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… in order to stave off Alzheimers. I learned how to use the macro function on my camera. His eyes are closed because I didn’t want to shoot this close with a flash with his eyes open. (I had to wait, oh, two seconds, for him to nap.) My camera has all these functions that I never use, so I’m going to go through and learn them all.

I’m also going to learn how to play the banjo I bought. My plan was to learn enough to play a Christmas carol last year, but I never got around to it. This year is the year!

Movie update. Dreamgirls. I’m sorry, but I didn’t like it. In fact, I found it excruciating. I don’t know why, everyone did a good job, and it had a few good moments, but otherwise I couldn’t wait for it to end, and of course it took freaking FOREVER to end.

The Painted Veil. Ah, this one I wanted to go on and on and on. My favorite movie in a long time. Tragic love story, absolutely incredible acting, scenery that made me want to move to rural China, I could have stayed in my seat and watched it again.

Failure. Photographing snow. It’s hard, it turns out.

Success. Coming up with a beginning, middle, and end to this never ending chapter. Now I have to go back and clean up, pare down, and tinker.

Failure. John, our choir director, complained that we’re not spending time at home learning the pieces. He complained again in email. The sad truth is, I spend about an hour a day working on the pieces (I have to, I’m a slow learner). The really sad truth is — athough I spend an hour a day on them, I don’t think I did any better than the people who didn’t even look at them.

Success. Okay, there has to be another one. Give me a sec. Okay, this is embarrassing.

Failure. The Miami police can’t find the case file I need. Still waiting to hear from the San Francisco police about the other one.

Success. Great. Back here again. Hmmm. It’s a really good chapter. That will have to do!

I am feeling seriously uncreative today. Just can’t get motivated to work. Here is Finney, who loves our HDTV as much as me, but only because it makes a nice bed in the sunlight.

So yeah, la-la-la, sitting around, being unproductive … tap, tap, tap … isn’t it great to have American Idol back? Isn’t Finney gorgeous? Don’t you wish you could marry him? Well, you can’t.

Okay, so that took up five minutes. How can I not-work next?

My choir’s next concert is all Ralph Vaughan Williams (Ralph is pronounced Raiphe, our director reminds us). I go hot and cold with Vaughan Williams. Sometimes the music is so beautiful it’s hard to get through it without crying. Sometimes, I don’t get it. When one piece we’re doing didn’t immediately grab me, I got a little worried. Then at rehearsal last week I started warming up to it. Even better, the alto next me to me said one of the pieces we’re doing she can’t sing without crying. YAY. I don’t remember which one she said, but yesterday I started working on “Toward the Unknown Region,” and it made me cry!!!

I was so happy. I have to find the alto and ask her if that was the one she was talking about. I’m begging you, find this song and download it. The lyrics are from a poem by Walt Whitman titled Darest Thou Now O Soul.

I’m one of those people who almost never reads poetry unless I’m depressed, and I know the whole world already knows this and I am the last to find out, but Walt Whitman was one fucking great poet.

The words will destroy you. (A good destroy.) I wish I could look at death like this. (I was just thinking, would I have rather written these words or composed the music, and I think I wish I had the talent to have composed the music.)

Darest Thou Now O Soul

Darest thou now, O Soul,
Walk out with me toward the Unknown Region,
Where neither ground is for the feet, nor any path to follow,

No map, there, nor guide,
Nor voice sounding, nor touch of human hand,
Nor face with blooming flesh, nor lips, nor eyes, are in that land.

I know it not, O Soul;
Nor dost thou all is a blank before us;
All waits, undream’d of, in that region – that inaccessible land.

Till, when the ties loosen,
All but the ties eternal, Time and Space,
Nor darkness, gravitation, sense, nor any bounds, bound us.

Then we burst forth we float,
In Time and Space, O Soul prepared for them;
Equal, equipt at last (O joy! O fruit of all!) them to fulfil, O Soul.

I didn’t leave the house at all yesterday, or do a bit of work. I still feel sick, so I’m going out for supplies, and then I’m coming back and curling up in this. Buddy is already there, warming it up. I’m considering doing work-related reading at least. But I’m also considering reading something escapist and watching TV. I wonder which will win?

The work-related reading is kinda fun. I’m reading about early UFO sightings in the 1940’s, when they still called them flying saucers.