The Mercenary's Logbook

It's been a while since I've posted anything here - I don't often check back because of some odd connectivity issues with where I'm living at the moment.

I haven't done this before, but I am doing it now - I'm putting out a General Call for Music. Last night, a dear friend of mine and her parents, dormouse_in_tea, were robbed. The thieves took quite a few things, but they also made off with her iPod and her laptop - and with it, all her music as well. Given that she adores music - and those who know her will understand exactly what I mean - I can't even begin to imagine what a crushing loss that is, along with everything else.

I won't go into details of all I'd like to do to these rotten, filthy scumbags who deserve to rot in hell, but I -would- like to ask a favour from anyone whom she's given or sent music to: if you wouldn't mind compiling a copy to send to her? I know for a fact that she's given me some beautiful stuff over the years that I'm completely in love with, and I'm going to get that copied up for her as soon as I can. She may be able to post a list of what she had when she's a bit more settled and less upset; in the meantime if you -do- have anything, you can either drop a note by here, or directly to her LJ.

It's the least I can do for a friend who's stuck with me through more than several years of ups and downs, ridiculousness and heartbreak, yeah?

...of sorts.

Hi, world. I'm baaack...at least a little. Yeah, haven't posted in ages and ages, and mostly it's because of a combined harvest of Things.

So updates:

1) My choir is going to Jakarta to represent the country in the 1st Asian Choir Games in November. I'm psyched as hell and scared as crap but it should be -good-.

2) I now sing with the performing chamber choir that's a subsection of our choir. First performance is June 1st - debut for S&T (which stands for Sopranos, Altos, and Them, since we have only three guys to the rest of the seven girls.)

3) I'm still drawing, and having fun with it.

4) Still with the Job of Doom, yes.

5) I'm still alive.

Be gentle - I might not post that often but just for now, I'm still around and hanging onto that which is called life, and it is...getting a little better I hope.

Entries here will be sporadic for a little bit, more than likely. This is due to several reasons, most of which centre around Stuff Happening RL, and not all of it is bad, it's slowly getting better.

So. Not ignoring anyone. I just might not see/read any important news until quite a bit later, because I won't be checking very often so my apologies in advance.

Friend: How is your evening going?
Me: I'm rapidly discovering there is no way in hades I can panel a noir page with the acapella version of the Gummi Bears Song stuck in my head.

***

Still alive, yes. Designing outfit for national awards ceremony on Sunday - I'm attending to the journalists with another friend. Cloud Strife will not go off well or professionally for said event, but elements of costume will be incorporated.

I now possess a beautiful Alexander McQueen kimono-inspired blouse pattern. It should come with the warning: REQUIREMENTS - MUST BE WELL-VERSED IN TRIGONOMETRY, PROJECTION AND CALCULUS. If you think I'm joking, think again - I had to print out an A4-sized copy of the entire thing and -study it-, making marks all over like an engineer while reading through the directions. I've only just figured out how the pieces should be -rotated- so they're facing the right way up. I would make it for the awards ceremony but that'd require a truly magnificent level of insanity even I don't have.

I also think that life is subtly hinting I should learn Castilian Spanish. Or at least SOME form of Spanish. Because my sketch site was just innundated with a flood of Spanish/Latin American illustrators and artists whose work is utterly awe-inspiring but whose sites and comments I can't -read-.

I'm a redhead again.

Heard the quartet on a video capture for opening night. They sounded so good, I cried.

Yeah. It was worth all the shit just to hear it all come together like nothing else on earth - in tune, in time, voices blended, -perfect-.

Dear piece of utterly scatilated cancer-ridden worm-infested SHIT who stole the birthday present that my brother sent all the way from Boston for her, whether you work for the postal service or not,

FUCK. YOU. With a rusty blade, several inches of live wire and may your innards never see more light of day than when I'm pulling out your testicles, ovaries, and whatever else finite tubing that's inside your overfed, ring-worm ridden pestilent pustules passing for brains. May you be cursed with the rot of a thousand screaming, howling, unsatisfied cranky zombie children who never die, and who always know how to judge with a nicety when you need rest the most and keep you from it.

May you never live another day without each piece of your sorry life going wrong. May every single thing you value the most crumble into smoke and be eaten by rabid ducks and tape-worms, may your prostate glands go into retention so badly all you can do is scream with no doctor free to see you, and may you never, for the rest of your mangy, uncouth, paramecium-brain-dead existence, forget that you're a thief, a liar, and may you die a thousand deaths every night through sleep deprivation, may your skin break out in boils that ooze pus every time you move, and may every single thing you set your hands to be stamped upon and eaten by the Yaks of Doom. May the police find out you're a thief, may you be branded as one, may you lose your job and never ever find another one and may you be reduced to the level of a bloody amoeba and never rise above it for the REST OF YOUR DAMNED, TRIPLE-DAMNED UNWORTHY LIFE.

Thank you for depriving my mother of a present my brother spent far more than he could afford on, just so she could have something beautiful. Your name is going to be mud. You AND the postal service. Just watch the papers if you think for one minute I'm joking.

If I could get my hands on you right now? Baby, they wouldn't be able to find enough of you to cremate in an urn. And when they find out who you are, I am going to be the first in line to personally bissect your stomach with my bare hands and feed your entrails to every gaping nightmare you've ever wanted to avoid. This I -promise- you, you despicable thief.

I definitely know I've been working at the hospital way too long when, in a bout of last-minute sewing alterations this afternoon for the dress that I'm going to wear for tonight's gig, I referred to the seam allowances as 'surgical margins'.

Effortlessly, I might add.

*grumbles*

In other news I have an appointment set to fix my hair, do my makeup and then I head out for the Gig of Doom. Maybe I'm just nerves because it's my first public one.

*sings The Prayer frantically all the way to the bathroom*

Mean as a stitchin' bitch and a half, that's me. *snickers*

As of 16th Sept. 2006? I AM AN AUNT. For the first time.

Welcome to the world James Tillman Bradley. I'm so glad to finally see you. Someday your momma will explain why I don't look anything like your Uncle Sacha or her, but it's an honour to be your aunt and I'm looking forward to it like nothing else in this world.

--Love,
Auntie Yin.

THE UNSEEN MEASURE OF DAYS - by S. Y. L.
Vincent Lee, 1985-2006
Requiescat in pace

They say the good do die young.
Maybe in some far-flung
High-spun corner
It connects but not intimately.
Not in the heart.
And the heart
Betrayed you. Such a tiny hole
Holding the universe twice over
And the remaining sifted years
Stretched out like ghost corridors
Into an infinite future.
One year of grace, extended
For twenty-one.
Your breath
Barely weights a basket of hours.
Seven thousand six hundred and sixty-five days
Frozen on a stopped clock
And sundered time filling the empty space
You’ve suddenly left behind.

We watched you defy gravity
And medical prognostications
And the fractured sky seemed boundless.

They say the good do die young.
We didn’t know the good
Had to be you.


***
My uncle-by-marriage's son passed away two days ago, and we just found out. He had a hole in the heart that doctors were certain would only allow him a year of life. He was 21 when he died.

I didn't know him; we never ran into each other and I was gone for far too long. I wish there had been time, but it's too damned late now.

First crash of the cymbals and my heart's already racing down, down the twisty dark oh-my-god path again, and you don't even need the electric to start wailing, the beat's seeped into my blood and ohgodohgod I'm drowning high as the stars sink down to the ends of the earth come dawn.

Red and gold and yellow, blue-depth of eyes, sea-black body-sloop, clear-as-kiss, supernova, lust, desire, running like the river wild. I'm breathless I'm panting, I'm swept away and I'm helpless to stop it and I wouldn't even if I could.

Like fire, like an earthquake, like an internal hurricane in rip-tide through every solid inch and cell, rippling like fish scales down down down the depth, make me shiver, make me want --

i want i want i want oh oh oh i want
don't stop let me drift
don't stop --

breathe, breathe and feel the hurl and fret of jagged-stipple notes twist me up into the night, down to the last frontier of the sun, burn, scorch, leave me needing, leave me wanting, leave me desiring, need, oh need need need and desire.

This is music, this is my life, my blood, breath and air and every living thing. Gods, how I've missed it so.

Oh Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeenn?

Behold! The BLUNDERBUSS of DOOM! Well...part of it but still.

There definitely could be improvement on:
1) Olna Rosetta's hair, that bloody splotch in the middle that didn't come out right, gah. Still pissed about that.
2) The line weights of the Fifth Wind, and
3) I really need to learn to clean up better after it's all done.

And for all it's practice and I need a hellalot more practice? I'm actually happy with it considering it was a last minute, 'My eyes hurt but I'm still going to be stupid and try.'

But! I managed the BLUNDERBUSS! Just for that, I'm THRILLED!

And what's even better: Till a friend of mine poked me on Trillian, I didn't realize I'd been inking for over an hour without a break. No. Pain. At. All. In my wrist. Just normal finger cramps. Previously there was still a bit of an ache after I got done.

But now? I am TOTALLY RECOVERED FINALLY from that wretched job what caused it.

Two. Damned. YEARS. About TIME.

So happy.

I largely hold Nigel Slater responsible for the sudden uncontrollable urge to cook something now (or at least within the next few days). His Kitchen Diaries, which I splurged on and got despite the howlings of conscience and my better self, is a year's worth of lyrical raphsody on enjoying food. I couldn't recommend it more highly. It's beautifully written, and the photographs are enough to make one's mouth crank into permanent drool.

And then again, I've been reading Elizabeth David's Christmas, and her recipes have gotten me itching for an oven (which I sadly lack right now, and won't be able to get any time soon in the near future).

Coinciding with all of this abundance of food-in-words was the opening of a new branch of Cold Storage, a grocery chain which caters mostly to expats and foreign products alongside normal local stuff. Which means that there are endives and Great Northern Beans, and tarragon vinegar and maitake mushrooms and even gluten-free stuff - all a bit pricy but I sing for joy because it's familiar ground. It's ghosts of a life long gone.

So today, when my dad and I went to browse around the cheese section, I went completely insane in the aisles, and spent a heftier sum than I have in a while getting groceries together to make a modified cassoulet in my 5 litre crockpot in the apartment.

Right now, there is a good-smelling, slow-cooking vat of carrots, chicken, pork, bacon chips and Great Northern Beans sitting on my kitchen counter. It's perfumed with lemon peel strips and generous sprigs of marjoram, and it will be dinner/lunch for a few days.

I can't even begin to describe how happy I was cutting everything up and layering them into the crock. Such a pure wash of joy, of 'everything's right with the world', of 'this is REAL FOOD and I get to cook it again'.

I haven't felt like this for so very long, I don't ever want to let it go away. I'm happiest when I have a kitchen I can use, putter about in; most of my friends who know me within the region of 'well' know I'm never happier than when I get to spoil them with good food and cook up a storm.

Happiness so sublime it's sacred. I really needed that this week.

And a LOT MORE COOKING.

Quartet is selected. Will likely rehearse them this Sunday; my alto can't make it, my tenor and bass can and they'll need more working on so I'll just start 'em first.

I'm better from the Stuff Wot's Going On and the Hell Day from Yesterday (thanks, guys, those I spazzed onto. Y'all helped me keep my sanity. Much hugs and thank yous.)

And now I'm going home because I'm done early and my index finger seems healed up enough to try working at the Byzantine chainmail I liked so much the other day.

*glazed eyes*

Spent the afternoon notating a song in Finale for one of our commissioned choir pieces. It is Syncopation Hell. There are four parts to it, though only three have been written.

Time, from start to finish: 7.5 hours.

Given that the person who was -supposed- to do it hadn't completed it in two -months- and the notes/rhythm she had were kinda -really- off (she actually has reason for this involving overloaded schedule, and I don't blame her at all; this is a piece that a classically-trained musician tears hair out over. It's ALL SYNCOPATION every other note), 7.5 hours is not too bad.

Just need to wait for the soprano part; that should be a lot easier now everything is in place.

Now if I sound totally out of it today, I apologize. I am.

Oh, and I'm not ignoring anyone. I'm just...there is a lot going on in life right now including sit-down-break-down-at-work-and-cry black hole depression. I'll emerge eventually, ok?

*glazed eyes and musical death*

OH. Yes. Happy birthday to the FURSTACK *furfurfurfurfur* and to Porpentine, both of whom I give tons of hugs. A bit zombified but hugs nonetheless. I'll think of a better present later.

Twin, the minute my brother showed me these I thought of you:

Cute!

Even Cuter!

Aren't they sweet?

Dear world:

All right all -right-. I get the hint. It's the New Game - Things to Upset the Mercenary. Now leave me alone. I have a crying jag to work out.

Notice posted up outside a large rock somewhere in the Condotierre Vicinity:

1) Vocal training camp happened this weekend. The toilets could be used to raise Cthulhu. There were attacking shower heads and slimy hoses from the Black Lagoon. The food was, however good. In-house solo performance happened with new version of Tam Lin ballad written that weekend. Screwed it up because too busy learning the 5 pieces of other people's music to accompany their performances.

2) Commissioned quartet piece for the choir finished, printed, and photocopied.

3) Have been paid the compliment of being given a chance to sing with above-mentioned quartet, and to teach the song. Will now have a quartet to coach for performance in October.

4) In a periodic flux of quiet and hermitdom. Will emerge.

5) Not dead. Yet.

Any one who blathers on to me about the 'inherent goodness of human nature' and tabula rasa can use this rusty barbed-wire wrapped club and shove it up their asses.

I don't say this nearly enough so I will say it now, and publically because these? Are the -best- things in life where my family are concerned.

1) I have the best brother in the world. wugga_wugga rocks my universe, literally and metaphorically and not just because he's my favourite all-time drummer and audio engineer. No matter how busy he is, he will always make time to deal with his sister's problems - especially audio mixing problems. Every performance track I have recorded, he has fixed, mixed, remixed, and sent them back to me in pristine, perfect, as-professional-as-possible-with-my-lousy-equipment-and-recording condition. And this on top of his 48-hour days with work and his bands and his social life.

2) My father? Counts as one of the coolest parents, because he learned how to use a computer well into his 40s and 50s - enough to diagnose and troubleshoot his own laptop problems and FIX most of the common crappage. Not only that, he always has time for me, even if it's driving all the way over from his place to mine here in the city to get my mother's Mother's Day gift to take home to her. Every week when I see him on Mondays before choir rehearsals, he always has a buttload of food for me because he knows I can't cook up here in the apartment. He'll go shopping with me, crack the most awful jokes, and even assemble my shelves for me (yes I'm perfectly capable of doing it, I'm no stranger to a carpentry set - but he does it anyway because he says he can do it faster.) He likes Dr. Who, will watch the new series with me when I get it, and is just...my dad rocks.

3) My mom earns the title Coolest Mom of the Year, hands down, every year, because, as I put on her Mother's Day card: "Happy Mother's Day to the best mom in the world who doesn't need grandchildren to validate her existence." I'm over 30. She's not worried if I get married or if I don't - as long as I'm happy doing what I love (she's also convinced that I'll be a mother-in-law's worst nightmare, and I don't really blame her at all). She has never nagged me to get married, nagged me to date, expressed disapproval at my weird inclinations towards taking degrees in subjects that will never make any money in the real world. Plus? She may be suspicious of computers and refuse to touch them but she knows how to text-message on a cellphone REAL good and she keeps in touch with me and my brother that way every day. She cooks wonderful soups and she sends them up with my dad so I won't always have to go out to eat, she remembers that I like blue and that I love pearl beans, so she'll go look for those things and get them for me even when I don't need them and don't ask for them. And when I wrecked our car lights backing out of a parking space, she did not get mad. She is also the one whose dry sense of humour includes asking me how much origami is on my desk that day, and laughing at my hissy fits at my boss without lecturing me on Being Good And Not Venting. My mom is SERIOUSLY COOL.

I love my family.

I have mixed Friday's performance track after a buttload of failed recordings, heart failure due to .wav sample compatibility, and a really pissy mouse. Not the organic mammalian kind, yes.

I now go to lay down because moral of the story is: Do not choreograph entire dance when one is already feeling bleah-sick from flu germs boss brought into work.

wugga_wugga I may need you to do some noise reduction; I can't get the bloody static pops out of my part of the recording with the rudimentary eq I have. :/