"Man is born free..." Can you find the Rousseau reference in this picture?

Immaterial! I was looking through my stuff this morning for various reasons. I have quite a few books and some good CDs. I can get pretty attached to my stuff -- I'm still distraught that I can't find a little red notebook in which I wrote a lot of stuff in Russia -- but overall, I try to remember that the most important things in life are not material objects.

Still, material objects help a lot. They can trigger memories, and keep us comfortable so we can concentrate on more interesting things (cf. Maslow's hierarchy of needs). And yesterday, my friend Alexei had a crisis in which he lost his bags in which he carried his journal and other notebooks. They contained all the writing he had done this semester. He was pretty upset. I think that his notebooks and journal have been returned to him, but certainly it reminded those of us who were with him that little McGuffins can become important, even to people who try not to get attached to mere physical objects.

So I was poking around my books, and realized that I have two copies of Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. As well, I own a number of perfectly good CDs which carry music that I just don't care for anymore, if I ever did. I'm going to try to get rid of this stuff. I think I'll give away/sell a bunch of stuff that I'm just holding on to so that I have artifacts around me that remind me how cultured I am.

Books in particular. I'm more than halfway through The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. I can't recommend it wholesale, the way Seth and his ilk do. I put it down more than a month ago because the plot wasn't advancing quickly enough for my taste. I picked it up again about a week ago. Now both my reading and the plot have picked up momentum. Unfortunately, because I've read some of Existence and Uniqueness, I know how the book will end. But I knew how Anna Karenina would end when I read it about five or six years ago (wow), and I still enjoyed it. In fact, it was reading Anna Karenina that allowed me to realize why some people like soap operas.

Speaking of Tolstoy, War and Peace was supposed to be in my hands by now. It and about five other books comprised the contents of the box that my host mother mailed off to me about two months ago. I imagine it's lost forever. Argh. More "it's just things/but they're things I wanted to keep and have around" Alexei-ish mixed emotions.

Oh, and the other day I was poking around my domicile for a copy of the Constitution. I found it in a textbook on American politics and government that Sam Hatch, an English teacher who taught me my junior year of high school, gave me. He infiltrated my senior year English class and left it on my desk before I got there. It contained a note:

    Sumana,
	Congratulation on your AcaDec
triumph.  I hope this volume is
helpful to you in Mr. Berkowitz's
class.
	Excelsior!
		-SamH.

Note that I was in Academic Decathlon in high school, that I was the "team captain" and highest scorer my junior and senior years, and that Mr. Berkowitz was the teacher of the honors economics/government class. This book didn't help me much in that class, since the standard textbook and Mr. Berkowitz's time-honed lectures contained the entire and relatively meager quantity of information that I needed and didn't already know. Mr. Hatch's gift did help me study for the Advanced Placement exam in U.S. Politics in Government. I studied for this exam almost entirely on my own (in contrast to the help I got from peers and/or teachers in taking the AP exams in European History, U.S. History, Calculus, and Literature and Composition), and I did very well. It was the only AP exam on which I earned a 5 (the highest score possible). My grade pleased me because I didn't have to worry that I hadn't studied hard enough.

There are four more stories behind my AP agonies and triumphs. I should tell them, so as not to lose them.

Art Spiegelman. Mike Spiegelman, the Fresh Robot who made the anthrax joke that Leonard referenced, has a father named Art. However, Mike Spiegelman's father did not draw Maus. However, Mike Spiegelman's father has conversed with the Art Spiegelman who drew Maus, and evidently they both like, as Mike puts it, "bad jazz."

I found this out because Leonard and I arrived an hour or so early to the Marsh's Mock Cafe and I got to converse with this particular Robot, who was also in the cashier's booth. I was the first person in the history of the Mock Cafe e-mail newsletter to mention it and get the two-for-one admission offer, Mike noted.

You're listening to Pterodactyl Edition. Leonard and I have been having fun with the hypothetical screech of the pterodactyl. But we haven't been having nearly as much fun as Alex Chadwick of National Public Radio. Last week sometime, he was hosting Morning Edition and expressed surprise/dismay at some news item with a very pterodactylic cry. "The baby weighed fourteen pounds -- rrraah! You're listening to Morning Edition."

No wonder that's not in Russian! I played some of Tarakani Live! this morning whilst doing Russian homework. It's one of the CDs of Russian music that I got back in Russia. The first track of Tarakani Live! reminded me of tracks on Rock by Naif. If you ignore the lyrics in Russian, you'd think the sound came straight out of mid-nineties Seattle.

More amusingly, it reminded me of an evening back in St. Petersburg. I had just bought Rock and some other CD, possibly Tarakani Live!, in a music store on Nyevskii Prospekt. The grandson of my host mother had a CD player. When I listened to one of the CDs, I thought and remarked that it sounded an awful lot like, I think, Limp Bikzit or some such. The similarity progressed. Finally, I actually recognized that it was a Limp Bizkit/Blink 182/whatever song, and investigated, worrying that I had just bought a CD of bootlegged Western songs, and found out that the CD player, which contained a three-disc changer, was actually playing a Limp Bizkit CD belonging to the grandson.

Fully Committed. Alexei and Steve want to do food-socialization things soon. Wednesday night, tomorrow, I concede to two hours of the telly. Thursday night Katie (of Russia-trip fame) visits. Friday night I think I have some other commitment. Saturday I'm spending with Seth and possibly going to a Dar Williams concert with him. And in the midst of all this I really should study for the Political Psych midterm on Tuesday, and prepare for some open-mic comedy that night at Blake's.

Nandini, Vinay, Nathaniel, Dan, Anirvan, and I saw "Fully Committed" something like a year ago in San Francisco. It was a quite funny one-man show concerning an elite restaurant and its overworked reservation agent.

More Guy Noir. I finished and sent in one outline for a Guy Noir script for A Prairie Home Companion. I'm working on a new one now.

---

Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/16/234754/20