I need more hard rain and good music

Lyrics: "But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao, You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow" - The Beatles

Nothing exciting to report so I will revert to my all-too familiar habit of bullet-pointing [this is a fabricated verb]:

a.) Milestones reached: For the first time in 13 years I have managed to do a split. Amalia Hernandez, the founder of the Mexican Ballet and the cantankerous, positively insane woman who I had the honor of calling “teacher,” would surely be proud, and so am I. It’s taken me a couple of weeks to get the muscles stretched that way again and the process reminded me of afternoons at her house, standing by the bar and watching spots of light dance across the floor, envious because all I was doing was my 100th plie. Or the Palacio de Bellas Artes, with her yelling somewhere backstage. I shouldn’t have left ballet with the childishly simple excuse of “it’s not fun”…it’s a beautiful art of body and soul. On another note, I ran a 6-minute mile. For the first time in quite some time I felt like what Mike Markowitz still refers to as a “beast,” though we both laugh about it. I had forgotten what track spikes felt like, wrapped tightly around your foot, almost willing your leg upwards with a Hermes-like weightlessness.

b.) I had a run-in with a key lime pie. Or rather, I tried to make one, but put in entire eggs instead of egg whites, and forgot that Cuban condensed milk is a lot sweeter than American condensed milk [of course, we Cubans have a tendency of taking things like "sweetness" or "grease" to unpalatable extremes]. The end result: a much too sweet, but still edible dessert, and a lot of jokes at the dinner table.

c.) Highlights: I saw “Across the Universe.” Aside from being an aesthetically pleasing spectacle, the movie moved me with its music. At points, the entire theater was singing and stomping to Beatles classics, which I didn’t mind anywhere near as much as I do those people who clap at random jokes in the middle of a packed theater or my one-time experience at the Rocky Horror Picture Show in Cambridge [Tom, back me up on this]. I actually enjoyed it and joined in. Driving home on the Turnpike and listening to a different kind of classic – Joshua Bell – I smiled to think how much of our lives is set to music. [On a sidenote, I wondered how much of my personal liking of the violin is narcissistic, since it's the instrument that most resembles the human voice]. In the past I’ve argued that music has taken away the natural ups and downs of our emotions, leaving us with a finely tuned escape permanently blaring from our iPods. Music can create little ersatz bubbles for us to walk around campus, permanently submerged in a stimulus other than our own thoughts. But oddly enough, on the drive home I felt that my faith in music had been restored. In fact, I felt a bit like Jack Kerouac (to name a figure that is period-appropriate), making rhythm with random words and streaming thoughts, half-accidentally showing the world that music is created everywhere if we just stop long enough to find a beat. And so as Nietzsche said (and later John Stamos, of all people, quoted), “Without music, life would be an error.”

d.) I’ve been thoroughly reviewing my Libertarian views, especially when it comes to the world economy. More to come on this later, if I ever actually get somewhere.

e.) Last night was restless, which is not particularly unusual for me. I woke up from the torrential downpour outside and cursed the alarm system that wouldn’t let me open my window for fear of waking everybody. I’ve concluded that the indoor spaces of houses should be more fluid with the outdoor ones. Windows and doors should be open. Damn alarm systems shouldn’t be in the way of me getting my hands wet with rain.

f.) I’m drawing again. Kind of. I have nothing to say on this other than how amazing it feels to grind charcoal on good paper.

g.) I want to be across the ocean already, so I can stop writing boring accounts of movies and random days, and start doing, watching, looking.