For all those of you who have been desperate to know: today I am wearing a knee-length natural linen skirt. Since there is no way to stop the linen wrinkling, especially in weather like this, I don't even try.

Today I bought The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists, which is pretty freaking hilarious. I had resisted it because I wasn't 100% sure I would like it and $16 is a lot to spend on a little bitty funny book, but stellanova's rave about it convinced me (mostly because I'd had the same sort of concerns about its potential nonfunniness as she did), and, indeed, it is extremely funny. I would guess I am laughing somewhere between once and twice per page. And they're little pages! I've only got a few pages left, but I'm saving them for a reward for after I have done some of my schoolwork. (Note that I am apparently not saving reading and updating livejournal as a reward for after I have done some of my schoolwork. Sigh.)

I also picked up Sufjan Stevens' album "Illinois."* I heard about this album on Slate, then noticed an interview with Stevens on the Onion AV Club, and apparently he is the Next Big Thing and it sounded like something I might dig, so I looked at the disc on Amazon, and there were tracks to download, and I loved them. The arrangements are really cool -- interesting things going on with horns and voices, sometimes there's a sort of Steve Reich-y kind of vibe, especially when he's got women's voices matching the trumpet. So I went and got that at Newbury Comics, and I was not disappointed (indeed, I am listening to it right now).

Also, apparently I got the first pressing of the CD, because my cover art has Superman on it, and the next printing will not have Superman on it because of legal issues with DC Comics (they didn't pull the already-printed Superman covers, though). So I hope that Stevens goes on to record albums for all fifty states (as he says he intends to do) and becomes enormously influential, so that my Superman cover will become valuable (of course, I will probably lose or rip the insert long, long before this happens). I don't think that's super-likely, though.



*"Illinois" is the official title and it's on the spine of the CD case, but on the insert and the disc itself the title is "Sufjan Stevens invites you to: Come on feel the Illinoise" and I wonder what the proper way to catalog this would be; I know we are supposed to go by what it says on the disc itself, so I guess the long title would go in the 245 and "Illinois" would go in the 246 as the spine title with an added entry? /cataloging geekout

The other night I was walking home from the T, and the sidewalk was in a different place. During the day, while I'd been gone, they'd re-routed a couple lanes of traffic and moved the sidewalk at least a few yards. I found this very disorienting; when I get off the T at 11:30PM, I just generally expect the sidewalk to be where I left it.

Now, I can't remember how the road and the sidewalk used to go. I know they were different last week, and I can make a few guesses based on where the current construction is and where the lines of the old traffic islands are and stuff like that, but I have no memory of what it looked like. This happens to me all the time; show me a gutted building, or a street where a building's been torn down, or anything that's been substantially changed from the way I'm familiar with it, and within a day or so, I can no longer remember what it was like before, even if it's a place I was very familiar with. I don't know if other people also have this problem (and I don't suppose it's a problem, exactly, it's just a little disturbing).

Today I am listening to and loving the Langley Schools Music Project, which is 19 tracks of a chorus of elementary-schoolers singing pop music, recorded in a rural Canadian school gym. It is pretty awesome.

I downloaded a Django Reinhardt/Stephane Grappelli compilation off of iTunes last night, and I am madly in love. I had a few songs of theirs from big "history of jazz" or "history of music" type albums, but now I've got, like 17 more songs worth! Awesome. Yay, Parisian gypsy-guitar violin jazz! Vraiment, c'est le Jazz Hot.