books, trains, luck

Swiss countryside. From train. Will try to do better today.

Started reading The African Queen but it committed what I consider to be an unforgivable sin: Cockney accent. Had to put it down, couldn't see through the inanity. Thought I would combat the accent with some American Fiction, and went to Tropic of Capricorn. It is aggressively negative, a diatribe of things like this: "I think of all the streets in America combined as forming a huge cesspool, a cesspool of the spirit in which everything is sucked down and drained away to everlasting shit" and sometimes worse than that, though that's fairly representational. Honestly, reading that sentence made me laugh; sometimes when something is so far from your viewpoint or experience you can enjoy its difference. And, for about 40 pages, things were going well, in this vein; but then. My luck with thrift store finds might have run out, and I may actually have to go buy a new book. All this time I'm wasting without a good book, it's depressing. If only I could speak German. I have a new theory; maybe if I stop trying to get the sentences to make sense in English, they will just start making sense in German. As things are, it still takes me too long to break down the sentences in order to get a cohesive whole; today in rehearsal, whenever the conductor would tell us where to start I would have to repeat the number silently to know what it was. "Vierunddreißig. Vier. Und. Dreißig. Thirty Four." It's a bit laborious. I would stare at the conductor when he talked to us, as if that would help me understand what he was saying; I think it may have convinced him that I did understand, which was a mistake, on my part, since, after all, I did not. (Vierunddreißig. OMG.) It is good to be playing, but heck, the length of the rehearsals is epic. The good old union kept me sane in the US, and I never took it for granted. Rehearsal is not to exceed 2.5 hours. Break must occur within 1.5 hours of the start of the rehearsal. Second rehearsal is not to commence until 1.5 hours have elapsed since the last rehearsal. Our schedule today: Rehearsal 2 - 5:15; break until 6:30, then rehearsal until 9:45. EPIC, I tell you. My little arms might fall off. But one good thing about having that much rehearsing in one day, is that tomorrow, rather than more rehearsal, we have a concert. So.

as seen from the train.

I had good luck today on the train ride home. My exasperated sigh, a response to the Henry Miller, made the guy sitting across from me laugh; he was trying to read, too (though I think his book was not nearly as aggravating as mine). Anyway, we had a nice chat, although he'd never been to the US he was quite interested in the country, and had some interesting ideas about all of it. He and his girlfriend are taking a road trip this summer to Syria (I still can't believe I live in a place from which you can just drive to Syria), and one of his jobs is reading aloud for audio books. Our conversation made the last hour of the commute significantly more bearable. Thank goodness for the English speakers.

AND, speaking of luck, British Airways is preparing to have a strike, and the dates just happen to include my return flight to SF (due to depart next week, scheduled for the sake of caution). What that means is that changing the date of that flight, to a date in the summer, was Free. Free! I just saved $300. So, see you all on July 7!

Unfortunately, we can't be lucky all the time. This happened on my way to the tram, in the middle of the street. Breathe easy: bass was unharmed.