is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.

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but i took it for fun!

When I was in college I took sight singing in the music department, as an elective to fulfill "breadth requirements" in the humanities. The class was fun but humiliating, since it involved singing in front of the class every freaking day. Even tests involved public singing. The only thing that made it tolerably (as opposed to intolerably) humiliating for me was that my voice and sight-reading skills tended to be better than those of my classmates. Hahaha. Apparently when it comes to humiliation, scale matters (and somewhere in there there is a sight singing joke about musical scales).

At first the class was confusing because its demographics were odd: almost everyone in the class was asian. I wondered about that. Then I learned that the course was a recommended elective on a brochure for the engineering school. Ah, right. "Humanities breadth requirement?! What's that?! What should I take?! I am confused!" And then, for engineering students, the comfort of guidance from a brochure. We had no such brochures in the College of Letters and Science. They just threw us to the wolves, I tell you. No easily accessible advisors either, until you declared a major.

Anyway, for some reason, after I took that class, I also took a second semester of more advanced sight singing? Also humiliating. I learned a lot more about finding intervals and interpreting time signatures with voice. I wish I still remembered all that stuff. But the funny part is how mad the teacher got at me at the end of the semester when he figured out that I had taken the course as Pass/Not-Pass. (That means that I didn't get a letter grade. I just passed the course.) Apparently I had earned an A, and was the only one in the course who had done so, or something like that, and the teacher just couldn't figure out why I would do such a thing, and then was even more mystified/annoyed when my only response was, "but I took this course for fun." It's not so strange, is it? I mean, it counted toward no college or major requirement, and I wasn't in it for the grade, so why not release the pressure and just take it for whatever you earn? I didn't have any regrets. He did not have any way of understanding my lack of regrets.

The only strange thing, if you ask me, is that I would take a class for "fun" that I have also described as "humiliating." Because it's not like it got less humiliating over time. Every single day was full of "ugh, he's going to call on me," and the heart palpitations that go with that. Go figure. Sometimes I wish I could, ahem, get those balls back and take singing lessons again.

By the way, it really bothers me when people say adventurous (or pushy or successful or commanding, and so on) women have balls. That's right. Adventurous women are man-like. No other way to explain it.

Use your metaphors with care! Better yet, make up new ones. Keep language alive, my friends!

It also bothers me when people call tits "girls." I am going to proceed as if the reasons for that are so obvious that no explaining is required. And then! It's OK to call arms "guns," but only if you do so once in a great while, and do so in jest. (As to reversing it all, it is definitely not OK to call girls "tits," but it is usually fine to call guns "arms." I mean, Vergil did it. The first line of the Aeneid is Arma virumque cano, I sing of arms and a man. And if he's talking about a gunshow, it has nothing to do with Will Ferrell lifting weights, you know? Arms are weapons. Though, of course, to avoid being construed as anachronistic, I should add that Vergil isn't singing about guns, unless "guns" is a metaphor for pre-gun weapons.)

Change of subject. When I framed that question about doctors who don't take insurance a few blog entries (and days) ago, it wasn't rhetorical. I actually do wonder whether this is a common thing, that whole leagues of doctors don't take any insurance at all. Or is it just another "tax" a person has to pay for living in New York City?

I cannot afford to live in New York City.

However, I do live in New York City. Todd, Lisa and I saw Zach Galifianakis the other night at 92 Y. The first 30 minutes were really funny. Then it spiraled out of control a bit, and not in a good way. He sometimes gets lazy or crazy and just starts talking to or picking on audience members. There was a bit too much of that. I'm always waiting for him to wrap it up and make it make sense. I think sometimes he succeeds in doing that. But not always. It was still a good show. I think maybe his audiences have become too kind. He needs to be booed and heckled and challenged. The booing pushes him to be funnier or smarter. As Lisa put it, all he has to do is stand there and someone will laugh. Whatevs, I say. People, you and your kinds laughs are doing no favors for the brilliant Zach Galifianakis.

Will Arnett (aka GOB from Arrested Development or, as Zach put it, "Amy Poehler's husband") sat in with him for a funny interview. And he also showed some clips of his "Between Two Ferns" online talkshow farce. I just made a couple of stabs at describing a weird but funny Goebbels joke he made but it didn't translate well into writing, so we'll leave it at that.

Last weekend Gus and I saw Milk. It was good. It was much more straight-forwardly narrative-driven than I thought it would be. There were only a couple of moments when it was really clear that it was a Gus Van Sant film. But it is a good film, and all the performances are really great. That's what stays with you later, all the truly excellent performances. I also liked the totally unhyped cameo appearance of Tom Ammiano, a more recent openly gay member of the SF Board of Supervisors.

Later last weekend Marian and I saw Four Christmases. She was an assistant costumer for the film, so she wanted to see how it turned out. We both thought it would suck. And it didn't. We both laughed out loud a number of times. I groaned at the tacked on heterofamilynormative ending. But, hey, it's Hollywood at the Holidays. The film's no work of art, and it has its slow moments, but I'm not sure why it deserves all the truly bad press and viewer reviews I've seen collected on Rotten Tomatoes.

And now I must get to work.

10:12 a.m. - December 12, 2008
js - 2008-12-12 21:31:04
ps-- sight singing means singing to written music. you have to learn how to read music and then how to interpret the written notations into vocalizations.
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Vladimir Estragon - 2008-12-13 17:26:18
Would it be ok to call your tits "Bono" and "Sandra Day O'Connor?" Those are the worst tit names I ever heard!
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js - 2008-12-15 15:22:38
wow. those are truly terrible tit names. i'm sure they're really your fist names, right? like when you get mad at someone and say, hey, you better shut your trap or i'm going to introduce you to [brandishing motion 1] Bono and [brandishing motion 2] Sandra Day O'Connor?! That might lead to some scary fisticuffs. Oh. I just remembered that you are probably referring to this. Heh. Or you aren't and you are just channeling 30 Rock. All good.
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