Small pleasures of today

(1) A ridiculously large piece of north end pizza picked up on the way to improv class.

(2) Improv class.

(3) Reading Eat, Pray, Love on the T on the way home from Improv class -- a book I wasn't planning to like when I picked it up at hazard at a bookstore, but which has surprised me with its delightfulness. I missed my stop on the T because I was so rapt in it. It's one of those rare delicious books where you feel like you understand the author better than anyone ever possibly could and you would be best friends if you were in the same neighborhood. Of course, a book that's #1 on the New York Times bestseller list must make an awful lot of people feel like that.

(4) Instant musical gratification from iTunes, in the form of three Mozart sonatas. Despite overall having a pretty solid background in classical piano music, Mozart piano solos have always been left out of my repertoire and I'm catching up now. I've recently begun revisiting some of the piano books I had a teenager, which had more music than I could ever play then, but which my piano teacher went through with a pencil to mark pieces she thought I would enjoy playing someday. Right now I crave the idea of inviting myself over to her house for tea (she perpetually had a cup of what I suppose now must have been apple raspberry herbal tea) to talk about more music, since I'm beginning to exhaust the reservoir of music she gave me and she is now getting old.

(5) Going to bed, which I plan to do presently. Isn't it marvelous to have a daily pleasure like sleep? I'm staying up way too late, again, since I need to be at work early tomorrow. The one thing it seems that Elizabeth Gilbert seems to miss in her book is the importance of sleep. Really, it should be Eat, Sleep, Pray, Love. I don't think she could have possibly succeeded on her journey to self actualization without getting enough sleep. It really has been a matter of curiosity to me, how much sleep she got while taking a year off from ordinary life; I suppose that living in Italy and India and Indonesia, you wouldn't want to miss time by sleeping too much, but you would surely get more sleep that you would in the corporate world. The author was so indulgent in her eating and to sleep a lot would be natural co-indulgence. The emphasis so far in the book on eating -- and overeating after years of eating organic plain yogurt with wheat germ while doing yoga -- is a refreshing change to what I expected the eating aspect of the book to be about (I mean, the title is so yoga wheat germ maybe vegeratian organic. so that she subsists on gelato and italian pizza and pastries in the book's opening section is a delightful surprise.