My Travels

Guuugh. Okay. Fine. I’ll update my blog. Gaaaaawd. But I should tell you that it took two (2) personal invitations to get me to do so. Mr. Bisker, Ms. Spencer: this one’s for you.

The reason I haven’t updated for some time is that I’ve actually been doing things. This is not one of those “I have a life, so I don’t have time to update my blog like you losers” better-than-you comments, though of course I am better than you. No, this is simply an issue of not knowing what to blog about, having had three straight weekends of adventure, relatively speaking.

First, the weekend of January 21, 2006. I went to Chicago to visit Jill. Highlights of the trip include:

1) Going to Blue Man Group performance, which was excellent.

2) Going to the Museum of Science and Industry. Here, we saw the outside of a captured German WWII submarine, the promotional posters for which pictured a submariney-looking gauge marked, as expected, in German. To be more accurate in its current setting, it should have stated simply “we gonna rip you off.” I say this because they charge an extra five bucks to enter the submarine, on top of the 12 or 15 or however many dollars we had already paid to gain entry to the museum. Frustrating, but interesting when considered in the context of WWII: capture the submarine of your socialist enemy and then charge people twice to go inside. Capitalism, ho!

3) Going to The Green Mill, the features of which were many including an exceptionally good jazz organ player, relatively cheap strong drinks, an amazing mix of people (including many young people actually watching the music), and a pleasant blend of art-deco landmark and gritty 50’s cocktail lounge styling. This should not be confused with The Green Mile, which mainly features tom hanks and copious electrocution shots. Green Mill, thumbs up.

4) Going to the airport twice in rapid succession, having forgotten my wallet in a sleep-deprived haze. Oops.

5) Leaving with my face (and all other parts of me) intact, despite Freud’s best efforts to the contrary.

6) An extra afternoon in Chicago, spent entirely at the airport, waiting for my plane to arrive. It left over four hours late.

Weekend of January 28, 2006
Keegan, alternately residing in Cleveland and Rochester, came down to Buffalo for a day or two. We hung out on Saturday night, and by hung out I mean drank at a number of Buffalo’s finest spiritoriums. Sunday we slowly recovered while playing Nintendo, and attended a Maria Schneider concert in the evening, which was the true motive for him coming down on that particular weekend. Maria Schneider is a big-band composer, and an excellent one at that. She was charming, her band was really quite amazing, and she had good things to say both about the business of music and composition. I would recommend her music to anyone within earshot of one of her shows.

February 2-4, 2006
Went to Bloomington, Indiana for a grad school interview. While there, I stayed with fellow Obies Brea and Matt and their dog Pepper, the latter of whom is wholly dedicated to licking faces, with an enthusiasm normally reserved for things like escaping death. As you, with intense focused energy and adrenaline, would run from a knife-wielding murderer, so Pep licks faces.

Bloomington is a nice town though, about an hour and fifteen minutes south of Indianapolis. It is bigger than Oberlin by far, but not so big as to be considered a city by most standards. No, it is just a very large college town, with all the trappings thereof, including many bars, restaurants, and young people. I attended the Opera of the week, The Barber of Seville. Beforehand, in the lobby, I had a conversation with a nice older gentleman who asked if I might know when the summer carillon concert would take place. I explained to him that I was only an applicant, not a student, and thus had no idea, I’m sorry. He then explained me everything about himself, including the death of his wife 10 years ago, and how they used to drive down from their farm in northern Indiana every year and stay overnight in Bloomington to see the opera, and how he still does it without her. I found this touching. He also had the good social graces not to overdo it, and soon excused himself to find a good seat. Excellent.

The logistics of the trip worked out exceedingly well. My flights to Indianapolis were smooth, and I managed to escape my Pittsburgh layover without being terrible-toweled (toweled-terribly?) even once. Upon arrival, I rented a car from Enterprise because their per-day charge for drivers under 25 was lower than the other rental agencies ($10/day v. $25/day or more elsewhere). I had planned to rent a Neon, as it was small and cheap, but not so small and cheap as the Aveo (a small Korean-made Chevrolet) which from the brochure seemed to be only slightly better than renting a bicycle. The salesman (and what a salesman!) told me about the underage fee, I said fine. He spent literally 15 minutes telling me about insurance options despite my insistence that I would purchase none, rentals being covered under my normal automobile insurance. He then spent another five trying to convince me to upgrade to a Hyundai for “only $5 a day more!” I declined. He then: (1) checked the availability of Neons, found there were none, and upgraded me to the Hyundai for free; and (2) forgot to add the underage-driver surcharge to my bill. All said, I saved something on the order of $30, plus the associated taxes.

The Hyundai, I must say, would probably have been worth the money. It had a CD player (for which I, an admitted overpacker, had brought CDs), and a sunroof. The latter was the source of some confusion during my first several minutes on the highway, as I found it to be partway open. It was, therefore, significantly louder, colder, and wetter (it was raining) than the interior of modern cars tend to be. Closed it up, though, no problem, and from then on things went just fine, thank you very much. Hyundai and I became good pals.

We (Hyundai and I) drove Brea to the airport on Saturday morning, as she was coincidentally departing for Los Angeles within a half hour of my own flight out of Indiana. We discussed the wedding (we had discussed this previously, too; I did a good job not flipping out, I think), and the possibility that I might write the music. I have clearly hit upon a cottage industry.

We ate lunch in the airport food court, and went our separate ways. Then my bag, which I will from now on call Judas, sold me out by flunking the Explosive Residue test at the security checkpoint. I was pulled aside and frisked in a little plexiglas three-quarter room between two metal detectors. Post-frisk, the TSA screener asked “are those just keys in your pocket?” I answered keys and a pen. He asked to see the pen. I demonstrated that it was a pen by taking off the cap and pretending to write with it, Marcel Marceau-style, on an imaginary sheet of paper between us. He seemed satisfied, and allowed me to go back to the checkpoint to watch as my bag was searched. Note: for anyone who has ever chided me for packing my clothes in large plastic ziplock bags, I should point out that my doing so saved me on this occasion, as it made the whole process much faster and allowed me to get to my gate 10 minutes early instead of missing my flight.

Still I wonder what caused the incident to begin with. I slept on the floor of Matt’s study. What, Matt, were you doing in there, exactly, that may have involved fertilizer or volatile chemicals? Are you even a philosophy student at all? It is a well-known fact that philosophy students cannot be trusted farther than they can be thrown, and if Matt is a representative example of philosophy students in general, I would judge this distance to be not very far. Or was it Pepper? He had used the lid of my suitcase as a platform to better position his tiny little body for face-licking. Is it possible that all the face-licking, and perhaps even dog-being, was an elaborate ruse to conceal more nefarious purposes?

Oh and the interview went fine. We’ll see how things turn out. Also I saw Scott Glenn, twice actually, the second time he helped me find the Parsifal Room, which, like Brigadoon, seems to be one of those places that only appears every hundred years and is therefore totally impossible to find.

Weekend of February 11, 2006
This weekend, I will be driving to the ritzy suburbs just north of New York City to check out SUNY Purchase, which has a studio composition program. Purchase seems to be one of those schools that is not remarkable in any way except that its proximity to New York attracts excellent music faculty. This studio composition program is one that they seem very proud of in a kind of vague way; the website doesn’t tell you all that much about it except how unique and awesome it is. This makes me skeptical. Anyway, I had applied at the last minute just to keep my options open, and being unsure, I was thinking seriously about canceling my interview, but my parents convinced me that I should just go ahead and do it. That and they offered to pay for a hotel. So to White Plains I go, tomorrow.

Over and out.