There and Back Again

Hi!

Okay so two month hiatus - I'm back.

So much. So much has happened. I sold my car, my baby: a purple 1995 Ford Thunderbird. This was the car that carried me around in Florida, shuttled movie peeps back and forth to shoots, slid up and down hills in the winter. There was a dirt parking lot behind Full Sail and some of my best driving memories ever are from whirling my rear-wheel-drive V8 around in that sandy pit. I felt like the duke of Hazzard. All that was missing was the ability to jump in through the driver's side window.

What else. School started, a fresh new semester with some really neat classes. My favorite has to be 'Ancient Epic,' in which we're reading The Illiad and The Odyssey, as well as The Aeneid and Ovid's Metamorphoses. Interested as I am as a Virgo in deciphering the patterns of the universe, this class is the equivalent of crack. You can literally see the web being spun that it is western literature. It's all there, in elegant poetry. One of the coolest things I learned so far is that, when the Odyssey and Illiad were first set to paper, Homer (or whoever) deliberately chose an older style for the language. It would be the equivalent of me sitting down and, in an effort to tell an old story, write in the style of Shakespeare. These poems were old 2700 years ago! To think that one can pick up a book and instantly be connected with millenia... tonight in my other class, Arthurian Legend and Cultural Change, we spent an hour in the special collections room of Hillman Library putting our paws all over medieval manuscripts. There is something magical about those old texts, voluminous works that are all hand-written, all transcribed by hand. It's amazing how text, when composed by hand, becomes more than what it is, transcends the page into art. When you hold one of these books you feel like you're holding something important. Maybe it's because it is unique, even if the words are not - like a painting of a familiar image that is a unique piece of art unto itself. Put some vellum and some leather-wrapped wood between your hands and you get a sense of just how precious those words are.

I've also become, in the past two months, a huge fan of World of Warcraft. It's a massive multiplayer game that loosely follows the rules of Tolkienien fantasy, and it is addictive and amazing and the best game I've ever played. The coolest thing about it is the interaction with other real people, not just little computer-generated characters - my whole apartment shares my addiction and it's been a great way to get to know one another and spend time together. It always gives us something to talk about in case we can't think of anything, and it's built a sense of comraderie which I value.

Ah! An update on the living situation: I. Love. Squirrel. Hill. It feels like the center of a little world, complete with amazing pizza and a grocery store right up the street. Of all the possible ways the apartment situation could have worked out, it really has worked out for the best. Thanks amorphous deity who I can't bring myself to call God!

If all this seems too easy to be true, I do admit that there's been a lot of rumbling about not having steady work and not knowing what my plan is for next year. I've had a couple professors I respect encourage me to follow the route of the educator, even going so far as to suggest schools to go to and the like: Columbia, Berkeley, Northwestern. It'd be nice if they'd recommend a school that one need not be Doogie Howser to geet into, but oh well. I like to think that my particular brand of intelligence is just hard to quantify. Can I get an amen. So, that's been kind of stressful - the GREs and letters of recommendation - I need to get a move on lest I cut slices of pizza at Mineo's for a year until the next round of applications is due.

In other news, it looks like I'll be performing at a ragtime festival in New Alexandria Bay, New York, October 12-14, 2007! Tony Caramia, my piano mentor and good friend, recommended me to the festival director as a sort of replacement after his retirement from ragtime, so I feel like I have some HUGE shoes to fill.

I feel like that guy in Rent who wants to write one good song before he dies - I've been working on this "Riding the Wind" rag for a year now, and would like to finish it before I'm too old to play it. I think I'll be playing in Sedalia again next year as well. Bill has been urging me to go with him to the World Old Time Piano Playing Championship in Peoria, Illinois, under pretenses I consider hopelessly optimistic. "Come on, we'll dominate," he soothes, unaware that neither I nor he have any chance against what are, frankly, some of the best ragtime piano players in the world. Then again, I bet it'd be a lot of fun and a good chance to meet other players. So, basically what I'm saying is that I feel blessed to have people who want to hear me play the piano :)

It feels good to post in retrospect - the emotion of the moments has dimmed leaving only the facts, which are rather happy. Things are going well. How are you?

always,
martin