If you follow every dream, you might get lost

September 29, 2005

I kept a promise today: I went to meeskoor practice. I showed up half in the bag (thanks, Paul; thanks, XII), but that didn’t seem to really affect things. I mean, the whiskey I sipped throughout might even have helped my voice a bit. I was the youngest person there by at least 30 years, but that didn’t really seem to affect things.

(Did Neil Young just name-drop Chris Rock in “No Wonder”? Shit, I think he did.)

I mean, I’m obviously not some kind of saviour of meeskoor or anything, but everybody seemed legitimately happy to get some fresh blood. They certainly knew their craft, though. Some of them have been coming to practice for over 50 years, and it shows. When you’re the newcomer and you haven’t read music or sung in a choir since 8th grade, it really helps to be able to sit next to a guy who seems to know every song by heart. I’m not ashamed to admit I was essentially cheating off the guy next to me.

(I’m only 4 tracks into the new Neil Young album at this point, and I have to say that so far it feels every bit as good as Harvest. And I don’t say that lightly.)

Anyway, I’d forgotten how good it feels to sing as part of an ensemble. The previous sentence is a complete lie, since I’ve recently been thrilled to harmonize at such events as people’s 70th birthday bashes, or Connecticut suvepäevad, but I had forgotten how good it feels to sing as part of an ensemble where you have four-voice harmony that’s actually composed beforehand, as opposed to being ad-libbed on the fly. Not that there’s anything wrong with the latter, of course.

  • I need to practice reading music again.

  • I also need to start learning how to play the harmonica I bought over the weekend.
  • I was never particularly good even remotely skilled at playing the violin, so that means it should be trivial to get myself back to my previous level of proficiency, right?

Anyway, I saw the following on a sign in K-Town and decided to put it in my blog:

カラオケ

(Humour me.)

Of course, I fucked up immediately after keeping that promise. I’m simply thrilled that I left the book I borrowed (the NYEM 30.a. Aastaraamat) on the train. I said I was going to look over it, and instead I called somebody, hung up on her in the middle of the conversation for no reason, and started working on the Sudoku (数独?) and crossword puzzles in the New York Post, which so absorbed me that I left the book on the seat. Splendid.

Song of the Moment: «The Painter» — Neil Young

Muutuiko mikin?

September 27, 2005

This is just getting weird — not only have I been doing 80+ pushups a day for a while now, but today I ended up going for a run.

I think something is wrong with me.

In other news, I finally tried out Rockbox firmware for my iRiver iHP-140. I really should have installed it sooner. On-the-fly playlists, gapless playback, a real shuffle mode, scrolling that doesn’t suck, customizable while-playing screens, and Final Fantasy Legend. And it boots in under a fifth of the time it takes for the stock firmware. If not for a few interface foibles it’ll take me a little while to get used to (and the fact that I can’t seem to have both Rockbox and my custom “Hyvät perät” boot screen installed at the same time), I’d recommend it with no qualifications. As it is I’m recommending it anyway.

Song of the Moment: «Super Car» — Love in Reverse

Trivia

September 27, 2005

How many times did Andrew Jackson win the popular vote in an American Presidential election?

Advertising

September 26, 2005

The only thing sillier than ads for money is ads for chemistry. I mean, come on. At least milk is, you know, a product that you can buy.

Song of the Moment: «Can I Get Get Get» — Junior Senior

Oh for heaven’s sake

September 22, 2005

Google News just greeted me with this interesting pair of articles:

I’m aware that the rise in vaccine-resistant flu cases (primarily in Asia) has nothing to do with America’s rising pansy-assedness and the associated constant ubiquitous use of antibacterial cleaners, that won’t stop me from drawing a possibly flawed conclusion from this.

To their credit, the site with that “wash your hands” article links, at the bottom of the page, to “ohshi antibiotics are being overused” and “hey maybe we need some germs after all“.

Sadly though, cutting back on human overuse of antibiotics won’t solve a damn thing, when this shit keeps going on. Fucking cattle. Fucking factory farms. Fucking petrochemical industry.

Song of the Moment: «No More Mosquitoes» — Four Tet

A Day at the Races (part one)

September 22, 2005

Easter Sunday 2005, Tampere. Today we pay homage to Jesus’s vaunted resurrection with one of our own. Getting up after three days of Koskenkorva and “Pass the Pan” feels just as hard as rising from the dead, and at least the dead can get some rest.

Lari and I pile into the back seat of Sebastian’s Nissan Sunny and take out his laptop for some in-flight entertainment on the drive to the ferry terminal in Helsinki. Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It’s a good film, and it helps pass the time while Seba sits all alone in the front, fuming about having to drive and stay sober.

On board the ferry, as luck would have it we have an encounter with Mikko (Level 23 Loppasuu, Level 1 History Student) and he joins our party. The ferry ride, though it costs around 20 GP, is peaceful and uneventful enough. Lari makes some investments, we play some Kasino, and we have a drink or two. After an encounter with a Piirivalve (we manage to slip past by using our Dokumendid) and some cutscenes, we emerge in Tallinn.

The relevant part of the story is this: In Tallinn, we stop at a Statoil for some gasoline and delicious Kabanosses. More petroleum probably goes into the making of the hotdogs than into the gasoline, but they’re delicious beyond belief so it doesn’t really matter. I take a big bite of my Kabanoss (squirted full of majonees & sinep) on my way out of the Statoil store, expecting to start effortlessly chewing a slightly-vürtsikas homogeneous suspension of hog anus, pig rectum, and shoat sphincter.

Instead I am greeted with a sickening crunch and the feeling of something hard between my molars. I fish it out of my mouth and decide it’s either a chunk of bone or a chunk of tooth. I finish chewing my mouthful of hotdog and swallow it, so I can poke around with my tongue to see if I can find any gaping holes where teeth used to be. Nothing hurts anywhere, but both my lower wisdom teeth just feel… unusual. Perhaps it’s my imagination.

I stand by the automatic doors and inspect the piece of bone/tooth again, and consider walking the 5 meters back over to the counter and complaining. If this were America, I’d probably get a brief mention on the evening news and some kind of settlement from the company after filing a lawsuit. But this isn’t America, and the most I’d end up getting would be a whole lot of attitude and, possibly, a replacement hotdog. But that sounds like a lot of effort for very little payoff.

I look back at the chunk, shrug, flick it onto the floor of the store, and step outside. Even if I’m not going to make a scene about it, I can at least passive-aggressively make somebody else clean it up. As I head over to the Sunny I gingerly and tentatively take another bite of Kabanoss. Nothing hard, nothing out of place — but my molars still feel weird. Obviously they can’t both be broken, since I only felt the chunk of tooth on one side; but I’ve forgotten which side that was. I must be imagining it since they both feel odd, right?

I finish the hotdog, feel my teeth again, and doze off. My decidedly discomforting dreams all feature gaping chasms, open pits, and a harrowing sense of loss. I’m relieved to wake up back in Tartu, where I proceed to look up the number of a local dentist immediately upon getting back to my room.

Three and a half months later, as I’m packing up to go back to America, I still haven’t called.

Song of the Moment: «Chicago» — Django Reinhardt

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