What I have been doing lately: Burying my nose in books

Tigger and I would spend all day out here if we could

I have had a life-long love affair with public libraries. We go through our rough patches. I get busy and neglectful. The libraries can be of varying quality. But in the end, it seems, I am destined to come back again and again to how amazing it is that I can, for free, walk into a building full of books, pick one, remove it from the shelf, take it home, and lose myself for hours. My weekend productivity is way down. My practicing suffers. Perhaps it's not the healthiest of relationships. It's admittedly a little one sided, and, for my part, borders on obsessive. At long last, I recently joined Goodreads. I haven't gotten much into writing my own reviews, but I've gotten a lot of excellent recommendations from friends and strangers by looking at what other people are reading. Those people who do write reviews are more often than not thoughtful and engaging in their commentary. Such a refreshing change of pace from the internet at large. My library branch here isn't huge. For its size, it has a pretty impressive fiction section, but the real magic is that I haven't found a book yet that the Austin Public Library system won't send winging my way just because I requested it on a whim. Look, I know none of this is news. But in this day and age, I feel like it bears repeating that public libraries are fantastic. Do I still buy books sometimes? Of course. Do I support Amazon in doing so? Yes, sometimes. But I'm never going to plunk down the money represented by the number of books I read from the public library any more than I would buy every single show I watch on Netflix or Hulu. And the books have the benefit of being available to me for free, and free of advertising. Can I stress enough how cool this is?

Time, Loss and Gain of

I see this view a lot

When I moved here, I lost a few parts of my life. Largely, I lost a lot of ways to spend my time. This sounds like an odd thing to be concerned about, I will grant you. It is annoying to have to spend an hour getting anywhere in Boston, whether you are walking, driving, or T-ing. In some ways, of course I don't miss that at all. But when you walk somewhere, you also take your time. You look into store windows. You scope out the apartment listings on that realtor you pass every day just because they're there. You stop for italian ice at that sketchy looking pizza place where you've never actually eaten pizza. On the bus, you read a magazine. On the T, you people-watch and are never bored (cranky or bemused, but not bored). Here, where everything is expansive everyone drives a car, only the poor and the hipster take the bus, and I spend about an hour every day just driving myself to and from work. As daily commutes go, I realize this isn't that bad. Some people commute for hours each way. But frankly, I think those people are psycho. Anyway, the thing is that even spending an hour in the car on a given day I have, on average, halved the amount of time I spend getting to and fro. And in the process, I've lost the little delays and distractions that make the journey interesting. So in a way, I've simultaneously acquired more free time and a lot more boredom. This doesn't even take into consideration the free time produced by living alone, by not having a TV let alone a game console, and by the relative desert of gigs that has been Spring in Austin 2011. But fret not, gentle reader! For I have not been sitting idly by, watching my life zoom past! Wait, actually I HAVE been doing that. But I have also been doing some other things. So I'm going to write a few blog posts about those things. I figure this might also make up for the fact that I've been completely terrible about blogging lately, as Aphy has often mentioned.

A Shot in the Dark

It's cold here. Finally, legitimately, cold. When it got down to the 30s around Christmas, it was chilly. I got out my gloves and hat, and carried on. I went home to Cleveland, enjoyed seeing the snow, shivered, and came back down here to Texas where it was probably in the 40s. This morning, it was 21 when I went out to my car at 10:30am, and I would call that actually cold. Of course, I already knew that it was actually cold because my apartment has zero insulation and incredibly leaky sliding glass doors. Last night, I slept with long underwear on under my PJs, which I have never done before! To be fair, that's probably because somehow I never thought of it before. Anyway, apparently I am not alone in thinking that this is legitimately cold, because apparently Texas ran out of power. That's right, folks. With wind-chills in the teens, the Great State of Texas is enforcing rolling blackouts. As one radio show put it this morning, "Wouldn't it suck if you were homeless, and you finally decided that breaking and entering was better than freezing to death and you broke in somewhere only to find that the power was off?" I had power this morning in my apartment, and consequently heat, but who knows what the day will hold. Hopefully my cats and instruments will not have exploded due to the cold if the power's out for a while, because it surely won't stay warm in there on its own, what with the practically open to the outside situation of the sliding doors. At least one set of friends here were unlucky enough to have had their power shut off around the time they needed to get up. Not much worse than getting out of bed into a refrigerator. My only personal experience with the blackouts so far has been the darkness of the traffic light at 2222 and Lamar on the way to work. It's a big intersection, and it took forever to get through it. Some of you may have heard me explain that I have learned Texans are afflicted with a tragic disability that renders them unable to observe the rules of a four way stop. Luckily, I've found that they are at least by and large observant drivers, so if one just takes one's turn gingerly in such situations, oncoming traffic will yield. So, here I am at work, typing away, scanning documents, and hoping that the power doesn't go out. Less out of a desire to preserve the work I'm doing than out of a desire not to be plunged into total darkness here in my windowless office. Good luck to those of you who are actually suffering from winter weather rather than just poor civic planning! I'm off to download the flashlight app for my phone...

The Jigsaw of Life?

There is a carelessness that comes of having a good idea where you fit into the world. The world in question need not be the world at large. It could be as small as your family unit, your work, your play. Great upheavals in our lives lead to a sense of something being askew. That something is us, and the difficulty in adjusting is to place a puzzle piece that doesn't quite fit. Do you reshape the piece, or recut the hole? Or simply try the piece in a different puzzle?

Necessity is the mother of reinvention

I am sitting in my half-empty apartment. The movers came today to take my stuff away. They came 3 hours early, which meant I had to cancel a meeting with my thesis advisor to have him sign it so I could submit it. They took what felt like forever but which was actually just a couple of hours, which, given how long it would have taken me to do myself, was basically instantaneous. When they were gone, I went to meet with the advisor, finally, and although he confessed he had not read it due to technological problems, he said he was confident my work was deserving and signed anyway. From his office, I went to another office to get a form signed, then went to the library to submit my thesis, pay the binding fee, and get the form signed by a different person. Then I took the pink copy of this form back to guy number 2, and then I was officially done with my thesis. Despite the scavenger hunt, it was rather anticlimactic. Anticlimax was somewhat countered by celebratory lemon ice, followed by cleaning. The majority of my Boston friends are either on their way to or already in Vermont this evening. I would have liked to have gone with them, but alas it was not to be. I'm sure they'll have a great time, and they might even miss me a little, but all that leaves me here in my echoing room. As I contemplate losing myself in Assassin's Creed 2 to stave off both the echoes and the silence, it seems as good a time as any to redesign my blog. After all, am I not about to reinvent myself in a way? Blogger made a pretty slick new tool for designing, and it's fun! If only self-reinvention came with templates.

Where?

I have been thinking a lot recently about place. Specifically, if I have one. If so, where is it? If not, how do I find one? Is it something I even need to have? In Cleveland, there is an empty house that was once "home" with all the messy, sentimental glory the term suggests. That glory faded not quite 4 years ago. In Cleveland there is also a house that has become a home again, but not "home." It isn't mine, and I've lived away from it too long to claim it as my own. In Oberlin, I had "home" but had to leave to have "life." Pity when those two can't coexist. In Boston, I have had apartments, dwellings. Boston was never home. Now I am leaving here for somewhere new. What I did not realize when I left for college, or when I left for grad school, is that moving to new places is made significantly easier by knowing that what you're leaving behind is solid. You know, viscerally, that when they say "you can't go back home" they're absolutely right. But you can still visit, and that's as it should be. We grow up, we move away, we come home to visit, and return to our lives. But what happens when "home" is a moving target? My father is being interviewed for a position at Dartmouth. I hope he gets it for a lot of reasons. But the prospect of not having a place to stay in Cleveland is unexpectedly disturbing. Can a city feel like home when you have to sleep on a friend's couch when you go there?

Consort Conspiracy

After a very long time in the works, our first concert is this Friday night! Please come if you're in Boston, and please bring your friends! It's going to be great music, in an entertaining format.

http://www.consortconspiracy.com