stereonights

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen

Nothing can stop us now.

I'm putting a lot of things on hiatus. I'll be leaving livejournal for a while. Best of luck to all whom I won't see in school or other places. God bless.

Meme.

Anonymously, write a comment to this entry about anybody or anything.

It was very nice. My parents were proud, and all my friends were there, and that really made it best. Wolfie gave me flowers. They're really very fragrant. These kind of light colored roses with red or orange tips are the ones that dry best. They look very nice. They don't get the color of dried blood the way red roses do, and they don't get the color of bile or dust the way white roses do.


Ah. I like performing.

If the walls in my room were covered with chalkboard rather than housepaint, I would write in neat little Asian girl script, over and over:

I WILL NOT READ JUUNI KOKKI. I WILL NOT READ JUUNI KOKKI IN THE DAYTIME. I WILL NOT READ JUUNI KOKKI IN THE NIGHT TIME. I WILL NOT READ JUUNI KOKKI WHEN I HAVE HOMEWORK. I WILL NOT READ JUUNI KO...

et cetera et cetera. I love to hate you for the MLP/twelve kingdoms infection you pass on to eeeveryyoneee.

If I don't stop comparing my mother to Augie's mother, I'll never be satisfied with my mother. Does having three kids mean you're three times as attentive to children as a woman with one kid would be? Whatever.

Come to the concert!
Dixit Dominus!
Community Church at Upper Ridgewood on the corner of Fairmount and Hillcrest roads!
8:00!

Why do certain individuals keep trying to make me choose adhesion to a broad and situationally useless standard over my own personal happiness and success? Okay. Conversations with my mother/father/stepfather typically go like this (a la the great Nate):

THEM: "So, what are you going to do in X college?"
ME: "Oh, well. Maybe music."
THEM: "No, I mean, what are you really going to do?"
ME: "...psychology?"
THEM: "Oh come on, that doesn't pay. What are you really going to do?"

And so on and so on until they suggest either engineering or business or some shit like that, neither of which I have any aptitude or desire for. Fuck that shit. I know exactly why they're not supportive of me. I know why they think I'm some failure derelict bad-choice-making morally retarded and misguided, lost, misguided youth. My parents and I really don't "hang out." When in my life will they stop equating academic performance to personal success and improvement? It's okay, it's okay, it's okay.

Astounding!

And to these people I have dedicated a sizable portion of my regard and respect and love: a lioness to my kit and cub, a mountain goat to my lonely moon on the mountain, and my king cobra, my keen and pretty black bird, whose crow calls herald the clean, dry dawn that will see me through this deserted in-between time.

( Freedom hangs like heaven over everyone... )

They got me to lesson twenty minutes late and picked me up twenty minutes late. It was enough time for me to hear Noah play a Hungarian Rhapsody. The AP Music Theory test is tomorrow. Noah is taking it too. We grumbled about that. Cosmo ordered the Czerny exercises for me. Noah laughed and said they were torture. We grumbled about that. It was slightly cool in Cosmo's house, but I was warmed by a large muff named Mario, who is a cat that sits with his tongue sticking out. Very unusual for a cat. The smell of Cosmo's house reminded me of being embraced by Gahl and Carson, of sleeping in Gahl's bed with our arms all tangled in our hair.

It really bothers me that my mother and her husband and my father have practically no idea that I'm musically inclined. I asked them again if they were coming to my performance on Wednesday, and they said, "Yes, your school choir, right?" They think it's another high school choral concert, which are awful regardless of how many good musicians participate. Our choir is number one in our division and we're awful. My family doesn't understand, really. I put in a CD that Cosmo gave me of himself and David playing Rossini. My mother said, "Who's Rossini?" This sort of thing happens all the time. My mother resents that she has to drive me to rehearsals and things. She has no patience for me while I'm working on these things. She'll be proud in a small and fleeting way when she gets the opportunity to show me off like a specimen, but she doesn't respect me for the work I do. And that's really more important.

She also doesn't do my laundry anymore.

I'm still, still, after a few months still coping with this.

(Partly because she gets offended when I try and "take over" her laundry room. I'm a damned fool for not having a coin-op in my closet.)

She also doesn't cook for me when her husband isn't around.

(Should I be offended at this?)

My father hardly knows me anymore! Spectacular! It only took four years for the distance between us to decrease by three hours and increase by a vast number of personal differences!

(Truth be told, it's because I have no time in my schedule for him. Isn't that sick?)

I need to get out of here.

The mission is be good to them always, love them and learn from them, but most importantly liberate them from yourself. I have done my best and feel closer to completion in that regard than I have in a while. Children can be cruel by virtue of their natural processes, and their sudden withdrawal from my side can leave me feeling cold. The past year has been a warmer time, where I've been touched on all sides by little hands and faces, little bodies pressing into mine, surrounding me with a sticky warmth that, when the body is held perfectly still, feels nice. But anyway I've grown tired of standing still, have ushered them off to build sandcastles of their own, so that I can be free to move my arms about in great circles--practice for when I'll have my bubble-wands again, with strong bubble juice made from my own mother's dish soap. I'm ready to create my warbling orb legions, ready to let them sail on the wind and burst as they may upon the world, being fragile things. Still, the sudden departure, even contempt, in attitude taken by my vehement, impetuous brothers and sisters has left my flesh feeling cold. Be good to them always, and liberate them from yourself.

That I still take offense when my skin prickles coolly is a sign that I'm not meant to stay in that warm, sticky state. I was never one for being pressed on all sides by affection and affectation. Until a year ago, I wouldn't speak of the cold or of being cold, but would let it sink into my entire body until I was very chill and icy to the touch, but supple and content in the choice and ability to be such. To be such is to hold no illusions, and also to embrace, face, address one's doom, should it be lurking near.

MY HORSE WON THE FUCKING DERBY. I AM A GENIUS.

You're welcome. Oh but it comes so natural to me. You're in me at the core of me and I know you like the back of my hand because I am you, we're so alike and I'm so proud of you. Me, too, and what more can I say. Me too.

Being knock-kneed makes it very difficult to stand for two and a half hours with your back straight and your arms out in front of you holding books open. I'm quite perfectly knock-kneed.

Upper Ridgewood is a very beautiful, quaint and well-painted little place, particularly at dusk. It's very lush and cool and breezy, though nothing like beaches. The choir sounded good tonight, I think our performance will be quite nice.

Wednesday the 11th at 8:00, Community Church at Upper Ridgewood on the corner of Fairmount and Hillcrest. Veni, veni, venite adoremus.

( addendum )

( Letter to a friend. )

I'm making silk-screened t-shirts/sweatshirts/bags et cetera with the following logos on them.



Takers? I shall take a grand trip to the Rag Shop to get blank clothing and totes and things.

If you aren't angry at me, then why do I feel this way?

My birds died this week. Either because it was too cold, or because we didn't give them enough foor for a whole week, or because their water was dirty, or because the radon levels in my basement, twice as high as the advised maximum, caused some kind of death reaction in them. Or because of all of those things. My mother was a little sad. We buried them under the stairs outside. Not we have a large empty cage. I hate birds in cages anyway, they make me unhappy.

I wonder if the radon is bad for us also.

Something isn't right. I don't know what it is. I have ideas. None of them are plausible if the human spirit really is indomitable. People keep telling me that it is, and I thought it was. I want to think it is. I just feel very defeated. It's got a lot to do with vanity and jealousy and sloth and other things like that, and also bad faith. And I've found the wellspring of eternal peace, and I know what that water tastes like, but to water my flock there forever I would have to give in to the life of feminine solitude habebat ab Laviniae. How do you say. All this time, for my whole life, I've been reading the words of men with a strong conviction that they applied just the same to me as they would a man. Or boy. They don't. Men write of hope and indomitability, and women write of defeat and perseverance after defeat and the total relinquishing of happiness as known by men and women who are young or not defeated yet. Does my soul have a gender too? Is that why the feeling runs so deep? I was wrong to assume a masculine pride and pomp and attitude when my father left our household manless. I was wrong. Women are damned, or so say a lot of austere authorities, as long as they're alone.

My vanity and my jealousy and my fear weaken my mind until it's plagued by thoughts of the Mouse. She got to you first, says the mouse that crawls through the dark tunnels of my mind. She got to you first. She got to you first and planted her flag there and it's only a matter of time until she asks you back, and I, the second-comer and second-tier and second-rate always beside her, I've got neither the right nor the ability to stop her, should she do that. Women choose men and not the other way around. This is the one area where men have no commanding ability. And anyway if they claim to, or even if they do, I have a hard time believing that.

Tao is a darker path than it's painted. It's completely colorless. It distinguishes nothing. Western convention causes us to expect the road to Nirvana to be paved with gold and lined with all sorts of jewels and finery and glory and other things, but it's nothing like that. It's completely ordinary.

The slow destruction of my self destroys the problem of not being able to love my self. The eastern mystic man tells me this is good and true, the only truth. Was I wrong, then, to be born into such a non-homogeneous society? Where I come from, they don't let you do this.

Whatever. (My mantra?)

Anyway, this is how I feel.

If anyone would like to see a good chamber quartet and our semi-professional choir perform Mozart and Handel in a program called Dixit Dominus at the Community Church at Upper Ridgewood (on the corner of Fairmount and Hillcrest in Ridgewood) on May 9th at 8:00, leave a comment and I will reserve you a ticket. For students, I think it's something like $12, but I may sell them discounted.

So today I saw Billy Idol live in concert at Sun Fest in West Palm Beach. Holy shit, that man is hot stuff.

I apologize if I haven't replied with your questions yet. You see, I've been very busy vacationing and teaching my near-fifty mother and her near-sixty husband how to headbang and give the horns.

Rock on.

I lied. I'm making a new entry with these questions.

( But I'm putting them under a cut )

Status bandwagon: jumped. The rules:

1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me."
2. I will respond by asking you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. You will update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

From Sara. I shall update this post as others reply with their questions.

1) At what point after being told that THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BLUE AND GREEN IF YOU'VE NEVER SEEN THEM BEFORE I SWEAR did you get fed up and wander off? I commend your staying power.

Well, what would happen is that I would go and come back, go and come back, and would sit down nicely and interject with my hands spear-shaped and raised a la Bruce Lee so that the others would listen to me. It was hard staying in one place anywhere on that boat.

2) Why the mandolin?

It's small and I'm small and we're both misunderstood by a lot of people to be things we're not (for example, in its case, squeaky and cheezy, and in my case normal and healthy). My fourth and fifth fingers are very flexible and lend themselves to easy mandolin playing.

3) Do you actually speak Italian? What is your level of comprehension, both aural and written?

Technically, I don't speak Italian; I speak Neapolitan, which is different in many many ways. My aural comprehension is good enough to let me know what's going on (between Neapolitans), but as the written language is Roman/standard Italian, I'm not so hot on the moderately complicated and above things. Of course, with the Latin, I can fake it.

4) The name by which many people knew you first: Yuuki. Discuss. Extra points given for explanation of two u's.

Taka Tanimoto, who now goes to Keio, was a boy with whom I would play suspicious card games in seventh and eighth grade. He taught me bad Japanese words. His little brother's name was Yuuki, meaning courage (rather than Yuki, meaning snow). On graduation day Taka granted me Japaneseship and renamed me after his little brother. Also I didn't want to make any friends in high school, so I decided it would be spectacularly easy for me to think of myself as unacquainted with everyone if they all called me by a name other than my own.

5) Japanese and Japan: which came first? What initially drew you to whichever you were initially drawn to, and how did that lead to the other?

It was Japan first, and Japanese through Japan, as a way to get to Japan, I suppose. I've always thought oriental people, especially women, to be very beautiful. But there is a story behind the language.

When I was younger, we lived in an apartment complex that was made up of multi-units shaped like long rectangles. The multi-units were laid out parallel to one another, and there were grassy areas about two thirds the width of a soccer field between the multi-units. In the middle of the grassy area behind the multi-unit I lived in was a big, big sakura tree, and every summer I remember there was a cicada season summer. The sound is still very prominent in my mind, that neurotic kind of rise and fall call that the cicadas make. Their sick mating call. And then, when I was thirteen, I met a boy named Ivan in a bookstore by my dad's house, who I met with several times in the bookstore and who lent to me an anime series called Evangelion that he really liked. He said he bought the videos in China Town, so they were original language with bad subtitles. I had to give the tapes back to him before I left for north Jersey again, so I watched every episode of Evangelion in one night. What a mind-fuck for a thirteen-year-old. Cicada sounds are one of the most frequently used and passively foreboding sound effects in Eva. I think so, anyway. And that was when Taka and I were becoming friends, and the series and Shinji especially felt like my own body parts and organs, and I wanted some secret way to communicate with Taka, and it was all rather cumulative. So anyway the next time I went to the bookstore I picked up some books and that was that.

From Nathan.

1. Tell me a story.

There once were two ninja who fought together for the same clan, and always executed missions together. Then one day while doing reconnaissance, one ninja fought a samurai. Fighting the samurai made this ninja realize how the secret shadowy ways of the ninja would never satisfy her as much as trying to fight, disadvantaged as she was by a life of throwing a ninja's swift passive attacks, in the sun and the light with all the other big, showy samurai. But then she and the other ninja had made a blood pact, which means that when one of them breaks it, the both die. And so slowly they both died.

2. Why do you love Haruki Murakami so?

It's because I hate him as a person. Were I to meet Boku, who is ultimately based solely on Murakami himself, I would be disgusted by him. I would hate him. I would find him uninteresting, which perhaps is worse. Reading about Boku's escapades is like reading about myself, with all the inwardly directed hatred and the futility of everything and the dismalness of Murakami's world in general and the amusing things. Murakami is the voice of the lost contemporary state of mind I feel I can at least relate to. Moreover he appeals to the vanity in me.

3. I remember you telling me once that you wished your family was from a far-off place. Why? And do you have any place in mind?

I wish that my family was from a far-off place because if it were so, I would have a reason which reflected no blame on me and illuminated no weakness or inability in me to fit smoothly into the culture to be estranged. It's hard to think of people like Kurt Vonnegut and Rand and Beethoven fitting smoothly into the culture. I want to be great and I want to be different, and I want to be in my own class but I don't want anyone to question me about it. Of course, this is very naive.

4. What do you usually do on Sunday afternoons?

Sundays are the only days really that ever resemble one another in form. On Sundays I sleep until nine or ten, then get up and clean my room, and then I'll either read or play the piano (in very short bits of time), or both, or I'll drink water or tea and will walk from room to room in the house pretending to do things, in search of the thing I ought to be doing, but never really finding it. And then if we don't go out, then I'll put the music on and check my e-mails and livejournal six hundred times until it's late enough to shower and go to sleep. The afternoons involve a lot of wandering and petty cleaning or tidying up or reading books or comics.

Some Sunday nights, I'll stay up until three or four trying to do art, but that's naive also.

5. You have an interesting voice. Has anyone ever told you that before?

Thank you. As a matter of fact, they have.


From Eric.

1) describe the ways in which you use sarcasm.
I use it as a diversion for myself. Sarcasm is the best I can do to keep my nasty, wrong and petty (pointy) side at bay. It's also a way I compensate for obvious lacks.

2) what do you strive for?
I don't know. Instead I'll tell you what I want. I want to feel invigorated and crisp and cool and clean and ready to do things, eager to do things. I want to get away from New Jersey, that's for sure.

3) describe yourself with a phrase, and explain.
I fought the law and the law won. No, I'm kidding. I will reference that song from Pippin (fine, Corner of the Sky) and I will not explain myself because it's too embarrassing.

4) what is your vision of a post-apocalyptic future?
Johann Johannson's Englaborn. Fantastic rocks, red and navy sky, lots of bright bright stars. Smoke stacks that never peter out and cool, clean structures. Everything is sand, clean simple sand, and the only trees around are simple and uncomplicated and pure of intent, and void of defining branches.

5) why real estate?
Because it's what Daddy expects.

I got in a horrible fight with him over you. Nobody can speak bad about you to me. You kill me when you're like this. Do I even have a right to say that like this?

In light of the fact that there is no room in my carry-on for machinery, I have opted against bringing my computer. I tried to delete all the songs from my Ipod so that it and I could get a fresh start, but rather than complying, in a way it suicided. I won't be this much of a failure as a parent. In any case I dug up a lovely little white-and-silver walkman, which I haven't used since, hm, late June, and it still has half its battery life. So I'm quite excited about that.

I've heard the news. After hearing the news, I got down my cool fabrics bag. This time, I've got a sewing machine, which with my audacity means I could mass produce them if I pleased. I don't please. This time there will be a matching one for me, because I seriously will never be cured of these feelings. What it is is the feeling of loving some part of your anatomy that formerly brought you shame. I love and accept this, and now it doens't hurt me quite so much. I'm good. I am good. The bags under my eyes are slowly disappearing.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ERIC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You are eighteen! How momentous! I mean, monumental!

( Book Meme )