first real quartet rehearsal
thoughts on karl

had quartet rehearsal last night. it was good, i guess. [don't get all overly enthusiastic or anything, b] we read a couple of things and decided to work on the smetana quartet (no.1? dunno. will have to get back about which quartet, exactly, it is). it's fun and complex and a bit modern and dissonant. i like it. i think (we read it at like, quarter tempo, so it's hard to tell what it will eventually sound like, ya know?). anyway, the room we were in had the heat on, when it was about 70 outside and we really really REALLY didn't need the heat and our instruments needed the heat even less, and we had to tune approximately seventy THOUSAND times. which reminds me of the one joke (sorta) that we (different 'we' this time) used to have in college when i played in an early music ensemble called collegium musicum [yay! latin AND music. oddcellist, i bet you loved it!]. that baroque string players spend half their time tuning and the other half playing out of tune. [okay, that really wasn't funny at all, written down like that, but what the hell. i'm not exactly known for my good judgement on what jokes are funny. ask me to tell yout the pink joke sometime. it's a doozy.] ooh, the wonders of unwound gut strings..... so anyway, besides the heat, alex (the second violinist), who is really quite good, sucks, and i mean SUCKS, at sight-reading. urg. he couldn't manage to play eighth notes while the violist was playing triplets, even at the ploddingly slow tempo we were taking. grrr. we kept having to stop and go back. and the cello part has like 35 measures of tied whole notes, so i just wanted to kill myself [not really, just an expression].

okay, i think i'm done ranting now.

anyway, got home after rehearsal at about nine. karl hadn't been there yet (he spent the night sunday night, and took the bus into the city on monday (yesterday) and was gonna just swing back by my place on the way back out to his house, cuz he left some stuff.). poor guy! still at work at nine pm! he wandered in about 9:30, exhausted. loooooooooong day. had some great sex on the couch, though. for the first time, i came before him. like i'm sure you care. but really, this is, after all, MY diary. think i'll care about this when i go back and read this years and years from now?

so karl stayed last night, too. fine by me.

last week sometime, we had a midnight-in-the-dark-in-bed conversation about him and john. he had done something (sonar kisses, actually, though i didn't tell him that (sonar kisses are something that john and i used to do just before going to sleep: in the dark, eyes closes, one of us would start making kissing noises, softly, and the other one would answer, and we would find each other's lips by following the sounds)) that john and i used to do, and it reminded me, bittersweetly, of john, and i got all sad, and he picked up on it, and that launched us into a conversation. i told him that after john, i'm not sure i trust my feelings. trust my feelings about whether my feelings for someone are real or whether i'm just lonely and looking for company. eventually i said that i felt like i was falling in love with him, and that this is where the not-trusting-my-feelings thing came in. said some other stuff along those lines. then he said that he didn't know whether what he felt was love or not. lack of experience with said feeling. but that he wanted to spend all his time with me and that he couldn't get enough of me. how do you know when it's love?

i asked him the other day if he wanted to come home with me for thanksgiving. he sorta freaked out at that. not sure why, really. is it the presumption that we'll still be together in another month? is it the meeting my family? what? i told him he didn't have to answer then, and that the invitation was extended and that if he wanted to come with me he could. i'll ask again as thanksgiving gets closer.

so. a bit of a freak out re: thanksgiving and a (so-far) uncertainness about 'love.' but i know from what he's said and done that he does quite like me. and i know it sounds like i'm over-analyzing/obsessing about this, but really i'm not. i'm just trying to record my thoughts about him, and writing it down makes it seem like a bigger deal than it is. 'kay. i think that's enough for now.