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Mozart in the Morning

I have unexpectedly and recently become a Mozart fan. I listen to my new free Mozart sampler CD and think, why did anyone in the West bother writing music for the next 200 years until they invented the electric guitar?

The CD came in the mail. If I subscribed to the CD-of-the-month club, I would get A Free Gift, plus more CD's in the mail that I would have to pay for. I immediately threw out all the paperwork, but kept the CD. It's not bad, and came with a nifty little booklet that put Mozart into better perspective for me. Did you know Mozart was around at the time of the American War of Independence? That he was born a few years before Handel died? The booklet had a brief biography and a painting of Salz burg at the time Mozart lived there.

I enjoy listening to our free CD in the mornings as I drive my son to school. We hit a few traffic backups every day, but with my Mozart filling up the car, I remain placid and unconcerned.  A friend told me that there have been studies that show that Mozart music is directly wired into the lizard brain. You can Google this even, although you need to type in "Mozart" and "limbic" to get anything helpful. This makes me wonder, how this could be. How could a brain come into existence that so perfectly mapped our most primal mind? How could his music be so intricate, and complex, and cerebrally stimulating, yet so sweet it makes you want to weep while you wait for the light to change? It's like his whole brain was some sort of metabrain that came into existence in a human skull, in a miracle of mystery on a rival with animals that change colour with the seasons and antimatter.

I was also wondering why Mozart, why now? I normally hate classical music, with its turgid sawing violins, choppy rhythms, claustrophobic wall of sound, and irritating melodrama. My friend reminded me that I had once told her I hate classical music because that's all my mother played when I was growing up. That and Broadway show music, which I perversely don't mind at all. I speculated that perhaps my mother didn't play that much Mozart.

Thinking about it now as I write this, I wonder if maybe its because I have grown old enough to forget the things that made my childhood so bleak even as I remember more and more specific events about it. Not the dramatic moments, which are seared in there, but all the boring everyday things that will crowd my conversation as I grow older and older. You know, the stories about the walk to the corner to catch the bus in the 40 below zero blizzard conditions kinds of stories.

Somehow, it seems the emotional content of those other memories has started to fade away. Not just the merciful blur phenomenon, where the painful things are hidden safely in the dark, but in a calm and distanced sort of way. I find myself thinking absently along these lines more often: Yes, it was traumatic and all fucked up, but oh well, I mustn't forget to buy cat food today.

Anyway, I recommend a nice Mozart CD for the morning drive, if you are so unfortunate as to have to endure such a thing. You may even want to sing along.

Grrrrr part 2

A minor incident at my son's school, subsequently resolved, left me wanting to kill everyone involved and sue their estate.

Grrrrr

I went to the Doctor earlier this week for a basic check up. What a friend of mine used to call a lube and oil job. She talked me into a tetnus booster shot somehow. Now I want to eat a bowl of rusty nails and growl defiantly at the sky, as I gnash pointed metal bits.

We have a fancy brass espresso machine, which is a story unto itself, that produces neat discs of used coffee grounds when you are done.

I usually bang the discs out of the coffee basket into the sink and then put them into a small galvanized zinc container that I couldn't figure what else to do with. It came with plants in it. Anyway, when the container is full, I dump them out onto one of my hydrangeas in a long-term, casual experiment to see if the flower colours will be different from the other hydrangea that does not get the coffee grounds. Making the soil around a hydrangea more acidic changes the colour from pink to blue, or vise versa, or so I have been lead to believe. So far the experiment is still in the inconclusive stages.

Many of the coffee ground pellets fall apart in the sink, so I just wash them down the drain. Why else do we have a garborator there, or as it is so coyly referred to in California, the Insinkerator, or under sink garbage disposal unit. Do not try to google garborator on Google.com, by the way. It wants you to look up carburetor instead. You need to go to Google.ca and then you will have hundreds of results. I was hoping for thousands, but it is a sparsely populated land, and we are not given to writing about household appliances. Until we move south, that is.

I know you're not supposed to use these infernal devices, as they add tons of organic content to the water system every year, thus further complicating the lives of countless fishes. But, what? A few coffee grounds. Besides, I read somewhere they help keep your drains clear. This avoids the use of truly toxic chemicals. So it's all good, right?

Our first garborator died shortly after we moved into our house. Plus it was scarily noisy. We happily trotted off to Home Despot to buy a replacement. We couldn't find one anywhere, so we asked the nice young man, "Where are the garborators?" thus plunging into the nightmare world of California customer service. You would think in an area where so many people speak so many different languages, people would be more agile in interpreting each other. It is not so. Our Home Despot worker, who was clearly trained in Customer Service in Russia, pre fall of communism, wanted nothing to do with us. He was cousins, I believe with the Sunnyvale waiter we encountered early in our sojourn here, who could not comprehend that I was trying to order the basil pizza. To me "bah-zil" is the herb. "Bay-zil" is I don't know what. To service workers in California, it is all one unpleasant mystery best to be avoided by pretending the customers are mentally slow and also invisible.

So, last week the latest garborator died. My husband returned home from the store quite promptly this time; his American improves every day.

He was horrified the garborator had died so soon after it had been installed, although it was a matter of years, and darkly blamed it in the coffee grounds. Needless to say I was skeptical, sticking to my drain facilitating story. Why do I bother, you may ask. Of course when the bad unit was removed, I received this happy report: "So it was the coffee grounds that burned out the motor. The entire bottom of the garborator was packed with them."

People with engineering degrees are so often annoyingly right about these things. But could he explain how sneaky editing had made the season premiere of House a completely different episode than the one they had been appearing to promise us all summer? No.

I do have my uses.