list from way past my bedtime

many things to talk about soon.

preview of coming attractions:

1. thoughts on internet dating (I'm not doing field research-- however, I was recently questioned about this subject in an interesting way and I'd like to muse about it in a philosophical and sociological way. Internet dating brings some interesting new twists to society that I'm intrigued by, disapprove of, and endorse all at the same time.)
2. Story about the girl in the bathroom stall next to me at Old Chicago's last Friday night. (And it's not gross at all. Unless your threshold for 'gross' includes things like 'oatmeal' or 'public transportation,' in which case you are probably upset a lot of the time for constantly being grossed out)
3. Why, and how, my new bedtime is 3am. IT'S RIDICULOUS. And so, so weird. And yet... not at all.
4. New additions to the list (tm) including: a secret that I'll have to figure out how to write in code to myself... cantering while in an *English saddle*... yes, East coasters, I've only cantered with a Western saddle... improve vocabulary for quickfire comebacks... write letters to people who have said or done *very* meaningful things that I would like to acknowledge them for-- including Mer & my cello teacher Maggie, my uncle who I don't really know, and the author of Bridge to Terabithia...learn an easier way to do the 'inside/outside' cable wrapping with mile-long extension cords and XLR cables.
5. Brief discussion of this week's impusle buys, including People magazine's cover story: Jody Sweetin-- From Meth to Mom (oh, trashy impulse buys...)
6. Extoll virtues of playing cello with Mer at least once every 48 hrs. If not twice.
7. in homage to Laura's cross-country move: a conglomeration of quotes from "The Adventures in Babysitting"
8. An appreciation of people who understand why you need to practice handshakes with them, and also give you a bear hug after said handshake practicing because they know it can be a challenging personal endeavor to test-drive your handshake

9. I'm off to bed.
10. let us all bow our heads and pray that's the case, anyway.

late-night croons of slim cessna on a cool monday night

2am.., and jane's awake. with the spirit of the revival music loud in her ears and the feeling of friendship close to her heart.

best springtime of my life... worst springtime ever to have a 9-5 job. so it goes.

meaningful quotes from my night (and also last night, because Meredith and I are school night warriors)

> the voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes [marcel proust]

> "excuse me, but are you James Joyce?" [throws head back and laughs] "No!" "Are you potentially channeling James Joyce's spirit through you at this moment?" "No." "Huh. Ok. I'm impressed by the resemblance-- although I don't mean to slight your own sense of style." "No..." "Those are the most amazing glasses I've ever seen!" "I know. Don't they look like James Joyce's glasses?"

> isn't it a little sad to anyone else that the moral of the Wizard of Oz is that Kansas was home all along? And you were destined to live in black and white, without the technicolor adventure all around you?

> listen up, good people-- the good people of Colorado. My friend Munly has something he'd like to say to you.
>This is how it's always been! This is how we do things in the countryyyyyy.

> "Let's have some Jameson." ... "And I think we also need donuts." ... [in unison] "Yes. Donuts."

> "I need to tell you something. We're going to call you. Don't answer. We're going to leave you a song." (an hour of rehearsal goes by... the phone is set to speaker... our song is played... we stop and have a ten minute discussion about what dorks we are, and what notes we missed, and why bras are REALLY uncomfortable if you're a cellist... and the muffled sounds of brassiers being pulled off under many layers of clothes and thrown on the floor with a resounding, "there, NOW I can be an artist in peace"... just to hear (7 minutes later): 'your message has been recorded. to listen to your recording, press...*click*)

Jane.
Go to bed.

A painful, painful day of work lies ahead.

[the moon is waxing crescent]
[goodnight]

jameson list footnotes

additions to my list, as meredith and I sit on my couch drinking Jameson and eating donuts:

1. babysit Suri Cruise (seriously. I had the most incredible dream about babys [editors note: this was supposed to end with babys-"itting Suri Cruise". Because I did have an incredible dream about babysitting Suri Cruise. Somehow, this post was left... how shall we say... incomplete, due to the distracting powers of whiskey & cello duets, and lying on the floor giggling to death with Mer as we left long, LONG music messages for a poor unsuspecting victim. The author apologizes for any typos and/or ridiculous sentiments left here on this post a few days ago.]

2. take old fashioned photos of ourselves out in a field with our cellos when we have more than two photos left in the old fashioned camera

3. buy a perfume to smell lovely on a subconscious level when meeting new people (one that doesn't reek as much as the atrocity that I just dumped on myself... while eating donuts and jameson)

4. sing 'for the beauty of the earth' with meredith on a golf course at midnight...without getting past the first three words and falling over giggling and calling it quits

5. RED HAIR. That I don't have to commit to for a year. Red, little orphan Annie, incredible hair.

on the good ship lemondrop

New essay up on dad's site... http://dansimmons.com/news/jane/jane.htm

Perks of the weekend, in list form:
1. Dad summoned his eccentric powers and set up a ginormous outdoor movie theater system in the backyard-- big outdoor screen, speakers, projector...mom made popcorn by the truckful. Neighbors and friends came over and we watched Jaws on blankets and lawn chairs... pretty much the best idea ever. It rained a little, which only added to the ocean freakiness. More movies to come over the summer-- if you need something different for your Saturday, join the fun... just look for the flicker of movies coming from the prairie just North of 66th.

2. Today Robin and I are meeting with a midwife to talk about international health education issues... we're hoping to find a way to expand our education beyond suburbia, and into developing countries and places where this would save lives. Many, many lives. And our fingers are crossed that we could do a little traveling and filmmaking in the process.

3. Meredith made me a lemondrop martini yesterday... it was delicious. We're having a cello party /Jameson party / taking Robert Doiseneau-style photos of ourselves in unexpected places with our cellos this afternoon... tomorrow we'll be rocking out to the sweet country goth croons of Slim Cessna & Munly at the Larimer Lounge with Laura, Beth and a few other brave soule.

4. With luck, the best live music in America will be a good way to send our Laura off to grad school at Baylor. I'm going to miss her! I'm so excited for her... but it's bittersweet when it comes to the friends you've had forever. You want to be selfish and keep them in a little tupperware wherever you go. I can't believe I've been friends with Laura since we were 12, and Mer since we were 14. And we still ended up with such similar interests and valuable friendships as grownups. What are the odds?

5. I will be tactful and fail to mention that I drank a bunch of blueberry beer and threw a pool party in the dark last week. But that was fun, too.

6. Must practice for the audition that I haven't practiced for.

7. Must leave this list immediately to be get ready for auditions / Jameson / midwives who lived in Darfur / lounging with a book / old fashioned photos / more list making...

happy weekend!

harmony to the sound of heat lightning

(photo courtesy of the interweb)

I had the loveliest of nights.

Busy, busy day at work... lunch outside in perfect weather... busy until the 9th hour of the work day, when I officially threw in the towel and left. Ate a bowl of cereal, and met Meredith for a 7:20 showing of Sex & The City. My feelings on the show, and the movie, are pretty complicated...I'd like to come back to that at some point when it isn't 12:22am. In short, I have laughed at the hilarious lines and cried at the truly moving moments over the past decade of the show, but overall, the show and the phenomenon disappoint me on a fundamental level. It asks us to be shallow; credit is given to those who are fickle; the women treat men in the way that I would never treat another human being. When the men act the same way, they are thrown from the show into a pool of rotting, unmentionable shame, from whence their acting career may never return. The movie's writing was the worst I've seen in years, which surprisingly made me feel disappointed-- I had low expectations, but hoped it would be the female bonding experience that I miss from my gaggle of girlfriends I had to move away from. One of the things I've appreciated about my job is that it's reinforced the power of female friendships and female bonds, and even if it was from a manufactured sexual feeding frenzy chick flick, I was looking forward to making a few "eee, she's getting married!" dolphin noises and muffling a few sniffles with my fellow females in the theater.

I digress.

After the movie, I turned the volume up on the cd I'm trying to learn for an audition. I drove up the country roads, and parked at the church on Niwot Road & 95th. Huge clouds had built up to the East, all the way up and down the plains, so I sat in the car with no lights on... watching heat lightning flicker across the vast expanse in the darkness, listening to frogs croak just beyond the church, and singing harmonies slowly and carefully until my voice relaxed into a timber that I haven't achieved since the old days, when singing had any place in my life outside of the shower.

The breeze and the night was so docile-- when I got home, I sat on my porch drinking a Blue Moon and playing a few songs multiple times in my iPod while I jotted the lyrics onto a legal pad. There was just a tiny bit of light spilling out onto my porch, and I had my bare feet up on the railing. Heat lightning began to flash closer, and clouds billowed up over my apartment,but there was no sense of a storm-- just a lovely, Western, summer night with a light beer and some deeply beautiful music. I began singing the harmonies softly with one ear bud in to hear the melody line, and discovering the complexity of the lyrics, a knot welled up in my throat and I discovered why I've been so sad to be away from music for the past few years.

It's completely silent outside.
The flickering of televisions in my neighbors apartments has subsided-- everything is dark and calm.
There's a cool cross-breeze coming in through my windows, making the apartment somewhat less stuffy than it was all weekend.

For a year, I went to bed at 10:30, and now it's 1am or later every night, with burning ideas and stories and aspirations pounding in my ears.

My mind and heart seem to have blossomed with the burgeoning of spring.

and I'll sing in a quiet place
I'll sing you to sleep
I know all the words to sing to finally satisfy you
-Wadirum

soundtrack to a happy weekend

Portrait of the ridiculous aspects of life when you're a bachelorette:


Went to Meredith's house, had dinner, sat around having a lovely chat with her parents, played with Gizmo (who looks like a little happy lamb). Lounged around in perfect weather with the perfect amount of breeze and no wasps flying around our food. Felt 100% relaxed for the first time in quite a while. (Then talked about politics and the economy and gross things that dogs do-- lost a little bit of my calm stupor)

Soundtrack of the evening, which sweetly represents everything my current life feels like:
1. a couple hours of Celtic music on our cellos-- lovely, ridiculous, good for the soul
2. got in the car... some reggae band was covering "Paranoid Android" on KBCO. Worst song I've ever heard, in the history of bastardized covers. It was so bad that I had to call Meredith and gag into my cell phone, and then writhe around in pain until I got to the Safeway on Ken Pratt
3. zoned out in a very sleepy stupor in front of the milk, confused momentarily by the packaging differences (my ghetto King Soopers has trained me to just find the blue 1% milk... Safeway is so much more about Earth-tones... oh, marketing, you control every ounce of our lives)... what comes over the loud speaker? Journey. DON'T STOP! BELIEVING!
4. caught my second wind from Journey (it's impossible not to)... danced a little jig up to the only open lane... a lady in her 70s (?) rang up my cereal and was so sweet that I felt like we should've swapped addresses and started writing to each other at major holidays. Rolling Stones came on (?) as I handed her $10 for the next three weeks of my breakfast items and $10 for the Windsor tornado relief fund
5. schlepped my groceries back to the car-- suddenly exhausted again. Some song came on the radio about "scrambled eggs, and my pegged legs!"
6. switched over to the cd of the local band (Wadirum) I'm trying out for, but have been feeling very low-confidence about lately (almost called to cancel this morning)... fortunately, I was so warmed up from hours of cello-ing, I rocked it out. Sang with ease and vigor and full passion for music and life all the way down the diagonal to my home. Promised myself I would still try out, just to conquer the anxiety.
7. Home, listening to the song of my oscillating fan and early summer stillness

My arms are tired from hauling a cello, two bags of groceries, a purse and leftover Cashew chicken up from the last spot in the parking lot.
My knee that dislocated (while I was simply standing on it) in college has become so sore and swollen over the weekend, I can barely put weight on it. If I go gimp again, I'm going to be SO CRANKY. Fortunately, I refuse to allow this to happen.
My inner monologue is surprised to discover that seeing "Thank You" on top of Chinese rice take-out boxes actually cheers me up-- I was reading the box as I closed the fridge, and disovered that I was smiling and feeling loved. Awesome! Quelle packaging! Why can't the rest of us be this cheerful and generous with our spunk?

My heart is full of love for friends and satisfaction that I have finally found a long stretch of momentum
and inspiration-- I truly want to make something of my life. The blissfully selfish part of being a lone reed for a chapter of your life is the 'wants', I'm discovering...
I want to eat better, dress better, speak better, sing better, run better. I want to listen carefully and live gracefully. I want to continue learning the best ways to cherish those who I love, and keep my heart open with a reasonable amount of vulnerability instead of slamming the chambers of my heart shut when it comes to the scarier, big-picture parts of life.

I want to continue holding firm to things that are important to me-- I've finally learned how to draw a line in the sand and say: "I appreciate who you are and what you say, but if you pass this line, then you're out of bounds and I'll wait talk to you when you get back on your own half of the beach". How do we know if we're being disrespectful to others unless there are clear limits? You wouldn't lash out at your boss-- yet we have all been guilty at certain points of lashing out at our friends and family members. It's important to set firm limits on what's ok to say to each other, and what's not... as kids, we needed boundaries, and as adults, it can be even more reassuring to know the cutoff limit.

Rambling. Sleepy. Need to get up early and greet the day face-on.
Grateful for my friends, my family, my weekends, and the many important moments that make up any given day.
Deliriously grateful for the part of the year that will always be the most special (to me, anyway)-- this subtle transition between spring and summer, which feels the way that light looks as it creeps across the planet in a sunrise, seen from space.

with mooshy sentiments and fingers stained black from cello playing until late,
Mae West