June 24, 2003 (person)

My boyfriend and I went downtown to get ice cream around 9:30, and found that the place we usually go was closed but there was a guy playing guitar sitting outside. I was really excited that my little nowhere town had gotten a street performer, so we got ice cream from Friendly's and came back. The guy with the guitar (whose name turns out to be Dan Wallace, I think, or something similar) had packed up, but played one last song when I asked him to ("Can't pass up a new fan"), and he's actually quite good. He has a really nice voice, and it was very full-sounding, even with just him and his guitar. And I liked the lyrics--there was a line like "Like the sun, I can escape all lives except my own"--either lives or lies, we couldn't tell. It makes sense either way. And it's pretty. Hopefully he'll come back. After Dan Wallace left, I started talking to this random guy who was sitting on the bench with him. He was middle-aged and enderaingly unattractive: longish kind of poufy dark hair, pale, kinda heavy. His name is Steve. We talked about music for a while. A very long while, actually. This guy is an encyclopedia. He reminded me of Seymor from Ghost World, the guy Enid starts hanging out with who collects jazz records. He listed all these 60s and 70s bands I'd never heard of (the point being that I'd never heard of them, since everything's become all commercialized), and we talked about the way music has become so much drastically less about talent and wanting to be on the stage in order to perform and share music and more about making money and selling records and being on stage in order to be applauded. He asked me if I played anything, and we talked about classical music for a while, and I was suddenly really glad I'd taken Music Listening. In spite of how painfully, excrutiatingly boring that class was, I actually did come out of it with a basic overview of classical music, and I can have a discussion about it without sounding stupid. Good to know it wasn't a complete waste of time. He also recommended this radio show on WNYC at 11 pm called New Sounds, which I'm listening to now--it's excellent. The last piece they played was based on a story about Bach: supposedly, Bach took a nap in the afternoon, and his kids decided to wake him up by playing a series of chords on the harpsichord but not resolving them, so that Bach would hear them in that half-asleep, half-awake state and start trying to sort out the sequence in his head and ultimately have to force himself awake to rush over to the harpsichord and play the resolving chord. It was played with a string quartet (or quintet, couldn't tell) and not a harpsichord, thankfully, but it was really cool.

Then a guy from my school, who was parked in front of us, backed his truck into the car behind it. Incredibly, the car wasn't even scratched. My boyfriend, Steve and I went over to check and make sure the car was okay, and noticed the guy's bumper stickers, which say things like "Nuke the Bastards!" and "Kick Their Ass! Take Their Gas! Proud to Be an American," which sparked a political discussion, covering the usual--the atrocities inherent in war and whether they're ever justifiable, the actual motives behind and outcomes of the war in Iraq, why the hell don't people drive hybrid cars, etc. Apparently there's a couple in my town who own an electric car. It's a little blue two-seater with two wheels in back and one wheel in front and a Back to the Future lift-up door. Sounds pretty cool. I've never seen it, though.

When I came home and told Mom, I was afraid she'd be all worried about me standing around on a street corner at night talking to some random middle-aged guy I'd never met before. All she said, though, was, "You'll really like college."