He asked me if I had done anything for halloween and I told him about the party I went to. He asked me what I dressed up as and (somewhat ashamedly) I admitted that it was a costume I've used many times before ("the earth")... but it was the first time I'd dressed up since I'd moved here and no one here had seen the costume. He told me that he dressed as "mr punctuation" wearing all black and punctuation marks attached to different parts of his body including number signs on his nipples, a sash with a forward slash in front and a backslash in back, an "@" on his belt buckle because "that's where the party is at". He said that "we went to a parade, and then a party" (again, confusing, who is this 'WE'?) and described the party. It was a bluegrass party so he go to play some music, and drink beer, and talk to people. He said that he thinks the point of music is to express joy and bring people together, and that the party was a good expression of that. I told him it sounded way better than the party I went to, and that I totally agreed with him about the point of music (I've been thinking about that a lot lately).
There was a pause, and he said he should probably get going (at this point, we had been on the phone for an hour). I did want to ask him for advice, seriously, about what to do for my next graduate program audition thingy. So I spoke up and said, "I was wondering if I could ask you another advice question, about what to do for my next graduate school thing... but it's probably not the shortest topic, so we definitely don't have to talk about it now. Basically, at first I thought I would go to school X in boston, and then school Y in NYC. And then I realized, why not just go straight to school Y in NYC. And then I realized that their deadline for the pre-screening recording is November 15th, and there's no way for me to get that together by then, so I'm confused about what to do." He told me it didn't seem unusual for this particular program to have a deadline that early. Then I said something like, "So, you'll call me, or I'll call you, or play it by ear, either way it's ok...?" he said this coming week he was really busy, but the week after that, the week before my recital, he would have more time, but that might not be good for me. I said, "OK, I'll let you go then" and he said sort of on top of what I was saying, "call me when it's a good time for you. call me when it's a good time for you." And then I said, "Great, I'll do that!" and we said goodnight and got off the phone.
