The month, in numbers

Number of days worked: 16/22 (projected)
Number of graduate school documents written: 3 (statement of purpose and two research papers)
Number of pages: 20
Number of books read in preparation for said documents: 7
Number of birthday parties missed: 2
Number of nights spent clubbing: 3
Number of tango classes: 4
Number of times I've stepped on a tango partner's foot: 13
Number of doctor's visits: 2, totaling $625.00
Number of early music ensembles founded: 1 (seriously)
[mrghgh]: mnlyaaaa³
Number of blog posts I will now end, because I'm totally procrastinating: 1

Wherein The Bone writes back to people who have reached this site today via internet searches

1. To the person who arrived via the following ask.com search string: when you lose your virginity is it normal to be late on your period a few days?

Normal? No. I mean, I don't think it happens that way as a matter of course. (Hopefully my XX-chromosomed friends will jump in here and correct me if I'm wrong.) If you're worried, take an OTC pregnancy test, see a doctor or go to Planned Parenthood. The latter would probably be a better place to find the answer to this question than a shitty blog written by a male bachelor in his 30s.

2. To the multiple people who have arrived here via the following Yahoo search string: gunter glieben glauchen globen translation

Jesus One-Armed-Drumming Christ. It was a joke, and one I fucked up anyway... the real phrase is "gunter glieben glauten globen." Please go away.

3. To the person who showed up here by Googling: "extremely large member"

It's all true, baby. A/S/L?

Plus and minus

(this conceit shamelessly stolen from bridgesyoucross on LJ)

[+] Writing samples are done.

[-] The John Cage paper is kind of a mess, and I have no idea what to do with it. A couple of friends are gonna give me some feedback, so hopefully it won't suck for long.

[+] The Arvo Pärt paper is rad. I may spruce it up a bit and submit it to the Choral Journal.

[+] The Magnetic Fields are playing LA at the beginning of March.

[-] Voice is still hosed. Better at the moment--I can actually talk and sing a bit--but yeesh. It's gonna be a while before I'm back up to speed. Like, a couple of years.

[+] [insert awesome gutteral noise here]

SF was the bomb.

Happy birthday to Kurt Vonnegut.

Two years ago this weekend, I spent the long Veterans Day holiday in San Francisco with my then-partner, and it was an amazing trip. For most of 2006, I was planning and saving money for an elaborate little scheme (the codename was Operation: Certain Things) which would involve a return trip up to the Bay over the same holiday weekend, and the popping of The Question. We broke up at the end of August though, and instead of getting engaged I ended up spending that weekend moving for the fifth time in two-and-a-half months. Sigh.

So, hanging out in SF this weekend would seem to be a ballsy move... and yet, that's what I'm doing. I'll be chilling at Amber tonight, mostly because it'll be my only shot for a while to meet this dude and this chick (both longtime internet friends who will be visiting SF from the UK and Canada, respectively). I'll be back Monday evening at which time I have dinner plans with ShanaKarinina, kaiserin and probably some colleagues, so an update will go up on Tuesday.

(In other news: I'm taking the entire next week off of work in order to rest my voice and plow through grad school application stuff. The writing seems to be going well so far.)

Saturday Night Linkfest

For KC/DC: The 2007 Douchebag Awards

For Chord and m: Amazing animation for John Coltrane's "Giant Steps", A musicologist analyzes every fucking Beatles song

For Natalie: A Soviet Poster A Day

For nietzscheswife: Banksy Shop, Brandon Bird

For kaiserin: Social Security Denies Gergor Samsa's Disability Claim

Discourse (fragments)

after Barthes

1. I am waiting for a telephone call, and this waiting makes me more anxious than usual. I pick up and put down three books, skimming over a few pages in each and not quite remembering what I read soon after. I click through websites and chatter away on instant messenger, with one foot out the door in each conversation, as it were, in the event that the phone should ring (a remote chance by this point in the evening to be sure). I walk back and forth in my room, and the various objects have become incorporeal, consumed as I am by my anxiety: it is as though I do not even walk, but rather drift about my room like a mildly hungry ghost, like mist.

2. I am waiting for a sign. And since this is a tale inspired by Barthes, somone who is paying attention might fairly ask, "Is he talking about a sign in the semiotic sense?" It would be a fair question, and the answer is "no." And just as someone might read the word "sign" and impose a semiotics-related signified where there may very well be none, I too overthink, metacogitate, carry out robust internal dialogues about the meaning/non-meaning of an unreturned call. Like a dog I chase my tail, and then, like Ouroboros, devour it.

3. When Barthes wrote A Lover's Discourse, he spoke of the tyranny of the phone when one must be away from it while hoping from a call from the other. He forbids himself to go to the market, the toilet, even to use the telephone for fear of closing off the line when the other finally calls. But almost thirty years have passed, and I needn't share the same concerns: call-waiting, caller ID, the portability of my cellular phone itself--all of these things, one thinks, would alleviate this angst a little bit.

Not so. For when I think of the phone in my pocket, I experience a strange sort of différance where I am more aware of the phone in its state of non-ringing. I reach into my pocket for my keys or wallet, my hand brushes up against the telephone, and my first thought is no call yet. It rings, and when the caller ID displays the name of someone who is not the other, I grow fractionally more resigned... the only thing that causes my anxiety to taper off by degrees is the growing knowledge that I may never receive the call I most desire. It inspires a sort of communicative thanatos, where I realize that I've grown calmer as I realize that the other is quite possibly lost to me. Still, the cellphone is as heavy in my pocket as my heart is within my chest... more "cell" than "phone."

4. I hesitate to unfurl my words toward the other in the way Whitman's spider spins the filaments of its web: "Ever unreeling them--ever tirelessly speeding them." Like this spider I too am noiseless, patient.

Okay. I had my doctor's appointment on Tuesday. I've given myself a few days to be miserable. And now, it's time to beat this thing.

I'm taking medication. Scheduling lessons with a voice teacher who works with students with damaged voices. Completely rethinking my teaching technique to eliminate singing and minimize talking (which is a fun challenge, in a sick way; I feel like I kind of have the teaching gig down, so this will certainly help keep it interesting).

I'm still really sad, and have been pretty weepy and emo for a bit now. This has sparked a huge existential crisis: because so much of my self-concept is wrapped up in my musicianship, then what am I doing here if I can't sing? There was a time in my life when I could sing anything, and that's probably over, regardless of the outcome here.

But people can recover from vocal health issues (two of my colleagues have beaten nodules), and I'm pretty good at getting things I want. I've had to reinvent my entire life three times in the last three-and-a-half years (and am doing so again as I work to get grad school apps done) and have dealt with other traumatic health issues, so I categorically refuse to accept a lifetime of not singing as a foregone conclusion. Seriously, fuck that.

Sigh

Damnit. Reinke's edema/vocal polyp.

In other news, "polyp" is an inherently ugly word, and has now overtaken "yogurt" as my third least-favorite word (however, it's still better than "panties" [great concept, horrible word] and my nemesis "moist").

Eternal Truths, vol. 497

From the zany culture that has brought us such terms as Schadenfreude, Weltschmerz and Angst (leave it to the Germans to have a rich and well-differentiated vocabulary for existential pain), comes this remarkable saying:

Man kann niemanden zu seinem Glück zwingen.

(One can coerce nobody into their own happiness.)

Tonight I rolled up my sleeves, cracked my knuckles, and attacked Jacques Derrida. ^[wiki]

The martial language is no accident. I've dug reading Žižek and Baudrillard, and while I find Foucault somewhat difficult I can take things away from his writing to some extent. But over and over again, I've heard people talk about Derrida's impenetrability, and it's always intimidating. The impression I've always had of Derrida is that his work is something with which one contends. In Aporias he poses the question "Is my death possible?", and I was fully prepared to write "I guess so, motherfucker, and if you weren't dead I'd fucking kill you."

But much to my surprise, I kind of got it. Kind of. I mean, I was reading essays and not Of Grammatology, but I was surprised at how much I understood, and even enjoyed. A friend who is writing a dissertation in which Derrida's notions of the archive are prominently featured told me that she found it was best to read Derrida as though one is on drugs--to not worry about understanding every little thing, but to pick up what you can and trust that rereading will fill in the gaps. Which is the strategy I tried... I didn't read the books so much as let them wash over me, and had a cool little evening as a result.

-----

The most humbling conversation that I've had in a while (over IM, with nietzscheswife):

BONE: I'm stressed about the foreign language requirement... they expect you to have a reading knowledge of two foreign languages by the time you're done. I did Italian in college, but it was years ago and I really sucked at it then. I'll have to do German, since there's a lot of scholarship in the musicology field in that language, and because I'll be studying medieval music I should probably learn Latin. That freaks me out more than the German.

NIETZSCHESWIFE: Well, I can still help you with Italian and French and Spanish and German if you like. And I could help you with Latin and Greek too. :D Pronunciation would be a bit difficult but linguistic transcriptions would help. There are also wonderful texts and websites in which pronunciation may be heard.

BONE: Seven languages. Life is so not fair. :)

Fuck.

My life flows on in endless song;
Above earth’s lamentation
I hear the sweet though far off hymn
That hails a new creation:
Through all the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing;
It finds an echo in my soul--
How can I keep from singing?
Baptist hymn, 1860

This was one of my favorite hymns when I was actively Christian, and I still think it's a lovely song... but I gotta tell you, I enjoyed it a lot more when I could still see the last line in that verse as a rhetorical question.

The voice took another downward turn this past week. I finally decided to pay out-of-pocket for top-notch care, and thus have a competent otolarngologist (the physician referenced in this article... ok, stop snickering!). A short course of steroids was prescribed (I'm singing some Mendelssohn this Sunday), and I have a followup on Tuesday so that he can look at the vocal folds without the obsence amount of inflammation currently present.

I'm cautiously optimistic... the doctor is very highly regarded, and even though it's gonna cost a mint (although, he did give me a discount, which was really fucking rad of him) I feel like someone is finally involved who knows what the hell he's doing. But still, it's always a little heartbreaking to open up my mouth and not sound the way I once did. Bleah.

A young man in Japan arranged his circumstances so that he was able to travel to a distant island to study Zen with a certain Master for a three-year period. At the end of the three years, feeling no sense of accomplishment, he presented himself to the Master and announced his departure. The Master said, "You've been here three years. Why don't you stay three months more?" The student agreed, but at the end of the three months he still felt that he had made no advance. When he told the Master again that he was leaving, the Master said, "Look now, you've been here three years and three months. Stay three weeks longer." The student did, but with no success. When he told the Master that absolutely nothing had happened, the Master said, "You've been here three years, three months, and three weeks. Stay three more days, and if, at the end of that time, you have not attained enlightenment, commit suicide." Towards the end of the second day, the student was enlightened.

John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings