Preface

I am writing this post because I had two friends, each of them suppressing laughter as they did so (or not), insist that I blog about these particular happenings.  This either means that the events recounted below have genuine entertainment value or I just have an apparently limitless penchant for humiliating myself on the internet.

Act I

I am afraid of insects, but, like most things in life, this fear is not a constant quantity.  The type of insect matters, of course: ants and gnats merit only an irritated roll of the eyes, while spiders and cockroaches have been known to cause serious cases of hyperventilation.  Then I must consider the size of the insect.  All else equal, an itsy-bitsy spider equivalent to the size of a few specks of dust doesn’t have nearly the same effect as one the size of my thumbnail – or, God forbid, larger than that.  Finally, the distance involved has a great bearing on my reaction.  I haven’t done any regression analysis, but I would guess that, for every foot closer I am to an insect, the likelihood of my ending up in a mental asylum before the age of thirty doubles.

Let us therefore find out what happens when M. discovers that she is in close quarters with a bug of both immense repulsiveness and considerable dimensions.

Act II

I was working at my desk on Monday night when I came face to face with a centipede scurrying along my wall, its limbs a filigreed blur of motion.  With a scream, I toppled out of my chair, stumbling backwards and losing a slipper in the process, as that deeply primal urge to inflict maximal harm, i.e., death, on the thing that threatens my personal security and mental well being kicked in.  My gaze ever fixed on the centipede’s progress around my flat, I inched towards my coat closet and grabbed from it the sponge-ended cleaning tool that has become my default weapon for smothering the life out of insects that are either too far out of reach or altogether too fear-inducing for me to get within anything less than a human body length of them.

The centipede hid behind my television for a while, then made its way over to a stretch of wall just behind my floor lamp and stopped.  This was it, I told myself, so I struck, shouting obscenities along the way.  My nemesis, wounded, eventually dropped to the floor and curled up in the shadow of a kitchen table leg; I pronounced myself victorious. 

Act III

When Napoleon Bonaparte destroyed his imperial foes at the Battle of Austerlitz in 1806, he commissioned the construction of that grand public monument, the Arc de Triomphe, that remains, to this day, a symbol of the glory of the French nation.  I settled for a tweet.

Act IV

Now needing to dispose of the corpse, I went back over to my coat closet, got out my vacuum cleaner, and wheeled it over to the site of the killing.  But the centipede was nowhere to be found.  Was it the Messiah of the insect world, its soul resurrected and drawn up to the heavens by the High Invertebrate God while my back was turned? 

It was then that I noticed a patch of something inching along the floor.  This centipede was no saviour, I thought, flailing as I abandoned the vacuum for my sponge mop thing.  This was an undead horror.  It seemed to sense my desperate approach, for it put on a burst of speed and successfully gained sanctuary underneath my refrigerator.

Act V

At this point, my nerves were like finely shredded tissue paper, so I called my friend Chase for psychological succour.  I could not be sure that the centipede was dead: maybe it had crawled off to that dark recess to die in peace, or perhaps, having now experienced first-hand my campaign of force and intimidation, it had slipped out of my flat altogether and was now terrorising the neighbours in #406.

Alas, neither was true.  After some time elapsed, it ventured back into the light, its (many) steps hobbled and tentative, and came to rest near the foot of the fridge.  It seemed quite grievously injured, but I could not be content with merely maiming it: this little shit needed to be exterminated.  Chase recommended that, à la Khrushchev, I use a shoe to bury my enemy for good, but that would have required engaging with it at a more proximate level.  This I could not brook. 

So, cleaning tool firmly in hand, I launched a punishing succession of blows upon the centipede’s defences, jolts of adrenaline shooting through my veins until, at last, it was definitively deceased.

Epilogue

I pay rent, write Excel formulas, and bake cupcakes like a boss.  I can speak with relative competence on subjects ranging from Mozart piano concertos to sovereign bond yields.  I am a member of Homo sapiens, arguably the most impressive and destructive species to ever walk the planet – we invented the atomic bomb for fuck’s sake.

But, sometimes, Real Life is just too much.

I’ve made it something of a tradition to watch all the seasons of Mad Men to date in (rapid) succession as soon as the most recent one concludes.  This didn’t require too much of a commitment when I first did this following season three, but, when I embarked on the task the day after season five wrapped up, I realised just what a project I now had on my hands.

I have heard it said by people who were not able to get into the show that it moves too slowly or, rather, that nothing seems to happen at all.  On the other hand, Mad Men – its spectacularly eventful fifth season, specifically – can generate the exact opposite opinion, which is that the symbolism is too heavy-handed and the show can be too self-conscious about its depiction of America in the 1960s.  Having conducted a love affair with Mad Men that is now in its third year, I would say that it’s a work of both art and entertainment that rewards consistently obsessive thought.  Sometimes, it practically whacks you over the head with A Big Theme, then hits you a few more times just in case, and, other times, I become so engrossed in the minutiae of these characters’ lives can hardly be bothered to think about their intimated meanings. 

Never, however, does Mad Men feel forced, which is surely a tribute to the extreme competence of everybody involved in it.  Even the most shocking and seemingly unrealistic of incidents grow organically out of the universe that Matthew Weiner has created, and long-range perspective gives context to once throwaway lines and formerly inconsequential behaviour.  But that’s what art is, isn’t it – not a representation of our reality but, rather, reality as understood, constructed, and delivered by the artist.  So long as I find the pitch persuasive, I see no reason to stop watching.  Or re-watching.

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It was a book review in The Economist that first brought Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 to my attention.  I was a junior in high school, a freshly minted AP European History alum, and a nascent but devoted observer of EU and French politics, so, naturally, I borrowed a copy of this 800-page tome from my local public library and duly devoured it.  In fact, I loved it enough that I bought the paperback edition when it came out a year later and read it a second time.  Its appearance on the syllabus for GOVT-121 Comparative Political Systems, which I took in my second year at Georgetown, led to a third reading.  Fast forward to the present day, and you’ll find me working my way through, yes, reading the fourth.  When I tell people that Postwar is one of my favourite books, you see, I am not merely being a pretentious ass – although I suppose that’s true as well.

I think the subject material is interesting, obviously.  I think twentieth-century anything interesting, but there’s something about the tragedy of Europe’s descent into internecine madness, paralleled then followed by the fitful, sometimes violent, often idealised emergence of modernity that is nevertheless always weighted by history and memory that must strike me as especially worthy of study (or perhaps this is just my Western-oriented upbringing speaking).  There is more to the book than that, of course.  Judt produced with this volume a truly European history, one that integrates both the western and eastern halves of the continent into a single narrative while it grapples with the long shadow of two world wars.  The story he tells does not try to be overtly ideological or political (though, implicitly, this can’t be helped); indeed, one of the primary takeaways from this book is the extent to which post-1945 (West-)European life became distinctly non-ideological and non-political, i.e., more concerned with providing for the welfare of its citizens and much less so for the demands of History/the Nation.  (To a certain but very different extent, this would also prove true of much of the post-Stalin Soviet bloc.)  On top of all this, Judt’s prose is lucid, structured, and garnished with enough literary flourish and occasional mordant wit to make me wish that I had even a sliver of his writing talent.  For instance:

Once again, Communist authority had been unambiguously revealed to rest on nothing more than the barrel of a tank.  The rest was dialectics.

On this fourth read-through, I am, in light of current events, paying especially close attention to his account of the history of European integration.  So far, though, I’ve only made it to the late 1950s.  The Treaty of Rome has just been signed, and Maastricht is still a long way off.

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Prior to the start of Wimbledon, I threatened to not follow the tournament.  Basically, I do this every time Roger Federer suffers a bad loss – which, in recent years, either means (1) a drubbing at the hands of either Nadal or Djokovic in a Grand Slam semifinal or (2) a shock exit à la losing to periodically headcase-y Jo-Wilfred Tsonga after being up two sets to love.  But let’s not talk about that, okay?  In the depths of my sport-induced emo, I just know that the heartbreak will outweigh whatever joy I might extract from tennis.

Wimbledon 2012 began yesterday at 11:30 British Summer Time, which is conveniently equivalent to the time for which I set my workday morning alarm.  To nobody’s surprise, including mine, the first thing I did upon waking up was sit down at my desk, scour the internet for live streaming video from SW19, and kick off my Wimbledon watching campaign.  I spent the rest of the day following tourney proceedings via Twitter and articles on tennis.com and might have devoted my lunch break to watching Ernests Gulbis upset Tomas Berdych on Centre Court (and got a little too emotionally invested in it along the way).

In terms of ranking points and the statistical retrospective, the four Grand Slam events are functionally equals, but it would take a wilful act of ignorance to deny Wimbledon its centrality in the tennis tradition.  It is difficult not to be ensorcelled by the tournament’s insistence on tradition and propriety and the resonance of tennis’s return to its original surface, no matter what the final outcome is.  Also: the all-white attire, strawberries & cream, Pimm’s, the lazy trajectory of English sunsets, and the unveiling of a new Roger Federer Wimbledon outfit.  This year, he is sporting a cashmere pullover sweater.  It isn’t quite the military jacket/waistcoat combination from 2009, but I approve.

The last time Katherine and I baked something together, we ended up with these utterly divine lemon cupcakes.  This time, Katherine brought along a recipe for strawberry tart – perfect for summer, no? – that was so straightforward and parsimonious that I hardly believed it would actually produce a dessert.  But then it did, and I was happy to be proved wrong.  The balsamic vinegar and honey paste drew out the strawberries’ sour notes, and the fruit itself, of course, provided enough natural sweetness to go around.  We also had the idea of sprinkling some confectioner’s sugar on top after it had finished baking.  It was a good idea.

With Katherine supplying the food, I provided the libations – yes, this from the girl who hadn’t consumed a drop of alcohol for almost a year.  When my dad came to visit me in DC two weeks ago, I had him bring down with him a precious unfinished bottle of Pimm’s that I had rescued from a Heathrow duty free shop on the day I left Oxford.  (Don’t know what Pimm’s is?  The New York Times recently ran a piece on it, which virtually guarantees that yuppies will soon be ordering it at a bar near you.)  That summer, I tried with little success to recreate the drink that had been an inseparable element of so many wonderful Trinity Term memories – the problem, you see, was in the lemonade.  When the British say lemonade, they take the carbonation for granted; when Americans do, they are instead referring to that high fructose corn syrup-saturated beverage that is very flat indeed, not to mention disgustingly sweet.  I attempted to mix some of our lemonade with seltzer water, but that just ended up diluting the drink beyond repair.  A substitute for lemonade could have been Sprite, 7-Up, or ginger ale, but I personally couldn’t brook any of those options.

Reunited with the above, I picked up a bottle of sparkling lemonade from Giant – which, in retrospect, was the obvious solution all along – as well as cucumbers, strawberries, and mint, and set myself to the task of mixing the drink properly.

Has success ever tasted so good?  I think not. 

Needless to say, Pimm’s and the strawberry tart made for an impeccable paring.  It took a hefty amount of self-control to just not wolf the whole thing down.  I did have to save some room in my stomach for dinner, after all.

I spent the better part of the first two days of my trip home last week intensely reacquainting myself with my piano; I daresay that it had been at least half a year since the instrument and I had properly crossed paths.  Sitting down at the keyboard after all this time, I approached it with the musical equivalent of small talk: a full set of arpeggios (repeated twice), then ordinary scales, third scales, and octave scales, all as I navigated through the initial strain they placed on my fingers.  Somewhere around my first A flat major arpeggio, my hands stumbled, and I panicked.  This was a warm-up exercise that I had been doing since before the onset of adolescence.  Just how much had my technique regressed in the last six months, and at what point does it become irrecoverable? 

Having loosened up my fingers a bit, I turned to Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major, the first concerto I ever learned.  I played my way through the second movement, a melancholic and sensuous Andante that I managed to butcher thoroughly.  A great start, I thought to myself with a generous helping of sarcasm.

♪ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major, K. 488: Andante
Vladimir Ashkenazy, piano, and the London Philharmonic Orchestra

In spite of my well-documented Mozart obsession, the composer whose work I decided to tackle this time around was Beethoven.  Not an original choice, perhaps, but, after reading Charles Rosen’s brilliant exegesis of his piano sonatas in The Classical Style, which for the first time allowed me to place his work in a broader historical and musical context, I was compelled to revisit a few of these pieces.  The first movement of the “Appassionata” sonata I learned when I was all of fifteen years of age.  It preoccupied me then with its demanding passagework, for I still remember playing it at a recital that year, my arms trembling with almost uncontrollable relief as I neared its uncompromising end.  Back then, I was troubled by the dissonances in certain parts of the music and never quite knew how to integrate them into the broader picture.  Seven years later, I felt with greater conviction the essential violence of the “Appassionata.”

♪ Ludwig van Beethoven – Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor, Op. 57 (“Appassionata”): Allegro assai
Emil Gilels, piano

Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 15, the “Pastoral,” has been an old favourite of mine, but a recently obtained recording of it by Emil Gilels made me realise that I was taking the first movement at too quick a tempo.  As I forced myself to slow it down, the music turned languid like the sunlit meadows promised by the sonata’s nickname, and the contrast between its irenic D flat major and the relentless, sforzando-ridden F sharp minor/major stretch at the end of the development section never seemed starker.

♪ Ludwig van Beethoven – Piano Sonata No. 15 in D flat major, Op. 28 (“Pastoral”): Allegro
Emil Gilels, piano

I also tried my hand at his Op. 110 sonata as a test of my sight-reading skills.  For the record, I did manage to get through the entire thing, though how pleasant it sounded is an entirely separate matter.  The third movement is the soul of the piece, plunging the listener into a darkness that seems to stagger forward under the weight of its own tragedy before it crawls its way upward to a refulgent absolution.  It’s all accomplished with a rather tricky fugue, and counterpoint was something that I had never before attempted.  But the difficulty was quite appropriate: playing Beethoven almost by definition necessitates a struggle with the music.  Where Mozart’s stock is in a seemingly divine perfection of balance, with Beethoven there is such force built into the music that he practically demands the pianist to push it as far as it will go.

♪ Ludwig van Beethoven – Piano Sonata No. 31 in A flat major, Op. 110: Adagio ma non troppo - Fuga. Allegro ma non troppo
Emil Gilels, piano

Although my relationship with the piano since I stopped lessons in 2007 has been more haphazard than I would have liked, thirteen years of piano training are not easily erased.  There is a kind of touch at the keyboard wired into the wizardry of muscle & joint, similar to how one never forgets how to ride a bike or drive a car, but the act of creating music is unrivalled in its kinaesthetic intimacy.  Undoubtedly, the transmission of note from score to brain to hand isn’t quite as effortless as it used to be, but what I have lost in technical polish, I think I have more than gained in a deeper appreciation for the music. 

Classical music is often derided as a dead art, relics left by some old white men from centuries past and ossified by a geriatric concert hall culture, but such a dismissal overlooks the fundamental truth of what this music is, what it truly is: that, at its heart, it is a person who sits down with an instrument and has something to say.  It is not merely that I have grown with the music, but the music has grown with me as well, and, as is the case with any good friend, I cannot wait to see where the years take us.

Last Wednesday, I went home for the first time in four months to see my younger sister graduate high school.  We attended the same institution, and it was actually my first time back since I graduated myself, though, this time, the roles were obviously reversed: she was the one walking down the football field – the cost of its Astroturf surface led my school district to cancel its Latin courses when I was in eighth grade – and I was relegated to sitting on an uncomfortable metal bleacher with my parents as I slowly succumbed to a low-grade hypothermia on that unseasonably chilly evening.

Even though she now stands half an inch taller than I do and will be off to the wonderful world of university in the fall, I will always think of her as my little sister, forever four and a half years my junior and, among other things, my partner-in-crime in those stuffed animal games we used to orchestrate with deadly seriousness. There comes a time, however, when every older sibling must acknowledge that the younger child is, in fact, no longer that but rather a nascent adult in her own right, so consider this my proverbial tip of the hat to you, sis.

Congratulations on making it through the academic trial and emotional blender that was high school – though your adolescence has a few years left in it yet, so you aren’t completely out of the woods (also, there’s the whole early twenties thing, but we don’t need to talk about that for a while). You might not like to read 1,000-page history books in your free time like your supremely awesome older sister, but coolness, I concede, comes in many forms. Your vivaciousness, loyalty, and kind heart make you an invaluable member of any community you join, be that your broader college campus or your closest circle of friends, and I have no doubt that you’ll thrive and grow in the coming years in ways that you cannot even begin to imagine.

(Just don’t expect me to be this nice to you all the time – somebody’s got to do the nagging, after all!)

(Wonderful graphic on the right found here.  Thank you, Tumblr, for facilitating my Federer fixation.)

Roger Federer’s Roland Garros 2012 campaign has been, well, not ideal, which I must say was rather unexpected, given how well his clay-court season had been going (title in Madrid, semis in Rome) and how easy his quarter of the draw ultimately was.  For the first four rounds, he played a succession of qualifiers but was taken to four sets by three of them.  These, admittedly, were not difficult four-set matches, but Roger’s game would mysteriously vanish for long stretches, replaced by shitty serving, epic shanks, and a total absence of concentration.  Optimistic Federer fans would point to the fact that he tends to elevate his level of play as the tournament progresses.  I have to say that, by the time Roger was battling his way back from a two-sets-to-love deficit against Juan Martin del Potro in the quarterfinals, this theory seemed more or less invalid.

Now Roger has the honour of reprising That Semifinal against Novak Djokovic in just a short while.  I can only take minimal heart from the fact that this has not been Djokovic’s tournament either.  Recent history, with the notable exception of aforementioned semi, suggests that he has the upper hand against Fed when it comes to the late stages of a Grand Slam tournament, and, given neither player has been anywhere near his best, I have spent the last two days determinedly resigning myself to a Novak victory.

Either result from this semifinal is going to be tragic.  Should Roger somehow eke out a victory, he’ll just get to be Nadal’s whipping boy for something like the millionth time during Sunday’s final; for what it’s worth, Rafa’s form?  Utterly imperious, even by his own standards.  And, if when Djokovic prevails, I am going to be forced into the unpalatable position of cheering for Nadal, and I just don’t think I’ll be able to live with myself after that.

Regardless of the answer, it happened, if I am allowed to pathetically #humblebrag about the occurrence.

I’ve written a few posts on this blog about how I have had to “learn to love” things like ballet, opera, and, to a lesser extent, chamber music.  Writer and composer Jan Swafford, who shares thoughts on classical music over at Slate (I may just have to confess to reading through his entire archive there), tackled that same topic last month in writing about his struggles with Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte and eventual surmounting of them.  At the conclusion of that piece, he invited readers to share their own stories about artworks that they only grew to appreciate over time.  I, apparently having nothing better to do with my time, sent in an e-mail to offer my own anecdote concerning the oeuvre of one Johannes Brahms, and I was taken aback in the best way to find it excerpted in Swafford’s aggregation of reader feedback.

Swafford ended that article with the following paragraph:

There’s all kinds of love, the easy kind and the hard-won kind, the ones you didn’t expect, the ones you resisted, the ones that blindsided you. Readers wrote in about their passions for F. Scott Fitzgerald, for Bach and Bob Dylan, and explained why they find Van Gogh scary. Mostly it was about love. All varieties of love help make life worth living, and in contrast to some varieties, artworks don’t criticize your driving or ask for a divorce. I remember a woman who called in to a radio show I was on concerning Brahms. “I'm 90 years old and blind,” she said, “But I play the piano and I still have a life in Brahms.” Art is just as big or as small as you are, and it loves you exactly as much, and as long, as you love it.

It’s a sentiment that I found equal parts sublime and truthful, and I must admit to tearing up just a little bit by the last sentence.  It states in terms more simpler and eloquent than I could ever summon why I clung to the Chopin ballades when I found out my mother was diagnosed with cancer and, on more prosaic basis, reach for Mozart symphonies after a bad day.  Music is the truest solace I know, as grand as it is intimate and endlessly forgiving.

This Month in Blogging

This month, I shared some more baking exploits, visited Richmond and saw Barack Obama in person along the way, just about died from fangirly glee when Feist came to town, went on a tennis rant (what else is new?), hung out with Oxford folk, hung out with Georgetown folk, and pretended to be a classical music DJ.

Work

Fairly quotidian month at the office.  Carry on.  It does occur to me that, in exactly twelve days, I will be celebrating my one-year anniversary with this job, and I can’t decide if that is a lot of time or none at all.

Life

Glancing at my calendar, I don’t think May was quite as busy as April, as far as my social life was concerned.   A highlight, of course, was my visit to Richmond, but I also had some friends drop in from out of town over the course of the month, which is always delightful.  After a cold put me on the fritz for the second half of April, I was able to resume a regular running schedule and have gotten to the point where a 5K doesn’t leave me completely winded and wanting to die (but a little bit? yes).  I also decided to redo how I approach my personal finances: I’ve been content to leave my budget static from month to month, but, now that I’m paying taxes on a quarterly basis, it makes much more sense for me to adjust my fiscal limits according to anticipated spending needs.

The Future

I have, in fact, made progress here!  Details to come in a post later…

Diversion

I began editing my NaNoWriMo novel in earnest earlier this month, though, unfortunately, that effort has stalled in the face of other demands on my time.  I did keep up with my leisure reading, though, excepting Charles Rosen’s The Classical Style, the three books I finished this month (George R. R. Martin’s A Clash of Kings, Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, and Albert Camus’s The Fall) were all re-reads.  Getting to check “see Feist live” off my music bucket list was most gratifying, and I went to the Kennedy Center a week later to see the National Symphony Orchestra for the first time in six months.  I didn’t write about it here, but, needless to say, classical music is always the best way to cap off any day.