I'd sit in the quad, and think, "Oh my God..."

Two Ole Choir home concerts digitized, one to go...followed by some Christmas Festivals. Gotta dig up some concert programs, to make those ID3 tags...

I do miss being in choir. My years in the St. Olaf choirs were some of the happiest in my life. I made a few good friends -- not many, but that was more because I was (still am) kind of an introvert than any other reason. The people in choir were almost all easily approachable and friendly...and we were all working together for that common goal.

One year, before one night of the Christmas Festival, I signed up to do devotions before the performance. (We did devotions before every performance...sometimes silent reflection, more often one or two choir members giving food for thought. One memorable one from that same year brought up the idea of God as a verb.)

I took as my inspiration something a choir member said during the PBS broadcast of the 1989 St. Olaf Christmas Festival. He was talking about the Randall Thompson composition "Alleluia", and he discussed how Dr. Kenneth Jennings (then-director of the choir) described it to them.

The text of Thompson's Alleluia is simply the word, alleluia, over and over again until a final "amen." Dr. Jennings told the choir to think of "alleluia" as an endless river of praise to God, and to sing the Alleluia is to dip into that river for a short moment of time.

I extended the metaphor to mean the St. Olaf Choir itself. Begun almost a century ago as a church choir, nowadays the choir is made up solely of students of St. Olaf College, and thus is renewed completely every three years. During our time in the choir, be it one, two, or three years, we join in a mighty river of singing -- of praise, and of beautiful music. Upon graduating, we leave that river behind us, knowing that it will continue flowing far past the point where we depart, and we will never touch upon it in the exact same way again.

What I wouldn't give to be part of that once more...

Random bit of fluff...

Found my electronic dictionary today, after a week of not being able to find it -- it was in my car. It's fairly old, now, and the newer ones have a lot more features -- a touch-screen interface, so you can draw kanji rather than look it up by radical and number of strokes (difficulty: writing it in correct stroke order), an English-to-English dictionary, etc. But I don't really need all that. (Maybe the Eng.<->Eng. dictionary...but since it's a learner's dictionary, probably not.)

An old college friend once mentioned to me how amazing it felt to live in a foreign country and suddenly not have to tote around your dictionary any more. It's true, it's a rush when you realize that you can actually communicate (albeit at a very elementary level) without technological crutches.

My latest milestone passed in the quest to understand Japanese was noticing that whoever did the official English translation for the manga "Nodame Cantabile" was not at all versed in Japanese culture, and in some spots showed a very tenuous grasp of the language...

Weird dreams.

I suppose I should be thankful for them, especially considering the period of time when I didn't dream at all...but last night's was damn weird. It involved moving-in day at St. Olaf, into a dormitory that was a weird cross between Thorson, Manitou (Ytterboe, I guess), and a shopping mall, and a bunch of old college friends/acquaintences that I haven't seen, thought of, or in fact remembered in years. One of which was someone on my frosh floor whom everyone hated...

I realized it was a dream when I noticed that I was far more suave and debonair than I actually was at the time. Or ever. And, since I noticed it was a dream, it's now lodged in my memory unlike most dreams I've had. But I seem to recall I've had similar dreams before.

Huh. No more cold pizza before bedtime, I think.

(This has been a POINTLESS BIT OF RANDOMNESS. We now return you to your regularly scheduled whatever.)