So I'm supposed to interview a living church music composer for my theology class. Normally, not a problem--I mean, holy crap, I spend three days a week with two of them, right? No, not right, because (despite what the assignment says) Roman Catholic composers are off limits, and the only ones I know strangely enough happen to be Catholic. I also misread the assignment, and thought the composer had to be from the hymnal that we wrote about in a previous assignment, which in my case was the Trinity Hymnal. Note: only about 15 composers from Trinity Hymnal are still alive, and of them, only 6 are younger than 70.
SO I finally found a composer and made contact through her publisher. I'm supposed to call her tonight at 9, and my stomach is in knots about it. We have a shitload of questions we're supposed to ask, and I'm calling her on her own time to help me do my homework. I hate this! I even typed the questions up and emailed them to her, hoping she'll choose to respond that way and I won't have to talk to her.
I hate cold calling. Which is why I would be a shitty telemarketer.
Friday, March 16, 2007
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Goodbye 2.0, Round 1
When I finally head home--two months and 6 days from now--one of the things I will miss most is architecture: columns and shutters and gingerbread trim and soaring ceilings; wood paneling and arches and turrets and spires that speak romance to the eye--that make the viewer want to know who lived and worked within those walls.
I will miss copses of oaks and sycamore, and the tulip magnolias that weep ivory and bruises in the spring. I will miss the bigness of sky that so terrified me when I got here, six and a half years ago, and the smallness of towns that are little more than hamlets...osteoperotic brick buildings huddling against one stop sign fire, backs to the prairie wind.
I will miss accidental encounters; the knowing that, if I am in a given place at any time of day, someone there will know me, and care. I will miss history, and watching the people who make it, and midnight jam-and-journal sessions, and sitting in empty classrooms after hours.
I leave here a piece of myself; a large piece that, this time, I will not be back to retrieve. I leave so many firsts, a dozen lasts, and the remnants of my idealism, though not my ideals. Those, and so many other things, innumerable and immeasurable in value, I take with me, to soothe the swelling ache that creeps in, now and then, of goodbyes and the tears that always follow them.
This, I imagine, is what Heloise might have felt after a reunion with Abelard: the passion of the first loving and anguished first leaving, and then--in Rome or London or Paris, at some meeting of abbots and abbesses or papal summons--the moment when eyes meet and love and lust return, the need to define self by the boundary of another's arms. This moment, then, is the morning two years later, waking in the abbot's cell to realize that once, she lived without and survived. In that realizing--the beauty but unnecessity of this love--she knows it is time to leave, and that from now on all letters will be merely sincere. That she has been the abbots whore, and is ready to be the emperor's wife, has had comfort and is now ready for challenge.
I will miss copses of oaks and sycamore, and the tulip magnolias that weep ivory and bruises in the spring. I will miss the bigness of sky that so terrified me when I got here, six and a half years ago, and the smallness of towns that are little more than hamlets...osteoperotic brick buildings huddling against one stop sign fire, backs to the prairie wind.
I will miss accidental encounters; the knowing that, if I am in a given place at any time of day, someone there will know me, and care. I will miss history, and watching the people who make it, and midnight jam-and-journal sessions, and sitting in empty classrooms after hours.
I leave here a piece of myself; a large piece that, this time, I will not be back to retrieve. I leave so many firsts, a dozen lasts, and the remnants of my idealism, though not my ideals. Those, and so many other things, innumerable and immeasurable in value, I take with me, to soothe the swelling ache that creeps in, now and then, of goodbyes and the tears that always follow them.
This, I imagine, is what Heloise might have felt after a reunion with Abelard: the passion of the first loving and anguished first leaving, and then--in Rome or London or Paris, at some meeting of abbots and abbesses or papal summons--the moment when eyes meet and love and lust return, the need to define self by the boundary of another's arms. This moment, then, is the morning two years later, waking in the abbot's cell to realize that once, she lived without and survived. In that realizing--the beauty but unnecessity of this love--she knows it is time to leave, and that from now on all letters will be merely sincere. That she has been the abbots whore, and is ready to be the emperor's wife, has had comfort and is now ready for challenge.
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