Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Beauty and gratitude, no fooling***

Today I decided that I would think about five things that I am grateful for each day. What with the post-flood-trauma of this school year (So! Many! Dreams! About! Floods! All this anxiety and it didn't even affect my house) on top of the ordinary insanity of graduate school, this seems like a simple way to keep stress under control. These lists probably won't all make it to this screen (I am an old-fashioned girl who keeps a paper-and-pen journal; actually, about four of them scattered about my place) but today's will. 

THINGS I AM GRATEFUL FOR TODAY

*the sunshine and the warm weather (especially since parts of North Dakota and Minnesota are, evidently, still blanketed in snow) 

*beginning my day with yoga practice

*Rose Petal Tea for the Queen of Hearts (with organic cream) this morning - beautiful.

*having memorized 14 of 18 pages of my Beethoven sonata ... almost there!

*receiving an unexpected gift of a free hour this afternoon in which I treated myself to more tea, a snack, and a really great musicology article. Yes, that seems like an oxymoron, I know. This might be the best musicology article I've ever read (not that I'm a musicologist, but I've read my share). In case you are interested in it, it is called "Text, Music, and Meaning in the Third Movement of Luciano Berio's Sinfonia," authored by one Michael Hicks and published in the 1981-82 Perspectives of New Music journal. This article has inspired me to (one day) read James Joyce's Ulysses. That is one darn powerful article. 


BEAUTY, ACCORDING TO ME

Everyone's idea of beauty is subjective, of course. But this website lists the 100 most beautiful words in the English language. Here are my favorites from the list:

Diaphanous (although it always reminds me of The Puzzle Master)
Ebullient
Effervescent
Eloquence
Ephemeral
Epiphany
Ethereal
Evanescent (... guess I like the "E" words)
Felicitous
Gossamer
Scintilla
Serendipity
Surreptitious
Sussurrous

This list feels somehow lacking to me, though. So check back for my personal updates to it. Such as 

Iridescent

***Happy April Fool's Day to you! No jokes played on me this year; however, I did manage to fall off of a chair in public (don't ask), so I'll probably have a lovely rainbow-colored bruise on my butt by tomorrow morning. 

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Best Dessert o' the Week: Chocolate (duh) Rosewater (notice any trends?) Cake at Fair Grounds Coffee House (surprise, surprise)

Currently not listening to: Pieta Brown playing live at the Mill, as I type this. Sadness. Too much homework. 

Currently listening to: 
Lowell Liebermann Nocturnes in my car (prepping for my lecture-recital/dissertation, which is at least a year out, but doesn't hurt to be prepared); 
Anne-Marie McDermott playing Bach English Suites and Partitas; 
Andrew Bird's new release Nobel Beast on Pandora.com

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