KJ

I had an interview yesterday, and it went pretty well! They said I should know by the end of next week.

Meanwhile, the units on either side of our place are both undergoing remodeling. :\ So that's a fun time for me to be home all day. I might need to start making more plans to get out of the house.

Also, it's a concert week. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, three nights in a row (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday -- I'd invite locals to check it out, but all three shows are sold out and have been for awhile; they even added an extra show on Sunday, and it sold out in only a few days). Plus tonight's dress rehearsal is being recorded, so we have to wear concert dress and be on our best behavior, so it's really more like an extra concert. Good times.

How is everyone?

We started rehearsals for this piece tonight. I don't have anything to say about that, really. I just wanted the excuse to use my Beethoven icon.

I was getting coffee at the cafe across the street, as I often do on morning when I have no plans to go out, and someone was playing the piano. This happens so rarely that I forget that the cafe even has a piano, so it look me a moment to realize that the music was live. The song was also familiar, and it took me awhile to place it out of context. Then it hit me: it was the Hymn of the Fayth, from FFX.

By the time I pulled out my phone to inform Tumblr what was happening, the pianist had begun playing Zanarkand, followed by a little bit of Yuna's Theme, and then he moved on to other, less nerdy things (a bit of "Come Sail Away", and some other pop songs, some of the Top Gun theme, a touch of "Heart and Soul"), although there was also an attempt at Roses of May, from FFIX. Then, before I finished my breakfast, he was gone, vanished before I could compliment him on his musical stylings. A bit of random happiness for me, although it makes me a little sad, too, that he will never know that at least one person heard his musical choices and knew them to be a sort of fannish kin.

Let's catch up on the last couple of weeks, shall we?

1. Work: Things have changed pretty drastically recently and I'm scrambling to keep up. The upshot of it is that I have fewer people to get more things done -- isn't that always the way? -- so I expect my life to be a bit more constrained for awhile. For one thing, I'm moving to a Tuesday - Saturday schedule for awhile, starting this week, probably at least through August. I'll probably also have longer hours in general, and my time while at work will be more constrained. Everything is balanced on a knife-edge, no slack whatsoever, and although I understand a desire to make things more efficient, if you pull too hard on a rope with no slack, it breaks.

So I guess we'll see.

2. Fandom: As planned, I've started a DA:O replay. I went for a Brosca game; her name is Kasia, and I love her to death. Right now we're back in Orzammar, and so far it's everything I could have hoped for. Very different from Aeducan's homecoming, and honestly I think better developed. But more on that when I've played it further. I've been blogging the game over on Tumblr, under the tags KJ Replays DAO and Kasia Brosca, if anyone is interested.

Also, don't forget Doink! signups close tomorrow!! Have a link. I have signed up and am really looking forward to it.

3. In other news: Chorus has started, we're doing Schumann's Mass in C Minor, which is a new piece for me. Very nice so far, although tough in some places. As of yesterday, I am going back to Rome in June, for a week with A and M, which should be extremely awesome, and there's also talk of spending Memorial Day weekend in Las Vegas. Whatever can get me through this ridiculous quarter, I'll take it.

Day Eleven: Favorite song from the soundtracks

The Dragon Age Origins party camp theme. No contest.



So beautiful. So haunting. I could sit in camp and listen to it for hours. Sometimes I have. The violin, the lead vocalist, the soft sounds of the chorus in the background. Even after three times through, I still get chills when I hear it, and I miss it whenever I play any of the other games.

I love good game music, and this is some of the best. It's perfect for the setting, and it stands on its own as a work of art. If the complete version were on the soundtrack, I'd buy it in a second.

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So this weekend's shows were awesome. To be fair, I have never been to a bad They Might Be Giants concert. The Johns and their band are fantastic performers, and I suspect that, even at their worst, They would be entertaining. They seem to be having so much fun on that stage -- Flans still jumps around like a kid with his guitar, while Linnell holds the center of the storm at the keyboards and the band rocks out. Saturday's show was excellent; I got to hear some old favorites (Pencil Rain! Why Does the Sun Shine?! The Guitar!), and some of their newer stuff, and it was all great fun. But I am so, so glad I went to Sunday's performance as well, because it was the Flood show.

Flood, TMBG's breakthrough album and the one that casual fans of the band are most likely to know, is not my favorite of their albums -- that honor is held by Apollo 18, and I would probably rank Lincoln, The Else, and possibly John Henry above it as well, in terms of "if I were to choose a TMBG album to listen to in its entirety, which am I most likely to pick?" But Flood will always hold a special place in my heart, because it's the album through which I discovered this, my all-time favorite band. It was the second commercially recorded tape I ever bought for myself, and probably the first I ever wore out from continuous play. It was also the first concert I ever saw, a free show in Union Square in the summer of 1990, back when it was just John and John and a drum machine and a collection of random instruments. And I will always remember what it felt like to be crowded on the pavement with a thousand of my fellow fans, enraptured in fangirl glee, listening to these two guys play live versions of songs that I'd listened to over and over, the same songs but new and different, like Whistling in the Dark performed on only a marching band bass drum and an accordion. And hearing Shoehorn With Teeth for the first time, and driving down to the city with my co-worker Beth and wandering around the mall and being free in downtown San Francisco -- no parents, no aunts, no school trip minders -- for possibly the first time ever.

And it was this that I was thinking about on Sunday night, standing on the floor of the Fillmore just over 21 years later, listening to the entire album played in reverse order (with a half set beforehand and a short interlude of newer works between the two sides of the album). They've changed up many of the arrangements, partly because they play with a full band now (and the band is awesome -- their guitarist, Dan Miller, is incredibly talented, and his acoustic guitar version of "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" is a thing of beauty) and I'm sure partly so they don't get completely bored of them. But they remain the songs we know and love, and the nostalgia provoked by dancing and singing along (because of course I know every word by heart) was intense.

Twenty years. Can it really have been so long ago?

In a short while, I leave for the airport, fetching A for a weekend of fun, frolic, and They Might Be Giants. Shows tonight and tomorrow; tomorrow's performance is being advertised as a "Flood Show", which is a pretty darn exciting concept.

Meanwhile, in lieu of substantial content, have a very thoughtful comment regarding the experience of being an introvert online.

And also, this may be my favorite thing in the history of the Internet. And that's saying something.

I hope everyone is having a splendid weekend.

Moving to a schedule of multiple questions every few days, for now. Maybe two, maybe three, depending on which questions go best together.

Day 03 – Your favourite Final Fantasy theme/song.

This is a hard call because there is so much FF music I love. "Zanarkand" has always haunted me, from the very first moment of FFX. The Guadosalam theme, as well, and "Moment of Truth", which is the music that plays before Operation Mi'ihen. Then there's "Terra's Theme", and the music from time compression in FFVIII, and the Great Crystal theme in FFXII.

But then I crack open my iTunes and remember: oh yes, FFIX. From the opening theme to "Vamo' alla Flamenco" (which I loved so much that, when I was watching T play the first time, I would beg him to play Chocobo Hot & Cold, and then when I finally played on my own, I probably ran through the Zidane and Blank swordfight twenty times just so I could keep hearing it), from the frog hunting music to "Roses of May" to "Not Alone"... It is my favorite FF soundtrack, hands down, and if I had to pick a single favorite track it would probably be "Vamo' alla Flamenco" -- but I don't know, ask me tomorrow, I might say something else.



Day 04 – Your favourite Final Fantasy party from your favourite game.

FFX: the entire team. I was obsessive about switching people in and out of battle so that everyone could get all the XP, and I also liked the tactics I could employ as a result: letting each character play to their strength, and shield the weak sides of the others.

Day 05 – Your favourite Final Fantasy City/Town.

I don't know that I have one, really; I tend to think more in terms of worlds and universes than individual locations. This might be colored by the fact that my first game was FFX, which was less about each town and city and more about the journeys between them -- you're not wandering around on a faceless world map, you're actually experiencing the pathways and the trails and the rivers and the mountains along the way. So maybe my answer is Spira, which continues to be my favorite videogame world of all time.

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Taking advantage of a quiet morning. The last week of the quarter is about to start, which is busy under any circumstances, but even more so when it coincides with holiday-making. I think tomorrow may be literally the only day I don't have anything planned between last Wednesday and Monday the 20th. (Tonight T's company is having a casual office holiday party, as opposed to the formal one which is usually held sometime in January.)

Yesterday I sang in the Stanford Sing-along Messiah. It's an annual event, but I haven't participated for years. It's always fun, although I think it would be more fun if I actually knew The Messiah; I'm essentially sight-reading, except for the "Hallelujah Chorus" which I sort-of know, mostly by osmosis. I am jealous of the people in this video, who all appear to be singing it without music:



Some of the folks in my chorus have talked about doing something similar; it sounds awesome, but I would really have to sit down with that music and memorize it. It's probably too late to pull one together for this holiday season anyway. Maybe next year.

renay asked me to share some favorite quotations.

This is tough, because I enjoy a good quote, but I don't tend to save them. In fact, when I want to quote something, I usually have go dig into my archives, or the Internet. This wasn't always true -- as a teenager, I started keeping a book of quotes, which I would write down in colored marker in a blank book that I purchased specifically for that purpose. Song lyrics, mostly, although prose and poetry quotations as well. A quick dig through some storage boxes turned up the book, and the vintage of the song lyrics would suggest that it was mostly written during college. Most of them unattributed; the lyrics I recognize for the most part, but others come from sources I can't remember. If only I had noted whom I heard say Backrubs and blood drives are evidence that there is a god on earth or A curious sense of unreality suffuses most parts of my life.

Given that the last quote in the book is a Barenaked Ladies lyric that was almost certainly meant to be a dig at my ex-boyfriend, I probably stopped writing them down sometime in 1998, which is just around the time that any famous quotation or song lyric I wanted would have become findable on the Web. And so I stopped keeping track. When I do save a quotation, it tend to be about words or books or language, like the three that live in my journal profile. I enjoy matching a quote to a situation -- going through that quote journal, I was pretty well able to guess what (or whom) I was thinking about when I wrote each one down -- which makes it harder for me to pull out a quotation when I'm not thinking about anything specific.

So here is one perennial favorite, a line of poetry I have long loved, and an appropriate way to sum up any personal entry:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

-- Walt Whitman, A Song of Myself

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