Category: Personal
-
Pieces
Experiences lately seem to come in defined, outlined, characterized pieces: like bits of a mosaic. But since the mosaic isn't seen whole (at least not by me), I am constantly surprised by huge shifts in the ground underfoot…. * A couple of weeks ago, at the acupuncturist, while lying pierced: a really astounding ecstatic experience,…
-
Redewendung
On Skype this evening, I was waiting for a prospective student to come online and tell me about a proposed project… he forgot or got the time wrong (this student keeps having trouble remembering which way the time zones run – I suggested he get a computer program to explain it to him…). Hans-Rainer was…
-
Database
Finally getting organized to go to New York and Washington next week, for my mother's memorial service at Arlington Cemetary; and staying with my sister in New York, plus catching up with a few old friends. I went through my old addresses database – now increasingly supplanted by the data shared between my phone and…
-
Game On
My only excuse – at least the only one I can think of at the moment – is that, after a month out of town, I've had a cold for five days. Therefore: dislocated habits, grogginess, slow response time… well it's an excuse. After a shower, vacuuming living room and laundry and feeling a bit…
-
A Dozen Roses for John
In the spring of 2001, I was planning to move from Hong Kong to Australia. At some point in the previous months – John will remember more exactly, he knows my memories are never very clearly date-stamped – John and I had met at an Australian musicology conference. This astoundingly beautiful, very shy and earnest,…
-
Spring
And finally, here it is, what we've been waiting for. Nearly a week after Easter (and apparently this year Roman Easter and Greek Easter were the same day, which is in itself a fairly weird result of changing calendars and seasons). A young father, slightly anxious-looking but in a light t-shirt, walks with a child…
-
Short List
So: exactly one long month after my last substantive (from my point of view) post, interrupted by only one jeu d'esprit about coffee… I keep thinking of the blog, of all the many large and subtle shifts that have taken place in that month, and keep feeling rather guilty for not writing about them… but…
-
Twenty-five miserable things about me
Having lost the chance to study in Zürich this year – yes, it will happen; but next February at best, more plausibly next June – I'm still going to start analysis in the next few weeks, and am meeting two prospective analysts this week. I keep thinking that what is really the central 'presenting' problem…
-
The day after
On a sharply disappointing day, when some bitterly familiar bad things happened – yet again – and I left early, missing the department Christmas celebration – while at home, avoiding everything – the television has a rerun of a favorite musical/dramatic passage: the final episode of Sex and the City. There are three exceptional passages…
-
Out of thin air
An e-mail arrives, from persons unknown, from parts unknown – subject heading: "Hey sexy music prof." No, it's not spam – or at least not mass-produced spam. A viola player, from the US; his website shows him to be a cheerful bear type, with a beard (I'm a sucker for facial hair – can barely…
Paul Attinello 