saxtherapist

I really need to start up a music blog. Something more substantial than Twitter. I could take a bunch of playlists I make for fun, and do legit posts on them. Blech.
On that note, it's 5:23 am, and I got bored over the past hour or so.
And thus I present, in the style of High Fidelity [though expanded from top 5 'cause I'm cooler than that]...

Top Ten Side 1 Track 1s:
1. War Pigs/Luke's Wall - Black Sabbath, Paranoid (1970)
2. Black Dog - Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin IV (1971)
3. Folsom Prison Blues - Johnny Cash, At Folsom Prison (1968)
4. Like a Rolling Stone - Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited (1965)
5. Gimme Shelter - Rolling Stones, Let it Bleed (1969) tied with Sympathy for the Devil, Rolling Stones, Beggar's Banquet (1968)
6. Smells Like Teen Spirit - Nirvana, Nevermind (1991)
7. Welcome to the Jungle - Guns 'n' Roses, Appetite for Destruction (1987)
8. Back in Black - AC/DC, Back in Black (1980)
9. 21st Century Schizoid Man - King Crimson, In the Court of the Crimson King (1969)
10. Purple Haze - Jimi Hendrix Experience, Are You Experienced? (1967)

Honorable mentions:
- More than a Feeling - Boston, Boston (1976)
- Sweet Home Alabama - Lynyrd Skynyrd, Second Helping (1974)
- Break On Through - The Doors, The Doors (1967)
- Stranglehold - Ted Nugent, Ted Nugent (1975)
- Thunderstruck - AC/DC, The Razor's Edge (1990)
- Boom Boom - John Lee Hooker, Burnin' (1962)
- Heartattack and Vine - Tom Waits, Heartattack and Vine (1980)
- Everything In Its Right Place - Radiohead, Kid A (2000)
- Blitzkreig Bop - Ramones, Ramones (1976)
- Highway Star - Deep Purple, Machine Head (1972)
- Jolene - Dolly Parton, Jolene (1974)
- Giant Steps - John Coltrane, Giant Steps (1960)
- Enter Sandman - Metallica, Metallica (1991) tied with Battery - Metallica, Master of Puppets (1986)
- So What - Miles Davis, Kind of Blue (1959)
- Seven Nation Army - White Stripes, Elephant (2003)
- Lonely Boy - Black Keys, El Camino (2011)

This is only enforcing my growing conclusion that my dream job would be a music journalist during the first years of Rolling Stone - 1967-1974/5 or thereabouts.

"Phalanges! Phalanges phalanges phalanges dancing phalanges! Dancing phalanges!"

...They put all four seasons of Bones [excluding the currently airing 5th] on Netflix Instant - and I'm halfway though the third season in an embarrassingly short time. Sigh. It's one of those shows where I KNOW the science and methods they use are totally wrong, but it's still entertaining for the moment.

Well, damnit.

I have a really bad habit with books [novels, that is] that I've done for years and years: either right at the beginning of starting a book, perhaps a few pages in...I go and read the last page. It's stupid, but I like to see if I recognize all the characters, see if the book ends with a bang or a whimper...it's not that I'm looking for spoilers, or even knowing how the book ends - it's really hard to understand a plot from a page, or half a page. It's just something I've done for a long time. Not always, but a good deal of the time.

This only ruined a book - well, ruined is a strong word, but let me know the surprise ending - only once that I can remember. If I recall correctly, I was so mad about it that I might have thrown the book against a wall after reading the whole thing. [Though my memory may be faulty - it was either the same book or another in the series.]
Today marks the second time the ruination-or-at-least-annoyance happened, and I am so ticked at myself. It appears that the main character died on the last page. I'm pretty positive he isn't actually [or at least permanently] dead, as there are another dozen books scheduled in the series, but I'm just so annoyed that I had that hanging over me the whole while I read the rest of the books. Damn me. It was a really good book, too, and I just think it would have been so much better if I hadn't known the ending.

In other news, Blizzard got back everything the person who hacked my account stole. I'm still very nervous, though, because my username was a frequently used e-mail address, and the password that was hacked was one used for a whole lot of stuff. I've changed the passwords of everything I can think of that uses those two in conjunction, but I'm still anxious about it. Grargh.

Oh.
My.
Fucking.
God.

I am going to kill something.
At 8:49 this morning, according to the e-mail I got from Blizzard saying that my password was changed, someone hacked my World of Warcraft account. On my main character, which I have had for FOUR YEARS, all of my equipment, bags, and money was deleted and presumably sold. My bank alt - where I keep stuff I sell at auction and most of my money - had all it's stuff sold and money taken as well.

I can't even explain how angry I am right now. It's not just that my stuff was taken. It's that someone hacked into my account, my private stuff, and violated it. I have never had anything hacked before - not an e-mail address, not a bank account, not an account on anything - absolutely nothing. And now I feel so angry and violated. I'm also worried, because the account username is my e-mail address, and the password was one that I use for a TON of stuff. I changed it to something esoteric, but I'm worried about other accounts elsewhere on the internet that I have that use that username and/or password.

There's also the practical part: checking my log, I have spent 52 days, 8 hours, 1 minute, and 34 seconds playing my character Kwack on WoW over the past 4 years. That comes out to roughly 51 minutes a day. That's pretty skewed, as I go for months without playing during the school year, and then will play a couple hours a day for stretches in summer. I also tend to multitask - I play while watching TV, for instance. Regardless of how you look at it, I've played her for a long time. With the exception of the waist [saving up the money for it] and foot [going to get it when I hit exalted with Wyrmrest] slots, she has the best equipment you can buy/earn without doing dungeons or PvP. I had over 5000 gold on my alt, saving up for a good waist piece and the expansion, which comes out in the fall and will require money.
The amount of time spent earning money and reputation to get the equipment I had...god. Some of it is relatively inexpensive, because they were reputation rewards. Some, like the chest piece and the mace, were. Argh.

So now I'm standing around in the north Dalaran bank, naked but for my Argent Dawn tabard [couldn't sell that, could you, BASTARDS], waiting for a GM to reply to my ticket.

I am so ticked off right now.

I'm slightly addicted to an album, and it makes me happy.

One of the perils of studying music - especially in my own area of pop music - is that you tend to start thinking about all music, whether you hear it in the classroom or on the radio, with a critical ear. I find it frustrating to listen to a longing ballad and think "Well, they're just using what's probably a V-vi deceptive cadence to evoke a wistful subject-position. How obvious." It sounds pretentious when I write it down, but that is honest to god what actually goes through my head, and I feel pretentious and pathetic just thinking it, involuntary as it may be.
It makes it harder to listen to music for pleasure. A quote by Jason Toynbee from a discourse with Tim Quirk that I adore and whole-hearted believe in describes it best: "The more music you play, the more music you hear, the harder it becomes for the music to affect you, and the better it feels whenever it does anyway."

When I was a kid and teenager, I'd find an album, and listen to it nonstop for days. I used to have a boombox [hah, remember the days of those?] that would sit on a shelf right above my head in bed, and I remember listening to the whole of the Little Shop of Horrors movie soundtrack before going to sleep for weeks. Once I taped "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" off of the radio - this was back in elementary school, when cassette tapes were still in vogue - and listened to it over and over, until I knew all of the words. Still remember them, too.
I think it might spring from the way my mom and I listened to music in the car. [My dad, to this day, only listens to sports and talk radio in the car.] We always had roughly half a dozen CDs in the car, and I pretty much only listened to those any time I was in the car growing up - this is through high school, mind you. The core collection was the soundtrack to Jesus Christ Superstar, the aforementioned soundtrack to Little Shop of Horrors, Foreigner's The Very Best and Beyond, Genesis' Invisible Touch, The Baddest of George Thorogood and the Destroyers, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and a few Gloria Estefan CDs. [There was also the Classical Thunder collection and the Sibelius Edition, but this is about pop music.] It was eclectic, to say the least.

Just flipping through my iTunes, I can find CDs that I remember buying and memorizing. Squirrel Nut Zippers' Hot. Cherry Poppin' Daddies' Zoot Suit Riot. The Dresden Dolls' eponymous album. Joe Satriani's Surfing With the Alien. Because I bought the albums in physical form with my allowance, I didn't get them all that often and so savored them when I did. Now, I can probably find a half dozen albums that I now have [mostly ripped from friends or the library] that I've never listened to. Just off the top of my head, Menomena's I am the Fun Blame Monster [that one's mostly suffering from my second-album-problem, though], Operation Ivy's Energy, and three of Dan Deacon's albums that Charlie just gave me.

I'm not examining [aesthetically, not theoretically] and savoring the albums like I used to, and it makes me sad. I think it might be because some of the music I get because I should, as a musicologist and early-20's reject hispter, own it, rather than actually wanting it. And it makes me sad.
This all sums up why I'm happy that I've once again found an album to get addicted to. I got a $10 iTunes gift card with a basket I won at the silent auction before the concert in Syracuse. And it just so happens that Florence + the Machine's album Lungs cost $9.99. I'd known a few of her songs - "Kiss With a Fist," "Dog Days Are Over" - but now I have the album, and it's really fantastic stuff. It's one of those albums that I can quote from/relate to my own life, in a way I haven't found since Who Killed Amanda Palmer? I find it very reassuring, that my musical soul isn't dead inside.
Go go addictive personality, I suppose.


There's a drumming noise inside my head
That starts when you're around
I swear that you could hear it
It makes such an all mighty sound

Louder than sirens
Louder than bells
Sweeter than heaven
And hotter than hell

Okay.
I have one episode of Law and Order: SVU, one episode of CSI: Original Flavor, and two episodes of NCIS that I have not seen yet at my disposal - all are shows I can watch with roughly 1/3 of my brain.
I have a room full of trash, unwashed clothes, and general untidiness.
I also have Febreeze, Pledge, various laundry items, paper towels, and possible access to a vaccum. And, barring practicing ear training this evening, I have nothing on for the rest of the day.

The goal is to get everything clean in the time that it takes to watch the episodes.
Doable? I think so.

And! I want to see how many empty bottles I have. Most of the trash in my room isn't gross dirty banana peels or rotted food, it's mostly just papers/magazines that I'm done with thrown in a corner, along with a whole MESS of empty bottles. [I have oral fixation/semi-justifiable fear of dehydration problems. Seriously.] I'm going to have to separate them out anyways for recycling; let's see how many there are...

Update:
Trash is off floor, desk is organized, bedside table is organized.
I came up with three coffee cups [which seemed weirdly empty. Maybe I had water in them instead of coffee, or something], two diet Pepsi bottles, two diet citrus green tea bottles and one bottle each of diet cherry Pepsi, strawberry Crush, cranberry-raspberry Fuze, diet Coke, diet caffeine-free Coke, oversized diet peach Snapple, and the strawberry-kiwi natural energy Minute Maid thing I just finished [it had been in the fridge, not the floor]. Oddly enough, it wasn't as many bottles as I thought it'd be...sad as it is.

I found the pennant which I plan to hand, the really awesome yarn that I plan to make Syracuse socks out of, and my FAFSA stuff that I need to file NOW.
First load of laundry is ready for the dryer, the second for the washer. I am going to clean this room so hard that it hurts.

Update:
Mwahahah. Everything is clean, four loads of laundry are done, I practiced ear training [and actually did somewhat okay ::knock on wood:: at it], ate a healthy dinner [going on a bit of a fruit binge lately], did my FAFSA and discovered the wonders of Lost video podcasts.

It's done! ::dances:: done done done done DONE!

I am registered for classes. I am now a full time student. I am graduated from Syracuse. WHEEEEE!

All I have to do is waive my health insurance [holy HELL it was an extra $600! I'm so glad I noticed and said I had my own - thank you UPMC] at health services, pick up my transcript from Keller and turn it in to the Grad school, and call SU to make sure I'm getting my diploma at some point.

Also! My book from IU press was delivered, so it's waiting for me at home [long story, but it had to be sent there instead of here].

I just have to get through musicianship tomorrow, and then the weekend awaits! And so does work, but whatever, I'M A REAL LIVE STUDENT NOW!
[and can check books out from the library! SCORE.]

Oh man. My vision is blurry, I'm so tired.
I'm proud of myself, though! I'm almost a functional human!

Managed to fall asleep at 9:30 this morning, grabbing all of an hour of sleep before my alarm went off. Had the longest opera seminar, EVER. It was one of those horrible presentation classes, where one of the people that presented was doing a contract paper on a similar topic to what he was presenting on, and so he and Mauro ended up having their own little discussion for a freaking hour and a half. I had to splash cold water on my face during the break just to keep from falling asleep during the second half.

I then did a whole bunch of life/school maintenance calls and visits, which was good. Early dinner, put laundry in to wash, practiced ear training, put laundry in dryer, cleaned room, and am now waiting for the laundry to finish drying. So. Much. Laundry. I don't think I've done laundry since I've come back to school...kind of pathetic.
Anyways! I got stuff done today, and I'm pretty much guaranteed to get a good night's sleep tonight.
And then...

SYRACUSE TOMORROW!! Assuming we can battle through the snowpocalypse, that is. They had a half day off! Wish I did. Bleh. It's been raining here for two days, and it's disgusting.

God, I feel like my brain is made of fuzz. I know there are things I should probably be doing, but I just can't remember what they are. As soon as my laundry comes out in half an hour, I'm folding it and then sleeeeeping.

Argh oh god I'm going to die.
I spent four hours putting together a discography of 17 operatic recordings and 3 compilations of Cavalli's operas. It takes a LONG ASS time to sort through everything, to make sure that items aren't duplicates/rereleases/released in another country/what have you, or making sure it's not sacred music.

And I was just informed that we now have to include all albums that have individual songs of Cavalli's. So albums like "Hilary Duff Decides to Record Some 17th-Century Love Songs." No joke, there are actual albums like that [though not that particular one]. When I searched "Cavalli" as an author on WorldCat - aka everything that he has one or more songs on - I got SEVEN HUNDRED results. Hence why it took four hours to get 21 recordings. I only got faster at the end because I'd pretty much memorized the recordings, their conductors, ensembles, and publishers/publication dates.
Argh oh my god this is going to take forever. And it's due on Wednesday, in addition to all my other work.
ARGH.