Month: November 2007

I had a coughing fit last night at the beginning of the dress rehearsal. Today, my cough is even worse. Maybe I should change seats with the person at the end of my row so I can leave without disturbing anyone if it gets bad.

The soprano soloist was SO good last night that during the rehearsal I was thinking Mozart would have adored her if he were alive to hear her. Afterwards another person in the choir said she was thinking the same thing. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a better soprano in person in my life. Her name is Yulia Van Doren. They were all great, she just stood out for me at the time.

Oh God, I keep hacking away. If I can’t sing tonight I think my heart will break. I called my doctor about it yesterday and they prescribed these pills, but they work by numbing your lungs and I’m too scared to take them. Can you believe me?? They’re called benzonatate.

People below a certain age may not get that post title. I am not having a good day. My apartment still smells, although I finally heard from the landlord’s office about it. I have no heat or hot water, AND water is leaking from the ceiling in the front, and my desk now has a few water spots. I’ve come down with a cold on concert week, the week we’ve been working towards for months. I’m going to be sick for the dress rehearsal with the orchestra on Thursday, this is my favorite part, and then for the performances on Friday and Saturday. I just want to take a hot bath, but I can’t.

Whine, whine, whine. I know. This is a Charles Addams drawing. Don’t you just love Charles Addams? I wish he was alive and we were friends. Charles Addams understood days like today.

One possibly really good thing though. I found a child who was at the center of a poltergeist story I may end my book with. I don’t know how much he will be willing to talk to me, but he didn’t hang up on me and asked me to call him after work. He could have been blowing me off, but maybe not.

Playing around, trying to be creative here. That’s an extreme close-up of one of my new ornaments, my favorite one. It’s fun putting up a tree, a fake tree, but it’s not very pretty in the end, I don’t think. And it doesn’t have the nostalgia appeal of a real tree. Maybe I should get a real tree. I will ponder this.

So, today is the big Bad Haircut Undo Day. Not too much pressure on this stylist, ha. But please please please let me get a decent haircut today. In other news: a friend of mine just decided out of the blue to go to Mexico for Christmas. I’ve always wanted to do something like that, just take off for the holidays. And now she is. I can’t help feeling she is living the life I only dream about.

I’ve got to get up off my ass. It’s not like I’m going to live forever. Except, maybe I need to get up off my ass in different ways, and not take off for vacations.

I know my TV. I want everyone to try this show called Bones. This week’s episode was so good I’m at the point where I now have the pleasure of a show I look forward to almost as much as I used to look forward to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (And the two shows have one actor in common, David Boreanaz.) My involvement isn’t as intense, it’s a different thing, but my point is: watch it. It keep rising and rising in quality. The writing is just so great. The stories keep getting better and more inventive and have depth and reality, the characters funnier and more endearing and realistically complicated. Oh and they add characters here and there that I just adore, like this new therapist name Sweets.

Their instincts are so good. I notice that characters I didn’t really get into are gone. At one point I was worried, because they gave Brennan a new boss, and at first I thought it was going to be this cliched thing. The new boss was a woman (Brennan is female) AND she was seeing Brennan’s partner, so there were two familiar ways it could go at once, but it didn’t and now I adore her boss too. We’re left with this perfect ensemble. Maybe that’s part of the reason I’ve grown so attached to it, I love this group.

Download it, bittorrent it, whatever. It’s worth the investment of time. You need to go back so you get to know the characters and see the development. I worry that the first few shows may not have been as great as they figured out what works and what didn’t and developed the characters, but don’t worry, I know they were at least really good. This season every show every week has been a home run.

The picture is the two main characters, FBI agent Seeley Booth on the left, and Dr. Temperance Brennan, aka “Bones,” a forensic anthropologist, on the right.

I had such a terrible day yesterday, oh man oh man. My editor wants a new opening for the book, which is fine, so I started working on it yesterday. But it just wouldn’t come together and I refused to give up and I kept working on it and working on it, hour after hour after hour — and you have to realize we’re only talking a few paragraphs, not a whole new chapter — but I worked the whole damn day and night and it just kept getting worse and worse and worse and I couldn’t stop. I knew I would feel terrible unless I got it into shape. Finally I had to throw in the towel. I had to force myself to give up. You may have beat me now New Beginning, but I will be back. For those who decide to read the book when it comes out — know that I suffered for those measly opening paragraphs, whatever they turn out to be.

It’s just that they’re so important. Someone is going to pick up your book in a bookstore, take a look at the first few paragraphs and if you don’t somehow grab them immediately, you’re dead.

My plan is to have a better day today, except I have no hot water AGAIN, so we’re not off to a good start. Can’t shower. But The March of the Wooden Soldiers is on a 9, and while I don’t like that movie, except for the scene at the end when the wooden soldiers come to life, I will have it on for nostalgia’s sake. Which brings me to the title of today’s post. It comes from a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, I’m not sure which, although for the record, 100 Years of Solitude is my favorite book of all time. In whichever book it is, everyone in a town is infected with the “nostalgia disease” and will die if not cured. When I first read that I thought, ‘oh, that will be me.’ I do love to wallow in nostalgia,

Here are the words from Toyland from The March of the Wooden Soldiers. They are actually kinda depressing!

When you’ve grown up, my dears,
And are as old as I,
You’ll often ponder on the years
That roll so swiftly by, my dears,
That roll so swiftly by.

And all the many lands
You will have journeyed through
You’ll oft recall,
The best of all,
The land your childhood knew
Your childhood knew.

Toyland, toyland,
Little girl and boy land,
While you dwell within it,
You are ever happy then.
Childhood, joyland,
Mystic merry toyland,
Once you pass its borders,
You can ne’er return again.