Trying to get work done and not being able to is the most depressing thing on earth. I'm trying to come up with something I can possibly put in the abstract I have to turn in for my syntax paper on Monday and my brain is all fuzzy and I'm trying to read articles, but I just keep feeling like they're not getting at the heart of the matter, but I can't remember what the heart of the matter is. Whenever I go to get an idea from my head, I lose the idea I was trying to connect it to.
I had a crazy night last night. Okay, so I went to the Of Montreal concert by myself because Suzanne was hanging out with some friends of hers who are only in town this week and I get to the concert way too early because I was worried about it selling out (I need to realize that in Columbia the opening band never goes on before ten, concerts in Boston are over at ten, that's because they are crazy about sleep in Boston). So I ended up talking to this guy who works at the deli downstairs from my house. He was talking to me more, but I kept answering him because I didn't want to be rude, and also because I have trouble holding my opinions back sometimes. We were talking about "indie cred" and how you could lose it (i.e. having your song in a Target commercial) and then he was talking about how sometimes at a concert the band stops singing so the audience can sing the words instead and what happens when the audience doesn't know the words and what about that moment in the band's career when, for the first time, the audience does know the words. And what if it was my favorite band? And what if it was your favorite band before that, but what if it was your favorite band because of that? Then you lose cred.
The opening band went on late and came off relatively soon. Then there was the hugest wait for Of Montreal. Here's how long it was, about twenty minutes into the wait they started playing Guero, and they played all the way through Guero before Of Montreal got up there. I was getting annoyed because the local indie theater was showing The Beaver Trilogy at midnight, the only showing, and I really wanted to see it. I was also getting really annooyed at all of the eighteen-year-olds and the drunk thirty-something women who thought they were eighteen-year-olds. So Of Montreal came out and of course they were amazing and Kevin Barnes was not wearing any pants! That man is crazy, no, beyond crazy! But very few people were dancing and I was just so sad that I wasn't seeing them at Lamar's with all of the Covenant dancing people and last time I saw them there was glitter all over and Bill was there and last night was just damned depressing in comparison, so I danced like a mad fiend for half an hour (the pinnacle being Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse, oh my goodness amazing) and then I dashed out of there to see The Beaver Trilogy, which was completely different from any other movie, mainly because it's three movies, put together, and one of them is real and the other two are just like that one, except not real, and because it has Sean Penn and Crispin Glover, playing the same character. And the people there reminded me that even though the concert kids were obnoxious, I still love the people in Columbia. Well, there are still cool people in Columbia, let's put it that way.
Whistling speech, I heard about this at SIL last summer, but I forgot about it till I heard a story about it on NPR tonight. In Mazatec, and I could be wrong, but I think in Mazatec the combination and length of tones is often enough to understand what phrase is being said. Which is where the whistles come in. Our phonetics prof last summer, an older lady who had spent a lot of time in the field, got great pleasure from "humming" us sentences and then telling us what they meant.
Also, while I'm on the "what I heard on NPR today" track, I listened to the podcast of this week's This American Life episode today, and I came to the conclusion that Ira Glass does pronounce his /l/s as uvular nasals (commonly refered to as "swallowing your l's"). It was a really good episode. It was called "By Proxy" and it was about people who have had to do things in the place of others. Davy Rothbart, the creator of Found Magazine, tells a story about a childhood friend who often asks him to make decisions for her, which of course leads down strange (and because it's This American Life) ultimately bittersweet roads. I liked that story the best, but there was also a story about an Iraqi translator and some elementary school kids in New York. These podcasts really brighten up my wanderings around campus, but I always get self-conscious everytime I laugh out loud.
"spring break, work hard, drink coffee"
That's what's written on the little chalkboard above the counter at my local coffee shop. It pretty much sums up my week so far. Spring break is hard because it's the only break we get in the spring semester and it comes right at the point when you realize you haven't made the progress on your projects that you should have. And once you put away the idea of going to the beach (or, more preferably, New York), you just kind of let things pile up because you know that there's this whole week when you'll have so much time, infinite time. But not really.
Yeah, so I kind of set spring break up to be the savior of my semester, knowing it was a bad idea, but I don't understand why I work so slowly and I always think if I just try hard enough everything will get done in, like, two days. Someday I will master this art, hopefully sometime before I retire . . . So it's been a busy week, and when I feel like I know what I'm doing, it's fun, when I can't figure out what my chosen topic has to do with the class it's for, or when I can't figure out what the topic is at all, then it is not so fun. I feel like all three projects I'm working on are fading in and out of reality this week. I'll go to bed thinking, "tomorrow I'll go research that in the library, I'll find materials, it'll be so easy." and then at the library I'll sit there for ages in front of the computer trying to think of a single search term that might describe what I'm looking for. And then when I do get materials half of them seem irrelevant and I'm worried that I'm wasting hours reading stuff I don't need to, so then I spend more time on Jstor, getting more confused about search terms. . . . And, yeah, you get the idea.
But I have been getting stuff done and thought-about which is the most important thing. And I did my FAFSA, so if nothing else, that's an accomplishment (eighth year in a row, baby!). Some friends and I have been watching What the Bleep Do We Know in segments this week. It's kind of a crazy movie. It's about science and spirituality and how they meet on a quantum level. It's anti-dualism, which I like, and I have no reason to want what they say to be wrong, but sometimes they contradict themselves, which I find annoying. But it kind of reminds me of a movie I watched as a kid called Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land and it kind of reminds me of Arcadia, only not very much, and really, everything reminds me of Arcadia.