Monthly Archives: September 2003
September 8, 2003
There’s nothing like cheerleading practice to make you feel fat, old, and useless.
And if anybody leaves a comment saying “You’re not useless!” I’m kicking your ass.
September 7, 2003
Thursday I went on a date with somebody I met through Planet Out. We were having dinner and talking about Star Wars. He said, “I was ten when I first saw that movie, and the first time Darth Vader came on screen, I thought, ‘Now there’s somebody I could really like a lot.'”
It became clear to me in that instant that we were meant to be together.
So I was very excited to go out with him again last night. We had dinner again, went book shopping, went book shopping at another place, and went back to his apartment, where we made out.
And there was no spark at all.
This guy is cute, smart, funny, stimulating, compassionate, and, one assumes, given that he responded to me after reading my profile, a top. And yet there was just nothing there.
Clearly I am going about this the wrong way.
Now, if somebody would just tell me what the right way is, I’d be all set.
September 5, 2003
In Handel’s opera Scipione, the heroine, Berenice, sings:
Ahi! Non bastan
le mie pene
ch’altri viene
pi
September 4, 2003
Please forgive my recent silence. I haven’t had internet access in almost two days and I think I’m going to lose my mind. (I’m posting this during a brief break in the class I’m teaching at NYU, so I’m using their computers.)
Wish me luck and hope I don’t return a raving lunatic.
September 1, 2003
With each passing year since I hit eighteen, my mental faculties have declined. As a child I enjoyed doing things like arguing in favor of debunked revisionist theories of history, like that the munitions manufacturers had been responsible for World War One (“Look! It’s all right there in the Nye Commission report!”). Nowadays I read books with titles like Pawn of Prophecy or Enchanter’s Endgame, and if I comprehend the headlines on the front page of the paper on my way to cheerleading practice it’s a good day. Simultaneously, my brother—who was always the unintellectual, athletic one—is getting a Ph.D. in American history; our apartment is slowly but surely filling up with books with titles like Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863-1923.
However, the undergraduate musical theater writing class I co-teach at NYU is about to start again, and my co-teacher and I are substantially revising the syllabus, out of a desire to take a broader perspective. We’re considering starting out with a class about the oldest origins of musical theater; that is to say, Dionysian ecstasies.
So earlier tonight I went out and bought Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music and am slowly but surely making my way through it.
And my God, I’d forgotten how wonderful it feels to think.
