ooh goodie, a new aria....

for any of you who care, i'm going to start working on this aria from previn's a streetcar named desire....


i can smell the sea air. ah, the sea...the blessedest thing that God created in the seven days. the rest of my days i'm going to spend on the sea. and when i die, i'm going to die there, on the sea, that sea! one day out on the ocean i will die. i will die with my hand in the hand of some good-looking nice ship's doctor with a small blonde moustache. and he'll have a silver watch, and he'll look at his silver watch, and sadly say: "poor lady." i'll be buried at sea. dropped overboard, sewn up in a clean white shroud. at the stroke of noon on the blaze of summer into an ocean as blue as my first love's eyes.

A light low in the East,
As I lie there,
It shows but does not move,
A light, a light as a thought,
Forgotten comes again.

The forest world is waking,
A thousand leaves are beginning to gleam.
Later on, as I rise,
It shows through the tree,
And lights the dark grey rock,
And something in the mind,
And brings the quiet day.

And tomorrow, tomorrow,
The light as a thought,
Forgotten comes again, again,
And with it ever,
And with it ever,
The hope of the New Day.

Sunrise Charles Ives

[sweet piece for voice, violin & piano]

oh they got me.

"I've always wondered why David Hasselhoff was so popular in Germany," began the charming radio man... "and last night was no exception."

[proceeds to play a horrendous clip of Hasselhoff singing "This Is the Moment" from Jekyll & Hyde on America's Got Talent--out of tune, lots of screaming--simply terrifying.]

"Oh god, not the key change...." [screams harder.]

"And here it is folks, the money note..." [a big scoop and then SLAM.]

"Wow."

"Yikes."

"David Hasselhoff, I hate to say it, but you are lousy."

"We know the Germans like you, but that's because they drink a lot of dark beer, and everything sounds better when you're drinking dark beer."

"But what I do admire is your lack of self-consciousness. I would be mortified to do that on the nation's number one tv show."

"Yeah, good point. We applaud you, Hoff."

"Yeah, we would never hassel the Hoff."

I was in tears the whole way to work in the car.

batten down the hatches!

okay, it is like frickin' hurricane andrew outside, and no one seems to notice.

does anyone care that my lightweight dodge neon is probably sailing down walnut street by now?? ah, it's just as well. i've sold my life to this place anyway. i might as well take the liberty of tacking up a hammock in the back room and making my nest there. let's see, what else will i need? i guess the hot-pot from college that was used exclusively for the creation of "all things ramen noodle" would be useful. there's a frightfully filthy mini fridge under the circulation desk that would be perfect for storing a bottle of water, a yogurt, and three grapes--(wait, does cyanide need to be refrigerated? if it does, the yogurt's out.)

seriously, i'm pretty sure the ark just floated past the student center. it certainly didn't pick up anyone as potential candidates for reproduction....

this day could not possibly go any slower. luckily, i have a charming dinner date to look forward to. (curse those dangling prepositions!)

wait, seriously?

like a flash in the pan, two years have gone before me. how did that happen? maybe i blinked and missed a month or so. exactly two years ago today, i moved to new jersey. i remember the day very clearly. my parents helped me shove all of my worldly possessions (which equalled a bed, a bookshelf, and a rather large toaster oven) into my rinky-dink apartment that would soon be sucking astronomical amounts of money from my bank account. after a day of the usual arguing and such, they left for pittsburgh, and there i was sitting on the floor of my furniture-less home, crying like a baby at my new surroundings. was i really going to do this? did i really think that i could get my masters? i better study my ass off for all of those entrance exams so i don't get too behind. will i ever be able to afford a couch to sit on? why does it smell so much like paint all the time? none of my neighbors speak english. but i'll never get to see my friends from college again! no one here will be like the friends i have just left. where the heck is the grocery store? oh my god, i forgot to mapquest how to get to the school from here. what if i'm late on my first day? um, will i actually be able to pay my rent? did somebody just get shot in the parking lot? wow, i've never felt so alone.

and look what's happened now. i love living here. despite my best efforts, i have made some pretty incredible friends. i live in a great townhouse in a really accessible area. i'm not too far from the ocean and my extended family. i have spent more money that i ever dreamed, but now i am also earning some to even it out. i have grown so much as a musician and an artist while i have been here, not to mention what i've learned as a woman and christian. my horizons are far broader, my mind more open. questions have not so much been answered as they have been raised. i realize i know practically nothing in the grand scheme of things, and yet i know so much more than i did when i first arrived.

all i can say is, i really did it, and i'm so glad i did. so now, when i'm approaching the future with fear and trepidation, not knowing which step to take next, i have to remind myself that this is all a part of the journey. i guess we'll see what i'm writing two years from today.

shoot out at high noon.

"You might get me in the rush...but not before I turn your head into a canoe."

Travis quoting Wyatt Earp in Tombstone during our rubber band fight at work yesterday.

love, love, love.

i re-learned an important thing about love yesterday.

it's one of those things that i already knew in another life. i don't think that i have truly experienced it yet in my own, but i have heard it through several, reputable grapevines that this is so. love is a mysterious matter. it is easy to get the idea of love all tangled up with attraction and affection and what not.* it is embarrassing how often i do this. if those damn butterflies show up in my stomach, all of my senses go out the window. i've been trying to so hard to step back, sit down, have a cup of coffee, and discern what is true and what is not.

yesterday someone reminded me of something very important--it is the rare person who fosters peace in your heart.

it's a different kind of butterfly. it's deeper, more solid. like the filling up of a well. an overwhelming sense of wholeness. something so beautiful and exceptional that i cannot seem to stop myself from smiling.

*read c.s. lewis' the four loves if you have yet to do so.

one of those golden moments.

As a child, I never learned how to shoot a rubber band.

I think a whole host of childhood instruction in fun and/or violent activities was not taught to me in my youth. I never learned to throw a frisbee or make a slingshot or a decent paper airplane or even do any of those tricks with shoelaces like "cats in the cradle" or "jacob's ladder." i'm not sure really how i missed out on all of these rather landmark moments in a kid's life. i find that in my twenties my lack of these seemingly useless yet time-honored skills have come back to haunt me quite a bit. often times, my little cousins will ask me how to do certain things, and i am forced to hang my head in shame and say to the young cubs, "alas, i know not how."

but today, oh today, kyle made my life brighter by teaching me how to shoot a rubber band. i've always been too embarrassed to ask anyone before. "hey, mine always hits my thumb [and hurts me] when i try it...." how lame is that? but he didn't judge me. he just said that i wasn't putting it far enough on the tip of my thumb to aim it proper-like.

so i was extremely excited, you see, to shoot a rubber band for the very first time in all of the 24 years of my life. unfortunately, i was so blinded by my joy that i didn't bother to aim it very well.... the rubber band sprang from my fingertips, soaring through the air with grace and ease..... my face lit up as do the delighted eyes of a child when filled with wonder at a new discovery....

that is, until the rubber band flew right over the cubicle wall of my boss and most likely landed on her while she was clearly participating in an important phone call. and just like that, my little bubble of happy was burst with the fear of reprimand and termination. soon they would all know my secret--that i am merely a child in a woman's body, forever seeking adventure and mischief in a world that requires me to be an adult against my will.

new favorite song.

this lyrical masterpiece is in a score called The Malvina Reynolds Songbook. enjoy.

we don't need the men

[words and music by malvina reynolds]

it says in coronet magazine, june nineteen fifty-six, page ten,

that married women are not as happy as women who have no men.

married women are cranky, frustrated and disgusted,

while single women are bright and gay (high E, fermata here), creative and well-adjusted.

oh we don't need the men, we don't need the men

we don't need to have them round except for now and then.

they can come to see us when we need to move the piano,

otherwise they can stay at home and read about the White Sox.

we don't care about them, we can do without them,

they'll look cute in a bathing suit on a billboard in Manhattan.

oh we don't need the men, we don't need the men
we don't need to have them round except for now and then.

they can come to see us when they're feeling pleasant and agreeable,

otherwise they can stay at home and holler at the TV programs.

we don't care about them, we can do without them,

they'll look cute in a bathing suit on a billboard in Madagascar.

oh we don't need the men, we don't need the men
we don't need to have them round except for now and then.

they can come to see us when they're all dressed up with a suit on,

otherwise they can stay at home (spoken) and drop towels in their own bathroom.

we don't care about them, we can do without them,
they'll look cute in a bathing suit on a billboard in Tierra del Fuego.

i love loons.

many rather colorful people waltz into the library every day. but the man who came in at 8:30 this morning may be my favorite. picture an anemic-looking Rudy Giuliani in a grey tee shirt and glasses, carrying a mysterious roll of paper--probably blueprints to the library because he's planning on infiltrating the sacred westminster archives once he's gained our trust.

here was his opening monologue:

"I have no credentials. I cannot prove to you who I am because I have no identification, but I would like to make use of your library. I'm a 1970 graduate of Princeton High School, a 1976 graduate of Rutgers University, and a 1985 graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary. I don't know what else to say because I have no credentials. I would like to make photocopies of all of the Bach cantatas I do not already own. I will need to make use of your card catalog. Let's see, what else....I'm a liberal Protestant, a minister...and I don't have a card or credentials because of the blunders of your predecessors."

Wow. Who let him out of the loony bin? I'd like to shake his hand. That was the funniest thing I have ever seen. I think I'll take him home.

the funny thing about libraries is....

you never know when there's going to be a raptor attack. never.

mike--the cool guy who works with me--just did his best raptor imitation and has decided to implement random raptor attacks on the patrons. love that guy.

ah, the joy of fellow employees.

is there anything so sweet as comraderie in the workplace?

nay, i say.

honestly, i don't know how i would survive if most of my friends didn't work at this here library. my boss says, "wow, never have we had so many good student workers." gee, i wonder why that is. they've followed me here, my little minions. like the pied piper of princeton, i lured them into my web of silent boredom. they didn't expect the toll this would take on our friendships. they're forced to give a smile, especially now that i'm their supervisor, when i say things like, "have you met my friend dewey? dewey decimal? MWAHAHA." those poor schmucks. i love them.

today my friend becki, who also works far too much at this mind-crippling establishment, said something that i rather loved:

"I'm not a bitch. I'm just brazen and cantankerous at times." this coming from a disillusioned 27-year-old with a hysterical way with words. i'm gonna miss the old gal when she goes back to massachusettes in august.

i don't even know what i was saying anymore. oh yes. my friends. i count my lucky stars for them. they make me pictures and leave me notes and send me emails reminding me that the sun is still shining outside and that my existence is not futile after all. praise be.

(This picture came up on google images under "comraderie.")

there were bells on a hill.....

or the lights in the library are just ringing.

a lot.

on 4th-line D, if you must know.

i'm sure you were wondering.

it's making me insane.

it also keeps making me want to sing "peace i leave with you," which started on the same pitch.

wow, i'm quite the nerd.

only three more hours of work to go.

yipee kayo kayay.

(that's hard to spell).

silence is not so much golden as it is a rather insipid shade of mauve.

i have been staring at the puce-colored curtain for well over six hours today. it is a shabby one, a makeshift wall of a cubicle in the way it covers the high, chain link fence that surrounds my desk. it makes me think of my grandparents' house in mckeesport whose perimeter sported just such a fence and whose interior walls were painted with almost this exact, putrid shade of pinkish brown. i have tried to spice things up a bit with some black and white photos of the city and italy and even a great oil pastel of watermelons on a table in the summertime. it has helped, but nothing will ever erase this color from my mind as having one of the most boring associations ever, in all of my insignificant history.

also, it is just so damn quiet in here.



that is, except for the banshees.*

downstairs there are some rather warbly and hooty sopranos singing into the rafters in a manner that irish folklore would deem worthy of summoning the chariots of death. i'm sure that all the dogs within a six-mile radius have buried their heads as far as they can into the earth by now. those lucky pups. meanwhile, i have to sit up here and endure the squeaky strains that somehow filter up through the cement floors into my sensitive ears.

i find that my hearing has become rather acute after working here. someone is clicking a mouse. there is a person, no a girl, sitting on the other side of the mauve curtain tapping a pencil on the desk. ken is flipping through papers in the back. someone is writing on an index card. a chair squeaks on the other side of the room. the door slammed shut. my keyboard is deafening. the sound of my own breathing is like a tornado.

either i've been working in the library too long, or i'm becoming a superhero. i desperately hope it's the latter. and maybe i'll even get a cape.

*once Michelle and Annie both thought, simultaneously, that banshees were in fact weird monkeys.

i hate root beer.

who the heck wants to drink beer from a root anyway? not me.

many of you who know me well know that i have never vomited. i have no gag reflex. i often get nauseous, but i never ultimately throw up. never in my known memory. however, the closest i have ever come to doing so, i believe, is when i was in second grade. i remember it clearly..... i was still sharing a bedroom with my brother at this point. we had twin beds that could not be far enough apart, as far as i was concerned. he was a royal pain in my tail...but that's another story. anyway, one day, in second grade, i became violently ill with some kind of 24-hour flu type thing of death. i would not eat anything. it was then that my mother, in her infinte wisdom, thought that she would give me some soda to help my ailing stomach. apparently we were fresh out of ginger ale (which i also detest, by the by), so root beer was the next logical choice. all i remember is taking a few long sips, and before all of it reached my little tortured tummy, it all shot right back up and out, burning my esophagus and forever tainting my traumatized taste buds.

call me pavlov's dog, but to this day, root beer conjures up a sympathetic taste response that is the closest thing to vomit i have ever known. so y'all can just stop trying to sway me with your sentiments in favor of the "all-American beverage." you can have as much of your patriotic carbonated barf water as you like. just keep it away from me.

i've been thinking about feminism a lot today.

i have never liked talking about societal paradigms.

why is that?

i think people get all up in arms about a lot of things. don't get me wrong. i think many of these issues are very important and worthwhile. however, i think that a lot of people, particularly those in my age/peer group, just like to talk about them without allowing "their" opinions to actually infiltrate their lives.

wow, i've already bored myself to tears.

all i wanted to eat for dinner was pizza. when you work at a library, eating pizza is not appropriate, i suppose. apparently, according to the paradigm, i crave pizza because i am italian. this is a bald-faced lie. so, just to fight this malarkey, i instead ordered a gyro. of course, half the world thinks i'm greek anyway because of my misleading last name. i give up.

(and in case you're wondering, no, i don't pronounce it "wheero" because that's just "queero".)

as the Italians would say,

"era un buon week-end."

• driving rules. i did a LOT of it. jack (my car) and i are like two peas in a pod on the road of life. (i think that's a willie nelson song).
• i had coffee with the one and only debbie richard
• katie & travis' rehearsal/luau was a ball....i even got to see monica and finally meet THE joel boerckel.
• stayed at jen's. had pancakes in the morning. realized i had packed NOTHING appropriate for the wedding. i've sung at like 603 weddings, you'd think i'd realize that you can't dress like a hobo. panic ensued. unlikely resolution occurred, and i ended up looking not half bad.
• wedding was be-a-u-tiful. of course it was. k&t were just so happy and excited, and it was so easy to see how ridiculously in love they are. that makes me have hope, you know? everything went so well.
• hung out with jen, katie & tim, and nick and rachel at cheesecake factory....so nice.....fun news........i'm getting old.
• woke up at 4:30AM to drive back to ol' jersey because i had to sing at church. LAME. but, drive home = awesome because of the great mix cd that katie and travis made.... "i believe in a thing called love" is my new favorite song.
• way way way WAY impromptu dinner party tonight ended up being a huge success and time hanging out with new people i don't really know, plus some other people i know and love dearly.
• bored yet? i could go on for YEARS.
• but i won't.
• hope your weekend was good, too.

"and time goes by so slowy..."

...and time can do so much....to my sanity.

i've been sitting in the library for the past fifteen minutes desperately longing for 9pm to arrive. these night shifts will be the death of me--particularly when they don't end until 10 during the school year.

tonight we have a birthday festival for miss carly. yippee!

tomorrow i leave for katie and trav's wedding....i'm very excited for that.

in between i need to sleep. hmmmm...

is there anything else dreadfully boring i can share with you?

-i need to paint my nails
-the oil and vinegar on my sandwich tasted remarkably like pickle juice
-the dust on my fan seems to be hindering its fannedness
-the rain washed all of the bird shat off my car
-i strangely like unsweetened herbal iced tea...

WHOA IT'S NINE!

the little joys.

[cue cheesy hallmark music]

it's easy to become bogged down by the everyday things that, well, are rather boggy. take me, for instance. i work at a library. i'm not allowed to use my outside voice all day long. fluorescent lighting does next to nothing for my color. it's a near travesty. or watch the news or observe the way people interact with one another on a daily basis. we have to pay our lame bills and fix our cars when they mysteriously stop working. we have to do a lot to please people who will never please us. and sometimes it seems to take an awful lot of work to be happy.

but sometimes it takes no work at all.

these three kids are the most amazing children in the history of small persons everywhere. and my heart is so happy when i am with them that i can hardly stand it.

back from the dead.

"Adventure, with all its requisite danger and wildness, is a deeply spiritual longing written into the soul of a man."
[john eldredge]

after more than three months of a hiatus from blogging, i have returned. (my throngs of followers in the blogging community may now rejoice wildly.)

is it a cop out to say that i've been really busy?? yes, that's lame. unfortunately, it's also true. and what's even more sad is that now that i have a full-time job, i will have much more time to write on this little thingymerdoo. ironic.

adventures in a nutshell (a pistachio perhaps?):
-passed my masters oral exams with much grinding and gnashing of teeth (3.28)
-performed my graduate recital that was well-attended by many people i loved (4.14)
-reached the frighteningly dull age of 24 (4.17)
-successfully completed my surprisingly insightful pedagogy project on the affects of performance anxiety pre-professional vocalists (4.27)
-had many delightful gatherings and parties (first week of may)
-new cousin, lukas john, was born (5.07)
-graduated with my masters degree in vocal pedagogy and performance (5.12)
-moved into a new townhouse at 34 gervin (5.13)
-went to charleston to visit the boys at the spoleto usa festival (5.22)
-ran off to italy to sing and travel for a month and spend all of my money (5.27)
-returned with much joy and frivolity and now have a full-time job at the college (7.01)

there you have it.


on the agenda for the summer so far (besides gads and gads of work):

-4th of july party at aunt lisa & uncle matt's (7.04)
-carly's fantabulous birthday extravaganza (7.05)
-travis & katie's glorious wedding--and also seeing jen! (7.07)
-bastille day festivities (7.14)
-michelle visits princeton!!! (7.27)

now that you know my life, i leave you.