mind wandered during the interminable Ballade (it’s a good trick to turn one of the more dramatic pieces in the piano repertoire into a drag) and I was much relieved when it terminated with a thud.  I just wasn’t touched.

Unadvertised Bonus Feature:  Today’s search term du jour:  Gucci toilet paper.  I won’t even mention how many people find this blog by searching “intellectual elitism.”  If I really were an intellectual elitist, I’d kill myself over the fact that a lot more people find it by searching “what does the phrase grain assault mean?”.

 

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Eye of the Beholder Monday, May 12 2008

This morning I picked up my new contact lenses.  I’ve needed new lenses for at least a year; most people who wear hard lenses manage to break them or drop them down the sink long before their 3-year utility-expiration.  I’d had mine for nearly five years, and was having trouble reading; I thought my vision was deteriorating, but it was just that the lenses were scratched and dimmed from age. 

When I left the optometrist’s office, I became uncomfortably aware that the deterioration of my contact lenses had provided me a pleasant soft-focus filter through which to blur the world.  Now that I can see, I’m appalled.  For one thing, my housekeeper isn’t doing nearly as good a job as I thought.  Those paint chips on my bumper are a lot more noticeable than I’d realized.  And, more to the point, I look like shit.  I can’t believe how bad I look, now that I can actually see myself in the mirror.  Every line, every imperfection, every small peculiarity of my skin has suddenly popped out at me like a relief map of the Rocky Mountains.  I can’t believe I’ve actually left home looking like this for God knows how long.

The only consolation is that everyone else looks a lot worse, too.

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Life’s Underrated Tragedies Sunday, May 11 2008

1) Your garbage collector normally doesn’t arrive at your house until 11 AM.  Generally you’re up long before that, and you’ve never missed the garbage truck.  The one day you’re sick and happen to sleep past dawn is also the one day that the garbage truck comes early.  In fact, it wakes you up.  After you hear it rumble off down the street, you remember the horribly smelly thing in the trash that will now perfume your garage for another week.

2) You stagger dispiritedly downstairs to make your morning coffee.  Life returns to you with the rich scent wafting from your coffeemaker.  Everything seems brighter, better, easier.  You find your favorite coffee cup.  You realized that a watched pot doesn’t perk any quicker, so you go fold your laundry for the first time in a year, knowing that the coffee will be done when you get back.  You get back.  The filter has collapsed inward upon itself, resulting in a carafe of water the color of weak tea. 

3) At some point in the middle of the night, your cat, in the course of enjoying the view from the windowsill where you keep your alarm clock, brushes up against both the tuning and volume dials, so that you are awakened by 300 decibels of static.

4) The person ahead of you in line at the French bakery gets the last one of the items you drove 20 minutes across town to buy.

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Piracy, Plus: A Bonus Feature Saturday, May 10 2008

My friend Russ (who shows up here sometimes in the comments section, eponymously identified as “David’s Friend Russ”) will be playing the role of the Sergeant of Police in an upcoming production of The Pirates of Penzance, a part for which he is well-suited, not least due to his ability to grow authentically Victorian sidewhiskers.  Russ doesn’t read music, so I sat down with the score this week to pick out his vocal line for him in the ensemble pieces and make a rehearsal tape for him, as he wil be doubling as a pirate in the first act (a common fate of Penzance policemen in small productions).  Die-hard Savoyard though I am, I haven’t listened to Pirates for quite a long time, and in looking through the score, was reminded of what a brilliantlty-written show it is; it’s irresistibly charming, and the Sergeant of Police and his crew (based lovingly on a choir of real policemen whom Sullivan once conducted) represent one of the finest collective characterizations in the G & S canon. 

Pirates also has some of my favorite Gilbert lyrics; there’s a laconic quality to the humor that is, I think, unique to this particular show … I laughed aloud when reminded of the Sergeant’s deadpan admission of failure in the second act:

You triumph now, for well we trow

Our mortal career’s cut short.

No pirate band will take its stand

At the Central Criminal Court.

The other pleasure of looking at a full G&S score is the ability to read the different lyrics in the ensemble numbers, which are usually lost; I had never known that in the first act finale, the pirates are muttering:

If he’s telling a terrible story, he shall die by a death that is gory,

One of the cruellest slaughters that ever were known in these waters.

Gilbert usually had a black edge to his comedy that modern audiences don’t entirely appreciate; or perhaps they are so distracted by what they perceive as the quaintness of the pieces that they simply don’t notice it.  The Mikado, for example, is an incredibly mordant and surreal work; there’s hardly a line in it that doesn’t make reference to violent death, and one of the numbers ends with a description of a talking disembodied head. 

There was more going on in the Victorian era than we realize, and much of it wasn’t much different from what goes on today … it was just more eloquently-stated, and hidden under more clothes.

Bonus Feature:  Someone found this blog with the search term “Why are neurotic people funny?” 

1) It’s nice that you think they are, and

2) Stick around, and you’ll find out.

Bonus Feature Two:

The Mikado lyric I referred to is at the end of the number The Criminal Cried, and goes like this:

Now, though you’d have said that head was dead

For its owner, dead was he

It stood on its neck with a smile well-bred

And bowed three times to me.

It was none of your impudent off-hand nods

But humble as could be

For it clearly knew the deference due to a man of pedigree.

And oh, I vow this deathly bow was a touching sight to see

Though trunkless, yet it couldn’t forget the deference due to me.

I don’t think you’ll find anything much stranger than that in current comedy, search though you may.  This kind of thing may explain why Gilbert had to wait so long for his knighthood.

 

 

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Songs You Won’t Hear on Country Radio Friday, May 9 2008

As some of you are already aware, I have a shameful fondness for country radio — or perhaps to be more exact, a shameful fondness for the morning show on 99.5, which is usually quite funny.  By default, I end up suffering through a lot of the songs when I listen to the morning program.  Last night, I dreamed that I was taking my usual morning walk, through an unfamiliar city (I guess i was on vacation) and listening to their local country radio station.  I was astonished when a steel-guitar-twanging, rabble-rousing tune of remarkable uncivility came hurtling down the airwaves.  More astonishing yet, I remember most of the lyrics; I won’t subject my gentle readers to all of them, but they were along these lines:

Want our love to thrive?  Then, bitch, let me drive

These old country roads have princes and toads

You can’t give it a whirl, because you’re just a girl.

You’re just a cunt — I should be out in front

But baby, you rock when you suck my cock.

 

I wish I had a film of how I reacted to this in the dream … I came to an abrupt stop, and looked around wildly, afraid that someone would somehow know i was listening to this on my headphones.  Being caught listening to country radio is bad enough, without it being abusively sexist.  Hmmmm.  Perhaps “overtly abusively sexist” would be a better phrase.

 

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Two Job-Related Anecdotes Wednesday, May 7 2008

1) Yesterday I showed A Disagreeable House to a client.  After touring it, I told her that she shouldn’t buy it.

“I agree with you — but I don’t know what’s wrong with it,” she said.

“It has a bad personality,” I told her.

“A bad personality?” she repeated, puzzled.  “It has all this nice woodwork, though.  What if I redid the kitchen, and fixed all this bad paint?”

“Then it would be like meeting a guy who had just gotten out of jail, giving him a haircut, buying him a suit, and taking him home to meet your parents,” I explained.  “No matter how much you fixed him up, he’d still have a record.  You can wax this house’s knuckles, but you’ll never teach it to behave in public.”

She thought about this for a moment, and then said: “On my way over here, I was talking to my husband on the phone about how entertaining you are.”

“I’m glad you think so,” I replied.  “Some of my clients seem to think I’m a little crazy.”

“Yes, I’m sure they do,” she said, with perfect gravity.

2) On Sunday I held an open house that was attended by thirty-five people who were all related to one another.  They had been at a local church for someone’s first communion or baptism or exorcism or something, and decided to descend, locust-like, upon me.  This is a nice house, so visitors are requested to either take their shoes off before entering, or wear shoe covers.  The shoe covers, which are advertised as “one size fits all,” do not fit over many men’s shoes, and are too large for some women’s shoes, so most people end up simply removing their shoes.  It was a warm day on Sunday, which meant that most of the visitors were wearing sandals, and therefore went barefoot (yes yes, I know, this is a fine way to spread fungal contagion, but given the choice of people walking around in their shoes or walking through barefoot, every homeseller I’ve ever known has preferred the latter, and in any event, most people touring a home of this caliber tend to be pretty clean). 

At any rate, I was in a position to notice that half of the people in this family shared what was clearly an odd little genetically-passed deformity:  the left foot looked normal, but the right foot had a badly fallen arch and the entire foot was oddly splayed or flattened, as if by a small unfriendly steamroller.  A moment’s further observation told me that the family members suffering from this peculiarity wore shoes that were two different sizes.  Many of them also had unusually long chins.  After five minutes, I began to feel as though I had been invaded by an alien race. 

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Good Suggestion from a Bad Date, plus: A Liu-ism Sunday, Apr 27 2008

1) Today I went over to an exhibition hall to meet a woman who suggested that we look at some of the artisan guild shows being held there today.  They were interesting enough … I saw an eye-catching exhibit of creative chairs by artisan woodworkers, several of which used whole tree branches with preserved leaves.  Anyway, there was something about this woman that I really didn’t like, despite her being intelligent and pleasant enough, and after a couple of hours, I invented an appointment I had to get away to (luckily I was aided in this subterfuge by my phone ringing at just the right moment).

However, she did have a great idea.  I was telling her that one of my challenges in getting out of real estate is lack of demonstrable experience doing things I’d enjoy more, one of which is that I would  like to be an efficiency/human resources consultant, as it’s usually very easy for me to walk into just about any situation and see where it’s going wrong.  She suggested that those types of high-end management positions are very hard to fill in volunteer organizations, and that it’s a frontier where people really don’t care what your credentials are as long as you’re willing to do the work.  However, if you do it well, you have a great reference to prove what you can do … and if you can do it even under challenging volunteer conditions, people generally believe that you can do it in real life.

I’d never considered this angle, and thought it was a brilliant notion. I still don’t want to see her again, but I thought the idea was worth two hours of my time.

2) Little Liu likes to sit in sunny windowsills.  Sure, all cats do this.  However, there is something particularly self-satisfied in the way she goes about it:  she presses the palms of her soft little hands against the warm window frame, closes her eyes, and smiles.  She looks so smug that I am actually offended by her.  I have dubbed this habit “The Insufferable Basking.” 

It was warm today, so there was a lot of Insufferable Basking going on.  I just hope she knows how lucky she is, the brat.

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What is Friendship? Friday, Apr 25 2008

It was suggested to me yesterday that I ask several people how they define friendship.  As many of you know, I didn’t get the “handbook” about human interaction, because my social development was so strangely interrupted by being, you know, hated by every child I met until I left high school.  Even now, although I have friends, I don’t really know how the whole thing works.  It’s been suggested to me that one reason I still feel as though I don’t quite benefit from the friendships I have, despite having several very good and trustworthy friends, is that I do not allow the concept of basic needs to enter into my relationships.  This is so profoundly true that I couldn’t even figure out what basic needs would be relevant to friendship.  I’m reading part of an abstract from a neurological journal about attachment disorders and how they impact the ability to form satisfying relationships later in life, but in the mean time, I’d be curious to know what you all think about what friendship is, including but not limited to:

1) How do you know when someone is your “friend,” as opposed to an acquaintance?  How do you define when you’ve let them into your inner circle?

2) What needs do you expect to have met in a friendship?  What needs are you prepared to meet for a friend?

3) How do you know when someone is no longer a friend?

4) What draws you to the people who become your friends?  How do you decide whom to cultivate as a friend?

All ideas welcome.

 

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A Bad Book, and a Bad Cat Thursday, Apr 24 2008

1) Yesterday at a long home inspection, I finished the task I had brought to occupy me while the inspector wandered around endlessly, and I turned for entertainment to the homeowner’s bookshelf.  Out of curiosity,  I picked up a Nancy Drew mystery.  Ten pages into it, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.  I do realize that the stories were written back when a different manner of iteration was common (1944, according to the imprint), but even so, I was appalled by the contrived and stilted language, and the stereotyping.  The text sounds like the desperate effort of someone who is painfully “learning to write”:

“I have an interesting case,” Carson Drew declared, smiling at his slim blue-eyed daughter.

“Tell me about it,” Nancy begged.

“I think this mystery is a good match for you,” the man said fondly.

Somebody shoot me.  No, really.  Please.

2) A certain denizen of my household who shall remain nameless, but whose initials are L L W Fiend, has taken to talking with her mouth full.  I don’t know why she started doing this, but I’m finding it disturbing, firstly because it is rude, and secondly because she sounds like she is choking herself to death when she does it.  I run downstairs in desperate alarm to save her, and find that she’s just standing over her kitty dish, eating and providing running commentary at the same time. 

Any of you who are cat owners will know that when cats get old, they become increasingly eccentric.  This cat is only five … and she’s already just … so strange.  I fear the future.

 

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I’m Regressing to a Freudian State Tuesday, Apr 22 2008

First there was yesterday’s post about the toilet tissue (or “Little Liu Loo Roll,” as it will now forevermore be known) and then today I saw this headline on Yahoo news: White House wants visitor logs to remain unseen, which caused me to think: “Damn, they should update the plumbing.”

Aren’t I a little too old for this kind of humor?

 

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