hot coffee

I'm drinking hot coffee right now, hence the title. Coffee does not in fact have anything to do with what follows, though it could in part be responsible for my effusiveness. I have a tee-shirt that says coffee is happiness that I wore yesterday, when I was ironically less than happy, because deprived of coffee. I suppose the woman at the optometrist's caught on, since she didn't dismiss my plea for a new brand of contact lenses with the sort of cheerful apologeticness that one expects on such occasions. It turns out that you need a different prescription for each brand of lenses you wear, yet another one for glasses, and that you're obliged to renew your prescription each year. It came as a bit of a shock, because I had expected that, armed with a prescription, I would be smilingly waited upon. In India you don't even need a prescription to get contact lenses--at least in my experience. It makes one wonder whether we are truly free.

Although, if online conversation is any indication of the general intelligence of the populace, then I understand and almost sympathize with any attempts to restrict everyone's freedom. Those bad eggs are ruining it for everyone. And they are so self-satisfied and dumb in their opposition to global warming and climate change, which is among the more infuriating activities they engage in daily. I don't much care for socialism, but that's mostly out of my innate misanthropy, which these festering cesspools of hydrogen sulphide are not doing anything to cure. But at any rate, they worship at the alter of capitalism--which is just as well, since I do, too. Earlier today I watched a video about a prodigious fourteen-year-old programmer who goes to college, and it made me question any desire I may have had to work for a corporation--or for that matter, to do anything. But that's neither here nor there. 

My parents are browsing matrimony websites in an attempt to set my cousin up with somebody before she "gets too old". She's twenty-nine, and frankly I can't see her with anyone. I kind of feel bad that her relations are thus conspiring to force her into something she probably won't enjoy. Not to mention how I loathe traditional Indian ideas of marriage and relationships, with their incorrigible misogyny and religiosity. I have nothing good to say about Indian traditions, alas, so I should probably check myself before I say something unseemly--though, if I did, that wouldn't necessarily mean that I don't hold such opinions with great passion.

Our sea consignment only gets here at the end of July, and it will take until the first week of August to be sent through Customs. In the meantime, the spot in the designated room is conspicuously without piano, and my sheet music is still in the suitcase. It looks like those last pages of Vallee d'Obermann will have to wait longer yet, and that's not counting the technical difficulties. 

Schumann's Fantasie in C Major, Op. 17 is truly a remarkable piece. A masterpiece. I'm frankly appalled that I should have said to my piano teacher five years ago that I thought Schumann boring. (I can't even remember what occasioned that, since I couldn't have listened to much Schumann before then.) The first movement contains an entire universe. There are passages that seem to carry you away on a breeze, and there are passages where time seems to stand still. Even the rests and pauses are so pregnant that you shiver. There are heartwarming passages filled with light, and there are passages that glare at you with glowing red eyes in infinite darkness.

As for books, I finished reading Of Human Bondage. I'm obliged to say that I have changed my opinion of Philip since my last review. He was somehow considerably less odious by the end, and did not, as I had dreaded, get back together with that contemptible slattern Mildred. All in all it was a great novel. I also downloaded and am reading The Trial by Kafka. So far I don't have an opinion on it.