carpal tunnel day

10-3-99

Most of what I did today involved staring at a screen. I uploaded the rest of my archives, so everything's here, finally. And I played Nintendo. In the afternoon I watched a sampler of movies from my adolescence, a few minutes of Back to the Future, half an hour of Edward Scissorhands, and (shamefully) a bit of Adventures in Babysitting. That was the low point of the day.

I also spent an hour blasting away at an etude by Verne Reynolds. (Blasting away on the euphonium.) These pieces are not at all "tonal," or harmonically pleasing, and they're hard as fuck. I mean, they're pleasing to me, since I can appreciate two pages of sixteenth notes centered around the interval of a minor second. But I'm sure my upstairs neighbors tore their hair out.

I got my impression of their musical taste from the bass that pounded through my ceiling on Friday night. I don't make a habit of ratting out my neighbors, since I heard so much worse in the dorms at Michigan. And my building is pretty quiet. The only time I was affected, really, was this one time on a Saturday morning: I'd woken up early, like 7:30, and they started up about 7:45. So faint that I wouldn't have heard it if I'd been asleep. I swear, it sounded like a cheap keyboard demo track, or a karaoke machine. And the guy started singing along with it, out of tune. All I could do was laugh.

In uploading my entries from 1998 I saw that the bottome parts of my crudely designed pages have disappeared. I don't know if I can find those or not, since I've switched word programs. I'll look around for those. In any case, very few people are likely to go back that far, and my writing style was not so great; I wasn't writing for an audience at the time. The only people reading were my husband and a couple of online friends. I thought I was hot shit back then.

Now I know I'm hot shit.

Wednesday is the anniversary of the opening entry of the Journal of a Cynic. This might be the longest I've ever kept my shit together on a project. I'll save this talk for Wednesday's entry.

Ten minutes later:

I'm being a baby about the october-january archives. I want to look around for those missing entries before I upload, so I don't have to do it again. February and March are ready to go, though. Have a blast.