I think Rosh Hashanah is a much more reasonable time to make New Years resolution. January is dreary and forlorn and you're already halfway through the school year.
Things I Would Like to Do Every Day:
- See my friends (significantly, as in a full meal and/ or conversation. Not so much via mass text)
- Write
- Knit
- Drink decent coffee (this is a tall order)
- Have satisfying alone time
- Sing!
I am eating Oreos in bed and it is lovely. The drawback is that Oreo debris is spreading far and wide. Hoisted by my own petard.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Twelve Angry Women
This weekend, my a cappella group spent a total of eighteen hours in a room together as we auditioned new members. For two straight days, chirpy “good morning!”s turned into grunted “have a good evening”s while we listened to sixty girls try out for two spots in the oldest all-female, continuously-run collegiate a cappella group in America. Say that five times fast.
The process was a bit like a bad remake of “Twelve Angry Men,” a film I saw in high school in which twelve jurors are kept in the tightest of quarters until they decide the outcome of a murder trial. The Vassar College Night Owls’ goal of unearthing one or two new Sopranos wasn’t quite so lofty, but after Hour Six it felt like the singular focus of my life to date. We heard scales and arpeggios, snippets of jazz standards and pop hits, and girls who caused us to put our pens down in amazement as well as those who tested the limits of our facial composure. Quite frankly, I was prepared to throw a chair at the next person who dared to mangle a Beatles song in front of me. We tried to maintain our humor and open minds, but once or twice the desire for pizza was stronger than the desire for a new and improved army of musical female goodness.
We don’t operate as you might expect of a group of talented, opinionated women. We genuinely care about the well-being of one another as well as the group, and it’s a testament to our deep bond that we opted to reconvene and hang out only a few hours after we left the audition marathon. When we do come up against a point of contention, we’re uncommonly respectful and articulate while finding a solution. The math of elimination, though, didn’t seem to leave much room for satisfied consensus.
The real trial came once the hopefuls had long since sung and we were left to decide as a group exactly what we were looking for. It wasn’t simply a matter of picking the most talented girls; the Night Owls already comprised twelve members with a full roster of Altos and Basses, and so our needs were almost cripplingly specific. I felt real pain when crossing out the name of a vivacious Alto with a voice like smooth, warm honey off my list of favorites, and I know that other Owls experienced similar loss. Suddenly having the power and the responsibility of determining the group’s future seemed overwhelming. We couldn’t and didn’t all agree on who we wanted or their placement or how to deal with the fact that other a cappella groups might want them as well. What we did agree on was our need to keep the group what it had been while making it into something new and better, and this felt (and perhaps still feels) like an impossible order.
I’m not good at saying no to people. I’m quite good at being critical, but rarely do I act on my judgments by flat-out rejecting somebody. Delivering fifty-eight no’s in rapid succession- worse, fifty-eight not-yeses- weighs on me, despite the fact that I was one of the most dismissive critics in the audition room. I found myself drawing x’s through girls’ names before they had completed a single ascending scale, and that realization doesn’t make me proud. On the one hand, the nature of the group is such that all members need to be able to hold their own musically as well as communally. However, my feeling of inclusion among the Night Owls was thrown into harsh relief by the exclusivity of rejecting so many interested girls. It makes my presence in the group as well as our overall dynamic feel more precious and more tenuous by equal measures.
It’s a matter of fate that I’m a Night Owl to begin with. I knew the second I entered the Raymond parlor last September and stepped into the ring of energetic, brilliant girls that I needed to be a part of this, and I rocked my audition like I never have before or since. My callback the next morning, however, wasn’t quite so charmed; my now-boyfriend and I had had slightly too much fun the night before, and owing to some miracle I woke up fifteen minutes before I was due to sing. I’m still grateful that my freshman roommate hadn’t yet installed curtains, and so the sun streaming through the cheap paper shades was strong enough to stir me. I rushed across campus wearing the same dress as the night before, with my hair scraped up into a stringy bun, and arrived out of breath just in time to be put through the same paces I helped facilitate today. After what I felt was a patchy, forgettable performance on my part, I consoled myself with the thought that I could just try out again the next fall.
I went to the library that evening to finish some homework and put the impending disappointment at the back of my mind. I was reading about something irrelevant like Spanish conjugations or Chaucer when my phone rang. My roommate was calling with some urgent yet vague story about a friend of ours passed out in our room, telling me to hurry back as soon as possible. In this context it’s clear what was going on, but at the time I was fully prepared to call 911. That would have been awkward.
I rushed back to my dorm (there seems to be a lot of running around in connection with my Night Owls membership) and arrived at my hall, where the majority of my friends stood around in a funny silence. I thought for a wild second that our friend was throwing up all over my carpet or something, when I entered my room and saw the group of nine girls crammed in around the ugly college-issued furniture. They burst out in song and put strands of Mardi Gras beads around my neck and tossed confetti all around. The confetti took over a week to fully vacuum out of the carpet, but I can still feel the exhilaration of that moment.
Besides my complex about saying no, another basic life skill I lack is the ability to deal with change. Part of the beauty of Night Owls is that it’s constantly in flux, graduating older members as it welcomes the new, and each manifestation is uniquely balanced and blended. I know all that, but part of me still clung to the hope that the two larger-than-life Mama Owls we said goodbye to last spring would walk through the audition room door in their new freshman reincarnations. I want to keep that same gorgeous sound we worked so hard to create, and I want to maintain the relationship we developed just as carefully. I realize now that I came into auditions this weekend with the prejudice that any new members would come as interlocutors, and that the goal in picking people should be to minimize such damage.
Somewhere along the gauntlet of auditions, however, I noticed the shocking intimacy of allowing twelve strangers to listen to one’s singing. No matter what face a girl wore while telling us her name, hometown and voice part, the nerves and the sass and the giggles faded during her singing and we were given the chance to really see a part of her. I would hazard to say that it’s impossible not to let a little bit of your true passion come through when you are singing. Seeing these hopefuls as people with the same desire as me for music and a community of our own made it even harder to say no to the majority, but also renovated my attitude when it came to accepting, in both senses, new members.
The Night Owls are certainly not perfect but nor are we set in stone, and that’s a scary and heady state to exist in. We are going to be fine and more than that, we are going to grow in ways that I haven’t even considered, musically and as a group of friends. By the same token, I’m looking forward to my changing role in this new group as well. The five other sophomores and I are not the fresh-owls we were last year, excused for our mistakes but exempted from many of the incidentals that pepper the group’s repertoire. Now we’ll have new members to teach and responsibilities to shoulder.
We’ll shed our skin next September and the one after that, and we will continue to do so long after I’ve graduated and found something else in the world that matters to me like this. Above all we are talented, nurturing, compassionate women, and I have never in my life been more proud to count myself as member of a group.
The process was a bit like a bad remake of “Twelve Angry Men,” a film I saw in high school in which twelve jurors are kept in the tightest of quarters until they decide the outcome of a murder trial. The Vassar College Night Owls’ goal of unearthing one or two new Sopranos wasn’t quite so lofty, but after Hour Six it felt like the singular focus of my life to date. We heard scales and arpeggios, snippets of jazz standards and pop hits, and girls who caused us to put our pens down in amazement as well as those who tested the limits of our facial composure. Quite frankly, I was prepared to throw a chair at the next person who dared to mangle a Beatles song in front of me. We tried to maintain our humor and open minds, but once or twice the desire for pizza was stronger than the desire for a new and improved army of musical female goodness.
We don’t operate as you might expect of a group of talented, opinionated women. We genuinely care about the well-being of one another as well as the group, and it’s a testament to our deep bond that we opted to reconvene and hang out only a few hours after we left the audition marathon. When we do come up against a point of contention, we’re uncommonly respectful and articulate while finding a solution. The math of elimination, though, didn’t seem to leave much room for satisfied consensus.
The real trial came once the hopefuls had long since sung and we were left to decide as a group exactly what we were looking for. It wasn’t simply a matter of picking the most talented girls; the Night Owls already comprised twelve members with a full roster of Altos and Basses, and so our needs were almost cripplingly specific. I felt real pain when crossing out the name of a vivacious Alto with a voice like smooth, warm honey off my list of favorites, and I know that other Owls experienced similar loss. Suddenly having the power and the responsibility of determining the group’s future seemed overwhelming. We couldn’t and didn’t all agree on who we wanted or their placement or how to deal with the fact that other a cappella groups might want them as well. What we did agree on was our need to keep the group what it had been while making it into something new and better, and this felt (and perhaps still feels) like an impossible order.
I’m not good at saying no to people. I’m quite good at being critical, but rarely do I act on my judgments by flat-out rejecting somebody. Delivering fifty-eight no’s in rapid succession- worse, fifty-eight not-yeses- weighs on me, despite the fact that I was one of the most dismissive critics in the audition room. I found myself drawing x’s through girls’ names before they had completed a single ascending scale, and that realization doesn’t make me proud. On the one hand, the nature of the group is such that all members need to be able to hold their own musically as well as communally. However, my feeling of inclusion among the Night Owls was thrown into harsh relief by the exclusivity of rejecting so many interested girls. It makes my presence in the group as well as our overall dynamic feel more precious and more tenuous by equal measures.
It’s a matter of fate that I’m a Night Owl to begin with. I knew the second I entered the Raymond parlor last September and stepped into the ring of energetic, brilliant girls that I needed to be a part of this, and I rocked my audition like I never have before or since. My callback the next morning, however, wasn’t quite so charmed; my now-boyfriend and I had had slightly too much fun the night before, and owing to some miracle I woke up fifteen minutes before I was due to sing. I’m still grateful that my freshman roommate hadn’t yet installed curtains, and so the sun streaming through the cheap paper shades was strong enough to stir me. I rushed across campus wearing the same dress as the night before, with my hair scraped up into a stringy bun, and arrived out of breath just in time to be put through the same paces I helped facilitate today. After what I felt was a patchy, forgettable performance on my part, I consoled myself with the thought that I could just try out again the next fall.
I went to the library that evening to finish some homework and put the impending disappointment at the back of my mind. I was reading about something irrelevant like Spanish conjugations or Chaucer when my phone rang. My roommate was calling with some urgent yet vague story about a friend of ours passed out in our room, telling me to hurry back as soon as possible. In this context it’s clear what was going on, but at the time I was fully prepared to call 911. That would have been awkward.
I rushed back to my dorm (there seems to be a lot of running around in connection with my Night Owls membership) and arrived at my hall, where the majority of my friends stood around in a funny silence. I thought for a wild second that our friend was throwing up all over my carpet or something, when I entered my room and saw the group of nine girls crammed in around the ugly college-issued furniture. They burst out in song and put strands of Mardi Gras beads around my neck and tossed confetti all around. The confetti took over a week to fully vacuum out of the carpet, but I can still feel the exhilaration of that moment.
Besides my complex about saying no, another basic life skill I lack is the ability to deal with change. Part of the beauty of Night Owls is that it’s constantly in flux, graduating older members as it welcomes the new, and each manifestation is uniquely balanced and blended. I know all that, but part of me still clung to the hope that the two larger-than-life Mama Owls we said goodbye to last spring would walk through the audition room door in their new freshman reincarnations. I want to keep that same gorgeous sound we worked so hard to create, and I want to maintain the relationship we developed just as carefully. I realize now that I came into auditions this weekend with the prejudice that any new members would come as interlocutors, and that the goal in picking people should be to minimize such damage.
Somewhere along the gauntlet of auditions, however, I noticed the shocking intimacy of allowing twelve strangers to listen to one’s singing. No matter what face a girl wore while telling us her name, hometown and voice part, the nerves and the sass and the giggles faded during her singing and we were given the chance to really see a part of her. I would hazard to say that it’s impossible not to let a little bit of your true passion come through when you are singing. Seeing these hopefuls as people with the same desire as me for music and a community of our own made it even harder to say no to the majority, but also renovated my attitude when it came to accepting, in both senses, new members.
The Night Owls are certainly not perfect but nor are we set in stone, and that’s a scary and heady state to exist in. We are going to be fine and more than that, we are going to grow in ways that I haven’t even considered, musically and as a group of friends. By the same token, I’m looking forward to my changing role in this new group as well. The five other sophomores and I are not the fresh-owls we were last year, excused for our mistakes but exempted from many of the incidentals that pepper the group’s repertoire. Now we’ll have new members to teach and responsibilities to shoulder.
We’ll shed our skin next September and the one after that, and we will continue to do so long after I’ve graduated and found something else in the world that matters to me like this. Above all we are talented, nurturing, compassionate women, and I have never in my life been more proud to count myself as member of a group.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
FIngerless mittens make gang signs a snap
You can't tell from the photo, but there are made from the most beautiful turquoise silk-merino blend ever. All the mermaidz are jealous. The pattern is "Fetching" from Ravelry, which is a lameass name that does not underly the fact that this is the most popular free knitting project on the internet. Whoa. I've joined the wooly masses and decided to make my own yesterday, and they knit up so fast I can barely remember casting on. AHHHH.Inching closer to the realm of things that don't bore the rest of the world, my last day of work is Friday (or Saturday, technically, since that's clean-up day when we completely kill camp). This summer has gone by really fast, probably because I have a job I actually like. Last summer took years to complete because I was a useless lump of unproductivity, and I had the Unemployment Tan the first week of Vassar to prove it. I will never not do anything for that long again.
I may love my job, but I'm ready to not get up for anything anymore. I have this routine where I wake up at 7:45, get up at 7:55, make coffee, start the crossword, get ready, yell at Matthew, then speed off to camp at least five minutes late every single solitary day. I'm turning middle-aged and I don't like it. Time for some good old-fashioned teenage irresponsibility and no damn alarm clocks!
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Vassar!
I just got back from a lovely lovely weekend at the Vass. I visited Sam and Jake and Tess and Brose and I drove three and a half hours each way to get there. This was the longest consecutive journey I've ever taken by about three hours, and so now I am disproportionately proud of myself.Driving makes me ten different kinds of nervous, but having my friends at the end of the Taconic State Parkway was as good an incentive as any to just get the fuck over it. The world feels a little smaller now.
P.S. Keep an eye out for "Hello, My Baby," the dazzling new musical that will clearly be all over Broadway in a matter of months. Twenty-two songs with absolutely nothing to do with the plot, kids forgetting their lines even though they were carrying their scripts, and such stellar writing as "The saloon died...just like Papa..."- what more could you even want?
P.S. Keep an eye out for "Hello, My Baby," the dazzling new musical that will clearly be all over Broadway in a matter of months. Twenty-two songs with absolutely nothing to do with the plot, kids forgetting their lines even though they were carrying their scripts, and such stellar writing as "The saloon died...just like Papa..."- what more could you even want?
Thursday, July 23, 2009
The Newsies soundtrack is blasting at full volume down the hall.
My boy and my grandma just came, saw and conquered the sleepy town of Needham. I thought this strange pairing would be unfortunate given Grandma's tendency to judge swiftly and harshly, but they ended up being best friends and she told him her entire life story. But now he is back in Chicago and I'm having trouble sleeping again. Serious case of whine flu up in here.
Second Session has begun at camp. The kids are older, smarter and more well-behaved this time around, but don't have that same ridiculous energy and lack of self-consciousness that the younger kids do. An eight-year-old doesn't think twice about jumping onstage and making up a song about rogue gorillas on the spot; an eleven-year-old twists her hands and smiles embarrassedly before whispering a few words and running off. That said, it's only the second day, and I think it'll still be a bitchin' session. I don't actually feel like I'm making things up on the spot anymore! First time for everything...
Second Session has begun at camp. The kids are older, smarter and more well-behaved this time around, but don't have that same ridiculous energy and lack of self-consciousness that the younger kids do. An eight-year-old doesn't think twice about jumping onstage and making up a song about rogue gorillas on the spot; an eleven-year-old twists her hands and smiles embarrassedly before whispering a few words and running off. That said, it's only the second day, and I think it'll still be a bitchin' session. I don't actually feel like I'm making things up on the spot anymore! First time for everything...
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Mittens!
Do you know how hard it is to press the camera button while wearing mittens? Now you do.
These are a combination of knit and crochet. I basically just made up the pattern as I went along, ergo they will fall apart before the temperature drops below 60. Oh well.
In that vein, I'm really excited for Vassar winter. It's cozier than winter in the real world, considering you're stuck in building with your nearest and dearest and a whole bunch of alcohol for something like six months out of the year. It's also the only time of year you can feel somewhat dignified for having Christmas lights wound around your entire dorm room.
Subnote: I look like a serial killer in that picture. No regrets!
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