Saturday

Can't believe it's already October.  Feel like I just saw a friend, but it was almost a month ago.

When I passed by the Henry on Tuesday afternoon, the room was free of balloons.  I guess there were special gloves with pins in them used to pop the balloons.  It might've been kinda' fun (if exhausting) to do that.

Woke up dark. Weird dreams about empty theatres, going back to houses I never lived in.

I keep volunteering to bake things lately, not sure why, I can probably count on two hands the amount of items I've baked in the past ten years, not counting this recent run.  Made these cookies from a childhood recipe, looking at the book, it's from 1965, I think.  I'd asked my mom if I could have it last time I was home.  The dough was really wet, and I was thinking I needed to refrigerate it, but my roommate happened to walk by and comment that it wouldn't make any difference and that I should just add "more batter," which I interpreted to mean "flour."  They turned out, got them in on time.  I'd been stressing out about it (as I always do) but in the end, they only take about 10 minutes max to mix, and 12 minutes to bake...I spent more time worrying about them than it actually took to make them.  (Peanut butter, made use of the jar I got in the gift basket.)  The book itself (one of those paperback books that people send recipes into) has all sorts of cookies you never see anymore (carrot, banana, date and peanut butter, etc.); I wonder if anyone would eat them, the choices around here are basic (peanut butter, chocolate chip, oatmeal, snickerdoodle, etc.), would these be too unfamiliar?  Some of the ethnic bakeries (Scandinavian, Iranian, Greek) have more choices, but Seattle is lacking in variety.  I digress.

The folk choir sang at this heritage award concert last night, with a Finnish-American kantele player.  While waiting for the program to start I saw a flyer for a free vocal workshop today.  My housemate woke me up at 1:30 am by hollering and stomping up the stairs, and I stayed up and watched a movie after that, then the power went out.  I decided I'd go to the workshop, the power wasn't back on by the time I left.  It was all day, I just got home.  Mostly for opera singers, as it turned out, but to my mind, any performance advice is good, and I enjoyed it.  We did classic/opera improv, and since improv scares the pants off of me, I volunteered to go up in the first group: four people sat in a circle, touching each other, everyone with eyes shut, and the quartet created a song together, by one person starting and then the others coming in and adding and building on it.  My group worked only with vowels, but later on groups got words they could take apart and explore...either way, the results were haunting and beautiful.  Then there were jibberish arias, mostly those were the opera singers that did them.  Not a form of voice that gets to do improv much.  I left when they were practicing auditioning, I have to work tonight.

The movie I watched in the middle of the night was "The Devil Wears Prada."  It's not a great movie, but I like it for the relationship between Andrea and Miranda, there aren't many movies that have that intense of a relationship between women (and I love Stanley Tucci.)  My only problem with the movie, and I haven't read the book, is that I don't think Andrea falls enough for her friends to turn on her like they do.  It's not justified (for me) by what's on screen.  The way it's played, she deserves more sympathy than scorn.

Been thinking about friendships lost.  Three in particular I'm willing to fight for to get back.  One, I've started to rekindle (the one I've already mentioned.)  Another, can tell me to ef-off if they want, but I feel I need to try.  And the third is so complicated.  But recently, I came to the conclusion that perhaps there was some outside sabotage involved, not that we didn't do enough ourselves, we did, youth and insecurity.  I don't know where to start, but it's the only one my heart breaks over.  I can forgive the hurtful words, though since I heard them secondhand, I don't even know that they were ever the truth, only that at one time, I believed them to be, and so I was done with it.  I suspect at this point that they weren't fully true, I don't know why they were told as if they were, though it no longer matters.  Deep, deep down, I think there's love still buried, a friendship that mattered.  How does one begin to recover something so long lost?