Last evening I went to sleep at somewhere after midnight after having watched the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and the Colbert Report, then reading a chapter or two of the Pickwick Papers. The reason I'm reading the Pickwick Papers for my bedtime reading is that I think I should read it at some point. While I got through Little Dorrit excellently the second time I read it (when my stock of patience had begun to wax and my rabid interest in romantic plotlines had begun to wane), the Pickwick Papers is, I think, on another plane of circumlocution. So I'm reading it late in the evening, when my mind is too tired to wander from the matter at hand. This puts me in the awkward position of noticing that something is funny but being unable to laugh because I'm too fatigued, but other than that the reading is pleasant.

But I think I'm incapable of fully appreciating Dickens, because while I can see his greatness in terms of literary skill, some aspects of his writing are simply not to my taste. First of all, after the first hundred or so pages of voluble social and personal caricature I tend to have had quite enough. Secondly, I find (unoriginally) that his sentimentality is sickly. Thirdly, the female characters annoy me. I'm not sure if I would feel the same if I reread A Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield, but I do still presently have a strong antipathy against Lucie Manette and Agnes Wickfield. Their constant, unnatural passivity and the apparent lack of intelligence (which is not to say that they are stupid, just that they don't seem to be actively intelligent) are exactly the traits that I see as the opposite of ideal in women (or anyone, for that matter). Selfless, pious airheads are airheads all the same.

Anyway, this morning I woke up at about 10:30 to a thoroughly overcast day. I ate breakfast, then peregrinated up the gravel path to the little house (or studio) as usual. Papa and I played one of Mendelssohn's "Songs Without Words," then Beethoven's variations on a theme from Handel's "Judas Maccabeus." Papa recorded the pieces, because we have a delightful set of two microphones with their own stands, as well as two other microphones that are simply lain down near an instrument, attachable to a mixing board thingy that I lack the technical knowledge to describe. In the "Song Without Words" the cello sounded beautiful. My accompaniment was, as usual, not legato enough; the slightly awkward, often staccato chords had a decidedly childish sound to them. Also, I barely even attempted the part where the piano has to play sextuplets. As for the variations, they went fairly well. There's still a lot of work to do, however.

I also played the beginnings of many movements from Beethoven's piano sonatas, and found something new in quite a few of them. In this case "finding something new" means that sometimes when I play a piece I suddenly play a part of it in a different way than I usually do, often in a way that sounds better (sometimes, for instance, I find out that I've been playing the wrong note for years). The piece suddenly makes more sense. Anyway, then I played most of the first two Mozart sonatas, and then a piece that I first played through in its entirety yesterday -- Preludio VII in E flat major from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, Vol. II -- and of which I am presently very fond.

My sister and I also looked through photos that she and my oldest brother had taken. Many of them were really good. Many of them we'll mostly keep for the memories -- for instance of the shed in the very back of our yard on whose roof we set up camp when we were little, and whose bare mention prompts a floodtide of reminiscence.

Anyway, after that my sister went down to watch television, and I eventually joined her. She watched the Bourne Identity (which I rather like) until she found the bleakness too much for her, then we watched bits of a "Night at the Metropolitan Opera." I, generally speaking, can't stand singing -- particularly where the singers overexercise their eyebrows, have a constant self-satisfied smirk on their faces, find it terribly amusing to overact their comedic roles, and above all sing what I consider as fake-ly. This time, however, I found the tenor unintentionally amusing, as well as the black-clad choir that was arranged evenly across the stage in two superposed rows in a manner strongly evocative of Hitchcock's birds. On a less superficial level, I also enjoyed Plácido Domingo's appearance. His movement of eyebrow was kept within bounds, his face was free from contortion and gravely composed, and his gestures did not distract from his actual singing, which was impassioned and earnest but not exaggeratedly so. After he was done we switched to another channel, and Papa (who had just returned from a shopping expedition with Mama) soon watched part of the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, specifically an interview about the new immigrant worker legislation in the US.

So, on the whole, this is probably the best day I've had since the wonderful day on which I wrote my Macroeconomics exam and was done with the course forever -- and could go home for the rest of the semester. Hehehehehe!