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Monday, May 22nd, 2006
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2:34 am - springed
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You guys, I'm so happy lately and I don't know why. I can't comprehend it, and frankly, I'm afraid to ask too many questions of it. I just feel like I'm in a good spot in life, celebrating what's good and simply accepting what's bad. I can't understand why people worry and complain so much. I can't understand how people can just sit around all day: wake up, go to work, go to a restaurant, watch TV, go to bed. I'm almost seriously considering just quitting my job in a few weeks because I don't want to have to deal with feeling like I have to work full time in an office all my free time this summer. Maybe I'll go in for an afternoon here and there. But I'll probably never get anywhere near full time.
I ran across something purported as being a "Navajo prayer" on the Internet tonight:Beauty is before me
And beauty is behind me
Above and below me hovers the beautiful
I am surrounded by it
In my youth I am aware of it
And in old age I shall walk quietly
The beautiful trail! I'm seeing beauty everywhere lately. I just want to dance and celebrate! But being here in Council Bluffs I haven't had as much of an opportunity to do that as I would like: I seem to be confined mostly to cars, houses, and stores as everyday life flows on here. Soon I will be back in Iowa City, I will walk all over the place, I will make plants grow, I will play music. And it will be delicious.
Today at Cara's graduation party I went out back and bounced on the trampoline with all the little kids. Their laughter and joy just made me so happy. I used to not like little kids much, and I don't know why, but suddenly I absolutely love them. Cara's little two-year-old cousin was just so fun (not that I had much chance for interaction with her: she was a huge hit among everybody there) and I loved making faces at her and making her laugh so hard.
Also, I learned that Cara's Uncle Fred, a Methodist minister in Ames, knows my paternal grandparents! My grandfather (actually step-grandfather, but I've known him as Grampa Ron my whole life) is a retired Methodist minister in Des Moines, and has been on committees and stuff with Fred. Fred also apparently taught a sex-ed class to junior high kids with my Grandma Ruth Anne. Very strange. And Cara's Aunt Jan and Uncle Whosits have stayed in Schwaebisch-Hall (the town where I'm going to be during August), and Jan talked with me at length about what she calls "cowboy music", which seems to be just old-timey folk music.
Last night Cara and I made a fruit pizza. It was no ordinary fruit pizza: it was piled so high with so much fruit (kiwis, strawberries, raspberries, mangoes, bananas, pineapple, grapes, probably more) that it was almost a mountain of fruit instead of a fruit pizza. It was amazing, and apparently a huge hit at the party today.
Also last night was one of my breakthrough nights with music. But it wasn't anything big; actually it was something really small. I just stopped worrying about what I was doing and stopped trying so hard. The rock'n'roll stuff I had been trying to do was tough, probably too hard, and so I'm probably going to abandon it at least for now. I went back and revisited (and reinvented) a lot of the old folk songs that I still remember (and some I had to refresh on) and felt almost effortless. I had been trying too hard lately without even realizing it.
Another really good thing is school. I got all A's and A-minuses this semester, something I hadn't done since my freshman year of high school. I think it's because I really cared about almost everything I was learning. This is why I like college. I went through and planned courses for me to take over the next couple years, and decided it's totally feasible for me to triple-major in linguistics, Spanish, and German and also earn a music minor, and if I can keep my GPA up I can also move into the five-year combined BA/MA linguistics program.
I'm reminded of Taoism lately. I don't really dig on the whole dogma of organized Taoism, or even making it a ritualized personal religion. But I love the ideologies. Everything just kinda is, and if you don't squint all the time, it's all pretty much the same. Let stuff happen to you when and how it happens, don't try to force it. Everybody and everything is important. Change happens, so just let it happen and don't sweat it. Embrace life and where you are and what is happening. It's nice to relax. I have no idea why I'm so relaxed these days, but I like it, and as I said earlier, I'm definitely not going to question it.
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| Monday, May 1st, 2006
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7:43 pm - !!!
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Today I learned of two thousand dollars guaranteed for me going to Germany next year, $500 of which is going to my airplane ticket (which I just bought online for $501.50) and $1500 of which is going to cover nearly all of my pre-program language study that I'm doing at the Goethe-Institut in Schwaebisch-Hall.
I've got most of my papers in to the Office for Study Abroad, except for summer information and travel information forms.
Earlier this evening I booked my Goethe-Institut Intensive 4-week German language course. And I just bought a ticket at StudentUniverse.com for a flight from Chicago to Germany, leaving in the evening of July 29th and arriving in Frankfurt the morning of the 30th. I will be in this country for less than three months more.
This is getting way exciting, especially since the language class and the plane ticket are pretty much paid for by money I received or learned I was receiving today.
I'm so excited. I have no idea what's going to happen to me, but I'm excited for it.
In other news, aside from a few finals here and there, I'm pretty much done with my freshman year of college, and I did okay.
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| Friday, April 28th, 2006
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1:49 am - linguistics
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I swear, all languages are the same. From this point on, I declare it my mission in life to discover the secret to unlock languages so I can just listen to a totally foreign language and understand it based on certain basic pieces. I have always been able to see that certain seemingly different words were the same, but I never knew how or why. Since being in intro to linguistics, I have learned why: sounds mutuate in very predictable (blaitaegdepl?) ways. Syntax too has certain structures that are always there and that are all variations on a very simple base structure. I feel like if you got to be really really really good at knowing how those sounds might change over time into new words and how structures can flip around, and then became fluent in "proto-language", you could hear a new language and on the fly figure out how the words and structures changed from proto-language to the language you're hearing, and eventually be able to talk to anyone instantly, on at least a basic level.
That's probably an exaggeration and/or impossible, but it's still fun to think about. Seriously though, we discussed historical linguistics in intro to linguistics on Tuesday, and I was just flipping out inside my head at all the possibilities and similarities and how I needed to learn Latin and Greek and Russian and Sanskrit and Arabic and EVERYTHING. And how it's all the same! I feel like I'm running out of time and wasting my life sitting around and not finding the ancient roots of everything we say. But tracing protolanguages (which are languages for which no real written or spoken evidence excists, but which we can reconstruct using known related languages, much like was done with Latin and Hebrew) is a, while certainly "theoretical", very true way to reach impossibly far back in history. I want to know it all right now.
I guess I'll fuck around and take these gen ed things, and keep getting better at German and Spanish so I can have three languages as very solid bases to work from, but what I really want to do is learn as much as I can about linguistics and then study it. And also I want to rock out.
Which brings me to another point. I'm equally convinced that all music is the same, just like languages. Music and language are both "infinitely creative and productive," meaning that in both there are basic units that can be put together in certain ways, but there are infinite possibilities in which units can be put together and how. Sometimes I feel like a secret to life, the universe, and everything is ready to burst out of my chest but I just can't find the shovel I need to dig it out. Bad mixing of metaphors, but whatev.
To some degree, I've already found a secret to both language and music, and it's good basic knowledge of the subject overall coupled with heavy familiarity with a group of similar subsets of language or music. With music, it's string instruments. I can pick up and play any string instrument set in front of me. It's tough at first, but the basic concepts are the same from instrument to instrument. This is the same with romance languages: I know Spanish pretty well, and know bits here and there about French and Italian, and from that I can get the basic jist out of listening to or reading a text of any romance language. A similar thing is starting to happen with me and Germanic languages: I saw some Dutch and other northern Germanic languages on a video we watched about the history of English, and I could understand it, and I could make basic sense of old English in our book.
Contemporary linguists see language almost as an organ that we grow, or perhaps more aptly, see a first language like learning to walk and then subsequent ones like learning to swim or pole-vault. It is interesting that linguistic theory borders on biology, because what I know of contemporary biological theory says that if you go back far enough, we're all the same animal. Indeed, you might as well be a giraffe if a few basic things were changed. Same with what we call "Spanish" and "French". This oneness is probably true of so much more that I haven't even thought of. I swear, everything the whole world is all just mixed up variations on the same thing. It makes me crazy to think about.
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| Monday, April 24th, 2006
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1:43 pm - simultaneously winding down and up
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Yesterday I had my orchestra concert and wrote my Spanish paper, and today I took my German test. I still need to write two papers for interpretation of lit. by Thursday, do a German oral proficiency interview on Wednesday, and write two "concert attendance" things for orchestra. After that, I have a down week, followed by a breezy interpretation of literature final, relatively scary (and grade-determining) finals for Spanish and intro to linguistics, and final papers for Spanish and German. I can do it.
Plans are maybe coming together for a trip to Texas for a couple days this summer. The prospect excites me.
Also money is suddenly looming as a huge issue again, much like it did last fall. I'm pretty scared about this, but probably the money thing will resolve itself much like it did last fall and I will end up with plenty of dollars that I don't know what to do with. But for now I'm terrified.
I don't think I ever wrote this in here, but a couple weeks ago my 72-year-old multimillionaire great uncle married a "smoking hot" (as my 22-year-old cousin put it) 22-year-old Peruvian girl who doesn't speak English but responds to "Serve your master" and bends down to tie his shoes. She was a servant for the family of his ex-wife who left him about a year ago, who was also from Lima, and his new wife is one of the big reasons his old wife is not his wife anymore. The whole family is in uproar about this scandal.
I need to go to the Credit Union and then to the library. I don't think I'm going to work today. I love that I can just not go to work if I don't want to.
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| Friday, April 14th, 2006
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3:00 am - Tornado!
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Even if you rarely read people's entries and never read long ones, you want to read this. Trust me.
Today after German instead of going to work I grabbed my guitar and walked to the Ped Mall. I met a guy named Nathan from Minneapolis who had a guitar, and got to talking with him and after a while we started jamming together. The music he played seemed to be a lot like the music I play, and I really felt like I could jam well with him. I've never felt quite like that when playing with someone, that we both wanted exactly the same out of the music. Anyway, it was a beautiful day, but I had to get to my Interpretation of Lit class at EPB (English and Philosophy Building, for non UI folks).
It was so nice that we held the first half of class outside, until it started raining. Then, around 8:10, we heard tornado sirens and managed to convince our teacher to move down to the basement hallway from our second-floor classroom. She was pretty sure nothing was going to happen, but gave in. On our way down, we looked out the doors and saw hail the size of ping-pong balls. It was pretty weird. We finished the last twenty minutes of class in the basement, and then she told us all to go home and be safe. I walked over to the east entrance of the building and opened the door. The tornado sirens seemed somehow more insistent than usual and the sky didn't seem right. A guy came out of the building behind me with his laptop, telling me about some movie he had been watching and something he was writing, and then he started asking me about how it was living in the "end times". We looked at the sky, and the clouds were all moving so fast.
All of a sudden that didn't matter though: I heard a huge WHOOSH sound coming from every direction, and in the south, over by Riverside Drive, I saw the tornado. It was the classic train noise, and it looked really big and white, just like a huge triange splitting the sky in two. I really didn't like it and was getting pretty scared, so I went back in the building and told the people from my class who were still there that I thought I had just seen a tornado. My teacher asked to borrow my cell phone, and then John Pienta and I went to look out the south door. There were some janitor-type people there, and we listened and heard the roaring noise some more, this time coming from more of an easterly direction, over by Burlington Street and the Lindquist Center. After a bit it just stopped, and the janitors were offering us popcorn and saying that they thought the roaring noise had just been the forced-air system (which I know from having to dig through hundreds of blueprints is jargon for the ventilation part of HVAC, which itself is jargon for Heating, Ventilation, and Air-Conditioning).
It wasn't the forced air system, it was a tornado going through downtown Iowa City.
I waited for a while more in the basement of EPB, then decided I needed to get back to Daum. I went back outside and the sirens weren't going, but when I had gotten just as far as Adler, they blared up again and I freaked out and went in there for a few minutes. Eventually I remembered the sirens go on and off and decided to head out again. That trek from EPB to Daum seemed so inconceivably long. I saw three cars on the street the whole time, and two of them were police cars driving around, both of which yelled at me on loud speakers that there was severe weather and that I needed to get indoors. That didn't help me. I got an extremely sour taste in my mouth, and that was probably about the most scared I've ever been. The whole time I was just keeping my eye on which building I was going to run to if I heard the train noise again. I kept trying to call my mom and Cara and other people and nobody was answering and half the time I would get a message that said all circuits were busy and the other half of the time it would just say "Call Ended." before it even started ringing.
I finally got back home and found people. We were getting bits of reports from my mom and from Amelia that there was some damage downtown, that a church had its roof blown off and stuff, and Amelia said Dairy Queen's roof was blown off and that Hannah was working there when it happened. She and her brother started walking downtown and Cara and I left to meet them. As Cara and I were walking out of the building, the sirens went off again and Amelia and Owen ran to my dad's house and found Denise there, who told them it was just the all-clear siren. Denise also told them that my dad was acting batallion chief and thus was in charge of the whole fire department and gave them a little more information about this seemingly increasingly disastrous storm. As Cara and I were walking down Clinton St. we saw emergency lights, lots of cars, and throngs of people over towards Burlington and kept walking that way. When we were by the pet store across from the Old Capitol Mall, we saw a piece of a wall or roof that had been blown into a No Parking sign; the wall/roof piece was bent like a piece of paper and the signpost was at a 45-degree angle to the ground. Then we looked over and saw that the window where the cats live was broken out and all the kitties were gone! We thought that was bad and probably most of the worst of it, but to our horror we were soon to discover that that kind of damage and worse was commonplace.
There was junk and debris all over the sidewalk and street and there were very strange smells in the air. In the intersection of Burlington and Clinton there was a big white shed. In the parking lot by the Mill we saw what looked like the remains of a dumpster shredded into pieces no bigger than two feet by five feet at the largest. We walked east and saw a huge pile of debris under the Mill's sign. As we walked past the restaurant, we saw the glass door had been broken and boarded up, and then when we got to the east side of the restaurant I happened to turn around and saw that the sign on that side of the building was falling off at a gut-wrenching angle. And just behind the sign I noticed traffic lights were missing from their poles. We kept going and saw entire traffic light poles shredded and thrown down to the ground and scaffolding from an apartment building under construction mangled and smashed into the side of the building. Then we ran into Amelia and Owen. We wandered around with them for a while and left them at The Pit, then they went home. It was getting pretty crazy outside, because thousands of college kids were drunk and partying and pretty sure the tornado was a funny joke. Cara and I went back to Daum to get my laptop to dump her pictures on (her memory card was full by this point), some substantial shoes for her, and some sweatshirts, blankets, and extra batteries just in case, all in my backpack. Then we found Emileigh and Alissa and went off to see more.
It was just incredible. Rebel Plaza, that right-angle strip-mall kind of thing on Clinton across from the post office and by the courthouse, had places where you could look through the windows and see the sky through the lack of roof. That beautiful old brick building just west of Rebel Plaza that had a law firm in it is now only two stories tall instead of three. We found St. Patrick's church, and the damage was worse than I had even imagined. About half the roof was lifted off completely, and a bunch of the inside of the church is just filled with rubble. I think it was around there we saw a stop sign with street signs on top, and the street signs were turned at a right angle to the ground.
There were trees up all over the place and debris everywhere. Mailboxes of Iowa City was having the same problem that Rebel Plaza was where you could see the sky through the windows, and that beautiful old blue house with the antique store in it has joined the law firm in now being only two stories tall instead of three. There were windows that popped outwards all over the place, making me really believe (even though I've been told all my life, it's hard to really trust it) that you should open your windows in a tornado. Signs for businesses all over were smashed to smithereens, and a whole section of top part of the south wall of the Rec Center pool was missing, so you could see the ceiling of the pool room. I think you could see the wall inside leaning against the windows.
Then we walked to College Green Park, at Amelia's suggestion. Outside the L&M Mighty Mart, there was a car turned upside-down and crashed into a tree, strong smells of gas in the air, and some downed electrical wires. We left pretty quickly. My dad called and told me that "the whole city is fucked up," that there's damage from Menards and Wal-Mart in the southwest, up Riverside Drive, over on Burlington, through downtown, and over as far as the City High area. He really was the guy in charge of the fire crews all night until they relieved him right before he called me a little after midnight, which must have been super-stressful, especially since I saw vehicles from nearly all the emergency teams from the whole county, including all the fire departments, lots of police and sherriff's deputies, and even the National Guard and Red Cross folks. He also told me that he had been in the BC van responding to a call when the storm went right over them. He said something went through the van and two of the windows were broken out. Way scary.
As we pressed on towards College Green Park, we kept seeing huge pieces of metal twisted beyond recognition just lying around on the ground. We approached the park and saw one tree stuck in another tree with more pieces of metal wedged in there. There was a piece of roof that blew into a see-saw and the nail that came off with the roof must have hit the see-saw with such a force that now the roof is nailed to the see-saw. Miraculously, other than the see-saw now being shingled, the play equipment survived totally unscathed. The bottom two feet of a pine tree were hanging out by the play equipment, the whole top 40 or so feet of the tree totally gone. We saw some downed electrical wires near there and steered clear, eventually making it back to the Daum area. On our way we saw a truck bed liner sitting on the sidewalk and saw news teams from Des Moines. Emiliegh and Thalia, whom we ran into by the church, went back home, but Cara and I went to The Pit for some food and then walked over across the river to see what happened on Riverside Drive.
There were some blocks sectioned off, so we had to make detours, but we basically followed the path of destruction back where it came from. We crossed the Burlington Street bridge and walked past the hydraulics laboratory. Right past that, there was an uprooted tree and what looked to me like it might have been ground torn up going down into the river, but I don't know if that was there before. Anyway, the tornado went across the river before it got to the hydraulics laboratory, probably hit the power plant and dissipated a bit, and then came back down hard on Burlington St.
We kept walking south on Riverside, and saw a couple more uprooted trees. There was a car parked in the parking lot that was sitting with its left tires up on a curb. I'm pretty sure they didn't park their car like that, and that the tornado just kinda moved the car over about a foot. There were also a bunch of trees with wisps of pink insulation in their branches. We crossed the street to Kum & Go and saw pieces of the Hungry Hobo sign in their parking lot, then looked across the street and saw our query: Amelia wasn't lying when she said Dairy Queen was destroyed. Every part of the structure that wasn't cinder blocks is just gone, nowhere to be found. We talked to some owner-type people who were hanging out there and were told that even though the roof was torn off, there are styrofoam cups on dry-storage shelves right under the missing roof that didn't even move an inch.
By this point we were both so exhausted that we had to get back to Daum. I've been sitting here for hours now going through the pictures and writing this. I'm totally awestruck. I had always had this notion that cities couldn't get hit by tornados because the buildings break up the wind. I should have known better; I've always heard stories of tornados going through big cities, so I should have known it was more than possible in this smallish city. It's so totally weird though. All these big old buildings in this place, this my hometown where I have always lived that I know and love so well, have been just shredded by this storm that came out of nowhere on a day when not two hours before everyone was commenting on how beautiful the weather was.
I have an overpowering urge to go and see everything that happened, to go out to Menards and Wal-Mart, and see everything that happened on the whole path over through to the Summit Street area. I already know that there's a lot of stuff in places I didn't get anywhere near, and I guess I just want to make sure that places I love aren't destroyed, and if they are, to make sure I know about it. I'm so glad that classes were cancelled for tomorrow, because I totally couldn't deal with it.
Cara took about 200 pictures tonight, and there are sure to be lots more taken tomorrow. Maybe sometime I'll get some of them up. If you're looking for pictures, go to www.press-citizen.com and they have some pictures their photographers took of a bunch of stuff, plus three or four articles.
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| Wednesday, April 12th, 2006
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3:04 am - Adventure
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D G
We hopped in the car, put on the Grateful Dead
A D
Drove a bit and then you said
Bm F#m
Stop do you see what I see in the road
G A Em
A boquet of flowers in my hand
G D
It was an adventure
A G D
Oh, oh, an adventure
A G D
Oh, always an adventure
We drove down the road halfway between towns
Turned at the radio
We did not find the radio that day
We found something far better
It was an adventure
Oh, oh, an adventure
Oh, always an adventure
First it was a path, then a tractor
Then some foam and trees
Then it was a pond and then it was a boat
Then we rowed 'til Kingdom came
To our adventure
Oh, oh, an adventure
Oh, always an adventure
No, we never did find the radio that day
Instead I was just a goose
And you, you were a buffalo
With your mystery man hiding your
Chocolate syrup adventure
Oh, oh, an adventure
Oh, always an adventure
Later I swear you still had my CD
And bananas and chicken bones
I painted G.G. on your wall
Yellow over red over your bed
Your adventure
Oh, oh, an adventure
Oh, always an adventure
One year before we cut our hair
And climbed to the top of Koobs
Koobs blew his horn and groceries came
And so did Rick and his music
To our adventure
Oh, oh, an adventure
Oh, always an adventure
Dressed like a clown in Germany
I came to wrestle with you
The very next day you turned to dust
But first you gave me words
For my adventure
Oh, oh, an adventure
Oh, always an adventure
Wild rice and apple pie
Never did you justice
My Desire drove me there
But your incense takes me back
To your adventure
Oh, oh, and adventure
Oh, always an adventure
Oh, you are adventure.
current mood: eleven months friday
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| Tuesday, April 4th, 2006
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1:28 pm - SWEET
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My mom just sent me an e-mail with sweet news:
Tonight, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06.
I'm definitely having a party.
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| Sunday, March 12th, 2006
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12:41 am - bagpipes
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Sometimes magical things happen, and I think last night one happened to me.
I was playing downtown and around 2:00 some people wandered by and listened to me and said they were from Sydney, Australia and wondered if it would be cool if they went to their hotel room and got their guitar and came back, and I said of course. About twenty minutes later I heard strains of a Grateful Dead song coming from the direction of the Sheraton and I looked over and there they were. It was a couple, traveling together, apparently going around the US doing photoshoots lately. (When I asked who was taking pictures of what, the man didn't answer and the woman looked around and bashfully said they were just taking pictures of stuff and sometimes she happened to be in them.) He obviously couldn't tell that his guitar was tuned almost a half-step below mine and kept insisting that he was totally in tune so I eventually just gave in and tuned myself way down to meet him. (And then people kept wanting me to play harmonica, which was totally impossible because both of us were tuned way flat to standard pitch.)
So we jammed for a while, mostly him playing and singing and me playing lead lines or bass lines with him, and then a guy from Ireland appeared out of nowhere. The Austrialians and the Irishman kept making fun of they way each other talked, which was way funny because to me they both sounded totally absurd. The best part was how the guy from Ireland kept saying totally stereotypical Irish things, like "Fer fuk' sake!" in the Irishest accent ever. And then he would spout paragraphs in Irish out of nowhere sometimes. He kept trying to get the four of us to take a cab to his house in Coralville to smoke his hookah, but the two Australians were increasingly ignoring him and staring in each other's eyes. The Irishman was getting way pissed off, and the Australians were totally oblivious. I didn't know what to do, so I kept talking to the ever-angrier Irishman and playing with the ever-more-oblivious Australian man.
The Irishman started yelling "Aussie Aussie Aussie Aussie Aussie!" at the Australians and they were pretty much not paying attention to him, and then he started yelling at the man to kiss the woman and was getting really mad that he wasn't kissing her, and then he did kiss her, and then he basically was just stuck an inch from her face from then on. Pretty soon the woman said they needed to go to bed and they said goodbye and left. The Irishman was pretty upset that they just left and that we never took that cab to his house in Coralville to smoke his hookah. He was actually pretty hilariously stereotypically Irish: stocky, red-haired, angry, and drunk, and he was even wearing green.
But then he started talking to me. He talked about bagpipes, and about how I should learn to play bagpipes. He kept saying that "these meathooks" (his hands) had been trained on many instruments but just couldn't play, but my fingers could actually do it. He was about to give me names of people around here steeped in Irish tradition that could teach me, then looked at me and said I wasn't ready. I realized I really wasn't ready, but him just doing that, keeping the information from me like some mystical secret, made me want to be ready really bad. And then he just walked away and took that cab to Coralville by himself. I kinda like to think that when the cab went around the corner it just faded into mist, and that he disappeared to the nowhere he came from. Someday I'll be ready, and I'll find those people, and I'll learn to play bagpipes. But he was right: I'm really not ready now.
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| Friday, March 10th, 2006
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4:18 pm - Frühlingsferien ahoy!
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ATTENTION: Michigeese and Michiganders!
My friend Amelia's dad is teaching at Grand Valley State in Grand Rapids this year, and I might be able to catch a ride with Amelia up there when they're going to visit him on Thursday or so through the weekend. I know lots of people in Michigan read this, so is anybody going (or want) to be anywhere near Grand Rapids next week/end that I could visit?
In other news, I managed to do actually probably okay on the three big scary tests I had this week and to finish the paper I had due last night. And I got a 94% on my Spanish paper to boot! I think college is too easy for me.
And finally, it was so warm today I had to take off my coat. And no school next week! Things are looking up! ... not that they were that far down to begin with.
current mood:  spring break
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| Thursday, March 9th, 2006
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12:37 am - GRUGRHGHHH
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Being told I can't play music is pretty much the worst feeling ever. Caleb + Quiet House = ZERO.
On the other hand, I got a relatively sweet amp for pretty cheap today at Mister Money to replace the one I blew out when I tried to run the signal out that warehouse-style PA speaker I found at work. So that's cool. BUT I can't play it after 11:00 or else! Maybe I really will move to Burge or something.
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| Friday, March 3rd, 2006
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2:56 pm - The best paragraph I've ever read.
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"Congratulations! I'm pleased to offer you acceptance in the 2006-07 Academic Year in Freiburg program. Our committee hopes that the year abroad will help you hone your skills in German and contribute to your personal and professional goals."
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| Thursday, March 2nd, 2006
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12:07 pm - hallo thomas... hallo alles klar
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I've been meaning to write this for a while now and it just keeps not happening! But now it is, so don't worry.
Last Wednesday, as I mentioned in my last post, which was forever ago, I was reading Kaylan's journal and it mentioned that her band Joiya was playing in Chicago this weekend. Cara and I had been wanting to go to Chicago for a weekend, and the chance was presenting itself. We, of course, took the Universe up on its offer.
We hopped on the bus here in Iowa City after our classes on Friday and rode to Davenport, then hopped on ( another bus ) and rode forever to Chicago. We arrived about 7:40, and Kaylan and Carly met us in the Joiya van outside the Greyhound station. We went over to DePaul University, where Joiya was playing in an hour or so. There were some other bands playing too, mostly experimental indie bands.
The band that played before Joiya consisted of three people playing guitar, bass (frustrated guitarist bass, no less, icky chords and all), and drums as hard as they could and as flashily as they could for twenty-minute "songs" that never seemed to go anywhere or consist of anything but little melodic fragments interspersed over seemingly random rhythms. We left because it was deafening and overwhelmingly not good. Then ( Joiya ) came on and they pretty much blew me away. They sounded so great, and all their songs had that quality I absolutely love in a good band where everything anybody does is for a reason. Then a band happened where there were three guys doodling on electric guitars, a guy wiggling around with a picked-up violin, and a guy swaying around with a trumpet and a bass, and they all just made noise in some semblance of pattern for about twenty minutes. They were not really playing together so much as playing at the same time. The worst part was how sure most people there seemed to be that the other two bands we saw were really good and worth listening to. They weren't.
After that, Cara and Carly and Kaylan and the rest of Joiya and two Joiya friends who also showed up and I wandered around and eventually went to a Mexcan restaurant called Qdoba, which was similar to Panchero's but slightly different. Then Carly and Cara and I went back to Carly's dorm (she's an RA at the University of Illinois in Chicago) and hung out until we fell asleep.
Carly had a test in the morning but Cara and I slept in. When we woke up, Carly was still gone but we decided to do wash some clothes that had been dirtied when Cara's free Kum and Go pop that we got before we left Friday fell over in the bus and went on my clothes in my backpack. I went to the washer and dryer room I had seen before with some quarters and the soda-soaked clothes and Carly's detergent and put the clothes and soap into a machine and then when I tried to put the quarters in there was no place for them to go. It turns out you had to have a little card to do it. So we waited around and looked for somebody with a card, and after what seemed like forever, our clothes were finally washed.
Then Carly came back and managed to snag us each a U-Pass for the public transportation, and Cara and I left, each toting a bag and me also with my guitar. We went first to a restaurant Carly had recommended called ( Lou Mitchell's. ) We got a ( tuna fish sandwich and French toast ) and it was pretty amazing. Then we headed ( across the river ) towards the Sears Tower thinking it would be cool to go up top. They tried to search all our stuff and charge us $12 to ride their elevator and that was basically a no, so instead we hung out with a ( homeless man who called himself Wisconsin ) who was sitting at the bottom of the Tower.
Cara and I eventually left him and then Cara saw a bus and said, "Let's get on that bus!" and we did. It drove us around for a while, then we saw an L station and decided to get off near that so we pulled the cord. I pushed my way out of the door with some difficulty but finally made it out. As I was stepping down I heard Cara saying, "The doors!" and then when I looked back behind me she wasn't there and the bus was starting to drive away. I frantically scanned the people inside the bus but couldn't see Cara, then I started yelling her name. She was right behind me. We wanted to find Indiatown, so I called Carly and asked her how to get there and she suggested we get on the Blue line and ride it to Western and then take the Western bus north until it started looking like India. We went ( to the train station ) and hopped on.
As we were on the bus riding north in hopes of finding Indiatown, a guy got on and started talking to us about music because he saw my guitar. He mentioned that he was headed to the ( Old Town School, ) a place where they have lessons and performances of folk and blues music and dance and other things. We decided to follow him there and he showed us around. There was a sweet music store, where I played a ( tenor banjo ) for a while (a rarity indeed: I've only seen about five in my life and only ever met two people who really play it out of all the instruments and players I've seen) and then bought an E minor harmonica. Cara and I wandered around that neighborhood for a wihle and found some weird stores, then rode the Brown line downtown in hopes of dinner.
We left the train station and while looking around for a place to eat saw that Swan Lake was playing at the Cadillac Palace Theater. It seemed like an exciting time so we asked how much the cheapest tickets were, and at $22 we just couldn't say no. We found a ( Corner Bakery ) and had dinner before the show, then saw a sweet ballet. Afterwards as we were walking to the train station we found an open square and took some ( pictures. ) Then we went back to Carly's in the ( cold ) and we all tried on our ( Joiya t-shirts. )
Sunday morning we woke up and packed ourselves, then Carly made us some corn-bread toast (it's like bread only it's made out of corn!) and showed us to the Greyhound station. We bid her adieu, and settled in for a long ride back to Iowa City.
What an adventure!
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| Thursday, February 23rd, 2006
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3:34 pm - few chure
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Right now I'm feeling an indescribably overpowering euphoria, about big plans in the near future and big plans in the far future, plans that are unimaginably far-fetched but somehow seem possible.
First, Cara and I are going to Chicago this weekend almost on a whim. We had been discussing a fun weekend trip to Chicago on and off for a while but not making anything out of it. Then, on Wednesday morning, I was reading my music camp friend Kalyan's journal and she mentioned that she was playing in Chicago this Friday with her band Joiya. At first I disregarded this, as over the past couple years I've been inundated with advertisements for Joiya shows that I just couldn't see because they were mostly around Detroit and pretty much all in Michigan, and Chicago also seems pretty far away. But then I got to thinking... what if I could hop on a Greyhound after class Friday and be in Chicago in time to catch the show, and just hang out there all weekend? After some investigation, it proved feasible, and Cara and I walked over to the Greyhound station today and bought our tickets. We should be in Chicago around 7:30 tomorrow evening, giving us about an hour and a half leeway before Joiya plays. Either we'll take a bus to the venue or Kaylan will be able to pick us up in Joiya's van. Carly, another Blue Lake friend who is going to school in Chicago, has been super-nice and volunteered to let Cara and me sleep in her room. I don't really know for sure what's going to happen and how it will work out, but I do know that it will work out and adventure will happen!
The second is even better. I met with Catherine Ringen in the linguistics department today and I may have figured out the rest of my life. The linguistics department has a joint undergraduate/graduate degree program that allows you to double credit for courses for both the undergraduate linguistics major and linguisitics master's degree. This master's degree is really what people want to see when you're applyinng for jobs teaching English as a second language. You can't apply for the program until you have 80 or 90 credits, so usually people apply for it before their senior year and take the doubling courses their senior year and graduate with an undergraduate degree, then the next year they take a few more courses and graduate with their MA in linguistics. Because of AP and FLIP credit, I could conceivably end up at 80 credits after next year and apply to the graduate college before my junior year so I could spread the program out over my last three years instead of just my last two. Now, if I'm careful, I can also get German and Spanish majors in addition to my linguistics major in my first four years. Then, the next year, I just push on and take four or five more linguisitics courses and an elective or two, and I've got an MA. The catch is, I have to get into the graduate college before I can take any of the doubled courses, which requires a 3.5 GPA and that I take the GRE. However, now that I know where I'm heading, I know exactly how hard I need to work and, more importantly, exactly what I'm working for. This is such a good thing for me to do. I think most people go to college and get one major and take a bunch of electives. That's cool and all, but as long as I'm able to do it practically for free, I might as well get as much recognition for my knowledge and as much additional knowledge and experience as possible for it. The five-year deal also gives me a graduate degree with only having had to pay for one year of school because of my $5000-a-year undergraduate scholarship from National Merit and William and Effa McMeans. Now, academics is cool and all, but it's not exactly life. That's where the sweet part comes in.
With an MA in linguistics, I will be highly qualified to teach English as a second language all over the world. This gives me the ability to do exactly what I've always wanted to do but also be highly paid while doing it. What I want most to do is to travel around and not just sightsee but inundate myself in a culture and really get to know the people and how they live, to live more as a native than as a visitor. I also want to know as many languages as possible. To me always before, the path to knowing as many languages as possible was taking introductory courses in a language here and a language there as my electives. With three majors, though, that's not quite so possible. However! If I have an MA in linguistics, I can get a real job in Japan, in Saudi Arabia, in Finland, in Zaire, in Brazil, wherever in the world I want to be. And I'll get so much more language exposure than just an introductory course at a state university. And it's a perfectly acceptable "career" to jump between all of these every year or two, essentially studying abroad for the rest of my life.
I walked out of Catherine Ringen's office a different person than I was when I walked in. It seems absurd that I'm thinking about graduate school and the rest of my life, but suddenly it all seems so feasible.
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| Friday, February 17th, 2006
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2:42 pm - play
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I wish I could just play music all the time instead of having to do this "life" thing.
Yesterday I passed a barrier that a year ago seemed totally impassible and a good reason to not even try harder: I was learning "Roving Gambler" and instead of relying on a harp to do instrumental verses saw possibilities of playing the melody over chords on just my guitar, like I used to do on mandolin when I played mandolin all the time and like I've been doing on banjo lately since I started doing this sort of frail-strum thing. It was actually relatively easy to figure out chord positions that left me with an extra finger or two to move the melody while it's on that chord, and now I just need to do it a lot so I can become more fluent at moving my hand like that. Granted, "Roving Gambler" has only three chords, and on all but about three beats just sticks to the root chord. HOWEVER, this is a major step for me.
And then after I did that I had to live: I had to do homework and go to classes and work and be so distracted, my fingers constantly wanting to be wrapped around that silly little stick with metal bits stuck in it and wires suspended tautly over it. I just want to play.
I wish my fingers could dance on the fingerboard like little faeries, like I see Jerry Garcia's and George Harrison's fingers do in videos, like Bob Black's do on his banjo.
I want to just play music and hang out with cool people and have adventures and then play music some more. I don't want to care about being "good" at music, I don't want this constant feeling of having to do homework or go to school or work or eat or whatever instead of playing. I just want to play. They call it playing because it's so fun, an exercise for the mind that challenges and entertains. There is nothing like the feeling of coming up with a new way to do a music. There is nothing like the feeling of playing a song and knowing it's the best time you've ever played it, or accidentally phrasing something totally differently from usual and knowing it's so much better than ever. It doesn't matter what music I'm playing. Genres are misleading. Music is all the same on a very basic level. If it's fun, it's music and you're playing.
I just want to play.
current music: Jefferson Airplane
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| Monday, February 13th, 2006
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9:54 pm - aims
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Last weekend my dad taught at the 17th Annual Winter Fire School in Ames. I rode along with the firemen and stayed in Nathan's dorm at Iowa State. Adventure ensued.
Friday night, Nathan and I had deliciouses and then watched the Free Friday Flick Waiting... Later we went out busking. It was bitter cold, but it was still kinda fun. On our way back we stopped by Jay Keyser's room and watched O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Saturday I found Emily Stout and we had dinner at a dining hall (which was not very good...), drew a really weird picture, and then watched most of I, Robot with some people. Around 12:45 I went back down to Campustown for some sweet busking. That place is so weird and not very conducive to busking, certainly a lot worse than Iowa City. The physically best pitches have nobody walking by, the geographically best pitches have loud music coming from inside bars, and there are no really quiet or wind-sheltered pitches. After I gave in to the fact that I was going to have to put up with some interfering music blasting from inside, I set up in front of "Dangerous Curves". It was snowing and pretty cold, but I kept playing for a good hour and a half or two hours. Around bar-close time a rather large group gathered around me dancing and chanting and stuff. It was pretty sweet, even though I couldn't feel my fingers.
Just as I was about to pack up and go, a hippie-looking guy ran over to me and pulled a drum out of his bag and started banging it next to me. We jammed for a little bit, and then stood there and talked for a long time. His name was Ben, and he worked at one of the gyro carts around. He got off at midnight and had had a few drinks and saw me as he was coming out. We talked about lots of stuff, and then he asked if I was hungry and we walked over to the gyro cart and he bought both of us a hummus gyro. Then we walked a couple blocks to a house where someone he knew had told him there was a party. It was the right house -- as he said, "That's their shit in there..." -- but there didn't seem to be anybody home, let alone any partying. Ben had a backup plan, though: we walked a couple more blocks to a different house that he thought someone had told him was having a party, but again, nobody was home... or so it seemed. He knocked on the door again, and finally somebody answered. It didn't seem to be the house he had been looking for, but they seemed cool anyway, so we stayed there. One of the guys who lived there, Michael Neff, saw my guitar and asked me if I wanted to play something, so I played for a while. Then he asked me if I would be willing to go upstairs and record some stuff for him. I said sure, and so I spent about four hours playing six songs into his microphone/digital 8-track/computer setup, talking to him, and fixing the songs up a bit. He drove me back to Nathan's dorm around six thirty or seven o'clock and I collapsed on the floor of Nathan's room in my shoes, socks, coat, and even hat.
The next day I woke up around noon, ate some cookies, got dressed, and walked over to the Scheman Building to meet the firefighters. I saw the last half-hour of the class my dad was teaching, then we drove back to Iowa City. All in all, Ames was pretty sweet, but I'm glad I go to the University of Iowa instead of Iowa State University.
Also, I made an account on a Web site called Audiri that lets musicians upload lots of music. You can check out the stuff I recorded in Michael Neff's bedroom at my Audiri page. Do it!
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| Sunday, February 5th, 2006
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3:58 am - basket
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So, back in November or whenever when it was starting to get cold out and I thought it was too cold to play outside, I was wrong. I went out tonight. It was seventeen degrees out when I got out there around midnight, and got down to ten by the time I left two hours later. I never got too uncomfortably cold -- I had to stick my hands in my pockets for a while sometimes to warm them up -- and a lot of people really liked listening to me. Also I made eighty dollars... one of my best hauls ever, especially since it was so cold out, and since I was only out about half as long as usual. Also I had a great time, and was just so on the whole time. I actually got a couple people to sit down and listen to me for a good four or five songs, giving me a chance to do "What Is That She Got" and actually have people hear and understand it. People were so friendly to me tonight, much more so than usual. There was only one thug who tried to bother me, and I just ignored him for a while, then in the middle of a song I just leaned over and told him I was trying to sing and he was really bothering me, and then he walked away. I'm so much better at busking lately. It's a skill in itself, busking is: it's cool if you can play or sing or dance or whatever, but you're just not going to make anything if you don't know how to busk.
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| Tuesday, January 31st, 2006
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11:35 am - whoa there Carla
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GuyPersonson (2:44:58 AM): You!
SmarterChild (2:44:58 AM): Me? Really?
GuyPersonson (2:45:07 AM): I want to take you to a gay bar!
SmarterChild (2:45:07 AM): Take me to a gay bar? Are you serious?
GuyPersonson (2:45:18 AM): Gay bar gay bar gay bar!
SmarterChild (2:45:19 AM): Hmm... I don't know. Gay bar gay bar gay bar?
GuyPersonson (2:45:23 AM): Let's start a war.
SmarterChild (2:45:23 AM): Ha. You want us to start a war?
GuyPersonson (2:45:35 AM): Start a nuclear war!
SmarterChild (2:45:35 AM): I don't know if I want to start a nuclear war.
GuyPersonson (2:45:43 AM): At the gay bar gay bar gay bar!
SmarterChild (2:45:43 AM): Really? At the gay bar gay bar gay bar?
GuyPersonson (2:45:54 AM): Do you have any money?
SmarterChild (2:45:54 AM): No. I don't have any money.
GuyPersonson (2:46:05 AM): I want to spend all your money!
SmarterChild (2:46:06 AM): Why would you want to spend all I'm money?
I like how it just automatically assumes its users don't know how to use the word "you're".
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| Tuesday, January 17th, 2006
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5:52 pm - tilde
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Holy asterisk, books for that goldarned Intermediate German class just cost me two weeks' wages!
Also, I'm playing at Guido's Deli (on Gilbert St. by Nagle Lumber and Aero Rental) on Saturday from about 7-10 PM. It seems like a pretty nice restaurant. They've got a variety of entrees, and if you're not looking for dinner, they have a wide and reasonably-priced selection of (non-alcoholic) beverages, appetizers, and desserts. I'd love to see you there, and it would be great if you could bring anyone you know who would like to come and/or tell other people you know who might be interested.
My schedule for this semester is pretty much amazing. My earliest class is Spanish-American Literature and Culture at 11:30 on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, and then I have Intensive Intermediate German every day at 12:30. Around 1:30 or so (whenever I can get there after German) I go to work for about three hours. Then I have classes in the evening. Monday evenings I have All-University String Orchestra, Tuesday evenings I have Introduction to Linguistics, and Thursday evenings I have Interpretation of Literature. I love this schedule, because it gives me plenty of time to sleep in and be at work, and also I'm only actually in class for fifteen and a half hours a week despite the fact I'm earning sixteen hours... and an hour and a half of that in-class time is orchestra.
Last night at the Mill went really well. It was the best I've ever felt performing onstage. I'm so used to playing either to myself or to crowds of people just passing by, and being in lights at microphones on a stage with a bunch of people at least half-paying attention to you (and many paying more of their attention than half) is totally different. I took a new approach to it though and sat down and let myself just close my eyes and get lost in the music and for the most part it went really well. (Really well, that is, except for when I put the instrumental verse not where I wanted it and flubbed some words in "The St. James Infirmary Blues" and when I hit the wrong initial note on my harmonica in "What Is That She Got", but I don't think anybody noticed those.)
I went out to the Ped Mall and played on Sunday night. It was probably about the coldest I've ever played in: less than 40 degrees. I was out for a little less than three hours (with a warming-up break at Jimmy John's) and there were not a lot of people out drinking. Much to my surprise I actually made almost thirty dollars.
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| Friday, January 6th, 2006
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8:22 am - blooz
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Oh man, I'm getting better at guitar every day. I've got blues I sing in E, G, and B now, with simple but cool-sounding riffs (no straight chords for Caleb anymore!) while accompanying myself on my guitar. A couple days ago I realized I could actually do a cool blues progression in C, and just now I came up with a totally awesome progression in A. This fingerboard is making more and more sense to me and it's arranged so seemingly perfectly for blues.
This thing I just came up with, though... I don't even know where it came from. I woke up at about 6:30 (for no reason I can understand either) and picked up my guitar (my mom was already awake and my brother's at my dad's house, so I wasn't waking people up) and started playing a song that I kinda cobbled together from words I heard on a Johnny Temple recording and the way I play Dylan's "Buckets of Rain". But this morning it took on a life of it's own and I don't even know. Then when I got scared I was going to overwork my new idea right away, I started playing around with different keys and settled on A. I screwed around with a few different chord positions and ran into one of my recent favorites, a seventh chord with the third on top that can be moved anywhere on the top four strings. It felt like it had to go down a half step, and then another, and then to an A major with root on top, and then to an E... and then suddenly I had a really cool turnaround riff on my hands. After a little more fumbling with some chord positions I had a sweet 12-bar progression in A, far more complex than anything I've ever played before. I have no idea how it happened. It was like ten different little things I've discovered in the past couple weeks just came together and suddenly they made an awesome. Or at least I feel awesome playing it.
Yeah, nobody really cares about that. Maybe you'd care if you heard it? How about this! blooz.mp3 Please excuse the poor performance. Also I'm pretty sure there are a few extra or missing beats in there somewhere, but whatever.
I love this feeling of figuring out sweet music stuff. It's an elation I can't even begin to describe, and I live for it. And, eek, it's already almost half past eight.
current music: Sonny Terry: The Folkways Years
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| Sunday, January 1st, 2006
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9:50 pm - moo sick
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Does anyone reading this know who to ask about legality of and royalty fees associated with recording other people's songs to which they still hold the copyright? I'm playing at open mike at the Mill on the sixteenth and they usually record a tape of you playing and give it to you. I was thinking it would be fun to make a CD from the recording to give to family and friends and maybe sell to people while I'm playing, but I don't want to distribute or especially sell recordings of me playing someone else's song if it's not in the public domain and they care about people playing their stuff. Luckily this isn't an issue with most of the songs I play because pretty much all of it is either stuff I came up with or (mostly) really old stuff that's certainly in the public domain. However, there are a few songs, especially the Grateful Dead's "Friend of the Devil", that I really love playing and would like to include... but if it's going to be a hassle I can just stick to old folk songs.
Speaking of that, I'm scheduled to play open mike at the Mill on Monday, January 16th at 10 PM. They usually run about a half hour behind, so I probably won't be on until 10:30 or so. It would be really cool if people came to see me, though. So mark your calendars.
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| Thursday, December 29th, 2005
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1:05 pm - monies
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If anybody who is a student at the University of Iowa is looking for the cushiest job ever, I can totally hook you up: the office I work in is looking to hire one or two more student employees. Also, it's really easy to work it in among classes, so don't worry about that.
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| Tuesday, December 13th, 2005
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7:39 am - spinnin' in the hula hoop
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I just realized I routinely sleep through half the daylight.
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4:09 am - rockin' and a-rollin'
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I pretty much h8 finals. Although, I'm super happy I'll be totally done with this semester, for better or worse, less than twelve hours from now. I just wish some sort of magic would make the work be done for me. Grag.
current mood:  exhausted
current music: eyeballs!
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| Monday, December 12th, 2005
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5:12 pm - Well.
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So, the girls who live below me don't seem to like my music. They came up twice in a few days to ask me to stop about two months ago, once around 10:30 on a Friday night and then around 8:30 the next Monday night, both times telling me they were trying to sleep. This seems a little absurd to me, that someone could reasonably expect to have a dorm totally quiet at those times, even though technically this is a quiet house. Admittedly, I was playing my banjo really loud one of those times and playing my electric guitar with the amp on the other time. However, the problem seemed, from my viewpoint, to dissipate after that. I heard nothing more of the situation.
Until last week, when I started hearing things someone heard someone else say about girls on fifth floor being mad at me because I play all the time. I didn't understand why they couldn't just talk to me about it, but I guess they didn't want to. So then Saturday a little after 11:00 I was playing my electric guitar amped and they came up and asked me to stop. They were kinda rude about it too, and acted as though they expected me to be totally unreasonable about it. I wasn't.
Then again Sunday around maybe 10:30 I was playing my acoustic guitar and singing and I heard a knock on my door and was asked to open it. It was the fifth-floor RA, come to tell me I needed to stop until 10 the next morning. I pretty much did, but after a while screwed around quietly on my un-amped electric guitar.
Today I got back from my Language and Formal Reasoning final and sat down with my guitar and harmonica and played around with variations on the melody to "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" on harmonica. I don't really think I was being particularly loud. In fact, I've been playing a lot quieter and more relaxed lately. But in the middle of one verse I heard the same knock and "Please open your door" from last night. It was the fifth floor and first floor RAs and the fifth floor RA explained that it's actually 24-hour quiet hours and not from seven to ten like normal (and like she told me last night...) and she asked for my ID and wrote down my name and number and stuff. So, now I've been written up for noise. Whatever that means.
current mood: this is biased!
current music: Bob Dylan: Time Out of Mind
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| Saturday, December 10th, 2005
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4:09 am - U-Haul sixteen tons and whaddayagit?!?!?!
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Never underestimate how good new strings can make an old instrument sound. For some reason the strings on my electric guitar were still the ones that came on it until tonight, and wow it sounds amazing. It even sounds good acoustic now due to its semi-hollowness.
Also, I was on the front page of the Daily Iowan yesterday. It was pretty weird. My grinning face was staring at me from all directions and looked everybody in the face when they first woke up and all sorts of weird stuff. Also, the thing I really hated about high school where everybody knew my name but I had no idea who they were has been happening again a lot. No me gusta. Also, I asked if I could get a digital copy of the picture they took of me and apparently if I want a copy of it I have to buy it for something like twenty dollars. No me gusta tampoco.
I wish it weren't so goldarned cold out. I really miss playing outside. Oh well. And, I think I'm going to Council Bluffs / Omaha the first week of break. Should be a blast!
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| Wednesday, December 7th, 2005
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1:59 pm
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Last night around 11:30 Cara and Angela and I decided we wanted to go to Village Inn. We spent about a half-hour wandering around Daum looking for people who would want to come. Finally we found three other people, Alecs, John, and Joe, who were interested, but by the time we got bundled up and out of the building they decided they wanted to go have coffee at a bar instead of coming to Village Inn. So C., A., and I walked to the car anyway and tried calling some more people. A bunch of people either didn't answer the phone or didn't want to come, but finally, Kenzi answered and was delighted to come along! So we went to Village Inn and had a blast. Kenzi and Angela wanted to go home, but Cara and I went to Wal-Mart for some reason. All night I had been seeing dump trucks full of snow driving up and down Riverside Drive and Grand Avenue. As we were coming back from Wal-Mart I noticed one in the opposing lane. It was just too intriguing to ignore.
I pulled a surprise U-turn and followed one of them down Riverside Drive towards Hills, wondering where in the world all these dump trucks full of snow could be coming from and/or going to. The dump truck turned into a parking lot by the Iowa City Transit building where there were gigantic mountains of snow and a big green tractor-loader piling the snow even higher. We parked and watched the truck dump its snow, and then much to our horror the loader started coming towards us, scoop raised threateningly! I put the car in drive and started out of the snowlot and the tractor kept following us down the road. It came up next to us and was looking scary: there were huge scary things coming off of the back wheels with no conceivable purpose but to damage cars driving next to the tractor. I let it pass us but kept following it and it drove down Grand Avenue, through the University Hospital complex, out into the sports complex, and parked near the entrance to a lot near Carver Hawkeye Arena. I drove past and parked in the lot too and we sat again, watching to see what it would do.
Suddenly a pickup truck with a snow plow on the front careened across the other side of the lot at impossible velocities, showering snow and sparks everywhere! A dump truck appeared, and in short order, two more plow trucks appeared. It was like some sort of midnight meeting of the snowplow people. It was pretty creepy so we decided to leave... and just in time, too, because as we were driving out of the parking lot the tractor-loader started moving towards us in attack position and two of the plow-pickups were closing in.
On the walk back to Daum, I discovered an amazing property of beards in the cold: condensation from your breath collects and freezes on the whiskers! It was pretty much awesome.
current music: Grateful Dead at the Uni-Dome, sometime in '78
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| Saturday, December 3rd, 2005
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6:57 pm
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"Don't worry! There has to be some way to get back to Father Time's house before the twelfth bong!" --TV
POP QUIZ
Question: What are you doing Monday evening at 10:30?
Answer: Coming to see me play at the Mill!
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| Friday, December 2nd, 2005
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4:41 pm - I win at Spanish.
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I got my Spanish paper back today, and at the end was written: "Caleb - ¡Superior! A+" This is a good thing.
Today I bought a gently used Fender acoustic-electric A-style f-hole mandolin for really cheap from a guy that knows a guy I work with. Now I have two instruments without cases, which, of course, means I need to spend even more money on musical instruments. Let's see how much money I have spent on musical instruments in the past month or so:- 10-22-05: Molded plastic guitar case and lots of strings, $98.95 at Guitar Foundation of Iowa City
- 11-2-05: Electric guitar, $172.50 on eBay
- 11-4-05: Amp, $66.51 on eBay
- 11-10-05: Audio cable, $14.65 at Musician's Pro Shop
- 11-14-05: Violin/mandolin stand, $30.40 at West Music
- 11-23-05: Violin pickup, $66.00 on eBay
- 11-27-05: New bridge and soundpost and fix of splitting seam for my second violin, $82.78 to David Pope
- 12-2-05: Acoustic-electric mandolin, $60.00 to John Schwarting
That totals $591.93 in a little over a month. Oops. I really need to stop.
In other news, I'm way hungry.
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| Tuesday, November 29th, 2005
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12:10 pm - reindeer armies?!
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The same thing I noticed all through high school happened again over Thanksgiving break: having school constantly makes me stop doing anything actually productive in my life and gets me into a rut, but as soon as there's a break from the routine, I can do so much more and make huge breakthroughs in myself. I hadn't learned a single new song nor had my playing style changed very much for about two or three months, but last week I learned three or four songs and started using my right hand totally differently and found myself unexpectedly able to play passably well in a bunch of new keys.
I wrote that about guitar and didn't even think about the fact that it might apply to other instruments. It's strange how much my focus shifts over time: I may be able to play all my instruments at a given time, but I tend to get into a groove with a particular instrument and spend most of my effort learning to play it better over a period and then gradually I shift to a different instrument. I guess guitar is just so versatile (I can't believe I never realized this before) and has so much for me to learn about it that I just keep going and doing more. I bet I sound a lot better than I did a few months ago, and I bet I can sound even better than I do today. Practice really works, I guess.
I was on the radio again this morning. That was pretty cool. Also, I'm playing at Open Mic at the Mill at 10:30 next Monday, the 5th of December. You should come see me.
That's pretty much all I got.
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| Friday, November 25th, 2005
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2:31 am
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I bought a violin pickup on eBay last week and the guy who sold it to me has a daughter who goes to school here and he picked her up here yesterday, so we just met at a gas station and he gave it to me there. He called my dad and me as we were driving to the gas station and asked if we were there, and I told him we'd be there in about two minutes. He said they had a red four-door pickup truck and I said okay.
A few minutes later, we got to the gas station and we got out and started looking around. We went in and saw waiting in line at the Subway attached to the gas station a group of girls, one of whom looked kinda like what I saw of his daugher on Facebook when I looked her up. There was an older couple standing behind the girls, and I assumed they were the girls' parents.
I felt weird just approaching the guy and asking him if he was Leslie -- that's the guy's name -- so I tried calling his cell phone back and got his voice mail. I hung up, looked around the store some more, and then finally decided to just approach the guy.
"Hello, are you Leslie?" I asked the guy. He said that yes, yes he was, and looked really confused. I told him I was Caleb, and I thought I bought a violin pickup from him on eBay and he looked even more confused.
In the middle of this uncomfortable confusion, the girl who looked like Leslie's daughter from Facebook turned around and said, "I think you're probably looking for my dad. He's outside walking the dog." Sure enough, there was a guy outside putting a dog into the red four-door pickup truck we had noticed as we parked.
So, there was a guy named Leslie standing in line behind another Leslie's daughter, at a random gas station Subway where a stranger was supposed to meet a guy named Leslie that he didn't know what he looked like and the real Leslie was outside but the other Leslie was right behind real Leslie's daughter. So weird. Leslie isn't even a common name at all!
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