Impossible Life

We went out for dinner (our excuse was that I have finally done my placement test and have most of my schedule for the coming year sorted out) - it was an Ethiopian/Eritrean restaurant. The food was delicious; we ate it by picking it up with pieces of pancake-like bread. It's fun to eat with your hands and have it be proper.

The restaurant is in Cambridge, around the area where we lived until I was about five or six. It's a little strange being around there because I feel a strange familiarity, yet also a disconnect - it's the first place I knew, but I don't really know it as well anymore. Almost like déjà-vu. I know the way the streets connect but I no longer know the contents. I know the skeleton, but not the sinew.

And as we stepped out of the little, low-lit restaurant, my world was full of impossibles: the air was impossibly muggy; the lights of Mass Ave impossibly bright; the crescent-but-fading-to-gibbous moon looking impossibly close; the sky impossibly, deeply blue, as it is when twilight begins fading to night; parts of the place, like the grass in front of City Hall and the Post Office, impossibly familiar, so familiar that it's like I never left, and yet so many places so impossibly different and strange.

Suddenly I was struck by the impossibility of my world; the infinite paths that could have been taken. The precariousness of everything. It is all impossible. As the Doctor says, we're all stories. "We're all stories in the end." That's how impossible we are.

IBIL

International Baroque Institute at Longy.

Explanations

1. My mom is a flutist.
2. My mom is a baroque flutist.
3. Baroque is "a period of artistic style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, architecture, literature, dance, and music." (Or so Wikipedia says. To my personal knowledge, Wiki is right.)
4. Longy is a school/conservatory of music in Cambridge, MA near Harvard. I have been around the school for as long as I can remember.
5. My mom teaches at Longy.
6. My mom is teaching at IBIL.
7. My brother and I went along with her to IBIL today.


We arrived near nine for the first class of the day - my mom was teaching flute, I attended the cello master class, and my brother went to the violin class. I didn't have my cello, since my teacher hasn't yet had the chance to return it to me after she kept it when we were in Israel, but that was okay, since it was a master class. I learned a lot about shifting, fingerings, and bowing - sometimes watching is the best way to learn. One of the cellists had a shirt that said "cello player fueled by chocolate." One of the cooler shirts I've seen. Also, one of the cellists memorized dates connected to composers and loved Harry Potter. How much better can you get?


Then they had coffee break until eleven, and my mom took me to the Conservatory's other building, where a Medieval/Baroque dance class was held. I managed to follow along well enough - the footwork isn't particularly difficult, even though some of it is exactly the opposite of ballet technique. Often it's more about the use of space and travelling around with your partner than the actual footwork, which is nice.


After that, we left the Conservatory for Border Café for lunch. I love that place - good food, and according to my mom it's fairly inexpensive. Also filling. Very filling. It's Mexican and southern-US-style food. In Harvard Square, if ever you come by there.


Then, after stopping by the newly reopened Bob Slate Stationer, we went home.

At IBIL, I found the same kind of intensity that you find at a summer dance program. It surprised me a little, since I always had a part of me that took music for granted - I've heard early music since before I was born. But I suppose that's the way it should be. I'd love to do this kind of thing for writing, as well.


This is exceedingly like a written version of a "Thoughts From Places" Vlogbrothers video.


Anyways.


DFTBA!