more work on the talks and some gym, housework. actually i wanted to meet jodie tonight because we haven't seen each other for two weeks, but she doesn't feel very well and texted that she didn't felt like seeing anybody. not even me :-(
alice sent over some 'smog' mp3s which are playing now while i'm reading up on canadian literary history to prepare for the orals.
feel like this day:
so, met with elaine this morning and she assisted me buying a suit. well, 'assisted' is not really the right term since she made practically all decisions from where to buy over what to buy to why to buy. i ended up spending 600 fucking euro i don't have (that's about 850$ folks!) - but she picked out a really nice, trendy, good looking dark hugo boss suit. i hadn't planned to spend so much but fact is that - since i'm rather tall and have long arms - i need some special suit-size which you don't get in the stores that are moderately prized.
elaine got me when she said:
"that suit looks so good on you! and imagine you're wearing *this* for your next concert! you're playing a really shabby bar wearing this classy suit!" and she kept mentioning again and again that it was the kind of fashion "those english guys are wearing in the music magazines". she called the one we picked a "babyshambles suit"...
ten hours at the office, working on the talks. then a call from the dean's office and i almost had to postpone the orals. then home and gym and now it's ten already and i've nada prepared the seminar session for tomorrow: annie dillard's "pilgrim at tinker creek" guess i'll have to improvise.
hm, a not-so-good gym day today. can it be that 15km every other day eventually leads to a kind of general wornoutness? there isn't really anything to report because a more uneventful week-end you could not imagine. work, gym and some housework.
"your words can charm a swarm of homing birds out of the sky" i said.
"is that all you can come up with?"
"no, there's more : your tales can fool a school of migrating whales onto the shore."
pretty worn out. has been a very long day. talked to princess superstar yesterday night for the first time since she gave birth to her baby boy. stumbled across two beautiful lines in dillard which i will use for the new song which doesn't have a title yet: "I am dazzled in days and lost. I live in tranquility and trembling."
wish i could have back the six months i wasted on learning latin and use them writing songs or prose. (because today the new guidelines for the phd exam got passed by the committee finally [see http://1000plateaus.blog.com/2221308/]. however, ironically thomas had all of a sudden set his mind to move heaven and earth during the past two weeks to change the changed guidelines with the result that you don't need to know any latin at all now. which means that i've worked my butt off in vain.)
and the vision that was planted in my brain still remains within the sound of silence.
stumbled across these beautiful passages in pilgrim at tinker creek while preparing tomorrow's session:
A kind of northing is what I wish to accomplish, a single-minded trek towards that place where any shutter left open to the zenith at night will record the wheeling of all the sky's stars as a pattern of perfect, concentric circles. I seek a reduction, a shedding, a sloughing off.
At the seashore you often see a shell, or fragment of a shell, that sharp sands and surf have thinned to a wisp. There is no way you can tell what kind of shell it had been, what creature it had housed; it could have been a whelk or a scallop, a cowrie, limpet, or conch. The animal is long since dissolved, and its blood spread and thinned in the general sea. All you hold in your hand is a cool shred of shell, an inch long, pared so thin it passes a faint pink light, and almost as flexible as a straight razor. It is an essence, a smooth condensation of the air, a curve. I long for the North where unimpeded winds would hone me to such a pure slip of bone.
[...]
Last year I saw three migrating Canada geese flying low over the frozen duck pond where I stood. I heard a heart-stopping blast of speed before I saw them; I felt the flayed air slap at my face. They thundered across the pond, and back, and back again: I swear I have never seen such speed, such single-mindedness, such flailing of wings. They froze the duck pond as they flew; they rang the air; they disappeared. I think of this now, and my brain vibrates to the blurred bastinado of feathered bone. [...] It is the shock I remember. Not only does something come if you wait, but it pours over you like a waterfall, like a tidal wave. You wait in all naturalness without expectation or hope, emptied, translucent, and that which comes rocks and topples you; it will shear, loose, launch, winnow, grind.
i want to write, too.
fixed a date today with elaine. she will help me pick a suit for the defense of the thesis. i don't own one so we'll have to go shopping. i don't have a shirt either. or a tie. or black shoes. this is gonna be one costly exam!
had a loooot of fun with elaine today at the office. i guess you call it 'galgenhumor' – gallows humor. my pc at work is bugged and all day long some guy from the tech department sat at my desk and tried to fix it.
"hm" he mused "this won't be easy." and he predicted that it will take until tomorrow evening. he was the same guy that spent hours and hours at my colleague jenny's office the other week. so tonight on our way home jenny and i were joking about it.
"he really seemed to feel at home" i said "i bet he prefers sitting in our offices rather than being back at the tech department. he's probably getting harassed by the other nerds who are constantly hiding his star trek coffee mug!"
"fuck a duck!" jenny exclaimed "how did you know?"
"know what?"
"when he was testing the internet connection of my computer he went to the star trek website!"
hm, maybe i *am* psychic after all.
my pc at home is shutting itself down every two hours without prior warning, so i thought it might be time to finally defragment the hard drive. which it is currently doing and which seems to take until early in the morning. just realized that i cannot update the journal via the ibook (on which i'm writing now) because the site keeps crashing in safari and the explorer won't accept my password. three cheers to technology! so i guess it'll have to wait till tomorrow.
listened all day long to a great cover version of the smiths' "headmaster rituals" by radiohead which alice had sent me the other day.
