Monthly Archives: May 2003

I am so in love.

Now I just need to find out if he is, too, so I’ll know whether to be delirious with joy or kill myself.

N.B.: This is my second post of two today.

Yesterday I started work on the closing number for the musical I’m writing about the concentration camp Terezin. My brilliant lyricist gave me a lyric that contained lines like:

And if the sun should blacken,
That would seem like justice.

and

In all the idiotic beauty of the world,
How do I find a way to live?

So after spending all day writing music that had to express definitively the meaning of the Holocaust, I went to cheerleading practice and jumped up and down and shouted “Here we go! Cheer loud! Cheer proud! The leader of the crowd!”

Sometimes I kind of love my life.

N.B.: This is my first post of two today, after inexplicably forgetting to post on Sunday. Well, not inexplicably, as I spent six hours cheering my heart out at the AIDS Walk—those of you who said you’d sponsor me had better pony up; details to follow—but somewhat disconcerting nonetheless.

He e-mailed again. We’re going out Wednesday. I hope this isn’t indicative of a pattern, because then we’ll have to put the wedding off until July, and I honestly don’t know that I can wait that long.

He e-mailed. We’re going out Tuesday. He is my 6:00 Friday aerobics instructor. He is also a physics professor and fluent in Italian.

I hope he’s all right with a June wedding.

So if on a Friday you ask a guy out for coffee for the following Tuesday and he says he’d like to get coffee but the next week is really bad because he has a friend in from out of town and final exams to grade but that he’d like to take a rain check but you’re not sure if he means it or not and you see him again the next Friday and he says the upcoming week is much better and the best way to get in touch with him is to e-mail him but you’re still not sure if he means it or not and you e-mail him at 7:44 that evening and he hasn’t responded by 9:36 on Saturday evening and then you remember the horribly sad dream you had the night before that you were in love with an actor who kind of looks like this guy a little bit but in the dream he had become a monk and so he couldn’t do anything with you but that didn’t really matter because he wasn’t in love with you anyway and then you check your e-mail again at 9:39 and the guy still hasn’t responded, does it mean you’ll be alone for the rest of your life?

My ne’er-do-well cousin has written a book that, within days of its publication, is the 78th most often purchased book at amazon.com. I find it almost impossible to believe that I share any genetic material with the author of this work, but we look enough alike that, unfortunately, there’s no gainsaying the obvious, if disturbing, truth.

I love working with brilliant geniuses.

A collaborator of mine and I are working on a musical set in a temp agency just after September 11. She sent me the following lyric, for a scene in which a new applicant is being interviewed.

APPLICANT:
One day you wake up weird,
All meaning disappeared,
And everything you’ve feared
Is right beside you.
You thought that you could cope,
But then you find out, nope,
‘Cause every smallest hope
Will be denied you.

All life ends, I have learned.
You’re hot, and then you’re burned,
And everything you’ve earned
Is dust and ashes.
We live like no one’s heard
That every goal’s absurd
And every dream deferred
Until it crashes.

INTERVIEWER:
I . . . I need to rate you on perkiness.

Every once in a while, I think that I know some really weird people, but then I come across something like this (thanks to this man) and then I realize how very sheltered my life actually is.

When I worked as the weekend supervisor at the music library of my college (oh, the power!) I had a boss, D.N., who was a very nice but very strange man. I got into the habit of encouraging him to leave early when I got there on Friday, which he usually did. We both found this a suitable arrangement and tended to stay out of each others’ way.

Every once in a while, though, he would try to tell me something or explain something to me. The problem was that he would talk for ten minutes without saying anything at all, and then say exactly one thing. At first this was excruciating, but eventually I learned that, if I zoned out for most of his speech, my spider sense would alert me when he was about to say the one thing that he had been going for all along. Then I would zone back in, he would say the one thing, I would interrupt him and say, “Perfect, D., it’s taken care of,” and that would stop the whole thing.

This worked fine until one day he said, “Faustus, we need to dialogue vis-à-vis the barcoding project.” (He actually talked like this.) So we went into his office, and he started talking. I zoned out and he talked and talked . . . and then he stopped talking and looked at me expectantly. Clearly he thought he had asked a question or stated something to which some sort of response on my part would be appropriate; in fact he had actually talked for fifteen minutes without saying a single thing.

I sat, staring at him in silence, as he waited for my response. I was in a precarious position. I could try to bluff my way out of it, but I had absolutely no idea as to the direction the bluff should go. If I said the wrong thing I might find later that I had agreed to rebarcode all the scores myself. But I clearly had to do something. My heart was in my throat and the tension was growing thicker by the second.

So I looked him in the eye and said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Then he talked for ten more minutes, he said the one thing, I told him it was taken care of, and he left early.

When I think about what a coward I am now, sometimes it helps to remember that I used to be brave.

Near the end of my college days, an editorial called “In Defense of Liberal Education” appeared in the campus paper. It contained sentences like “Diversity is in vogue wherever the many rule or wherever power belongs to the mediocre” and “Liberal education is anti-democratic, shunning what is vulgar and variegated in order to perfect the few best souls through intense study of the few great books.” The editorial wrapped up as follows:

There is not enough space here to supply an adequate roadmap for a liberal education. But a good procrustean rule of thumb is to doubt everything modern, which means all philosophy, literature, art, and music less than 180 years old. . . . But wherever one begins, one must ultimately turn to the exceedingly difficult works of Plato and Aristotle. . . . The liberal education aims to produce the whole human being, who possesses everything of genuine worth, who lives in truth rather than ignorance, and whose soul has come to rest. . . . The word diversity . . . stems from the word divert, which means “to turn aside from a course or direction,” “to distract,” and “to amuse or entertain.” Diversity is as false, fragmentary, and shallow as liberal education is true, whole, and deep. Let us not be diverted from what is good by what is fashionable.

I was going through some papers earlier today and found the letter I wrote in response to this, which the paper published:

The most surprising of the many errors in L.I.’s column is his careless derivation of the word “diversity,” which is related far less to “divert” than it is to the Latin diversitas, “difference, disagreement.” I am amazed that I. finds distasteful one of the most fundamental principles of liberal education—listening to those who disagree with you—but seems not to mind making public errors that could be avoided by spending two minutes with the Oxford English Dictionary. And I.’s injunction to “doubt . . . all philosophy, literature, art, and music less than 180 years old”—this includes, incidentally, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and every word published by Dickens—is simply bizarre.

Maybe I. feels that Plato and Aristotle are sufficient weapons with which to battle the confusion of the modern world, but I for one lack his confidence. I have read Plato and Aristotle (in English and in Greek), and I still need all the help I can get. I hope I. will forgive me for including the work of women and minorities in my search for viewpoints that will challenge me rather than pat me on the back. I. has chosen Plato and Aristotle as the end of his liberal education. They are the beginning of mine.

If only I were still smart enough to be that vicious today.