Thoughts and Words Ill-Sorted

So you may remember that I went to see my college roommates in Boston a few weeks ago.  That was the start of the sugar binge.  Chocolate, cupcakes, you name it.  I did fairly well when I returned home, but I didn’t get a chance to do much cooking in the few days before Mom came, so I didn’t feel quite on my nutritional feet again.  And then a) visit from Mom, which made us both feel like we were on vacation and b) Valentine’s Day.  Yup, a dangerous combination.  Much sugar was had by all.  Now, though I’m busy with lots and lots of school stuff, I made sure to make a big pot of soup at the beginning of the week and some other good stuff, so I am back and ready to eat real food again.  Much as I like sugar, I’m glad to be back 🙂

Erin

Mom’s headed out this afternoon.  Poor woman has read her way through four books as I’ve tried to keep up with email (horrible stuff, that, sometimes) and grade a batch of papers.  Thankfully, all of this recent visiting has a) raised my spirits and b) worked up in me a hunger for real work.  So I already have a list of work goals for the end of the month that I think will keep me plenty focused when she’s gone.  And, at any rate, we’re down to three weeks.  I’ve been away from Sydney for three weeks before.  Wasn’t happy about it, but know I survived it!

Speaking of Sydney, on Valentine’s Day a dozen yellow roses showed up on my doorstep, carefully carried by a young delivery guy up our icy steps (and driven up our icy road!).  They are beautiful!  Mom approved, too 🙂  So, as I continue my emotional roller coaster, I have an elegant visual reminder that Sydney’s still out there somewhere.

Erin

It’s Day Five of Mom’s visit, and so far my cooking hasn’t killed her off!  It’s also reassuring that I haven’t heard from her any of the following: “Oh, Erin, do you think that’s safe?”  “Have you ever considered cleaning x?” or “Wow, I didn’t know that you could get away with y.”  As one who is making up this whole grown-up thing as I go along, it’s reassuring to have a real, established woman not run screaming from your house.  Of course, a mother’s love can go a long way . . .

Mom has, so far, worked her way through 1 1/2 books that she picked up at the bookstore, while I am struggling to get through even one.  My inbox seems to be bombarded with a curious kind of “spam” recently: email come regularly, from different senders, and with various messages, but all seem to require me to do something.  I need to submit a form, I need to reply with a solution to the crisis in the paper’s argument, I need to write a recommendation letter, etc.  Unfortunately, these are all just a part of university life, and I can’t just hit the delete button!

Thankfully, Mom seems happy to chill out on the couch, read, and keep an eye on my mood.  She’s here, basically, to keep me busy and (if possible) happy for 1 1/2 weeks of Sydney’s away time, and allow him to get some work done!

Erin

It seems that everywhere I look someone is busy being outraged at something or other that the Archbishop of Canterbury said about Sharia in Britain. Can someone explain to me what the fuss is about? Nothing I’ve seen so far is nearly specific enough for me to find it particularly credible. And I haven’t been able to get my hands on an actual transcript yet. Anyway, given that fewer than one in a thousand who thought they did actually had a foggy idea what the Pope said in Regensburg, I’m inclined to doubt that the Archbishop said anything exciting. But, still, I’d like to know what the fuss is about. So can someone tell me what exactly he said that is supposed to be so outrageous?

Sydney

My mom flew in Thursday night to keep me company for a week.  Since then we’ve been hibernating, with only one excursion out of the house over the weekend.  Partly we’ve stayed close to home because we both needed and wanted some chill time.  Partly, however, Ithaca has been full of major wind and blowing snow, which made it a lot less fun to get out.  I was delighted to see the snow, since we’ve had a lot of brown terrain and freezing rain of late, but Mom spent much of yesterday frowning out my windows.  Apparently she’d just come from severely cold, very snowy, very windy weather in Iowa, and had had enough after about a month of it.  Now, of course, she’s getting the same thing–but in a different location!  And now I have to break it to her that it’s currently only 3 degrees Fahrenheit outside . . . and it’s going to snow tomorrow . . .

Erin

Remember the fish that absorbed their mates? Here’s the next installment on weird animals. Caecilians are tropical amphibians that completely lack limbs. Hence, smaller species sort of resemble earthworms (they also live underground), though larger species might remind you more of snakes. The largest ones are up to five feet long. But that’s all the boring stuff. It turns out that in at least one of the species the young live off their mother’s skin. As in, the mother regrows a nice, thick, fatty layer of skin every three days and periodically the young have a feeding frenzy in which they tear it to shreds. BBC has an awesome clip here.

Sydney

A recent survey found that males between the ages of 18 and 34—note that I said ‘males’, not ‘men’—spend more time playing video games than males between the ages of 12 and 17. (Members of the latter group average about 2 and 1/2 hours per day, in case you somehow missed the fact that they play a lot.) That’s depressing beyond words. Then again, that’s a few hours each day that they’re not watching porn.

Sydney

As my salute to the beautiful day, I swung over to the University Parks this morning on my way to get groceries. Here are 0.2% of the snowdrops—absent any snow—that I saw:

There were also a few daffodils:

As usual, it’s sunny with nary a cloud in sight. The temperature is 12° C (that’s 54° F for you Americans). And every day in the weather forecast is supposed to be exactly like this, give or take a degree or two. This just really feels wrong. By my calculation, I’m 620 miles north of Ithaca! And 455 miles north of where I grew up in Nova Scotia!

Sydney

It’s always nice to find someone else thinking exactly what you’re thinking:

Wandering from one television channel to the next the other day, I came across young people playing the piano. One man, bearded and a little hefty, rippled through a Beethoven sonata, sharing with the camera complicit smiles, exultant grimaces, gazes to the right and left, and a gentle swaying from side to side.

The next, a young woman, sat down to Schumann, bending her back, lifting her head and gazing straight up. Maybe God was sitting in the rafters just above her, and she was using the opportunity to say hello. Both pianists were perfectly fluent. They kept time, played the right notes and sounded expressive when they were supposed to.

I had to turn away. I could listen, but I couldn’t watch. Two performers, four glazed eyes and four waving arms were too much for my stomach.

That’s Bernard Holland from the NYTimes. And I share his sentiments exactly. What is with these theatrics while playing? I remember seeing a cello soloist in Nova Scotia once where I found it just about impossible to pay any attention to the music, even though the music was beautiful. To say that she looked possessed by a demon would be a gross understatement. Possessed by an entire legion engaged in civil war might come closer. And then there was the pianist who kept gulping and looked remarkably like an oversized toad …

Holland goes on:

The television program I happened to come across was produced by or for (probably both) a major American piano competition, and the young people I saw on it were part of that process. The program also offered commentary by an eminent conductor talking about the differences between Apollonian and Dionysian approaches to art. The Apollonian refers (and I paraphrase) to symmetry, invention and elegance; the Dionysian, to art more from the gut, more spontaneous.

More personal too. Dionysus had the stage when I was watching: two ambitious young people were taking part in a system that asks them to use Beethoven and Schumann as ways to sell themselves. Maybe our eminent conductor could have added another distinction to his two-sided debate: that Dionysian pianists care about Dionysian pianists, whereas Apollonian pianists care about music.

Exactly.

Sydney

… and the crocuses look even better:

I don’t quite understand how things work here. I’ve been told that Oxford is most likely to get snow in March. So, if it’s spring in January, does that mean that the order of seasons here is spring, winter, summer, fall? How exactly do plants cope with that?

Sydney