In other news:  I have figured out how to write a musicology paper about space (outer).  It is ostensibly about the B-52s, but mostly it will be about space.  This will require many trips to the Observatory so that I can learn everything there is to know about space. I actually went there this Friday already, which made me flash back to those days when Young Alexandra, Age 13, saw the film Contact and decided that I would be an astronomer, until I realized that such a career choice would probably involve knowing lots of math.  So then I gave up on that and decided to be an opera singer, until I realized that I actually hate other opera singers, and only wanted to be an opera singer because my voice teacher told me that I did, and so now I am a musicologist who writes papers about space.  Ah, memories.  All alone in the moonlight.

And also, at the Observatory there was a Tesla coil for no reason at all.  Tesla coils, as you may know, look pretty neat and shoot sparks in the air but don’t really have much purpose, other than to broadly indicate “SCIENCE” in a certain breed of science fiction film with which I am intimately familiar.  Ergo, awesome.

I am thinking of going away for spring break to some place really dreary.  Maybe Seattle?  I hear it rains all the time in Seattle.  And I could take that train that goes from LA to Seattle along the coast and takes, like 36 hours.  I think I would like that.  I like traveling on buses and trains because it is an excuse to not do anything, because what can you possibly do?  I also enjoy doing those kinds of things alone.  I like spending days without talking to anyone because it lets me get really weirdly self-indulgent and introspective and decadently melancholic and I don’t have to care about what anybody else thinks.  (Unfortunately, this tendency probably means that eventually I am going to die alone and be found days later, half-eaten by my pet ocelot, but what can you do?)  I want to go on holiday and I want for there to be no sunshine for days.  I want to be able to wear boots and my raincoat that makes me look like a Russian spy.  With a cardigan underneath.

Oh, and I am so excited right now because the radio in the cafe where I am working is playing The Shirelles!  I love it when The Shirelles happen.

Ok, I should go home because I have been here for four hours.

Of course this was not true.  CNN was doing a piece on Micheal Crichton, who is an author who is dead for real, not theoretically.

a) Days of the week,

b) the alphabet.

Oh, good.

2.  I am reading Hegel for class.  Or rather, I was reading Hegel.  I got as far as halfway through the first page when I reached the following sentence and then had to stop and stare at dresses on the internet for an hour to help put my brain back together:

“All that it says about what it knows is just that it is; and its truth contains nothing but the sheer being of the thing.”

Weirdly, now that I have typed that sentence out, I suddenly actually know what it means. Sadly, this implies that the only way to understand Hegel would be to transcribe his collected works.

Sincerely yours,

Alexandra, who ditched the conference and went out for hipster coffee instead.