Sunday, March 16, 1997
12:05:36 PM
I think there's been a lot going on in life the past weeks and months. Things appear to be going very well. But don't let me bore you with tales of things gone right. Especially since things could just as easily backslide the way they often do.
Yesterday was to be the day I sat here and wrote all day long, just for the sake of talking to myself about everything and sorting out the next few months of life. So much e-mail to catch up on, so many people to talk to, so much to think about, oh so much to do.
Instead I practiced Rachmaninoff most of the afternoon and played Quake all night, and today is shaping up to be similarly desultory. Feel like listening to CDs and drinking coffee all morning, afternoon and night, then getting dressed up and going to a rich bar over on 3rd Avenue (McMullen's would be nice), ordering a Stoli Gimlet and sitting at the bar, stroking the wood of the solid oak counter and secretly eating these jelly beans I bought yesterday. Watching Masterpiece Theater on their TV.
A couple of weeks ago I started messing around with a java-based streaming audio applet from a company called Vosaic. With it, I'm able to put audio files of myself playing piano on this website, though I'm running out of diskspace pretty quickly. The problem is, the audio has to be encoded as .GSM files, and .GSM is not an ideal format for music. Particularly music with any dynamic breadth.
So the only stuff that sounds decent is quiet, even music. I recorded things like Pictures at an Exhibition and part of Charles Ives' Concord Sonata, but the sound quality was wretched and at times the music was simply unrecognizable through all the clipping and distortion.
At any rate, I posted several low-key recordings from some of my demo tapes. One of them is embedded in the frame beneath these words, and there is a link next to that applet which takes you to another page with more stuff. I am really curious to know how it sounds on your computer. I know already that it doesn't work on Macintoshes running Netscape. I was, however, able to get it to work on a Mac running Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0x 128-bit with the java libraries installed. Most people I've asked say it sounds ok w/Windows. Kind of like shortwave radio in terms of sound quality.
I intend to add others, probably later this afternoon. This is one of the things I meant to do yesterday, dammit.
Normally I backtrack while writing sentences, and the first thing I do is take out as many occurances of the word "I" as possible, then get rid of the passive voice wherever it makes sense to do so. Not going to do that right now. Not even going to look at what I'm typing. Just don't feel like it.
Got a new keyboard a couple of weeks ago. Had to throw out the one that came with this computer, it was too small and recalcitrant and literally made my arms hurt just from typing. Before realizing this, 3 weeks had passed and I had not used this computer for anything except games and things that used the keyboard only slightly. This new keyboard is an ergonomic thing, it's like typing onto a woman's breasts.
I'm sitting at my desk. This desk was a gift from a friend several years ago. It's fairly large, and the movers had trouble getting it through the door almost 3 years ago when I took this apartment. Had to dis-assemble and re-assemble; then they almost wrecked my piano. They moved that in and I paced around the still-empty room fidgeting like some nervous old lady getting her Mercedes worked on. This realization forced me to leave the room and just let them do their thing.
For a while it seemed like all my furniture was either a gift or something I found out on the sidewalk. First night I lived here there was no place to sit except the floor or the bed, so I went outside and found a nice comfy chair among another building's trash. Grabbed it, dragged it home, it's still here, but I don't sit in it much. Usually just throw clothes and bags and other crap all over it.
I'm listening to Akhnaten, by Philip Glass, for the first time in about 2 years. Lots of pretty singing la-la-la-laaaaa. I'm supposed to see Das Rheingold next week.
I'm so tired. Might take a vacation this week or the week after. Probably will not be much opportunity for that in the coming months. I'm going to be spending some time in Atlanta. It's a good thing I have no romantic prospects right now. I actually kind of do have such prospects, but I will not date anyone I work with, so that rules out a lot of situations.
Thinking about shutting down the Payphone List. Haven't updated it in months, and don't intend to, so can't decide between leaving it there or trashing it altogether. There are just too many fake numbers in there, and my desire to dial payphones in remote cities and towns and have conversations with whoever is lonely enough to answer and talk has been satisfied. At least for now. Most people found these attempts at conversation to be threatening. Or else just crazy. None of us ever had much of a conversation about it.
I can't think of any other feeling as strange as trying to spot a conversation in that particular manner.
Time to go get more coffee. Maybe even a real coffee-maker.
4:08:42 PM
It's later in the day. My mind keeps wandering into the dust, and I've eaten nothing today except jelly beans and coffee.
Now I'm tapping on the desk and staring at this picture:
It is a copy of a drawing pasted onto a thick piece of cardboard. It cost $1 at a second-hand shop on 2nd Avenue and 80th Street. Not sure why it interested me, but it's been sitting here for over a year and I'm still looking at it, so it must mean something.
It is signed "Steinberg," and dated 1965. It reminds me of how I can only seem to ever draw faces when I'm inclined to draw or doodle anything at all. I try to resist the habit, but no matter what I draw it ends up being a face of some sort. Usually human, but not always. Two eyes a mouth and a nose would seem to be a universal emblem of a face. Maybe I need to look deeper into people.
Now I have the urge to litter this page with irrelevent links to things I wrote last year, or two years ago.
Now I think I'll go outside. Because I can not seem to make this page look anything except an ugly, cluttered eyesore, and it's just not that important right now.