Les said, the better II

Letter from mom

Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 12:11:13 -0800 (PST)
From: Eileen Hutchins
Subject: Grandma
Dear Celeste
I left a message on your voice mail this AM. Grandma is having some
medical problems.(Bloody urine) and needs cheering up. Paul is coming
over to dinner tonight, and I was hoping my two daughters could come
tonight or tomorrow if possible. If not, maybe next week sometime.
Grandma is definitely not moving to the Retirement Inn until all her
medical problems
are solved. She also has a cataract
and some other problems. Love, Mom

dead letter. dead things in the letter: mom, grandma, “two daughters” relationship.

Rebounding

Pros and cons of different methods (not all of which have personally been tried by the author):

	Pros	Cons
Moving far away	Seems like you can run away from problems Locations don’t remind you of anything	Problems follow you You leave behind support structures and friends and end up feeling alone
Graduate School	Learn nifty things Get a degree at the end Chance to network in yer field	Lotsa work Possible Debt Might have to move far away Danger of becoming a professor if overused as rebounding tool
New Relationship	Comfy Reassuring Hopeful Might have picked the right person this time	Might be making all the same mistakes again
Sleeping with as many women as possible	Hrm, this deserves it’s own post in the morning

Letter

Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 12:24:55 -0800 (PST)
From: Eileen Hutchins
Subject: forgot
Dear Celeste,
I forgot to mention that Bro Bob will be in Oakland next week, so we
gave him your phone number. I think that’s cool’ that he wants to see
you guys.

Catherine called and wanted to be remembered to you. She is in a
swwimming exercise program, only this morning she couldn’t find her
bathing suit. She saidit is worn and mended. We wondered whether the
laundry thought it was a rag and pitched it. One day Dad put out the
garbage and the garbage man took the can.
Love you, Mom

Brother Bob is a family friend. He now hosts all the holiday dinners for Christmas and Thanksgiving and whatnot. Catherine is my cousin. Actually, she was my grandma’s first cousin. She’s in her late 80’s at least now. She’s a nun. And I can’t blame the garbage man for taking those cans. They were rusty and dented. One didn’t have a bottom anymore. I don’t know how my dad kept using them. when we moved from San Jose to Cupertino in the early 80’s my dad moved the garbage cans too.

Left in this year

I got one ten page paper due monday where I must apply critical theory to Joan of Arc. I will be relying heavily on Cixous and talking about how, while with the French army, Joan of Arc escaped binary oppositions about gender. I got one 20 page paper due May 14th, which is a research paper applying critical (feminist?) theory to Christine de Pizan’s poem about Joan of Arc. And I’ve got to do my documentation of the electronic music studio + test utlities for setting up 4 channel audio, prolly also by the 14th. and some sort of installation for a parking garage muzak system by the first week of may. that’s it. then I’m done. till next year. My plan is, of course, to finish this all as early as possible so as to coast thru the last few weeks. or leave early.

all the undergrad thesises (thesi?) were due tuesday, as were many of the graduate thesi. Isaac, tho, is still working on his, although he can sometimes be spotted on the porch of India House, taking a smoke break.

but class has been a bit relaxed as a result of so many folks being done. Especially in the one with the prof whose still out sick.
Tom, who just turned in 70 pages single spaced, and whose concert is sunday, participates in a class discussion and installation artists.
And I took some time yesterday to finally get a haircut. Issac was nice enough to take my picture afterwards.
If I look like I’ve been rained on, it’s cuz it was pouring yesterday. connecticut doesn’t go half assed with this weather thing.

rainy day

but happy anyway. In fact, when I went to my see my shrink, I’ve been so chill lately that she told me not to schedule another appointment unless something came up. Apparently, the Wesleyan student health services has deemed me sane. Or sane enough, at least. Part of the reason I was in such a good mood is because Cola sent me a CD of an Oakland-based duo called The Coup. Cool stuff. Also jelly beans and dark chocolate. Cola is awesome.

So yeah, I’m not a game show host. I’m not gleeful 24/7. But damn, I’m doing better than I was in February when I had devised a plan on how to harm myself. Um, yeah. A plan I decided not to execute. Would have gone to a hospital instead. Didn’t want the world to know what a loser I was. Didn’t want to hurt my dad. Also knew that I would probably feel better later. But I did think about it. Bad times. I wouldn’t be blogging this unless it was 100% past tense.
So damn, what a year. There’s only three weeks of school left, but I have a paper due May 14th. I’m actually starting to really like school, now that it’s almost ending. Not that I’m not anxious to get home for the summer. Xena will be going to dog summer camp in Kentucky with Angela. I have two offers for house checking up, but no offers for subletting. Alas. I was thinking I should drive across the country, but Sophie points out this would take a week and flying is faster and cheaper. So… do I really need all the gear I was going to haul around? My desktop is excellent for running protools, except it doesn’t work. And I’ve barely run protools all year. Do I really need it for the summer? What if I just had my laptop, my bass guitar and some clothes? Maybe my basshead too, cuz it’s small. I keep thinking I should bring my drum machine, but I can’t think why. I mean, it needs MIDI to work and I have no MIDI on my laptop. Why is my drum machine calling to me? Maybe I could have discussed this with my shrink today. She wanted to know what’s been bugging me lately. Same old stuff, you know, but not so much I can’t just annoy my friends or feel better by the next morning. Couldn’t think of much to talk about. She said, “can’t you dig up some anguish?”
I got rythm, I got music. You’re wondering what a basshead is. Some bass amps are in two parts, the amplifier and a seperate speaker. I have an insanely huge speaker cabinet because some boy was giving me grief about my rig and I caved into peer pressure and now I have gigantic speaker that I don’t ever want to move anyplace. the head is a seperate part that actually does all the electronic amplification. It has a power cord. the speaker does not. Most people, despite what peer-pressuring boy says about “professional” bassists, have these peices joined together in a combo amp. the electronics are at the top of the amp and the speaker is below. I have helpfully taken a photo of my basshead sitting on my ludicrously large speaker. It will come in handy if I play in a too-loud punk band next term…

augh

protools is not working on my desktop. it crashes the computer with an evil hard bad crash. everything has been sketchy on that system since i went to 10.3 instead of 10.2. now i can’t run my most important application, basically the main thing i use the desktop for. can’t run protools on my laptop because it requires a pci card. double plus ungood.

pictures

what better way to distract myself from my woes than posting bad pictures of my campus?
That building is called the music studios. It actually has windows on the other side. there are practice rooms in the basement, then a bunch of classrooms and offices upstairs. There’s also a computer lab upstairs, but i don’t have any classes in that building this term, so i only go in the lab when i need to print.
That’s the big concert hall. It slopes downward into the earth. the stage is two floors below gournd level. It’s a nicer concert hall than Mills has, but there is not quite enough seating. It was built with some 70’s idealist goal of not having enough seating to turn a profit, so that it would always remian unblemished by commercialism. it’s pretty reverberant with all that cement, but they’ve got some wood stuff inside, which makes it ok for concerts.
That’s the rehersal hall, where I spend too much of my life. the concert hall is directly to the right of it. They’re connected underground. There’s a windowless classroom two stories down where we get to hear long lectures about random subjects once a week. On the surface level, the left window is the Electronic Music Studio.
I take classes in other buildings, but i spend most of my time in the music area. If somebody tells me to go to another building, I may stare blankly and ask them where it is. Which reminds me that I haven’t done any reading for my mom-music class tommorrow… dern it.

Give me feedback

on my resume. Or pass it along to you work’s audio department. Everyone is always looking for interns cuz we work cheep and it’s short term and companies will hire interns even as they’re laying off real employees. alas.

when acronyms go too far

I was just looking at the calendar for “wesfest,” a bunch of events organized for perspective students:

Queer Issues Panel
Curious about queer life at wes? Come talk to members of the LGBTTQQIPFAGBDSM etc. community about dating, coming out, bathrooms, activism, and anything else that suites your fancy.
Location: PAC – PAC 004

Is this a joke?

Um, so yeah

I’m trying to post everyday, but there’s not stuff I want to post about happening every day. “Had granola for breakfast. Went to class. Hadn’t done half the reading. Went home. Gooffed around and IMed people. Walked dog. Went to bed.” yay. I could write a CGI script to post that for me every day.

happy easter

Today is somehwat interesting automatically as it is the holiest day in the xtain calendar. I went to Easter brunch at Emily’s house. Emily is an ethno student studying drum and bass. She’s exciting. Nick, another ethno student, brought champage and mimosas were made.

Show and tell

That’s wlater and Chris. Walter is a grad student. He plays piano and improvises and is very good. He’s from Argentina. Chris is a sophomore undergrad. He’s the one that brought Peaches to class on tuesday, which is when I took this picture.

That’s the inside of my house before the Seder. My house is not as big in the part I’ve got than it looks in the picture of the whole thign from the outside. And the oven outside on the sidewalk is gone. yay.
This is David after supercollider class. He just got back from the left coast and he says he bought those glasses at a toystore in Portland Oregon, but couldn’t tell me which one. David is a geek. David is living on the wrong coast. When he was in SF last week, he was excitedly IMing me about “war driving.” Pull up on a side street, see whose wifi network is wide open. Get online. CT is not like that. no.
That’s the Olympia Diner. I went there after Supercollider class yesterday with Jess and Tom. Tom is possibly going insane from his thesis, but is very happy UConn won. I once flew on the same plane as the UConn women’s volleyball team. I asked them what school they went to. then I asked if they were from Canada or Alaska. Confusing school names.
And last, but not least, this is my housemate Aaron, who is very nifty.