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[eub]

You see the two-week estimate to wrap up my thesis was optimistic, due chiefly to the seething hatred for ever looking at the thing again. But last week was sort of productive. Next week should do it, this time for sure. And a week from now I'll be visiting Seattle for interviewing and apartment-looking, though we're leaning towards getting into temp housing for a bit and hunting from there.

Today Dee is train-gaming and dancing. I got the oil changed and stocked up on vanilla and tea, and read Gardner's Grendel in the park. I went to the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble's first concert for the season, prompted by Roger (my advisor) having a piece opening it. Turns out the piece was part one of six and was about 43 seconds long -- I came this close to missing the whole thing because I was driving around and around the North Side loop and ending up parking in a non-functioning parking garage -- but the concert was all good. Now I feel like a dope for not going to a PNME concert in any of my previous seven years in Pittsburgh. I suppose it's because most of my exposure to academic new music is ICMC concerts, which IMO are mostly wastelands of overprocessed mush. Half of this concert was a longish piece about an elderly Einstein reminiscing, which was well-played and well-sung but whose text struck me as anachronistic and scientifically sloppy and just careless of Einstein's voice, an intrusion. The David Lang piece, on the other hand, was engrossing. The concert was staged with a good deal of mugging by the performers during and in the margins of the performances (no idea what of this was called for in the scores), which was both amusing and distracting. One nice bit of paramusical business was the "radio DJ" on stage who closed out one piece and introduced the next -- and whose news headlines bled over into it. Give me slippery framing games, I'm easy.

I think I'm going to have some kind of deliberate program of exploration so as not to take five or ten years to discover Seattle.

Last night we went to a box at the Waterfront, Damon's, for decent meat and mostly for trivia games. Dang television questions in the home stretch. At one point we had our restaurant at #1 nationally: I think that was the game where they asked whether a big-ass computer was a mainframe, mainline, mainstay, or Maine lobster.

I apparently stealth-torqued my knee playing volleyball yesterday. Knees are such an engineering cock-up.

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