For the fourth time in a year and a half, I’ve been told by someone (not someone I’ve mentioned in the blog recently) that I’m physically attractive and that I’m friendship material, but that the person isn’t romantically interested in me. I hadn’t yet made up my mind about what I wanted from the guy — hadn’t really spent enough time with him to know — although this makes things easier.

What I’m more concerned about is that this is the fourth time this has happened to me in a year and a half. Four guys in that time period have signaled to me that they find me physically attractive and that they want to be my friend, but that they don’t want to date me.

Ruminating on this probably won’t help matters. I figure I’m too anxious and too emotive. I figure what I need to do is shed the self-pity, pretend to be more self-confident, keep my problems to myself, be noncommunicative, and not give a flying fuck about what anyone else thinks.

Of course, it’s 5:00 in the morning as I’m writing this, and I’ve been kept up all night by my upstairs neighbor playing music, so I’m not exactly thinking clearly. But maybe it’s time I stopped thinking so clearly.

More Musical Musings

I’ve been spending much of the day reading about Wagner, particularly this site. My gosh — I’m moved by an overwhelming desire to digest all 15 hours of the Ring Cycle at once, to know everything about it, to be intimately familiar with it. Sometimes I just want to absorb the entirety of a subject, just swallow it all down in huge thirsty gulps. I’m saddened, sometimes, that many people will live and die having listened to nothing but pop music and Top 40 crap — that most people will live and die without ever experiencing even just a part of the whole universe of timeless, wonderful music that’s out there.

I think of someone like Leonard Bernstein, one of my idols, a man who spent his entire life in the world of art music. I envy the lifetime of expert musical knowledge that he acquired. I imagine him as an old man, listening to something as complex as the Ring, or Tristan und Isolde, and knowing that music as deeply as he knew his own mother. I want to feel that way someday.

When Bernstein died in 1990, the New York Times ran his obituary at the top of the front page. It contained one of his more famous quotes:

I want to conduct. I want to play the piano. I want to write for Hollywood. I want to write symphonic music. I want to keep on trying to be, in the full sense of that wonderful word, a musician. I also want to teach. I want to write books and poetry. And I think I can still do justice to them all.

What an incredible man. RIP, Lenny.

Maybe I’m Getting Paid To Blog

This morning I turned in a legal memo that I was supposed to turn in on Friday. It was only about a week’s worth of work, but I had three weeks to do it, and I still turned it in late. It was a rush job toward the end, and I thought, “This is going to be the worst piece of crap I’ve ever written, I shouldn’t have spent so much time surfing and blogging.” But a few hours later I heard back from my boss that it was perfect. Then I reread it, too, and I realized it was pretty good. Wow. I guess I’ll stop feeling guilty about goofing off at work.