Radio attention.

Like a month or two ago on a Sunday evening I went online and checked out what time this one classical music radio program I like is on since I hadn't heard it in a while, and I noticed on the schedule that the program before that was going to be playing Bruckner's 4th Symphony, which is totally like one of my favorite pieces of music, ever.

So, I cleared time out of my schedule and when it came on, I just laid on my couch in my darkened living room and I just listened to it for the entire time, which is like just over an hour.

It was very wonderful, and it made me wonder why I don't do stuff like that more often, and instead default to having the radio on in the background as background music.

I'd love to read a biography of Anton Bruckner, and if I ever visit Austria, I'd go to see where he was born or played organ or was buried or wherever.

If I ever get to play double bass again, too, I'd totally get my hands on a score and try to play along to the bass part alongside a symphonic recording...  I've often thought that that would be a fun thing to do, to learn some bass parts and some music from the inside out, in a very easy way. I'm so lucky that the instrument that I know best usually has super easy parts!

Ah, life goals.

Weird textual resonance.

Last month I was translating a transcription of an Egyptian border marker from the 1st half of the 2nd millennium BCE, and a sentence said something about the powerful pharoah speaking and acting, a pretty common trope I've come across in an anthology of Egyptian literature.

Then, later that same night, I was reading the book of Ezekiel (in translation), and like the exact same trope was used, but with G-d, I think.

How random is that?

English vocab variability.

The other week, the one official at the Romanian consulate kept saying "Sars," even though everyone here says "Covid."

I'm like 100% positive that she's translating from the disease word that they must be using in Romanian.

A Dream of Wagner.

A few months ago, I dreamnt -

I'm like two-thirds towards the back of a big formal sloping theater that's fairly full and that I can't see the walls of, and a high-cost production of Wagner's Goetterdaemmerung is playing onstage, and there's some kind of wedding feast scene happening with a lot of drab but artfully-dressed people standing around the edges of the stage as well as this giant nineteenth-century-looking clown up there centrally with a white painted face and a frilly collar and a stumpy cap, him like being all very large and very very white and completely the center of attention.

And, my mother is with me, and she leans over to talk to me.

"This is really good, but I have to go to the bathroom!", she was like, and she gets up to go to the aisle, and I'm not sure if they'll let her back in until a change of scene or even act, and I think that it's her decision to miss something or not, though, though I wish she wasn't so old and didn't have those kinds of bladder problems.

Later, I'm in a different auditorium that's more like a high school auditorium with a stage at the side of a gymnasium, and there's hardly anyone there and I'm standing right up in front of the crappy stage, and this one slightly off doctoral student who I know from years ago is standing there singing, and it seems improvised but also part of Goetterdaemmerung, like it's some kind of amateur community production, and for some reason I'm profoundly uneasy with what's happening, perhaps because I don't actually think it's Goetterdaemmerung that they're doing.

Then, I'm outside on a grass parking lot and a high school friend who I haven't seen in years and who married an evangelical bodybuilder is getting into a car, and she's telling me that it's good and she liked it, but it was going on for too long and that she has places to be.

And then, I woke up.

. . .

My mom on late Dec. news:

 "They always write year-end reviews of this and of that because they don't feel like working. Why would you even buy a paper?"

. . .

(I haven't heard her say this for at least a decade, but I picked up a paper before New Year's and saw year-end listicles and the like and I thought about her saying this years ago.)

Resthome conversations (4 of 4): Missing sandwiches.

Also also also at the resthome last month, the one (very chill) resident told me out of the blue that she misses sandwiches and that they don't serve enough sandwiches there.

"They do sometimes," I was like, and I also reminded her that for any meal she could always substitute a sandwich if she ordered ahead of time, since that's something that they do for people who don't like either of the two meal options that they have for every meal.

So, at the very next opportunity, I got the menu for the next day and we looked ahead, and she ordered a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch instead of the 2 options that they had, and it turned out, too, that one of the actual meal options for dinner was a barbecue sandwich.

"Do you still want the grilled cheese sandwich for lunch?", I was like. "If you order the grilled cheese sandwich for lunch and the barbecue sandwich for dinner, you'll get two sandwiches tomorrow."

"And you'll get a happy camper," she was like.

Addendum.

It was very interesting to see how it played out that the resthome gave us all Thanksgiving turkeys for Thanksgiving, since so many of the people who work there are from other countries.

A lot of people just didn't know what to do with them!

I think my one (edgy) (Ethiopian) coworker even gave hers away to my one (older) (Chinese-Filipino) coworker, since he said he'd take it.