Three weeks that I’ve been in my new apartment and I still don’t quite feel at home yet. It kind of dawned on me yesterday that I actually live in this new place. I think now that that’s kind of gotten through my head, I can really start making the place my own. First up is to get the stuff out of her that still needs to get out of here, like the entertainment center that’s still in pieces (need to find out if I can just drop the pieces on the street on trash day or if I need to take them to a dump or something) and the love seat that I really just don’t have the space for. Then I can finish getting unpacked and really get comfortable in this place.

Having 12-foot ceilings is really nice, too, but it poses a wall space problem—the problem being, of course, that I have to find something to fill them. I’ve been thinking that I could take some of my own photography and put it up in large-format prints (poster size, perhaps), but part of me says that it’s a bit conceited to do that and part of me realizes that in order to do that, I have to actually go take photos in order to get them printed and put up on the walls.

In other fronts: I went back to Plymouth last weekend to perform in a 9/11 Memorial concert. A bunch of alums and community members did a performance of Mozart’s Requiem, and the orchestra debuted a new piece by my former composition professor that was based on a poem written by another faculty member. It just blew me away.

Speaking of 9/11… At first I was going to write something about the anniversary, but I realized, as we got closer to the date, and especially after I did the concert, that I really didn’t know what to feel about it. I was confused, hurt, angry, morose, and just plain annoyed at everything. The politicization, the pseudo-patriotism, everything about it just kinda made me sick. What drove me over the edge, though, was hearing the letters to NPR’s Morning Edition this past week. I know that NPR can choose to run whichever letters it wants to, and so to some degree even this was politicized, but some of these letters just made me literally sick to my stomach. To suggest that a media outlet is committing sedition by running a segment about Muslims in America on the anniversary of September 11th is the absolute height of idiocy.

The close of this very strange, unique week was the I AM festival here in New London. One of the myriad of benefits of living in this very interesting city is that I get to be exposed to its rather large and thriving indie music scene. The I AM festival is New London’s own little indie music festival. I only caught the tail end of it (having completely forgotten about it until I was eating dinner), but I managed to make it down to the docks in order to catch a couple of bands, then heading to the after-party at a local club and catching another couple bands. Some of the stuff I heard was flat-out amazing, whereas other bits were, well, less amazing. All in all, though, it was a great way to close out the week, especially because my job has been asking us to put in extra hours, so I feel the need to kick back and relax with a little more force than normal during these times.