#435: I filled the soap container in our bathroom for the first time in my life tonight. This is a major accomplishment for me on many levels. What I'm talking about here is using the big CostCo sized hand soap tub (kept under the sink) and filling the bite-sized dispenser by the bathroom sink with soap. Now, I know your first thought is that I am a horrible messy boyfriend who makes my woman clean for me. But that is not the case. The case is that when I lived alone I had no use for hand soap by the sink. I just didn't need it. I used my shower barsoap and was perfectly content. Or so I thought. Living with my gf has opened my eyes to the joyousness which is having hand soap in a easy to use container by the sink. Oh the wonder. Oh the magic. Anyways, in an effort to try and do more things that I don't usually do, I took the initiative and purposely refilled that sucker. I popped my soap dispenser refill cherry.
#89a. I enjoy and appreciate watching/experiencing people who are the best at almost anything. If you can eat the most bananas in 3 min. or are a master kite fighter, I want to see you in action. So, when I heard that Zakir Hussain, the maestro of the tabla, was coming to perform at UMass, it took very little convincing to get me on board with checking it out. And let me tell you, it was worth it. This guy owns that tabla. He made it his ever-loving biatch. His hands flew at the drums in a way i can only compare to watching Japanese kids play those crazy slap-button arcade games in Tokyo. It was impressive in a way that, even though i knew I was missing some additional cultural element, i still could appreciate as masterful.
#89b. And this is probably more important that 89b. I, being admittedly ADHD, cannot listen to more than 2 hours of any type of music that I don't already know all the words to. That is to say, when Zakir and friends hit the 2 hour and 15 min mark, I was ready to jet. It got a little painful at the hour and a half mark when one of Zahir's friend's on the, let's call it the twangy sided & tabla sided, 2-sided drum, ripped off a 30 min solo which broke my gf's concert staying power. To my credit, I didn't even say anything about leaving til the 2.5 hour mark when my gf and I caught a lull (Tangent: Indian music has no actual song endings [making it difficult to leave], instead there are moments of lulls in the musical pattern every now and again.) We left one of our friends behind (of her choosing) and as we rounded the bend away from the performance hall, we could hear the drum beat starting to build once again. Incidentally, as we were leaving, we realized that every non-Indian person at the concert was also leaving. While this was the minority of people at the show, it was incredibly apparent that the 2.5 hour limit on tabla is a cultural thing.
One of the other reasons we left is that a good friend had her best friend coming in from out of town, and I wanted to get a chance to meet her. So we took off from the UMass campus on the 20 min drive (including our walk to our parked car) to Northampton. While approaching the bridge into town, a full 15 min into our trip, I get a text from our friend who we left behind at the show: "Still same song"
This is one of the funniest and saddest texts i have ever received. So the fun fact here is that while I understand and even appreciate the greatest tabla player in the world, I cannot listen to more than 2.5 hours of his music until he comes up with some catchy lyrics to go with it.
crap! I missed it! I LOVE zakir, but yes, even this brown girl would have had to leave too!
ReplyDeleteI feel so famous.
ReplyDeleteSound like someone deserves the good lovin', you soap dispenser-filler you. Perhaps you were also showing how much you enjoy and appreciate soap in bathrooms (ahem, UMass)
ReplyDeleteYou use soap?
ReplyDelete