I do believe I've found THE ONE!!! We went to Strings& today and tried about ten violins. Now I have a very sweet-sounding, pretty-looking, REAL violin for the week. It's all but a done deal, though. It had me at hello.
It's amazing how little you have to do for someone to let you walk out of a store with a violin you haven't paid for.
Well, I'm feeling lame. I had two opportunities to go to Willy Wonka tonight and now I'm not going at all. This is the first time in a while I've felt like crying. Maybe pirates will hold me over until the IMAX showing on Sunday. It's not that I really wanted to hang out with any of the people going (in fact, both events had the potential to be completely miserable), and it's not even that I wish I was out. I just wish I'd known sooner and been able to spend the afternoon differently. A nap would have been great. Now I've got a deli sandwich and two Netflix that don't seem very interesting at all. And I unknowingly walked into the middle of the Harry Potter crowd waiting for midnight at Barnes & Noble. And they didn't even have the book I was looking for.
Bitch, bitch, bitch. :) Hopefully the symphony will work out better. Oh, and didn't I find the cutest boy on CL--looking for amelie, my semi-celebrity twin!
Took the rental back today. I hadn't played it or even tuned it since the new one got here, just to be sure I didn't rebond. It worked. I wasn't sorry to leave it behind, but I was sorry to lose that new string on it. I love that store. They were packing up cellos to send out. Someone was tuning in the back room. The sound made me miss lessons. The woman behind the counter said, "So that's enough of this?" It never even occurred to me that they'd think I was quitting. I said, "Nonono, I'm going to buy soon!" She was ecstatic but said nothing about buying there or the credit, so I guess that month did count...although I did get $135 of the deposit back. Found money. I think I'll go shopping tomorrow....
Nothing like having things feel pretty much back to normal at 2:00 and then creeping someone out by the end of the day. Lunch was really nice. The weather was beautiful. Things felt in place. Then, on the way out of work, I think I set things back to weird. I wonder if I can fix that tomorrow.
My neighbor and I went to see the Met at the park tonight. She was such a kick. The weather was still beautiful. There were fireflies and a huge moon. It turns out I like opera. What a surprise. In the middle of it I suddenly thought, Wow, I really miss Miss R.
Things are much better today. Spent most of the weekend cleaning, trying to ignore the terrible feeling that b and I might not be friends anymore.
This morning I tried not to e-mail right away. Took care of some work, went to a meeting, and then finally decided to find out what was up with the bounce-back. We went back and forth for most of the afternoon, with one very long uncertain pause on his end, during which I threw a little fit and cleaned some more. (My apartment and office are going to be spotless by the time things get back to normal.) Our e-mails were very straightforward. We didn't talk about...the thing. But there weren't any games, either. Every message seemed to have a simple "let's be friends!" undertone. Very first grade. He stopped by my office before he left this evening (last week it was as if he was sneaking out every night). He made small talk. "How was your weekend" small talk, which was kind of funny, because we had already covered that in the e-mails. The ground got less attention than it has been getting lately. There were smiles. Finally he said, "So, lunch tomorrow?" I said, "Yeah!" He seemed happy. I felt happy.
I just realized that in the middle of the world becoming so weird, I completely forgot to write about the one thing that has kept my mind partially off the weird stuff. My very cheap just-to-get-by violin made it here. It was scheduled to arrive on Wednesday, but on that Monday morning when I wished I was anywhere but at work, it suddenly appeared in Brooklyn. After getting an e-mail alert that it had been left on the front stoop at 2:30, I asked my boss to let me leave. Between the sun and the traffic on our street, I was sure it would be gone or destroyed by the time I got home. It was still there an hour later. It's a very sweet instrument. Nothing fancy, just factory made in Romania. But it has a low, mellow sound that's more me than the bright (and, the way I play, sometimes piercing) sound of the rental. I'm still a little sad about taking the rental back. But the new one is actually mine (a very strange thought. I own a violin), and it will do fine for the time it takes to shop for the real thing. I loved it from the moment it got me away from work on that awkward day.
Okay, now I'm going to rave about my violin teacher again. Unfortunately my livejournal was still deserted when I was going through the misery part of my violin experience, so it's probably not obvious to everybody why this is such a brilliant development. But even I was only expecting to feel relieved, not completely ecstatic about the whole thing! Anyway, we had our lesson and it was so much fun again. We're just the same amount of flighty-spacey-hyper, so we manage to connect on some level that is a bit above earth. Somehow it works. I could happily play Twinkle Twinkle for hours at her house. And a good thing...because we're playing Twinkle Twinkle for hours and hours at her house. But she lets me play Twinkle Twinkle on all four strings! :) Good-bye to stressed-out humorless group students, intimidating Eastern European twenty-somethings who poke with their bows while yelling about relaxation, and frighteningly located pot-smoke-filled apartments of descendents of famous jazz musicans.
Someone burned popcorn downstairs.
Now, while I'm raving about people I've already raved about countless times, I have to give a nod to nan again for her endless collection of unrequited love songs. For someone without this problem, you are definitely the master!
Also, thanks to JJR for help with the DaVinci's Notebook mystery. Time for a Missed Connection!
Let's see. My brand-new cool-as-hell violin teacher came down with the flu and we've had to postpone our first "real" lesson. But of course I'm playing, even though I don't really know how to play anything, and we're so bonding now that the good violin teacher has given me permission to stop using the hurty shoulder rest. We sit around together and watch TV. It's excellent. I'll be sad to give it up when the rental term is over. Or when I move. Or when I get frustrated and throw it across the room. Whichever.
Now, a note to JJR. I need your help in coming up with the date of a show. Remember the davinci's notebook show at the knitting factory about two summers ago? That's the one I need. And I know you want to help me out so that you won't be totally responsible for causing me to miss my density...oh, no, wait, that's what I DID manage to connect with that night...I mean MY DESTINY!
If you can count on tmbg fans for one thing, it's being obsessive-compulsive about the details of live music shows. :)
Have a beer, y'all. I'm going to start offering gumbo and po-boys here too.
Originally the plans for the day had to do with buying groceries and doing laundry and going into the city to find some work shoes and to try on a Gap skirt, even though it's one of those items that's a little too obviously Gap and could lead to running into people wearing the same thing. Now that I'm still in pajamas at 1:34, those have been adjusted. Grocery shopping, yes, but not extensively. Just grab some things, check out the firemen, and leave. Drugstore, essential, because I'm out of just about everything. (CVS has begun stocking my brand of pyons again, although only after they were rebranded as TEEN. I'm going to be forty years old and using TEEN pyons. That'll be great.) Then maybe some bathtub laundry, because I just can't face the laundromat. And some cleaning to make me feel as if I've done something. But there will be no leaving the neighborhood.
Yesterday I went to a scavenger hunt in the museum of natural history with a bunch of people I didn't know. Something weird happened there. I was standing with a group of five people and was getting along fabulously with one girl who works as a nanny. This came up before we got around to asking everyone else's professions. When we finally did, I told them about my job. The girl was all excited and said, "What company?" I told her, and she held out her hand and said, "Hi. I'm
[Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<my [...] company's>') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.]
Originally the plans for the day had to do with buying groceries and doing laundry and going into the city to find some work shoes and to try on a Gap skirt, even though it's one of those items that's a little too obviously Gap and could lead to running into people wearing the same thing. Now that I'm still in pajamas at 1:34, those have been adjusted. Grocery shopping, yes, but not extensively. Just grab some things, check out the firemen, and leave. Drugstore, essential, because I'm out of just about everything. (CVS has begun stocking my brand of pyons again, although only after they were rebranded as TEEN. I'm going to be forty years old and using TEEN pyons. That'll be great.) Then maybe some bathtub laundry, because I just can't face the laundromat. And some cleaning to make me feel as if I've done something. But there will be no leaving the neighborhood.
Yesterday I went to a scavenger hunt in the museum of natural history with a bunch of people I didn't know. Something weird happened there. I was standing with a group of five people and was getting along fabulously with one girl who works as a nanny. This came up before we got around to asking everyone else's professions. When we finally did, I told them about my job. The girl was all excited and said, "What company?" I told her, and she held out her hand and said, "Hi. I'm <my company's CEO>'s nanny." I would not have been any more surprised if she had said she was Michael Eisner's nanny. It was like a hidden camera show moment. Fortunately, I hadn't said anything negative about anything. Not that there was anything negative to say. But from that point on, we were each a little bit careful about what we talked about. She got a big kick out of telling people we worked for the same person in very different ways.
I just noticed that one of my interests is "metropoli," which other people apparently share with me. I wonder what it is.
Today was like a morgue at work. Yes, I was sad and maybe even filled with dread at the news, but my coworkers were beyond consolation. In a really annoying way. Every time I wrote a response to their e-mails, I decided I wasn't upset enough to defend myself for not being upset enough, and I deleted it. In the end, I opened my big mouth long enough to say that I thought both of them had reason to be embarrassed about how close it was. And actually, I think it was a lot easier to get over the presidential results than the gay marriage thing. Although I also think this might be a good time to get out of NYC.
That's enough about that. I've been so distracted, I forgot to be overjoyed about the fact that the campaign is over.
Also in the news, the very short e-mail discussion and the crush have crashed into a brick wall. I'm not feeling very mournful. Probably because it's a fake crush to pass the time, and because I've convinced myself that he's a totally inappropriate choice anyway, which makes him perfect as a crush. However, it has really restricted the areas I can frequent at work. I get my tea REALLY fast these days, mumbling at the machine as the tiniest trickle of water runs through the teabag.
ALSO, I had a lesson with the best violin teacher tonight, someone who didn't poke me with her bow and yell at me to relax. She's excellent, and even though I haven't met the other two yet, odds are very good for her.
I just rediscovered the song Power of Goodbye on Madonna's Ray of Light record. When Felicity began, I was obsessed with this song. It's still amazing. I can't believe I forgot about it.
Congratulations to Nan for adding Devo to her family!
excited
mellow
content
lazy
hyper