Well, I've been planning out bits of this entry for days, but things kept coming up....

First of all, Valentine's Day was great. Truffles are my friends. I have eaten SO MANY of them since I opened up my gift box Saturday morning! :) I definitely got The Right Gift. Patrick says he likes his Valentine's (vegan) truffles, too. It was a nice day, as was Sunday. We watched two great movies over the weekend--"Monsoon Wedding" (one of my favorite films) and "An Ideal Husband"--and one dumb but still fairly enjoyable one, "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days".

I had lots of plans for Monday and wasn't sure how they were all going to fit in one day, along with a requisite big dog walk, but as it turned out, almost none of them happened. We woke up to find a major puddle had formed between our toilet and our shower. Aack. The pipe behind the toilet was leaking heavily. Worst of all, the house (as is often the case after a nice relaxed weekend) was WAY too messy to let outsiders see (eg, on their way in to fix the toilet pipe), and since Patrick was on his way in for a day to work...well, it was time to call out the Inner Fembot again. Aack! I canceled my fun on-campus date (with two other PhD students who are normally out-of-town, sigh, sigh) and started tidying and scrubbing surfaces.

No fun at all, but the house did get an awful lot nicer, and I felt much better about it by the time it was about 1:30, and I was halfway through. At that point, I decided to give myself a break by checking email--and found that the preparatory seminar notes had just been emailed out to me and a bunch of lecturers, who were all due to teach a seminar the next day (Tuesday)--which, in the stress of house stuff, I had somehow managed to completely forget about. Aack! Aack! Minor meltdown. Much stress. Much wanting to either run away or hide under a blanket.

Luckily--and as so often happens--my friends saved me. The seminar was on "Transcendent Music"--i.e., how can we define "transcendence" in music? What kind of music might we label as "transcendent"? We were of course expected to bring in several examples. I, as a grad student and not a lecturer, am of course not allowed to check out CDs from the music library. (Grr. Major, long-term irritation, noted.) All I could think of from my own CD collection was Mahler 2 (the "Resurrection" symphony). I was pretty sure that wouldn't be enough. But I asked all my friends from the neighborhood, and by 8:00 that night, I'd had ten (!) CDs donated to me as ones with Transcendent Possibilities, and I was feeling a whole lot better. Best of all, the next day, in class, I got to look incredibly cool and musically well-rounded with the wide selection of music I played, rather than (as in fact is closer to the truth) looking like a dork who really only knows much about classical music.

Sadly, when I got home prepared to enjoy the rest of the day and get some work done, I crashed--turns out, I'd caught the disease Patrick had last week, and I ended up too dizzy to even stand up by 1:00. Bleaghh. Tried to write this entry yesterday afternoon, but couldn't, because even sitting up was too much. Now, Wednesday morning, I'm feeling a bit better--still too woozy to move around much, but fine to sit up as long I retreat to lying down on the couch at regular intervals.

In case anyone's interested, the pieces I played in class yesterday were:

1) Mahler's 2nd "Resurrection" Symphony (the last part of the last movement, when the building tension in the orchestra finally breaks through and the triumphant choir sings that man has passed through suffering to be resurrected in eternal life and joy)
2) Kontakt, "Show Me a Sign"
3) Scott Bond vs. Solarstone, "3rd Earth"
4) Iron Maiden, "Paschendale"
5) Goldfrapp, "Utopia"

They all worked--often in surprisingly similar ways--and they produced a really good, enthusiastic discussion about musical techniques, the importance of what the listener brings to the experience, and the difference between live vs. recorded music as a transcendent experience...

Any other thoughts??