smelling the light at the end of the tunnel

I was hours into an epic battle with the dust bunnies in my bedroom the other day when I got to the corner of the room occupied by my guitar. I wiped a thickness of dust measurable in centimeters off the case, and opened it up. Still in tune! So, needing a break from Spring cleaning, I played for a while. I played for the first time in months. And I started writing a song about weather and love and Pop-Tarts* and I think it's coming along all right. It has a melody and a structure and a first verse and I have sore fingertips.

My guitar (like my blog) has been woefully neglected lately as I spend the majority of my waking life leading a Shermanic march towards the May SAT. Once that test has come and gone, my next big push won't really start until September. I'm really not sure exactly what I'll do with myself in the meantime. Depending on which day it is, I alternate between visions of two extreme scenarios: 1) a sangria-drenched summer punctuated by productive creative bursts, cross-country trips, friends and Mets games, or 2) a sedentary marathon of FPS-induced brain-softening. It'll probably (I hope) end up being somewhere in between.

I bought a new laptop last week. A Macbook. I had been thinking about doing it for a while, and when I woke up on my one day off last week and there was somebody sleeping on the couch that I had been planning to occupy for the better part of the day, I decided to get out of the apartment. The only place I could think to go was the Apple Store in SoHo, which is a wonderful part of town to be in on a warm spring day. There's always a better than decent chance that, if you look at all like you know what you're doing, you'll be asked for directions by a runway model with an accent. Anyway, I'm writing on it now from a monastery-converted-to-a-conference-center outside the city. Aside from my frustration that the 'control' key seems to have been robbed of its livelihood, and my hardened conviction that Winamp is far superior to iTunes for album listening, I rather like it.

* It might not still have Pop-Tarts in it when it's done.