Finite Jest

Hey friends this post is sort of fragmented. Time seems to be racing so quickly to mid-February. I got my Korean visa in the mail so everything is starting to feel really real! Thankfully, I've been talking to Emma H. and she has been making me feel more confident about going. I don't want to just rely on her, but I definitely feel a little more at ease knowing that I'll at least have one or two (including Andrea) friends already there.

So, Colleen, River, and I didn't end up going to the animal shelter, but we did go out and get sushi and hot pot again, and we started working on a DnD game. I've never played DnD but it's fun to do it with them and I really like me and River's characters. Unfortunately, Colleen had to go and get a full time job, which she just started this week, so I don't know how much time we'll have to play before I leave.

Evidence of sushi/hot pot

also last week we had a traumatic experience with nachos at a Chili's so now we're on the hunt for the best nachos in Norwood. This week: Napper Tandy's (an Irish pub), pretty good nachos not gonna lie.

I watched Alien with my family on Friday, so we're officially 5% of the way through our 100 movies to watch before you die list (which, folks who took Stats with Rude Boy Bert might be able to intuit, means 5 whole movies). I'm proud of the progress we're making and honestly my family doesn't hang out all together a ton anymore so it's nice to get to sit down and watch a movie together once a week. Unfortunately, we won't be able to keep it up for long since somebody had to go to Korea for spring semester, but I'll be excited to watch more movies with my family when I get back.

One of my New Years' Resolutions is to work on my focus/attention span. I hardly ever read anymore, even when I have time, because my attention span is so fried. It's one of the reasons I like to go see movies in theaters, because I have a bad habit of looking at my phone or opening another tab when I watch something on my laptop at home.

So anyway I'm trying to get back into reading again. I mostly just read comic books and poetry, and I like them both a lot so that's fine with me, but I wanted to try to get back into other kinds of literature. So now I'm trying to read Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace before I leave. It's over 900 pages and one of the most verbose books I've ever read. I feel like it's one of those books that has a reputation mostly just sustained on being as inaccessible and hard to read as possible. There are a ton of endnotes that are often long descriptions of the chemistry of a particular strain of drug he's talking about, and some of the sentences feel like exercises in being as technically precise as possible. Not quite sure how I feel about, but it's one of those books I want to read so that I can have a formed opinion about it. So it goes.

I'll let you guys know if it gets any good.

Finally, today I picked up my saxophone for the first time in months. I'm very rusty and the horn itself is kind of in rough shape due to nonuse. I'm going to try to practice regularly between now and when I leave because I miss playing a whole lot. I almost feel like I don't have any hobbies anymore, since music used to be such a big part of my life. But I feel like I've been moving so fast and doing so much these past couple years that I didn't even notice how much of a bummer it is to not play anymore. I miss the satisfaction of playing something exactly the way I wanted to, more than anything. Like I miss looking at a piece for the first time and completely butchering it, but then really taking it home and working on it bit by bit until I could play it exactly how I meant to. Even now, just practicing without a real goal in mind - a concert or a competition - isn't quite the same. But it still feels good to play again.

think i'm gonna take him into the shop this summer (the flashcard sticking out is to stop that key from sticking)

At the Smithsonian, I learned that they have to bring in musicians to periodically play the string instruments, because otherwise they get rusty or out of tune or something (my friend said it was because they would get out of tune, but I didn't fully get why that would matter if they were just going to be looked at most of the time anyway). It was a cool thing to learn, because honestly I think it's weird how curators talk about how an object - like a guitar - stops being a guitar when it's in a display case; now it's just a symbol of a guitar. But anyway, me and my friend who plays trumpet were wondering whether they ever practiced their wind instruments and we figured it would probably be too unsanitary. But honestly, after not playing my saxophone for so long, it was visibly pretty out of shape when I opened my case. I spent the better part of an hour afterward just polishing it and trying to fix some stuck keys.

Funny how even if you put something away in a sealed case and keep it out of harm's way for so long, it still breaks down.

Recommendations

The Circle (US): Please watch this show, it's on Netflix and I need to talk to someone about it. It's about 8 people living in an apartment building, but none of them can meet each other face to face, they all interact through a social media service called The Circle. Some of them are real, some are catfishes, and they vote every week on the most popular players to become "influencers" who get to block people from the Circle, since they're all competing for a cash prize. I realize this sounds very Black Mirror but I love it more than Terrace House I think.

Sidney Gish: I've been listening to her a lot recently! She performed at Smith last year I think but I didn't see her. Apparently she's a Northeastern student (or grad i don't know) which I think is pretty cool. Also in one of her songs she sings about being an NPC and I identify with that hard.