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Tuesday, July 19, 2011

In the summer, oh the summer

One day when I'm all grown up, I will tell my kids about the summer Jordan and I lived without air conditioning.

(That's this summer.)

So far, it hasn't been too bad. We have a fan that we drag from room to room in our apartment throughout the day, and we stay pretty cool. It's nighttime that's bad; somehow all the heat from the day pools up in the bedroom and unleashes sweaty heatwaves all night, no matter how close the fan is or what setting it's on.

My solution, which has worked well enough, is to get everything ready for bed, take a cool shower, stand in front of the fan for a while until goosebumps appear, and then go to bed. My rationale for getting everything ready before taking a shower is that I don't want to exert much energy afterwards, lest I get hot and sweaty again.

The only problem with this situation is that I tend to wake up in the middle of the night, dying of heat, so I have to take another shower. But what isn't totally awesome about a shower at 2:30 a.m., right?

P.S. I saw Harry Potter and Voldemort and Malfoy hugged and I weirdly felt like my life was complete.

Thursday, July 7, 2011

We'll all rejoice and sing a song

About two nights ago, I became mysteriously ill with some strange stomach bug; I felt like the contents of said stomach would surrender themselves to the toilet bowl, but for whatever reason, it never came. Don't you hate that? I mean, it's bad enough to feel like you're going to die, but at least when you throw up, you feel about eight jillion times better.

Anyway, as I sat on the floor of the bathroom, I entertained myself by trying to figure out where middle C was and to memorize it. It so happened that I knew a song in the key of C that started with C, so it was pretty easy to find. I was incredibly pleased with myself for figuring it out, since I could add C to my list of...(now) two notes that I've memorized. I've also memorized A.

The reason I was able to do this is that I have good pitch memory, meaning that if I hear a song enough times, I "memorize" what it sounds like and I know which key it's in by ear. (I hope that makes sense. This isn't to say that I can exclaim, "Oh, that's in A minor!" when I hear a random song...unless I happen to know that the song is in A minor somehow). This strange gift is great for singing a cappella. It's also awful for listening to people a cappella, because I know when they're singing it in the wrong key.

So my life goal now is to train myself to have perfect pitch, if that's the correct technical term for it. I feel like it would be great to expand my weird talent even further, don't you?