There is something about riding trains that helps me think. I got a lot of work done on my way to and from downtown. I always get a lot of work done going to and from downtown. Lately I have not been getting much of anything done in my office. Perhaps I should grab my laptop and ride in and out of the city all day until I finish something.

It was too cold last night to do too much meandering around town. I ended up taking the el partway to my gig last night, because I thought it was going to be too cold to walk, as I originally intended. I did enjoy my short stroll through the Gold Coast, however. I haven�t wandered around that area in a while. Plus it wasn�t as windy as it had been in the Loop.

I love being out at night. It was one of my great pleasures when we lived in the Loop. I�d put AJ to bed, say goodbye to my husband, and go exploring. It�s difficult to do that here because there are no lights, although the moon and snow combination this week have resulted in near daylight conditions in the middle of the night. This week all I have to worry about is frostbite. And coyotes.

The church last night was freezing, but everyone seemed cheerful about it. I love singing with that group. I�ve known almost all of them for years from various gigs � even in Chicago, the world of professional choral singers is not large. I always feel a bit like a weak link � I think I�m the only one who is not actively pursuing a career in singing. It is a wonderful thing to sing with an ensemble that is better than you. It challenges you to sing better too.

The repertoire last night was Renaissance: Palestrina and Jacob Handl. These are two of just a handful of composers whose music is nearly mind-altering in its ability to control the way you sing (Sch�tz and Machaut are the only others that come to mind at the moment. Bach and Monteverdi both have their moments, but are a little too quirky to consistently fall into this category.). It�s a little bit of predictability of melodic line, a lot of writing that is very considerate of the voice, and a little bit that is distinctively the personality of the composer (in that it is unlike the music of other composers of a similar style) that allows you to give yourself over to the music, even in pieces you don�t know. It�s almost trance-inducing for me. And I always feel like I could sing a piece I�d never sung before without looking at the music, assuming the rest of the group was singing its parts correctly. If, for example, you were to play me a piece by Palestrina and leave out the soprano line, I bet I could supply the missing notes (pitches and rhythm) with at least 90% accuracy. If you�re not a singer or musician, this may not mean anything. But the experience of singing such music is qualitatively different from anything else I�ve experienced. It puts me in a mathematical frame of mind. For a few moments, I feel like I understand how the universe works. It�s clarifying.

On the way home, I covered twice as much work as I had on the way in, due, no doubt, to my newly enlightened state. However I was regularly distracted by the man in front of me who spent the entire trip photoshopping a picture of a beagle. Watching the reflection of his computer screen in the plate glass of the train window, I saw him blow the beagle up and shrink him down, adjust his color and shading, face him in different directions, and finally place him into a picture of a tile floor with adjacent toilet. What could he possibly have been doing?

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