Talk about a boring Saturday

I get up, I have lunch, I study, I buy books, I buy booze, I study, I eat dinner, I study, I clean, I drink, I study, and now I drink while on the computer, and if people don't show up because they actually have lives, then I'll study some more before going to bed.

I drink so that I won't have completely lost all my tolerance when I go back to London :)

I highly recommend this book: Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, by Michael Baxandall. It's assigned reading for my Renaissance Art course, but the book itself rocks. The first chapter is all about patron/client relations in the "manufacture" of painting as opposed to other arts. It explains contracts down to details of how much the various grades of ultramarine blue cost at the time. I'm obsessed and I'm only through the first chapter. Obviously, I really like my Renaissance Art class.

I spent about forty minutes cleaning my room (it's a tiny room -- I have seen closets bigger than my room). Vacuumed, dusted, washed the window. I swear there was more than just a quarter's worth of dirt and crap in there. Nasty shit. Blasted Bombay Dreams and attempted to get drunk while doing it. Didn't take. Called home for a while out of sheer boredom. Did more reading for art history.

Last night was I Just Stopped by to See the Man at the Steppenwolf Theatre. Jim True-Frost is such a doll, I love him :) I was going only because of Jim, and this is Jim's last weekend. The play is about a blues singer, his daughter, and an English rock musician in the mid 1970s. Jesse is supposedly dead, Della keeps his secret because she's also in hiding, and Karl's band is breaking up and he's desperate for something to save his career, so he goes looking for Jesse "The Man" Davison and finds him. I don't think I was prepared for Jim to be dressed as, well, Mick Jagger, and it was hard not to crack up at his entrance. I was only there to see Jim. I definitely thought the play itself dragged in places and some of the blocking was awful (and this was supposed to be closing weekend -- a couple scenes between Karl and Della look cartoonish, and dammit, Jim is a good actor). I also didn't really like Karl (and I adore Jim, so see, he's a good actor *g*). I was totally on the side of Della and Jesse. And yet, by the end, I'd be won around, partially. Jim's genius was evident in how by the end, when I had almost been won over, his exit allowed me to maintain the ambivalence -- his motives are not straightforward and it's hard to tell what the character really means by anything he says. I'm definitely beginning to think that Jim's position in the company is to be cute and provide a variety of British accents (I first saw him as David Copperfield a couple seasons ago, and I desperately wish I could have seen him in Playboy of the Western World). Still, I happen to like that position, and Jim fills it admirably. I don't think it was groundbreaking theatre, and yet it pulled a definite emotional response out of me (not least because it was tour closing in TGL, the relief that Les Mis may well be continuing, and that Karl's tour is closing, so obviously things were conflated). It worked on me when at intermission I was certain it wasn't.

Tomorrow afternoon is Sunday in the Park with George at Navy Pier. My first production of Sunday -- I'm quite excited. Thanks gruyere for the flip advice :) I'll let everyone know how it goes.

I think I'll be able to head downtown again on Friday for the Medici exhibit at the Art Institute. There's a "field trip" being organised for a Tuesday (free day) for class, but I have Applied Foreign Policy on Tuesday afternoons only, so I can't go. So it'll run me $12 ($6 for student entry, $6 for the audio tour of the exhibit), but it'll supposedly prove helpful for the second paper.

It's supposed to be so fucking cold this week. I don't know why I'm planning on going downtown a third time in a week. It is currently 15 F, and tomorrow will be the warmest in a week at 28 F.

I am totally not getting drunk quickly enough on this stuff. Hooch Hard Lemonade. And it's too sweet for my taste. Keep that in mind. I'm on my third bottle and I'm just a little tipsy. I was doing my art history reading while on my second bottle, no problem. Weak stuff. I need food. I have a craving for salt. I swore I wasn't going to have popcorn a third time in as many days, but dammit, I have a craving for salt and nothing else to satisfy it. Orville Redenbacher Microwave Kettle Corn is wonderful stuff.

Ok, I give in. I have to get up at 10, to be safe, but if I succeed in getting drunk, I'll be awake then anyway. I don't get hangovers -- I sleep poorly yet feel more rested than when I don't drink. Ok, popcorn and bottle four and if everyone else has a life, then more art history reading.