another looong day... and the mystery of rhythm

dude -- i'm so ready for this semester to be done. one week from now i'll be done with lie groups and graph theory... 2 weeks from now i'll be completely done with the semester, half my NJ friends will have flown to their respective homes for a week or two (or a few months as the case may be), and i'll be packed up and ready to head out to tour the midwest for a few weeks, leaving first thing that wednesday morning... i'm excited for the trip and to see old friends, but it's also hard to believe things wind up so quickly, and change pace so drastically when they're so intense right now.

e.g.: today.
i left my place here at 9:30am, running late for algebra... 80 minutes of algebra and 80 minutes of graph theory later, i was tired of taking notes... eric and me went to subway for lunch and talked about classes and stuff for a bit... then 45 minutes after my last class had gotten out, we were back in the math building working on analysis homework with lots of other people... we did that for 4 hours straight, then i worked on writing up my answers neatly while eric practiced his horn... we got a quick dinner in the student center and went to colleen's band concert... then back to eric's for a tiny bit so i could explain some of the assignment to him that he didn't understand yet... now, well after 10pm, i just got back home... am going to watch scrubs, which i recorded while i was out, and then get to work on graph theory.... joy.

and this is typical for the next 2 weeks... yuck

on a more entertaining note... eric is really into music/music theory and since he has a really strongly-defined sense of rhythm, he thinks everyone must... and i insist i have no sense of rhythm whatsoever... i explained how although i understand the concept of what sheet music is supposed to represent, i basically read the notes as tones, and either (a) while playing by myself, play the rhythms how i feel like it (i.e. don't parse quarter/eighth/half notes, etc. and play what i want) or (b) absorb how the piece is "supposed to sound" together with other instruments and just remember the sound and play based on that... prime example... when i used to play flute/piano duets at church w/ my mom, i'd never play from the music that just had the flute notes -- i'd always get a copy made of the piano and flute lines together and time when i played my notes along with when mom was playing her melodies -- i've NEVER learned to count out rhythms that have anything shorter than a quarter note in them and sometimes not even then!.. for someone with a highly musical mom, and who played flute for years, this is kinda strange, eh? but definitely true.

eric was so thrown for a loop by that that we spent the time driving to colleen's concert and the time there trying to count out rhythms in the music... when he asked me what meter one song was in during colleen's concert and i responded "well, i counted to 19, and decided i really didn't want to go into 20s so i started over again and got to 13 before things changed majorly, so i'd guess it's divisible by 4", he was completely floored!... it's funny, because eric still insists he can teach me rhythm... we shall see...

mostly i argue that even if i can hear a downbeat now and then, measures seem arbitrary to me, and if something's written "in 4", why can't i just move bars on the sheet music around and make it be "3" or "5" or whatever i feel like... kinda like my counting to 19 and not having a problem with it... eric insists there's periodicity in all music in western culture, that that's where the meter comes from, and he's just trying to help me learn to pick up on the rhythm of the world i've been living in for nearly 23 years.... i'm just being honest and am convinced i just parse music differently than he (or most any musically inclined person) does.

anyhow, that's the discussion of the day. night y'all.