h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

i've been nursing a cold and severe cough since wednesday, when i foolishly decided to walk back home in the rain. i've been on sedilix for the last couple of days, and i've one thing to say about it - it is *potent*. it's helped clear my throat and alleviate my nasal congestion and all, but (combined with my daily dose of beconase) it also seems to have a *major* hallucinatory effect, with the result that i've been woozy and floaty and half-removed from reality for the last few days. if this is what doing drugs does to you, i'm glad i never *started*.

interestingly, i made the discovery that while i do absolutely *miserably* playing yahoo! text twist while lucid, it is in this state that i do tremendously well (and i have the scores to prove it). however, i am also currently a hazard to everybody, especially myself, in the lab because i keep on losing track of what i'm doing. it would be a *bad* thing to get ethidium bromide on myself...

amazingly, however, i managed to play for *three* convocation sessions in this state (oh, didn't i say? last week was convocation week) our conductor, casey, graduated on friday. we played 'yorktown' from james hosay's 'tales of the bay' (it's a nice little march) when his faculty went up, and eugene got us to crescendo when *casey* went onstage. only we overdid it and *blasted* the stuff at full volume, so that nobody in the audience could hear anything else but *us*. dead . i'm looking forward to wearing my own neon pink sash next year...

Try Drammamine (for motion sickness) and waking up at 3:30 in the morning before an 11 hour boat trip. No hallucinations, but drugged/dazed state is not short in supply. I ended up sleeping a lot, which I can't stand. I couldn't concentrate enough to actually read anything.

I just played (in a string quartet) in a rock performance. Wired all the way! We did Beatles Mean Mr Mustard/Polythene Pam, and for the guitar (cello) solo at the end we used one of the band's distortion pedals. It was one of the most fun things I've done in my entire life. And thanks to the band for the use of their amps and all of their expertise during sound check. (it is not a pretty thing if you take a bunch of classical musicians and give them too much tech stuff to play with without also giving them instructions.) I was terrified during the beginning of the concert, as I had two tradtional groups to play in as well, and the second one was a hard piece for me (only a week to prepare). But knowing that I could come out at the end of the concert and be really loud and obnoxious, and just do something I love (making music and Beatles) helped me to not totally break down. I normally get very nervous before performances (solo/small group, but not orchestra), and I think sometimes that is reflected in my stage presence, but I felt more confident this year. Barb (who played viola in the piece I was nervous about, and was our beatles group coach) told me that it didn't matter how we did, because no matter what happened, after that I was going to rock! And not only did the yuckky piece go pretty well, the beatles was great. Yield very tired (we stay up late all week) but very happy me.

sounds like you had fun

yeah, it sounded like fun! you played the violin, i presume? only i don't have much experience with strings playing rock, understand (oh, hang on, there's that group, whatsit, suede?).

as i said, we played for convocation last week. thanks to marcus, who conducted us for the first half on friday, we managed to transform a number of pieces (most notably 'yellow bird') from standard pop-rock to really steeeaaamy cabaret-type music. (put it this way: we swelled every single note, and wherever possible, slurred them. works best on the trombone) our ex-conductor would have highly disapproved.