Tonight, Chris came over and there was music and cooking and computer-talk.  The meal is worth recounting: it was a fruit-based almost-stir-fry.  Apples, peaches, clementines, around onion, garlic, ginger, cardamom, pine nuts, cinnamon, and all tied together with coconut milk, and underlined by habaneros.  Delightful.  Served over couscous.  Oh, also, sultanas and dried cranberries.

One thing Chris was sure to point out: habaneros are the necessary choice of pepper for this, as they have a real time-delayed effect.  This allows the sweetness of the fruit to be enjoyed, and then the spiciness to hit you.

Soon, I will get Rocky Road to Dublin down, and have a tune I can contribute.

I made great spanakopita this weekend, and biked, and hiked, and played frisbee.  I was productive, too—I achieved in 2 hours what would have likely taken me a day to a day and a half had I been in the office.  This is consistent.

I was sent this link, which made my day.

I played concertina, I sang.  I began to learn a new song, Farewell to Nova Scotia.

And yet, I still feel the pull of the East as strong as ever.

More to the point, Austin and I saw her live tonight, at the etown taping at the Boulder Theater.  She is more amazing than anticipated: pretty, socially conscious, really smart, and most of all astoundingly talented.  With versatility like you’ve not seen in a long time.  She went from classically-informed current singer/songwriter to “didn’t Alan Lomax record this?” in a moment.

Bottom line: check her out.

So that’s part of it.  But part of it is feeling intensely like, despite being here, going out, doing things, trying to be here in an honest fashion, and trying this for 6 months, I’m still not succeeding.  I have made beginnings of friendships, and shied back from them, or found them uninteresting—even out of the people I knew back East who are out here, I’ve seen all but one of them, managed a few times, and then, really, lost interest.

And then, on the other side, I need more singing.  I think if I had managed to keep going to Meeting, I might have enjoyed the occasional singing there, but it runs deeper than that in any case.

There’s the one thing that really gives me pause, though, and that is the fact that my job is basically awesome, and it’s hard to envision a better way to be employed*.  So… do I risk that?

(A somewhat strange realization: one of the things I am particularly missing right now is late long summer evenings on Karl’s porch singing and picking.  It’s almost bringing tears to my eyes right now.)

However, I’m still feeling a bit ill.  This is a particularly bad time for it, as it sort of precludes open water certification this weekend, which precludes getting that at all before Zanzibar, which is sad.  I could perhaps spend two days and get open water in Zanzibar, but… I am not holding out too much hope for that.  It’d be a lot of time in a cramped schedule.

First, an addendum regarding Abigail Washburn and the Sparrow Quartet.  If there were an extended musical scene at Jabba’s palace in Firefly, they would be the band: the mix of Chinese and Appalachian influences makes that clear.  But also the moment of musical apotheosis when two banjos, a cello and a fiddle play Eleanor Rigby, really, was just amazing.

Second, I watched a wonderful movie last night, War, Inc. John Cusack, Joan Cusack, Marisa Tomei, Ben Kingsley, Dan Akroyd.  Sort of a spiritual successor to Grosse Pointe Blank, a favorite movie of mine.  It is a sort of near-future corporate dystopian view of war, and a satire of US foreign policy and corporate greed.  Blatantly but excellently done.

Their music has all something needs and more: it has the old, the ancient, the modern, and the future.  A song inspired by making a mashup of Turandot and Woody Guthrie songs, bluegrassy Chinese and, in one case, Kazakh songs.  It would be inspiring if it were just done alright, but it is done so well.

What I have to say now concerns serendipity, and a positive attitude.  I feel that, in my life, very little happens that is bad, very little goes wrong.  In fact, there are a number of things I can think of that may have seemed like they were bad, or went wrong, but in fact turned out for the (likely) better.

For example, I met my first girlfriend through a bureaucratic mis-placement (of both of us, I believe).  And I got this job because of my CS major which was only possible because a summer program in Japan didn’t teach me as much Japanese as I had expected, and I couldn’t skip all of Second Year Japanese.  Things like that.

The most recent was this: I had resolved (but not Made a Resolution) to dance more this year, and to that end had asked my super awesome neighbors of win, Mike and Erika, when the Scandi dances they play for were happening.  It turns out they’re every Monday, but that they start with an hour of teaching at 7:30, not 8:30 as I thought.  So I arrived, and was quite lost — Scandi dances are harder to jump into than Contra dances because (a) they are couple, not social, dances*, and (b) I have never done them before.  However!  It turned out to be great — I got to spend the time watching, observing, talking with people there, and not freaking out that I was doing it wrong.  So I have some groundwork now to start from, when I go next week in time for the teaching.

In other news, I have pictures of the snow.

* I know I am using these terms sort of incorrectly, but it’s how I think of the difference.