Totally unnecessary

I had an audition last night. I thought it went well; hell, with the exception of the G-Flat that I naturalized, I think I gave one hell of a performance.

Nonetheless, they haven't called me back with the results. There were only fifteen people auditioning, only six of them bassists, and they still can't tell me what they thought of it.

*twitch*

Some form of Snow White

I drove home from Ann Arbor Sunday night, having spent a signifigant chunk of the evening parked in front of a friend's TV grappling hairy beasts and jamming swords into them. And debating, the whole time: I can barely afford to pay rent with this ridiculous new job. Can I really afford to buy Shadow of the Collosus?

Eventually I decided that just mooching off the purchases of others would have to suffice for now, and back I went to my apartment. I pulled in to a parking space conveniently outside my doorstep (unusual at two in the morning), and saw that there was a skunk in the lawn right outside the front steps, dragging a College Inn pizza box around.

On the one hand, it was freaking adorable. Skunks are cute little critters, and someone told me once that they make fine pets, once your have their scent glands taken out. They're small and they're frisky and their tails are poofy and snuggleable. Warner Brothers didn't have a huge challenge in making Pepe le Pew a charming character (though in these days, his persistance would be deemed stalking and possibly sexual assault).

On the other hand, adorable thought it may be, I'm not fond of skunk-reek, and I didn't want it to be all over my clothes. The skunk was happily nibbling a hole into the box he was dragging around, and seemed to be ignoring me, but what would happen when I approached the stairs?

I had two options: I could drive to another parking spot, then go around the building to the back door, or I could just be a jerk and interfere with nature's beautiful cycle of scavenging.

I picked up an empty soda can from my car, hid behind the door, and threw it in the skunk's direction. It jumped in the air, and then scrambled into the hole it had chewed in the pizza box.

At first I thought my vision had failed me, and I turned my headlights back on. Not seeing anything new, I flipped them back off, and walked up the pathway onto the front stairs, watching the pizza box as I went.

Sure enough, as soon as I was safely hiding behind the stairway, the skunk poked its head out of the hole, looked around briefly, and started pulling itself out. It then turned around, pulled a crust out from behind it, and dashed off around the other side of the building. I continued onward, smelling like deodorant, rather than musk, and went to bed.

In other news: After a four month wait, I finally had that appointment with a dermatologist. Lady says that I look pretty much skin cancer free, but that I have a flat mole in my hair I'll have to have someone else check on if I'm ever getting my hair braided. Crazy stuff.

Fifteen minutes left at work

All I can think about is that leftover Chinese food in my fridge. It was a terrible, mega-stupid mistake to eat nothing but a handful of almond M&Ms before I came to work today.

Okay, small lie. Leftover chinese food and all of the events associated with the time when they weren't leftovers yet. Video games and swapping fluids. But it's not good to think about that too hard at work, or I'll just start blushing. And I wouldn't want to be sitting at my desk, vapid smile on my face, cheeks burning read.

Or maybe I would.

Sigh.

So.
Damn.
Hungry.

Seven of twelve roses agree, he loves you.

Interpretation: His feelings towards you are ambiguous, but probably in your favor.

One of the women who lives where I work received a dozen double delights from her husband's college; he'd taught there for many years, apparently impressed a lot of people, to such an extent that she still gets roses from them on various occasions. As with many of the folks here, she likes to show off the flowers they receive, so I end up tending a lot of vases in the front lobby.

I generally like that sort of work; cutting stems, arranging flowers and the crap that gets sent with them so they're only moderately haphazard. I usually snap off a couple of petals when I'm asked to do this, and I will run my thumb along the basin of the petal. It's silly and comforting, a secret stress-relief. Nowadays, it just makes me sneeze a lot, but I do it anyway.

Eventually the roses start to wilt and look sad, and before they get too pathetic I'll throw them away. But I get to have my way with them before they go, and in this case I played he-loves-you-he-loves-you-not with fifty dollars of someone else's floral arrangement.

Is this why tuition is so high?

Experience is a nasty bitch

So last Wednesday, I got a good solid whang in the back of the head with a cello case. I'm not gonna lie; it hurt a whole lot, and I told the carrier of the cello as much.

Now, oddly for being smashed in the back of the skull, I had an instant full-lobed headache. Also, I was pretty dizzy; carrying my bass down the hall seemed unnecessarily balance-challenging. I made it through orchestra (the throbbing asymmetry of Mars didn't help matters), walked my bass back, and drove home. (I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't think about what a bad idea that was until later.) I walked in to the apartment, went to pee, washed my hands, and took a long look in the mirror.

It would have been a brief glance, except that I noticed my pupils were engorged for no reason.

Actually, said that snarky inner monologue, they're dilated for a very good reason; you have a concussion, dumbass.

It was about then that I got a call from my Escape Valve from the Estrogen Pit, asking what I was doing tonight. I told him I was really goddamn tired and sort of wanted to nap for a while, not to mention the terrible headache from intersecting vectors with a cello case. He pointed out that common knowledge has strong beliefs against sleeping after a head wound.

So I did the next natural thing; I called my mom and freaked her out, asking questions about how injured should I be before I went to the ER. She said it was cool and I could sleep, which I proceeded to do with passionate nappitude.

Post-nap, I went to hang out with the EVfEP (though there was only one person present for that terrible event), and established my new, total inability to communicate in an intelligent fashion for the next twenty-four hours. Which leads us back to the underlying music theme, you see, because the next evening I had to go to Music Theory class.

Dr. Iannaccone began playing this piece by Mendelssohn, and asked me what technique was being employed to mix up the variations. Now, what was happening was this: a theme was being introduced in the top voice, and while it continued on to new material, that same theme was played in the lower voice. This technique is called 'imitation,' because music theorists aren't that creative when they're naming things. It's frequently used in the works of J. S. Bach.

I stared at him blankly, trying to be as uncreative as I could possibly be, and I failed, utterly. The word was not coming to my mind, regardless of how desperately I tried to pull something from the shaken recesses of my mind.

Finally, with infinite blanditude, I asked if he was just Bachin' it up.

That got a laugh out of him and the class, and he didn't ask me another question for a significant portion of the class. Fortunately then I got it right. (Deutsche uber-massige sechste Korden <3)

Aside: Haha, Jake, I managed to use both throbbing AND engorged in a totally non-sexual context. HA HA.