the trick is not to appear like you enjoy your own joke too much. even though you know it’s freakin hilarious. that’s just a little wisdom from on high via the oracle of anne lamott.
it was a long week, but good. i’m going to end up taking all the classes i signed up for.
on friday i played at stanford’s art affair. it was quite a big production this year: two big stages, one open-air and one in a tent. every artist only had 15 minutes to play, there were so many performers. i played in the tent stage at 4:25, after hanging around and listening to friends and other random people play their sets.
maybe this is bad, but i’ll be honest: i don’t like most of the music we have at stanford. i love the fact that we have music, and i’m always supportive of people playing at art affair, or the coho, or whatever. but i don’t like the music. there are exceptions–i have some friends that play occasionally, and i think they have talent and potential (i include myself in this group since i’m the arbiter of my own opinions). but anyway, that’s my opinion.
i felt my show went well–i played solitary spaces (with a cool new surprise intro simply because the song is my most repetitive and overplayed), a pixelated life, and my new song rainfall: monologue. as i was playing some people came in from outside the tent to listen to me, and that made me feel pretty cool. more importantly, tons of my friends came out to see me, and gave support, which always makes me feel like a rockstar.
i hung around art affair for the rest of the evening (after an interesting time where i was locked out of my room) and soaked in the atmosphere, which was very … joyful… and a little reminiscent of a music fest. i sat around and talked to friends and just hung out, which i haven’t really been in the habit of doing at stanford. it was a nice change, and i plan on hanging out with friends much more often.
i stayed up late playing empire earth with eric, kicking some assyrian ass (that’s a joke). empire earth’s a computer game where you control lots of little fighting guys and make buildings and walls and stuff, and try to destroy the bad guy. and we destroyed him with elephants and archers and catapults and lots of horseys.
saturday dan and i woke up about midday, ate, and then drove up to castle rock. it’s about an hour drive. we spent the entire day climbing rock routes in a place known as the underworld in castle rock state park. first we set up an anchor on a slopey 5.8 route. climbing routes are rated 5.1-5.14c, i think. dan’s a climbing master, so he did it really fast, and i followed a little slower. then we met up with some other climbers who were working on a rock called ‘the gods’. there i cranked out my first 5.10a and 5.10b. it felt really good to know that i’d improved since the last time i was out there.
if you only go to climbing gyms or fake walls, you never really get the feel of real rock underneath your hands. it’s completely different. at first i thought i would never like it. i thought i would prefer the certainty of the wall–easily defined holds on a rational grid of bolt holes. but i found that i really liked the feel of the rock, the various holds you could get in a few square inches, and the way the shoes can stick to virtually anything.
on our way back from castle rock we passed REI, so we stopped and i succumbed to the trend and bought one of those indestructible nalgene water bottles. i will now fit in if i ever go up to an oregon college campus.
dan and i thought it would be a good idea to hang out with some girls saturday night, since we’d never really done that here. sadly, we were at a complete loss of who we could even hang out with (we’re pretty new at it, you see). eventually we called serena and shannon, friends from cornerstone. shannon was gone but serena came over and we hung out in our room and talked and played guitar and spilled popcorn over the floor and made fun of www.getsigned.com. and we didn’t watch a movie — a rarity among college students, i’m sure. all in all, a fun if at-times-weird night.
today i slept through church due to the time change and tiredness, then spent all afternoon recording pedro the lion covers. i’m working on a 5-song pedro the lion cover cd. i recorded and mixed and mastered three of the songs today, which was quite phenomenal, since it’s a lot of work. i’ll put the mp3s up here sooner or later for download.
now i’m on my way to a passover seder that cornerstone is having….if you’re paying attention you’ll notice that this will be my second one of the year. strange, yes, but free food is good, and there’s no reason i can’t take some more time to think about the meaning of passover and all that.
i just hope the upcoming week doesn’t suck! i forgot to do all my homework this weekend. uh oh.
virtual disc on spin: when we were small | rosie thomas
