Good morning. Hello. How are you this lovely Thursday? Looking pretty cloudy and rainy out there. Has been raining all night. Hopefully it’ll clear up in time for me to start planting tomorrow I am very excited to start planting things tomorrow. Look at this forecast, that is some solid planting weather.
Today is my area’s average last frost date, so I should be good to go. All the grapes are going strong, the rose bush is doing great, and more amazingly, so far two of the four trees I left in a bag of water for six months have started to come back and hve little bits of green on them. I can’t believe it, I am shocked.
I watched a gardening YouTuber last night who is also in my climate zone (7b) say that I should wait to plant my peppers into the ground until it’s above 40 at night but I don’t wanna wait, as Paula Cole said. I wonder what is up with Paula Cole let us check. Hold please. Hrm well I just learned a bunch about Paula Cole. She is from Rockport, Ma. She went to Berklee and is now a faculty member at Berklee. She got her start on Peter Gabriel’s Secret World tour. She is still making albums, with her last one called American Quilt from last year, to which I am listening right now. First song has a real Corrs vibe to it, Celtic thing, which is kinda weird on an album named American Quilt but what are you gonna do. Wow I don’t think I have ever willingly listened to Paula Cole before but this is not bad.
Jane is at Grammy’s this morning because I’m supposed to have a call with some Italians in an hour but they have still not confirmed or told me where to call. It is very hard to call Italians, I’m finding, not least because of the seven hour time zone difference. Once that is done I’m going to sneak out to the recycling center and the Walmart because I cannot really do these things tomorrow morning now, because Jane will be with me unlike normal Fridays. All very exciting. Also Emma has a bunch of work today and tomorrow. BIRTHDAY WORK. Ha. Emma’s birthday is Saturday. We are going to go see our friends in the Magnetic Fields in Durham on Saturday, which is sort of a big deal for us because we haven’t really done something like that in a long time. But it’ll be good to see Y Mike and Chris I am very excited. Also I got Emma really dumb presents but I like them so that means something right?
Another thing I kind of love about Olivia Rodrigo is her refusal to write her lyrics with the appropriate number of syllables. She does this a lot and I think it is just great. It’s so frequent and she is so talented that it has to be intentional, to give her songs a bit of discomfort. Take, for example, these lyrics to “Brutal,” the opening track on Sour:
I'm so insecure, I think
That I'll die before I drink
And I'm so caught up in the news
Of who likes me and who hates you
And I'm so tired that I might
Quit my job, start a new life
And they'd all be so disappointed
'Cause who am I, if not exploited?
The line “Quit my job, start a new life” is just wedged in there, whereas “Quit my job, a new life” would totally work thematically and would fit the meter of the song far better but nope. She’s gotta cram those syllables in. She does this time and time again and I love it so much it is just so teenage awkward it works works works.
Finished Elie Mystal’s book last night, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution which was a real good time if you want to get super angry about how totally racist the founders of this country were and how distorted the “originalists” have made our legal process. It’s very satisfying to see someone methodically tear town their idiotic arguments, and really drive home just how absurdly neutered they’ve made the 14th and 15th amendments which were made by humans that were around to say what they were thinking when they wrote them but suddenly in those situations their original intent doesn’t matter. Also I had never really thought before about the absolute denial that originalists have that the ninth amendment exists:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
And I hadn’t really wrestled with the fact that Article 5 says that you can’t amend the constitution to fix the senate that is some crazy shit I never really thought about right there. It’s almost like the Connecticut “Great” Compromise was bad bad bad.
I wrote this in my personal journal yesterday, about the war. I still think about it every day, and of course the news coming out of Bucha and elsewhere is awful, horrifying.
Ukrainian war still going strong. The Russians are now losing, withdrawing from places, so their atrocities are coming to light and it is awful and horrifying. There is still no end in sight, no one knows the endgame here. Two weeks ago, the Ukrainians attacked the Russian navy when it was docked in a captured Ukrainian port city, so now the Russians have gone back to sea and since then their Navy's been pretty useless offering support for Russian troops, which is great. There was also some mysterious attack on a Russian fuel depot or well or something in Russian territory, and the Russians blamed the Ukrainins, but the Ukrainians denied it, which was kind of a mystery because why would they deny their ability to take the war to Russians. Zelensky is giving speeches to the UN and European parliaments and such and apparently the Czech are secretly giving them tanks and NATO is considering letting the Ukrainians bring their weapons into NATO countries for repair. It is all such a mess.
It's still on the front page of all the papers, though. We have not forgotten. We want to help more, we just don't know how to do that without starting a world war. For once, the US is on the right side again, and doing what it can and we generally can't complain, at least in broad strokes, about our response. A relieving change of pace.
Jane had a little wobble in her leg the other morning from her flu vaccine. She got out of the crib and her leg hurt, which makes sense cuz man my arm hurt from this flu vaccine. And she was just so confused and panicked. I got to teach her the concept of “walking it off,” which was fun. But it continued to bother her all day. Also she has little kid allergies and it is just so sad I am so sorry we gave you shitty allergies, Jane. Neither one of us really had them kick in till we were like 12 or something so it is somewhat alarming to see her get them so young. I tried to explain to her what pollen is, and how we breathe it in, and how it comes from trees, but she loves going outside and I hardly want to make her afraid of breathing. She’s gonna get a blood test soon (gotta take her back to the doctor to get the draw maybe I’ll do that tomorrow morning) to test her blood. It is so awesome you can test allergies now without pricking your skin in thirty places man those old allergy tests were so awful. When I got my blood draw/allergy test five years ago, they made me go to an ENT for it which is dumb and I was worried they were gonna do that with Jane but naw, we can just do it with her PCP at her normal clinic that is nice.
Okay well that Paula Cole album was a little jazzy for me to but I liked a couple tunes on it. Here’s a club mix for you. I mean, don’t get me wrong I haven’t been to a club, aside from that LCD show, in, like, seven years or something so it’s not like I have any idea whatsoever what clubs are like. And, like, if I were personally DJing a club I would probably just play “Tutti Frutti” by New Order over and over. But people still make music like this and I like some of it and so we are going to listen to it. Maybe one of you will dance around your studio or workshop or office today listening to this that’d make me very happy. Maybe I will, even!
No word from these Italians, with 20 minutes to go. If they stand me up after I found alternative childcare and totally changed my weekend plans for them, I am gonna be grumpy, very grumpy indeed.
Tune in tomorrow for the thrilling conclusion to The Italian Mystery.
Re: syllables and singing, I read something when i was a teen about how Syd Barrett fit music to his words and not the other way around and I always notice that when i listen to him/Syd-era Pink Floyd. Bike is a good example.