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[darcydodo]

I was planning this huge long entry in my head this afternoon/evening, but I have no idea either how much of it I remember or how much of it will actually spill out onto the so-called pages of this journal; that's what happens to all my mental compositions, like it or not.

So after our first choir rehearsal this afternoon (we had two, with a 2-ish hour break in between), leech and I went for a wander. Dinner was on the cards, but both of us had eaten large and late lunches and weren't particularly hungry as of yet... so aimless rambling ensued. I had, densely, never noticed that there's a little round pool by the libraries (or if I had, I'd forgotten again), but there is one, and it had a couple coins shining under the murky water. Very murky; it looked vaguely as though globs of duckweed had spontaneously generated and then proceeded to decompose. But there was this subtle copper radiance around one particularly bright penny, and when leech threw in a nickel, it looked as though a round beam of light had struck the bottom of the pool and fashioned a small glowing moon there. The nickel, I believe, was thrown in in order to avoid the possibility of having to flip a coin not to decide where we were going to eat, but to decide between finding somewhere to eat and flipping a coin.... We talked a bit more about P5 politics and then decided it was far too nice a day for such topics of conversation. (This nice day in fact being a very confused day: I left the house this morning to see a blue sky fringed by peripheral stormish-looking clouds, which managed, during my ten minute cycle to campus, not only to completely blot out any blue in the sky, but also to start raining. While I was in French, it actually began to pour; by the time I got out of French, the sky was blue again. Go figure. And then for the rest of the day it couldn't decide whether it wanted to be warm or cold or breezy.)

So we wandered some more, heading on a whim to the west; but as we got across the bridge, I saw some flowery weeds I wanted to look at, which then prompted leech to remember some interesting ferns he'd seen that morning and wanted to investigate more closely. We went in search of them, and they really were very cool — the fiddleheads were still in the process of opening, and I find it absolutely amazing how they uncurl in a precisely synchronized fashion on either side of the frond. They were also stupidly tall and standing up very straight, so that they just made me laugh. We started walking towards the creek by Valley, but I remembered the daisies I'd seen this morning or yesterday on the bank of the creek between Dwinelle and Chavez, and we thought that making daisy chains was not a bad way to spend part of the afternoon. leech claimed at first that he hadn't made daisy chains since he was living in Yokohama, but later my singing of "If You're Going To San Francisco" prompted him to think that he might have actually made daisy chains at mathcamp a few years ago. And the Japanese daisy chains had actually been clover chains. Well, I hadn't made daisy chains since last year after Finals, the day that we had planned to watch all three Star Wars movies in a row and ended up lazing around on the St John's lawn until the sun went down at around 8:30pm. (Incidentally, a word to the wise: if you're watching Star Wars in company, make sure that everyone there has seen all three films before commenting aloud on the suggested Luke/Leia action. Otherwise, problems can ensue. "They what??" *grin*)

Now, I've always made daisy chains by slitting the stem of one daisy and sliding the next daisy through the hole. That's how my dad showed me when I was little and we made daisy chains in the park in Westwood with the big fish sculpture/slide, where I later made Claire laugh by telling her I'd pull her up like a dead seal. That's how all my friends were making them last year on that warm Oxford afternoon. But leech had an entirely different technique, which leads to daisy chains that are really very pretty (but have somewhat less structural integrity, as was proved when the wind blew the crown apart fairly quickly). No slitting of stems involved, just twisting stems around. I'm now curious as to the different traditions and styles of daisy-chaining.

Dinner eventually consisted of tom kha kai soup and a very yummy prawns & eggplant dish at Thai House, as well as the phrase "they had same-sex orgies of ten or more people" (vel sim.) delivered by yours truly just as the waitress came around to our table. I then managed to be talking about masturbation when the waiter came to deliver the bill. (No, we were discussing purity tests, what do you think?! Filthy-minded little...)

I saw Kristen in the restroom before the second rehearsal, and she asked me what was going on between me and leech. Nothing, blatantly, but she was then curious if anything ever might. Etc. So I was amused and relayed the conversation to leech, who was, I think, equally amused. And pointed out that it was just as well that he hadn't worn his daisy crown to match mine. I got lots of comments on mine, to which I eventually replied that it's what happens if you sit in the grass too long; it just starts to grow on you.

Merriment ensued during the dress rehearsal, because Marika wanted me and Elizabeth to switch places. A normal request, you might think, except for that I normally barely come up to Elizabeth's shoulder, and Elizabeth was standing in the gap between the two risers... so that she and I appeared to be of equal height. Imagine, then, for a moment, if you will, what happened when she stepped up on the riser and I stepped down.... So rather than conceding defeat, Marika told me to trade places with the woman standing on the riser to my right. No, sorry, she's a soprano and I'm an alto. Ain't happening. (Besides which, I'm probably taller than the soprano, so the height difference would still have been silly, it just wouldn't have been me.) Eventually Elizabeth and I switched back, no harm done. But when we later were lining up to go back on the risers, (oh god I forget her name, Indian girl who stands to my left) told Elizabeth, who was wandering, to get back in her hole. Marika happened to be passing by and actually cracked up, which set me off — I did not ever expect to see Marika giggling. And given my recent lack of sleep, I was in one of my uh-oh-I-can't-stop-giggling moods, and everything kept setting me off again. Disaster was, however, averted by the imminence of the Beethoven, so that for once I actually managed to compose myself and stop giggling before I burst into tears. This is a definite Good Thing; I haven't had a laughing attack for over a year now, and it would really be much more pleasant if I could keep it that way.

Rehearsal did, I think, go very well, and apparently people sitting out in the house could actually hear us over the orchestra; this, and managing to sing the music to tempo with the orchestra (my god, it's unheard of!), were both definitely improvements over the last rehearsal we'd had with the orchestra, which could probably be defined as the rehearsal that put the sham in shambles. This is fortunate, 'cause the first concert's tomorrow, and a bad dress rehearsal would not have simply been an example of 'the worse the dress rehearsal, the better the show.' It would've been a case of 'this is what happens when we sing Brahms until about three weeks before we're doing the Beethoven.' But fortunately all went relatively smoothly, and the soloists are really good. Particularly the soprano, I think, though they're all excellent.

OK, rambling probably now at an end. I have no idea if I managed to include everything I thought of earlier (there were undoubtedly some digressions missing), but it doesn't really matter. That was a long entry. I shall now attempt to get some sleep (or else get distracted by finishing the fic I'm currently reading).

Comments

[tzeentch.livejournal.com]

Wow, I really wish I had been there during your dinner discussions. They sound very... interesting. Also I would have loved to see the look on the waiter's face. ;D

[darcydodo]

Actually, he didn't react at all. Either waiters are trained to ignore interesting conversations, or else my voice wasn't carrying quite so well as I thought and leech intimated. :)

[leech.livejournal.com]

They weren't really that interesting. For one thing, I don't really anticipate darcydodo and I participating in a same-sex orgy of ten or more people, unless my quest to sing alto leads me to drastic measures.