Here at Placebo Meadows we believe that no matter how old you are, you can always expand your life with learning. With that thought in mind, here is a list of this year’s lectures. Dates will be announced in the near future.
The morning after Astrid sprains her sternum at the Baptist Indoor Beach Party, I arrive at orchestra rehearsal with my cello. I tighten my bow and swipe its horse hairs across a crumbling mass of dark rosin. Orchestra is my favorite class. I relish every early morning musical moment before enduring the rest of my sophomore schedule. I take my seat in the second chair of the cello section next to Milo, who plays third chair and can barely read music. The first chair, which belongs to Astrid, the virtuoso of the 1995-96 Trojan Orchestra, sits empty.
Hold the applause. Put down the glitter bomb. Nestle the expired poppers back into your Lulu fanny pack. This coming out is not as exciting as you think. I’ve spent a decade of pride months unable to enter the gay community as predator or prey. The Darwinian classifications leave me out entirely. Bear? Otter? Twink? None fit.
Our antiquated names for the days of the week are hopelessly irrelevant and should’ve been replaced sometime during the reign of Charlemagne. It’s true that we still have a sun and a moon (or Mon) but we only think of the moon when making love en plein air and we only think of the sun when it’s too hot or has gone AWOL because it’s January. We might vaguely remember Woden and Thor (garbled into Wed and Thur) from Norse mythology, but, have you ever given them a serious thought? How did a good Roman like Saturn wander in among these horn-hatted Vikings? Anyway, can you name a classical deity more obscure than Saturn? As for “Tue” and “Fri,” I neither know nor care who they are. Perhaps they used to be worshipped in the Seychelles Islands.
When I moved to Seattle from a small town two hours south, I loved looking out my window and seeing evidence of other people: blinking marquee lights, flickering TV screens, the line of cars crawling up and down Queen Anne Hill. The people whom, barring a catastrophe, I would never have to know. I inherited this worldview—that the best neighbors were strangers who stayed that way—from my mom.