It's always darkest before the dawn

I really need to hit the sack, but first...

I bought this tea sampler of Kusmi teas. They are Russian, but made in France. o___o They're incredible! I sampled four out of the five today >.>. At one point I was flying on tea. Told Kit about it, and gave them my live reaction(s). It was a good way of seeing just how strong they are as well. SO far Troika and Prince Vladimir are strong enough to have at breakfast with milk. Nearly resurrected my Tea Journal. I have managed to stop acquiring things, finally.

..on a related note, I was seized last night with the sudden desire for a violin. x_x I even found some online/at the local music shop for reasonable prices. Hmm. But it is rather hard and I would be bonkers to try it, more than likely. Kit plays and recommended (highly) some sort of instruction though she says that attempting to learn it on your own is not impossible or unheard of. I just could not shake the idea from my head. Still pondering it, but waiting a bit to see if I can manage. I would have to get something to deaden the sound. It would more or less be a secret.

HMM.

( Doctor Who Babble. Feel free to skip. :) )

I am trying to learn another bit of music and finding lettering and letters annoying. It's like no matter how many times I read a piece of music, the letters never quite stick. I have this problem with dictionaries, iPod lists where the artists are alphabetized (which is generally how that works), foreign language syllabaries. If I color the notes, I never mistake what they are.
(More on that and my funny brain in another post). I can be scrolling through my iTunes library for something and I will go right past it, like I don't even see it even though I was obviously looking right at it.

Family is sort of better, and sort of difficult.Likening it to a cut healing where it itches in the meantime whilst getting slowly better. My family isn't stinging or painful, but it itches a little. I hope it's itching and not something else.

My LJ turned twelve on May the 1st!
Wow. Seems like an obscenely long time ago!

I have things to do, fun things, good things and I want to do them, but I have been binge watching instead. :S

The other night I sat out on my balcony and watched the light fade. It took about an hour. I noticed that the breeze would ruffle the leaves on certain trees, but not their near neighbors even though the leaves on those trees were not any heavier. But then it would ruffle the leaves aways away like it was skipping over certain trees. Like little micro breezes. It seems that the smaller a system like that gets, the less apparently predictable it becomes. Ever wonder why that is? Some folks cite math, but I think it's energy. The breeze must be following a certain path for a reason.

Need to redo the hummingbird feeder and set the coffee maker for the morning.

I will leave you with an odd tune that I have been obsessively listening to: Plans by Grizzly Bear.

P.S: It's a Full Moon!

I write in here nearly every day, at least three times per week, and I have been keeping this up for the past two years. Before that I was writing a handful of times a month. And I have been locking all of my entries. Why the fuck have I been doing this?

Putting this here because it is amazing: extreme words of wisdom about playing an instrument, specifically piano. It highlights how you have to work steadily, consistently, and reasonably resting in between sessions.

My favorite line: You can't cram the piano.


So working on third day in a row of tossing and turning. I would always get back to sleep, but then I would wake up again. My cycles seemed to elongate as I approached dawn, probably because I was talking to myself (in my head) and trying to soothe myself back to sleep and into a more prolonged sleep, which worked, albeit with weird side effects. I would be dreaming and I would think to myself, "Damn! This feels so good, sleeping." and "I can see the edge of the dream. It's the outside world. Shit! Don't want to wake up again!" And then I would "physically" run away and plunge deeper into the dreamscape. I would even feel myself waking up and I would force it away. Then I thought, "Gee. I hope that I can wake up again if I need to." I can do this thing where I can be dreaming and I can decide to wake up, not every night, but a lot of nights. Lucid dreaming is really cool and also kinda strange. Being able to control your sleep means that any stressor or misstep and you can wind up with a jacked up sleep schedule. Mind over matter is not always a picnic, more like a demented carnival ride.

I've decided to pretend like this is a normal day and that I do not feel half delirious with dark circles under my eyes. I don't think that napping is going to fix it. Perversely, if I do my practice (gently) and manage to accomplish things, slowly, it will put my mind at ease better than trying to take half-assed naps would. The last time that I was sleep less, getting good and exhausted was the only sure way to calm my arse down. It's like I have to really want the sleep because a lot of the time I am too wound up or spinning my gears too much to settle down and accept the loss of consciousness. Even if I think that I want to go sleep. Spinning stories helps because it takes concentration, but is also diverting and relaxing and eventually you lose the thread and drift off. How sick is it that I play mind games with myself in order to sleep?

That and Camp NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow. It's the same as regular except that you can set lower or higher word counts for yourself for the month. And I do not want it to be like camp when I was nine years old where I was sad, beleaguered, and half feral from lack of rest.


***********

Three hours before three o' clock! Woohoo!! I spent a lot of it practicing Bach (which is restful for the sleepy mind) and this thing called Parisian Street Scene which has a pretty wicked tempo and is a lot of fun. I feel so accomplished right now, I can't even tell you. I think that I am going to do some leisurely exercises, grab a coconut water, and go sit outside at the shadier end of my patio and luxuriate in beneath the crepe myrtle and snapdragons/mint/violas/morning glories. It is pretty dope out there now with everything lush and flowering, have to say.

Mint water is GREAT! Ice water with crushed mint leaves in it to be exact.

I had to stop myself from going back to the piano earlier. I am tempted to play a little more, just something leisurely. So long as I do my three hours, I suppose I can do extra dabbling here and there. I think that I am going to start doing daily s l o w trill exercises. I started to do hand over hand arpeggios a couple (??) of days ago.

Tonight, I need to shower after dinner (I am going back to showering in the evenings because I forgot to this morning and I realized that it is weird after having showered for years in the evenings, pretty much my entire life with a brief interlude from HS or uni??) and then finish transferring notes and snippets into Scrivener. Tomorrow is IT. 1,110 words per day for a month. I can do this. I just need to find a suitable time of day. Seems like mornings would be best, first thing, after breakfast but before the piano.

Might have to dance this evening to induce serious tiredness. That and it will drive away over thinking by refocusing my energy into my body.

I am seated downstairs on the large (and freakishly comfortable) sofa listening to more sonatas and reading music. I am getting much better at identifying notes without pauses and I can sit down and begin to play things fairly accurately, but I need to quiz myself, have like a note reading blitz. I have been spending my evenings practicing which I am going to switch up again. I've just been busy in the daytime lately. It is a task to sit down at seven or eight with the evening wearing on into later evening. You grow tired and do not feel like staring at the keyboard and at sheet music come eleven thirty. Practicing in the mornings and afternoons is a bit better, but this works. I still produce results and benefit from it. It is just "geh".

The weather has turned a little chillier, but I find that this makes for the perfect Sunday. It is just active enough to inspire movement and creativity, but relaxed enough to allow for repose. The sun peaks out, clouds obscure it again for several minutes, and the breeze undulates through all of the new foliage like an underwater current. I can see large petals scattering into view from somewhere left seeming to follow the downward movement of notes on a staff. A dried twig from a nearby redwood alights on the patio and sits stilly heavy with meaning. It might be that Sundays are always like this and I just now noticed.

I love how Scriabin doesn't even really bother with key signatures as such in a bunch of these. He just says it's in C and tosses in truckloads of accidentals. It's all relative anyway. (Not to be punny). And it obviously does float around a tonal center or it sounds like it does because we expect it to…I think technically it really doesn't??

Haha…I also love his notations. They're very whimsically specific!
"avec une langueur naissante" , "sombre et mysterieux", "avec une douceur de plus en plus caressante et empoisonnée" , "tres pur avec douceur" , "imperieux", "comme des éclairs", "orageux", "avec une céléste volupté".

In all important fic news, she updated again, the third in less than 48 hours or it might be the fourth, losing track, and she has made up for things somewhat. It was a short chapter, but I do not mind having short chapters twice or thrice a week. :P It's great! Her Natasha is quite cool and she finally convinced Bucky to be roommates and leave his shithole apartment; and he quit his sleazy bartending job. Why in the hell do I read these things?? Going to reread more slowly, savoringly, and then back to sight reading practice.

Sight reading this stuff is not very fascinating. It's the same five or six notes over and over again. Perhaps I should skip ahead? Perhaps I should not type a running commentary on my day in here.

…I more than made up for getting up late by putting in my time (around four hours??) today. I should probably take closer note of how much time I am spending on practice. I was feeling it in my left thumb pad and right wrist a little so I thought it would be prudent to knock off for the evening.

So the birds. At one point this afternoon they were rolling on the asphalt, no joke. I watched them tumble under a car in dismay. But they seemed no worse for wear seated at the feeder together. I changed it out as they watched from the tree. Complete nutters. They tussle every damn day.

I am concerned about Angela. She is receding, putting up walls. I texted her about getting lunch and she sort of brushed it off though she did mention wanting to…sometime. Sent her another text today inviting her to dinner tomorrow, but nothing. Her living situation is becoming untenable, apparently. But she spurns my advances, my attempts to be an ear or to help. I am trying to be the friend I have always wanted, basically. It's like, Allie was here and in some ways we scarcely connected. I feel very connected overall to the wide world even sitting in my room, but to certain people in my life, there are barriers. I can hear/feel/see/sense what they are about. I can't not. But they do not always acknowledge it themselves and you can't make people talk or open up even when you can already see them.

At any rate, I am so so tired at this moment. I woke up late and you know how even getting adequate sleep doesn't quite reverse the fact that you had a very long day prior? I woke up at seven yesterday and did not get to bed until after one in the morning. :S
I am putting in some serious hours, learning a lot in a short period of time, which is amazing. I love it! Though by "quitting time", I am super knackered. I had to force myself to stop earlier. I was unwittingly analyzing the Blue Danube. It's effing brilliant in its simplicity. Strauss switches from consonant intervals to perfect intervals and from more dissonant ones to more consonant ones leading back perfectly and elegantly to the tonic (C). And it's so pretty! Like he'll have the harmony be a second and a third, then two thirds, or a tritone and a third, then a fifth and a third. It just floats up and down the same few notes not deviating beyond the E above Middle C and the B just below that, but it's sublime. Brahms apparently was a huge fan of it and wished that he had thought of it.

And now to bed, for we rise at 9:30, ish. (Not really, more like seven thirty).

Who got 49/50 on the last lecture exam? This person, right here!!! YES. I think that I did well on the lab bit too so that's a great big boost from like 88-89% overall to a solidly, safe "A". We are about halfway through the exams, grading wise though more than halfway through the course. I am so so pleased right now. I am currently leaping ahead since I pretty much have the blood vessels down. We are being lectured on Lymphatic/Immune/Respiratory on Monday, but that's a quite a bit considering that we have yet another exam on Tuesday so I am actually starting early.

Here is a comment that I made on the latest and greatest chapter by Shiso:

"There's this wonderful unspoken connection (again) between them sort of like breathing or the ocean. It feels like there is distance there of a sort, but not really since there is this great, big something connecting them at all times. (I think of water because, well, emotions, but also because it feels like that to me. ) The right swell could come along and just suddenly push one of them back into the other's orbit."

It felt like a bit of a babble, but she really liked it and I like the image the more that I think about it. It got me thinking in other ways. Several of her responses did actually, about life and people. I think that we are all floating in the same whateveritis, something, some substance akin to water or perhaps like a cross between water and light, a form of energy, a medium that we all inhabit/share/cohabitate. Some are farther away, off in seas separated by great watery expanses (that could have proper names if this was about some odd, interstitial geography), but inevitably connected nevertheless, the people we love, strongly dislike, don't particularly like or dislike, and the ones that we know nothing about. And I like that. I like that I am connected to everyone, even people whom I would perhaps choose to not be around. They deserve a space and they have it just by being part of the human race.
Of course, it makes me also ponder the other thing, that there are people whom I like, who I am related to, or what have you that I am also connected to no matter how far away they may appear to be. It gives me hope. It could be a bonkers only child thing, seeing connections by virtue of being the observer, of knowing solitude and not being either ashamed, insecure, or especially bothered by it as a concept and as a practice when necessary.
Sure, I desire a social life a bit more scintillating than the one that I've got at present, but I can go out into the world and do things myself on my own and derive pleasure from it. I can sit in a cafe or a shop and watch other people and not think, "Well, gee I should have just stayed home rather than venture out with no one else to do it with" cause this is what a lot of people do, sadly. It's like they need permission to go out alone, like it's somehow odd or embarrassing. It might just be a smaller town thing. I suspect that in highly urban areas, folks are less reticent about going out alone, more confident which makes them seem usual so that it sort of normalizes itself. And, yo, people watching.

Done! ...with the chapter on lymph/immune. I am going to do the Respiratory tomorrow and then review the set. I cannot imagine that he is going to include all that much from this latest stuff seeing as we will scarcely have the time to go over it in any detail.

Colin was singing in the shower last night at one in the flipping morning. I think that I partially surfaced for a moment, long enough to wonder, "Can I hear singing?" and then I fell deeper into sleep. Apparently he kept people up... He said that it made him feel less uneasy. Aww, he's afraid of the dark. <3 He said that it was taking his mind off the potential for psycho killers to randomly get him in the shower. :S

I could cure him of that. ;D