Subject:	Trains
Time:	3.00P

Mood:	excited
Music:	Bjork - Pagan Poetry

Yesh yesh yesh! Matt is coming today and I'm very excited. I'll probably leave here in an hour (though he should be here NOW cos that's when the train schedule said he'd be here) because his train is an hour and a half late. I'm not sure what we're gonna do yet. Logistics get weird when you don't have a car and everything is miles from where you really want to be. But as long as he's here I'm happy. I'll probably miss the Mahler 2 tonight on campus. BSO is doing it. They just did it in Oberlin, and I was supposed to sing in it, but alas... I never learned the part, and that's what got me an NE in MU. Yah eat that, non-obies. I'm doing some more score reading because that's what my life is about these days. I'm gonna try the Schubert 15 4tet and see if I can reproduce what the Juilliard 4tet did last week in concert. I will fail miserably. BUT, I will learn it. And that's the point. I can't sit still. Goodness. And I'm still thinking about people I miss whom I barely even see anyway. Goodness indeed.

Subject:	God Bless America: Land that I owe
Time:	11.12A

Mood:	loved
Music:	none

I love Brad. He's just an all around good guy. Ever since we started talking to each other, there's been a strong connection. We had another great conversation last night. I still think Adam Tully is evil. But I'm looking forward to having another close friend.

Today is the 4th of July, and I'm sitting around in the nation's "birthplace" so to speak, and I don't feel festive. I'm sneezing a lot. But otherwise, it should be a nice day. We have class at 4. So for the next 5 hours I guess I'll just sit around. I haven't decided if I'm going to Linda Ronstadt tonight. I actually think my pass won't get me in to that concert. So that makes the choice easier. Maybe the gang will want to go out for drinks tonight. I hope so. Last weekend was so much fun, I wanna do it again. like... RIGHT NOW. Even though it's only 11.

Hrm.

Today is Matt's grandmother's birthday, I believe. He's with the family and enjoying every minute of it I'm sure. He should have brought his laptop so I could talk to him. I'll probably call him later to make sure everything's in place for tomorrow. I can't wait to see him.

My stomach has been hurting the last few days too. I don't know why. If I had any other symptoms I'd say it was stomach flu, but it might just be the brie. Time to go look for some interesting fonts and filch a copy of photoshop. I'm getting rid of dead journal and replacing it with a more real, STABLE one. But that will take time, and much coding -- a slow and painful process that I've forgotten about all these years. Maybe I'll just wait until I can get a copy of flash. that would be so much easier. And sexy too. Woohooo!

Subject:	My favorite Book
Time:	10.42P

Mood:
Music:

Please read the following paragraph out loud (in a low murmur if necessary). Read slowly and let the words drip from your tongue. But also be aware of the incredible humor of the passage and picture each image vividly as you read.

Among some treasures I lost during the wanderings of my adult years, there was a snapshot taken by my aunt which showed Annabel, her parents and the staid, elderly, lame gentleman, a Dr. Cooper, who that same summer courted my aunt, grouped around a table in a sidewalk cafŽ. Annabel did not come out well, caught as she was in the act of bending over her chocolat glacŽ, and her thin bare shoulders and the parting in her hair were about all that could be identified (as I remember that picture) amid the sunny blur into which her lost loveliness graded; but I, sitting somewhat apart from the rest, came out with a kind of dramatic conspicuousness: a moody, beetle-browed boy in a dark sport shirt and well-tailored white shorts, his legs crossed, sitting in profile, looking away. That photograph was taken on the last day of our fatal summer and just a few minutes before we made our second and final attempt to thwart fate. Under the flimsiest of pretexts (this was our very last chance, and nothing really mattered) we escaped from the cafŽ to the beach, and found a desolate stretch of sand, and there, in the violet shadow of some red rocks forming a kind of cave, had a brief session of avid caresses, with somebody's lost pair of sunglasses for only witness. I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu.

Subject:	Salvatore Matteo Antonio
Time:	12.08A

Mood:
Music:

It really really pisses me off when people say bad things about Matt to my face. Or even when they draw conclusions. Matt, though completely oblivious to the world around him 90% of the time, is the most loving, the most beautiful, the most wholly devoted person I've ever even MET -- let alone dated. He's made each day of my life fun since we met, regardless of whether we're fighting or fucking. I'm thinking about him every hour of every day. Grr... I've never felt this way about another human being before. And it's frustrating, and confusing, and impossible, and wonderful, and worth every second. Part of me doesn't want to give in to him. And until it does, our relationship is not going to reach its full potential. But every day we're together I give a little more. And so does he. And soon, for the first time in both of our lives we will have given everything of ourselves to another person without fear. And for a second the world will slow down on its axis just enough for us to see the stars as they really are. And we will be at peace.

Subject:	A busy day
Time:	11.08P

Mood:	drunk
Music:

I missed my lesson with M. Voisin today. But that's ok because he's too old to remember I was supposed to be there anyway. I got up at 9 and got to campus just in time for Phyllis Curtin's master class. She is the woman whom the role of Susannah was created for. And Susannah is the opera I'm conducting next month. (Now that it's July) So I sat and listened to two baritones, a mezzo, and a soprano, all of which *I* felt were substandard talents. I thought since this is Tanglewood and all, and since Ms. Curtin is fucking famous that there would be incredible people here to learn from. Turns out they all suck. Ms. Curtin's talent, however, is not to be outdone. She pulled a sound you could actually listen to out of these people. In fact, as testament, even demonstration of thier ineptitude, one of the baritone's asked the following question:

"Ms. Curtin, I noticed that when you inhaled your ribs seemed to move out and stay there... is that something you taught yourself to do for air reserve?" Of course, to the trained singer, and I do mean TRAINED, this question is absolutely absurd. For the rest of you, here's why this question sucks. The technique he's describing is what the Italians call "apoggio" or lean. It describes the motion of the muscles of the ribcage. There are three small muscle groups between the ribs which all work to move the ribcage in various directions. As you inhale, your ribcage moves out laterally (to the side) which creates a vaccuum inside the lungs which means lowered air pressure which means the air from the outside rushes in to equalize it blah blah blah! Anyway... as you exhale while singing, you try to keep your ribs in that expanded position, but as your lungs get emptied, the ribs want to return to their original position. This fight between the muscles of the ribs is what DEFINES healthy singing. You make the diaphragm do the work of supporting the tone instead of collapsing the rib cage. And this technique is the first thing you learn as a singer. Because without it, the tone and whole vocal mechanism fails, and the work required to sing increases exponentially. SO the fact that this 27 year old who has a masters in singing and is by most counts "a professional" had never even HEARD of this, the most basic technique, was to me, unfathomable. The horrible tone and bad technique continued in the Dawn Upshaw master class in the afternoon. Dawn was polite. She didn't say "you suck you suck you suck!!" Which is what I would have done. Luckily, no one has called me to do a master class. At the Q&A after the class, people were asking absurd questions. "How did you get into singing?" "I love this album, why'd you make it?" and even "What kind of repertoire do you like?" When I opened my mouth to speak, mind you, in front of ALL the vocal fellows -- people who are supposed to be the cream of the crop of the nation's singers -- I asked AN INTELLIGENT QUESTION! I wanted to know how Dawn's development as a singer included knowledge of vocal technique (much like the one I described above) if at all, and how important she viewed knowledge of anatomy vs. teaching by images. She preferred the images route, but as all the vocal fellows turned around to see WHO THE FUCK was talking, I just beamed and gave them the "you might wanna write this down" look. After all, they're here to LEARN something, aren't they? Well, the moral of this story is, if I had known how easy it was to get into this place, I would have auditioned two years ago.

In other news, less fun, but important nonetheless, Matt went to Toronto for pride this last weekend. After a long talk about how lonely I was here, he promised he'd be there for me. But he didn't call once the whole weekend. And I'm hurt. Because I really needed to talk to him over the weekend. And no matter how often I called, or how many messages, he didn't pick up a phone. I know his cell didn't work, but I know they have payphones, and he has calling cards. Or at least the hotel had a phone.

The weekend was good, even without him. But it's hard not to even get one call for 3 days. I'm still hurting. A lot. It's going to take a few days. My biggest fear in life, and I mean the BIGGEST fear is being forgotten. And I feel kinda like that. I don't know where it comes from. I'm not going to delve into that. Not here. It's enough that I even admitted that online.

I just hate being left behind. It's really the most horrible feeling a human can experience.

Ugh.