I have arrived in San Francisco and promptly locked myself out of my apartment. I'm not used to these new-fangled (not so new, I guess) lock features, where the door locks behind you through a push-down button. It doesn't help that the housekeys I had thought were in my pocket were actually my mailbox keys. And, last I heard, you can't live in a mailbox. Also, I have no mail, so it'd be a dismal existence. My landlord, who lives half an hour away, isn't picking up his phone, but luckily, while I locked myself out, I had also every intention of leaving at that point to go to the school.

I tried to jimmy the lock but I didn't have a coat hanger and -- who am I kidding, anyway? I knelt in front of the lock for fifteen minutes with the blade of my nail clippers and the point of my mailbox key trying to open the lock. At that moment, one of my neighbours opened their doors, and I suppose first impressions aren't my forte.
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Apparently, if you can think it up, someone's done it. Someone stop me from making an obvious and unsightly pun involving meatheads.

I've never given much thought to it, but making a hat entirely out of meat never seemed like a practical thing to do. I've left meat out for a few hours and any artistic beauty achieved by putting together a Meat Hat -- red meat being the aesthetically pleasing thing it is -- would quickly be out-rivaled by its smell.

I've finished with the last of the concerts this summer and I'm getting ready to head down to San Francisco. Many thanks to Dave and Yuri for doing innumerable things to help me get settled before I even get there. Everything, even the apartment hunting. With friends like these, saying they're the greatest seems empty.
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I made a mistake tonight and decided I was going to clean my room and pack. I just realized that I'll be leaving Canada in a little over a week and my suitcase, which has sat half-emptied and abandoned for two months in the same spot since my trip to Ottawa, needs to start pulling its weight again. My problem is that "cleaning my room" often means going to the nearest cabinet and steeping myself in nostalgia. I start reading journal entries about every girl I've liked since kindergarten (I started young), old stories I wrote for school projects (they are unintentionally hilarious), and thumbing through old pictures (it's now confirmed that my wardrobe has changed little since tenth grade). I only snapped out of this unproductive trance when I caught myself four hours later, reading the directions on a tiny bottle of hotel shampoo I found in my drawer. It was so hard to read, I finally asked myself what I was doing. When the answer was "To find out how to work shampoo" I knew I wasn't on the right track.
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I have known Tiffany Keung since she was born. While growing up, our backyards were adjacent to each other and to this day our families are close. Anyway, Tiffany wrote the other day because she wanted to tell me that Blunt Ethiks CDs have actually travelled farther than I thought: "My mom gave me a Blunt Ethiks CD. I lent it to my friend Jillian who took it to Oregon by accident. She then returned it to me, and I lent it to my friend Ben who has had it for over a year. [...] I happen to know that they drove their car to North Carolina last year for Thanksgiving, meaning that the CD [you had mentioned going to] Alabam was not, in fact, the CD's first trip to the south."

She meant this as encouragement, so I'll try to ignore the fact that this story shows a) just how hard she was trying to get rid of it, and b) that the distance it travelled was primarily by accident.
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In acknowledging complaints that I don't announce performance dates early enough, I will be playing Mendelssohn's String Quartet Op 13 and several Mozart Divertimenti at the Whitehern Museum, August 10 at noon. Admission is free. (But you can give me money, if you want.)

Speaking of money, a recent CD was sold and sent to Alabama, which would be the furthest a Blunt Ethiks album has gone. I like people from Alabama. If I could have my choice in accents within the English language, I would split my days between speaking with laid-back Southern twang and the sheer splutter of Mexican enthusiasm. To date, our CDs have yet to be sent to Mexico, so, step your game up, fellas.

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Dragonball meets Yo-Yo Ma. (In no way am I comparing my playing to the latter.) I think I was very upset at something on my music when someone took this picture. The cello inspires me by way of angry osculation.

Nobody told me that today, August 1, is Civic Holiday, and that the banks aren't open. I'm just wondering why I'm always the last to get the memo.

In other news, I haven't shaved in 5 days, as a friend and I have agreed to do so. My mom, who just returned home from camping, was visibly upset when she saw me and asked why I always insist on looking like a hoodlum. She's relented to allowing me to keep it until the prescribed week, by which I'm ordered to never do this again.
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