Wait, wait.... nope. Still not a genius.

Now it's cold. Sixty to zero in two days. Okay, so I just wanted to invert that phrase. It's not zero. It's actually thirteen. But that's pretty damn close. Plus, I live on the Ameri-tarded measuring system, so thirty-two is my zero. The point is, it's cold. And I made an important discovery, which is that my coat stops being effective somewhere between thirty and thirteen degrees. Which means I need a new coat. A Wisconsin coat. Anybody know where I can buy parkas that aren't ugly?

It was sixty degrees over Thanksgiving weekend. We went for walks every day. We visited the arboretum. I mean, everything was brown and crunchy, but at least I was outdoors without wishing I were dead. And speaking of brown and crunchy, I have to say that Madison in the winter is disappointingly drab. Aside from the older neighborhood streets--which is thankfully where I live--the architecture here would make an incredible case study in why not to build an entire city in the 1970s. The spirit of Madison seems to bubble up over the boxy prison-buildings, and there are parks and trees everywhere, people with dogs, the lake full of sailboats, sidewalk cafes.... oh, wait, all of that is only in the summer. Now the trees are bare and hide nothing; the lake is gray and empty; all the people shuttle by in puffy coats and fuzzy hats*; and sidewalk life, dog walking, and lingering conversations in the street have given way to an intense desire to be indoors NOW. So now I can see the buildings. And they're ugly.

*Why, oh why, didn't I buy a fuzzy Russian hat while I was in Moscow?

I still like Madison. She's my dog.

So this was the first time I hosted a holiday. My mom came here and slept in my guest bedroom. She offered to help me with my dishes. I took her on fun little outings and excursions. I thought it would make me feel old, but it didn't. It made me feel like my mom was old. It made me think of us hosting my grandmother for holidays--she'd fly in by herself, shuffling through airport security and take up awkward space in our house for a few days, seem sort of small and disconnected. My mom does none of those things. She's active and fit, energetic, and young. Still in her 40s. But it made me see her set apart from our home, adrift like my grandmother. It changed the way I saw our dynamic, and that made me see her as old, as less attached to a set of symbolic anchors, somehow drifting apart. I don't know. I guess I can't explain it. It seems like something DeLillo would explain perfectly (I'm reading White Noise right now, which incidentally is incredible).

As if my mother sensed that I passed an entire weekend without feeling old, she sent me the link to a story about a child music prodigy. And within four seconds I went from feeling like a reasonably self-assured twenty-something who's pretty cool and has a whole adult life with which to do great things... to feeling like a giant dried-up waste of good organs. Then I stopped making it about me and decided that this kid (Jay Greenberg) is pretty damn cool. He's 14 and hears entire symphonies in his head, just like Mozart did, which is... absurd and phenomenal. He could name instruments before being taught to and could write symphonies without knowing how to play any of the instruments. He goes to high school and Julliard at the same time. He's being called the first real musical genius in a couple hundred years. I read a bunch of articles and watched the 60 minutes special on him, and the one thing I wondered about, which no one brought up... are his pieces any good? Or is that a stupid question? Okay, he has an almost supernatural ability to hear and write music. That's so astonishing as to defy language. But is that kind of genius necessarily accompanied by creative genius as well? Is it possible to have a Mozart-like genius for musical comprehension but to hear and record derivative drivel? Or is this kind of prodigy-level of fluency all by itself the measure of "good"?

I am consumed with the hope that this kid is the real deal. I'm really fascinated by this stuff, because I don't understand what it is. I mean, seriously. Explain it to me. Is it a genetic mutation? Is this the beginning of the wimpiest X-Men ever? There isn't even a musical history in this kid's family, and he hears symphonies. I've often wondered if the age of the classical prodigy is over, now that we give that kind of music so little cultural space, and kids rarely grow up exposed to it in the same way they used to. But the idea that without any exposure this kid knew how to write symphonies suggests something very elemental about that kind of music. I've feared sometimes that we've murdered our modern-day geniuses in the crib with Jessica Simpson and flourescent lighting. So what's the explanation? We all have talents, that's what makes us different. But this kid is abnormal. Is it mutant DNA? Reincarnation? Growing up on a nuclear test site? Honestly. Let's talk about this. I don't know what the answer is, but I think it's pretty cool.

Feel like crap now? Me, too. So if you'd like to see something at which I achieve brilliant levels of mediocrity, check out my latest book review in the City Paper.

I will post pictures of my apartment next time.

And for an update: I am still burping a lot. Like all the time.