in which Rachmaninoff inspires me, but not in the usual manner

Today I did something that was strenuous, time-consuming, and utterly pointless. It was also fun. This will seem even more completely bizarre to you when I tell you what it was: I wrote an article for Wikipedia on Tibetan funerary practices. Here it is. Warning: it's not for the faint of heart.

The reason this came up was that my mother wrote an email to all her living relatives asking if anyone was paying the annual upkeep fee to take care of the burial plot of all her dead relatives, which is on Long Island. (She mentioned her own first cousin repeatedly and spelled her name wrong every time, but that's beside the point). At the end of this lengthy missive, she concluded with the following exhortation:

Attention to respectful burial is one of the marks of Neanderthals etc
becoming homo sapiens & civilized beings so I hope our family doesn't
abandon this civility.

To which I was forced to respond,

Since I just did a unit on ancient humans last year, I thought you
might be interested to know that this isn't quite true, in three ways.
(1) Neanderthals seem to have buried their dead, more or less—laid
them out in caves in specific positions with specific objects. (2)
Neanderthals died out, they never became homo sapiens. (3) As I'm sure
you know, not all humans bury their dead—some burn them, some grind
them to bits mix with barley and feed to the birds. But maybe you
didn't know that not everyone even does anything with their dead. Some
just leave them by the wayside.

Mom asked about the "feed them to birds" reference (noting that she wouldn't want to be the funeral director there!), so I did some fact-checking and discovered, horror of horrors, that Wikipedia had only two sentences about Tibetan funerary practices, both of which were only partially accurate. (I also discovered that yes, she would definitely not want to be the funeral director there). Five hours later, this sad state of affairs had been remedied, making the world a better place. OK, not really, but humor me. Maybe it will become a decent 3 to 5 page undergraduate paper for some future plagiarizer.

When I asked Loopy, Autumn & Shamus to guess what I had done today, Loopy immediately took all the fun out of it by suggesting that perhaps I had, on a whim, paid my 2004 taxes? Which of course is only the tip of the massive iceberg of things I haven't done.

The other day in a big chain store I picked up a five dollar CD with a Rachmaninoff piano concerto that I used to love (#2). (This may seem like a non sequitur but bear with me for a moment). So tonight in the car on the way home from seeing Harry Pothead (entertaining by the way) I listened to it and remembered why I used to turn up my nose at five dollar CDs. I also read the liner notes (not while driving) and discovered an interesting story.

Apparently Rachmaninoff experienced a horrendous critical failure in 1897 and was paralyzed by despair. He was unable to compose any more music for three years. Finally in desperation he turned to a skilled hypnotherapist who implanted the suggestion that he would soon compose a wonderful piano concerto. Then he did. Not only was it wonderful, it was much more uninhibited and confident than his previous efforts and attained a genuinely personal, unique voice that blossomed throughout his career.

In case it's not blindingly obvious, the point of this story is, maybe there's hope for me yet.