This Side of Lost

Okay, Megan and Melissa (and anyone else), thoughts on this?

They love to do their homework: At this Southern Baptist seminary, women who serve God also serve their husbands. Baking, sewing and laundry are part of the curriculum.

My thoughts: At first glance, I am enraged for several reasons. Not only does this sort of clear gender inequality rankle me on a basic level, but it also perpetuates the popular misconception that all Christian thought and practice is blatantly patriarchal and misogynistic. (Just to clarify to my non-churchy readers: there are several denominations that ordain women, including the ELCA and Episcopal churches, the two I most closely identify with.)

But taking a look a second time, I of course can't go around telling other people how to live their lives. If these women are truly fulfilled and feel that they are living the Gospel and following in Christ's example by living this way, who am I to argue? They probably get along much better in their backwards Southern communities this way. There's value in that -- albeit, at the expense of shaking up the status quo and perhaps working towards some true gender equality -- but in lieu of that?

Also, the idea of people learning how to keep a household is not inherently a bad idea. It just saddens me that this seminary recognized that their students aren't learning that stuff from their parents and larger family group (the best source of such knowledge) and need to actually offer formal instruction.

What do you think?

Samantha has accepted a position as Rare Book Cataloger at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY.

First off, she's completely jazzed about the job. It will be for her what my current job has been for me -- a fantastic first position doing exactly what she wants to do, with a great salary + benefits, great colleagues and a supportive administration. Plus, it's in the Hudson River Valley just north of New York City -- a beautiful region with a lot to offer. So I'm very excited for her as well. She starts in mid-November.

Secondly. For a variety of reasons mostly involving the timing of academic hiring and a bevy of musical commitments I've made, I can't leave California quite that soon. So I will be staying here for a while. Probably until next summer. Yes, that means we will be dealing with a long distance marriage for a time. This sucks, but we're prepared to deal with it because we know that this short-term problem will be for a better long-term future. In the meantime, I'll be looking for positions in NYC and surrounding area.

This has been in the works for about a month and a half, but the official offer letter did not come until last week, so we had to kind of sit on it. But there has already been much progress to make this a reality: Samantha has located a subletter in Pok (the us-approved shorthand for Poughkeepsie), I have located a smaller apartment here in California, the rental truck has been reserved (we'll be taking our lessons learned and making the cross country trek ourselves with Samantha's half of our worldly possessions in November), the flight back home for me has been purchased, etc. etc. There's still a lot to figure out -- should we switch banks? get a new phone plan? what happens to Netflix?? -- all of which will come in time.

But soon that sample Google Maps search is going to come a lot more in handy.

The news would have you believe that the entirety of southern California is in flames. It's not quite true. Yes, a quarter of a million people have been urged to evacuate in the San Diego area and there was smoke on the horizon almost everywhere I looked this morning. But life here in the Valley pretty much is going on as usual. Don't worry about us -- we aren't rich enough to live in the hills or near any natural brush or forest. So we're safe.

We were mostly unaware of the conflagration until yesterday afternoon. This is because we were in Bloomington, Indiana, over the weekend witnessing the wedding of our friends David and Anne. They tied the knot on Sunday at St. Thomas Lutheran (the church where David was the organist and where he and I became friends) amidst marvelous music: we were part of a small choir that performed four pieces and the wedding favors were kazoos -- the attendees were encouraged to play along with the recessional. We always enjoy any excuse to visit our old stomping grounds there. We stayed with Mari and Tony, enjoyed two visits to our favorite bar, saw some of Samantha's fencing buddies (and their adorable cats!) and generally enjoyed being in a place where you can walk around easily and where seasons occur.

Music has been taking over my life of late. The Los Angeles Master Chorale had their opening concert of the season a little over a week ago -- one of the four LAMC events I'll be taking part in. It's pretty wild to be a member of a professional music ensemble -- it's very different from most of my choral experience up to this point (the topic of a planned future post). But it is neat to see the concert reviewed in the newspaper and even to see myself in a photo (middle row, on the right)! Anyway, the rehearsals for this came on hard and heavy for the two weeks leading up. Add those on to my usual twice-a-week rehearsals for the Oxy Chorale and my church gig and Andrew was a busy singer for a while there.

This coming weekend, Samantha's brother Ben will be visiting along with his friend Austin. This visit has been preordained for about six months, ever since Samantha saw an announcement that Ian McKellan would be playing King Lear when the Royal Shakespeare Company came to town in October. Samantha told Ben (Shakespeare nerd-ery runs in the family apparently), who promptly made plans to fly out to visit and see it. Ben bought tickets hours after they went on sale about three months ago. Good thing, too, since the prices have jumped considerably since then. We've been reading these news stories with interest, and pondering what we would buy if we could sell our tickets at such prices. But I think this is the sort of thing we'd regret missing.

Other news of late:

• We went to see They Might Be Giants when they played in Anaheim a few weeks ago. Andy Kasper got us off our butts and across the southland and we're glad he did. It might have been the best of the six shows I've seen of theirs. The guys can still rock. The show has set off a mini TMBG obsession in Samantha, who subsequently added Linnell to her Top 5 guys list.
• The planning continues for the big move. Mostly what that means is that there are lots of boxes in the apartment. but it's less than three weeks away, which makes it a little more real.
• Did I ever update you on my fantasy baseball leagues? I came in first in Aaron Steele's league and in third in Soren's league. I'm pretty happy with both results, though I got lucky in the playoffs in the former after Aaron smoked everyone else during the regular season.
• On a related note, the Twins finished their season under .500 for the first time in six years. They turned in a pretty disappointing season all told as their offensive woes came back big time. But the eternal refrain of the loyal baseball fan rings true -- there's always next year. In the meantime: go Rockies!

The first year I lived in Indiana, I auditioned for the choral ensembles at IU and was placed in the Contemporary Vocal Ensemble. Note that if you peruse the previously linked page, you may find that the home page for CVE is nonexistent. This is not surprising given how much the music school cares about its choral program or about ensemble musicianship in general. You will never find the opera pages in such a state of disarray, however! Oh no, not them.

But I digress. CVE was a largely regrettable experience. I almost typed "forgettable," but it would indeed be difficult to forget. Our director, Carmen Tellez, is a scholar of the highest order and passionately committed to her cause -- performing contemporary choral music. Unfortunately, yours truly is not a very big fan of most contemporary choral music, because yours truly is of the opinion that most contemporary choral music is bad. Add to this the fact that Carmen's greatest talents don't really lie in conducting and her choir is mostly full of conductors, not singers, made the group a study in divergent singing ability meeting with bizarre and immensely difficult music. You add that up and tell me how it looks to you. I did meet some cool people, though, and it also was the source of my film debut.

One of the last projects I did with CVE was a performance of The Bells of Leopardi by Yehuda Yannay. It easily fit in with the other music we did that spring (the theme of the concert was something completely crazy like "Music in Space and Time"). In portions of the piece, a voice recites numbers in Italian while the choir sings marcato chords imitating a clock tower. So guess who was the voice?

Anyway, the performance then spawned a multimedia project! It was set in the semi-circular concrete staircase in the Musical Arts Center on campus, and involved a toddler with a book, a vision of beauty, a chorus in black and the insomniac poet himself, played by the man with the voice, yours truly. I can't really remember much of the explanation for why the video contained all this, since it was two years ago. But it was an entertaining day in the MAC, walking up and down stairs, staring at people intensely, and that sort of thing.

When it was over, Carmen told us that she'd be in touch when the post production was finished. I never heard from her again.

Fast forward to last weekend and my visit to Bloomington. I ran into Sara Schaeffer in Mother Bear's. When she saw me, her eyes got wide and she pointed at me like I was a ghost. (I get this reaction a lot.) And said, "You! Carmen wants to talk to you! The video is done!"

And so it is. It's pretty weird, as expected, but the production values are pretty good. To think I didn't even need to move to LA to see my name in lights -- err, I mean, in Youtube.