November 19, 2024

New Perspective

New piano, new perspective: literally. We rearranged all the furniture this weekend to accommodate my new Steinway B, fresh off the truck from Yonkers. I love it so much. I love practicing now. There’s such a joy to having your instrument respond exactly as you intended. There’s almost a clairvoyant aspect when I play it, as if the keys know exactly what I plan to do before I even touch them, and after my fingers land, there’s a sense of trust, security, an implicit “I’ve got you, and you’ve got me” that is the subconscious through line of every stable relationship.

Speaking of stable relationships, our best friends got married last weekend and Mike and I co-officiated, and I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say this may be the best wedding I’ve ever attended. So much love, warmth, kindness, it’s everything they are as a couple magnified by 1000x in the form of their close friends and family. Every speech was equal parts sensible chuckle + poignant tearjerker (a couple were even downright ugly cry-worthy), their vows were beautiful, and I suppose my husband and I also acquitted ourselves adequately under the circumstances. What a wonderful event to inspire love, goodwill, and a general sense of renewed hope and faith in this cruel and nasty world.

November 12, 2024

Topsy Turvy

I’m not sure when we all slid into the upside down. I think it’s been a gradual slide since the 80’s, but momentum has picked up the further down we go, and now it’s a full-blown avalanche. It’s been extremely difficult to stay positive and not dive headfirst into nihilism, but this year has shown, in ways both big and small, that everything I hold dear–art, morality, kindness, civility–is inconsequential in the face of the brutal, bullish, blunt-tipped knife of late-stage capitalism.

I’m also incredibly tired of arguing semantics with all these limousine liberals trying to “both sides” the election results, telling me to look on the bright side because stocks are up. No amount of Wall Street success is going to prevent us from careening down the climate change cliff of no return, is going to tamp down the rise of authoritarian regimes across the globe, is going to protect my bodily autonomy, is going to rid society of our basest, crudest, most decrepit Russian-troll-fueled narratives of hate and vitriol.

Where do we go from here? Nowhere good, I fear.

November 5, 2024

Democracy Dies in Darkness

Watching election results with dread, horror, lump in throat, pit in stomach. Flashbacks to 2016. So much talk of the Blue Wall. The news anchors all looking bedraggled, shellshocked, robotic. “Too close to call” quickly becoming as triggering a phrase as “Relax, calm down” and “Where are you really from?”

September 25, 2024

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Here’s a journal entry of mine from March 23, 2021, 9:30pm and MAN, truly not that much has changed and it’s both depressing and entirely too predictable:

“Write drunk, edit sober, indeed. So much for consistency in writing, huh? Shit, I can barely see straight. After just half a bottle of white wine. Bush league.

Let’s see.

I suppose I’ve been in a pretty dark place these last couple weeks, throwing myself a pity party about being an artist in this country and a woman and a minority and The Old Choo would have said I’m just making excuses in order to explain my personal and professional shortcomings, except that

IN THE LAST TWO WEEKS

an article came out about how the assistant principal cellist of the Met Opera orchestra had to sell his bow in order to pay his mortgage, and James Levine died, and OH, a 21-year-old religious maniac shot up three massage parlors in Atlanta, killing eight people, six of whom were Asian females and

LAST NIGHT

someone shot up a supermarket in Boulder, killing ten. So it’s a little more than a pity party.

More and more, I’m struggling to find the good in a society that allows its most talented musicians to resort to pawning priceless pieces of their livelihood in order to keep a roof over their heads. A justice system designed to fail those most desperate and deserving of justice. A country that, despite its ‘melting pot’ status, still only accepts one default skin color as normal; everyone else is ‘other.’

Most of all, I’m tired of constantly having to advocate for myself–in a country I’ve inhabited since the age of two–that I belong, and that I deserve respect and a living wage. Hell, at this point I’d take and/or.

On a more micro level…when I moved to Atlanta 3.5 years ago this [redacted expletive] told me that two pianists pretty much had the market cornered in this city, that I was too late and best of luck, GTFO. I was determined to prove [them] wrong, but sadly I’m starting to wonder if they were right.

The sad truth is…most people can’t tell. As long as you can serviceably make your way around an instrument, the average audience member isn’t going to discern between magic and meh-gic.

So then it becomes a question of personal integrity, and I suppose this is the hill I’ve chosen to die on, because I refuse to sacrifice my musical morals for constant content or maudlin visual masturbation.

Am I delusional in wanting my art to speak for itself? In a culture that can’t tell the difference, who are the arbiters of taste? Am I living in a bygone era?

I have to pee and sleep.

September 10, 2024

There is doing what is legal, and there is doing what is right.

That’s it. That’s the statement. Time to go watch this train wreck of a debate now.

August 29, 2024

A People United Will Never Be Defeated

Y’all really have no idea who you’re messing with. I woke up today ready for a revolution. Gloves off, megaphone charged. One of my abuser’s favorite lines was “The loudest person in the room is usually the weakest.” Sounds so wise, until you realize it’s just a manipulation tactic to get you to stay quiet. Well, folks, a riot is the language of the unheard. And I’m about to burn this place to the ground.

Jun 27, 2024

Inflection Point

I’m struggling to adequately express the complicated emotions that this spring/early summer’s various events have instilled in me, but here are a handful: pity, sadness, fury, frustration, but also relief, resolve, and extreme gratitude.

No doubt in some older, wiser future, I will look back on Spring 2024 as an inflection point in my life where I (finally! maybe?) sloughed off the calloused barnacles of projects, people, and positions that don’t serve me, leaving a gleaming hull, a little weathered, sure, but more worldly and resistant to manipulation and misconduct by cold corporate captains.

I have spent my life setting ambitious nigh-impossible standards for myself in the professional world, getting disappointed and bitter when things don’t work out, while ignoring all the great things that are right under my nose. My marriage, for instance. If you had told me ten years ago that my marriage and home life would be my greatest pride and joy, I would have said, “I’m married now? …Ew.”

And yet there we have it. My relationship has shown me a peace, love, and fulfillment that no professional achievement has even come close to emulating. So what exactly am I trying to prove, and to what end? Stop running. Stop chasing. Everything I never hoped for is right here under my nose, peppering me with scratchy kisses each morning before they leave for work, anticipating my needs before I could even voice what they were, being more supportive and rational and excellent than any person has a right to deserve.

This is a gratitude journal entry for my husband, and my dog, and the life we’ve built together. Utopia is a morning snuggle session, coffee and reading books in separate corners of the living room, curling up with the Sunday crossword, a post-dinner neighborhood stroll. Eden in a slobbery lacrosse ball chucked across a soccer field and eagerly retrieved by a panting four-legged mop. Paradise found. Nothing else matters.

Aug 23, 2023

Summertime Madness

Where does the time go? One minute I’m fretting about not having enough to do, the next I’m buried under a mountain of repertoire because I simply can’t stop saying no to people. Someday I’ll figure out this whole work/life balance thing, but today is not that day. Knowing me, that will be the day I shuffle off this mortal coil, probably tidying up as I shuffle because I can’t resist a multitask.

May 18, 2023

Super perfundo on the early eve of your day

Suddenly half a year has gone by. “You’ll write more,” you tell yourself, greeting every day with a promise that “Today will be the day I start on that story/essay/novel” and every day the same ending, a promise unfulfilled.

Is it a lack of inspiration? Motivation? Failure to launch, arrested development, insert-your-choice-of-pithy-cliche-that-has-been-coopted-by-a-romcom-and-or-sitcom? My mind always circles back to that line from “Waking Life”, my favorite film when I was an insufferable pseudo-intellectual teenager: “Which is the most universal human characteristic–fear, or laziness?”

Dec 29, 2022

Lethargy

In an early post from this blog, dated December 30, 2013 (almost nine years ago to the day), I wrote: “The week between Christmas and New Year’s is one of my favorites. Nothing too pressing ever happens in that week. No one ever remembers what they did during that week.” The last two sentences remain true. The first could not be more false.

I now find this week unbearable. We are in the dreaded doldrums where productivity is non-existent but you still need to be a somewhat functional human in society. You (and by you I mean “I”) busy yourself with household tasks and mindless practicing just to keep the demons at bay, but everyone knows you’d rather be curled up in layers of blankets somewhere binging Emily in Paris even though you’re no longer sure whether you’re hate-watching or just straight up enjoying it.

But you remain vigilant. You take your dog on long morning walks, soaking up sunlight which is supposed to help your circadian rhythm, never mind the fact that you stay up until well past midnight doom-scrolling on Reddit, the blue light from your phone screen frying your bloodshot eyeballs and inhibiting your melatonin. You refrain from having your first cup of coffee until 90 minutes after you wake up. You stretch (not as much as you should.) You meditate, sometimes. You wonder if you should stop heeding the advice of the attractive neuroscientist/podcaster whom your husband mistrusts because, as he puts it, “No one can be that smart AND that in shape.”

You keep repeating the mantra of “You don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems” until semantic satiation kicks in and none of it means anything anymore. You think about the numerous projects kicking around in the waiting room of your consciousness, idly flipping through old Highlights magazines while they wait for you to get your act together.

You tell yourself you need to start journaling again. Where does the helpful coping mechanism begin and the productive procrastination end?

You open your laptop and log on to your blog page. You’re about to find out.

Dec 28, 2021

A Carnival of Quackery

This has been a banner year, and I can’t even talk about half the incredible things that have happened to me. You’ll have to wait for the novel to hear about those.

The things I can talk about: Went to Turkey, got engaged, got vaccinated, saw my little ensemble blossom into a known entity in the Atlanta arts community, road-tripped across the entire country with my dog, played on stage again for the first time since early 2020, had one of the greatest professional experiences of my life (and I can’t talk about it yet! ARGH!), got married, got LASIK, didn’t get COVID. (These events are ranked more or less chronologically, not in order of importance.)

Outside, the world is still simultaneously on fire and underwater, but in my own quiet little corner life is pretty swell.

I refuse to feel bad about celebrating my milestones. Traumatic one-upsmanship is so passé.

Recently I finished David Sedaris’s latest collection of diary entries. Now every time something mildly noteworthy occurs I think of how he would write about it. Today I found a mess of empty potato chip bags littered around the park. Because Sedaris picks up trash as a hobby, I thought about picking them up and throwing them in the trash. But then I didn’t, because I’m both a garbage person and NOT a garbageperson.

I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions but if I did I would resolve to write in this thing more. Ha! We’ve all heard that one before. See you in eleven months.

Feb 9, 2021

All In

This pandemic has forced me to prioritize my career goals in ways I wouldn’t have had to confront when I was hamster-wheeling in my former performer-for-hire life. What would I be doing even if I weren’t making money doing it? How do I channel my visions for an equitable, just society using my platform in the arts? How much of my personal resources am I willing to invest to make this happen?

I’ve never been good at self-promotion. It is one of my biggest shortcomings, and possibly the primary reason I’m not more successful by conventional financial standards. Talking about my accomplishments always felt to me like bragging. In my experience, the people who hype themselves up the most have generally the least amount of goods to back them up. (Not always! But often.)

That’s why my dedication to making ensemble vim a success feels so natural; it’s not about me. There is a real need in the Atlanta community for intersectional artistic output. Unity has always been our mission, and all the synonymous buzzwords surrounding it like worker drones around the queen bee: Togetherness. Collaboration. Cross-discipline. When the arts combine forces, amazing things can happen.

Oct 9, 2020

Six Months!

That’s how long, almost to the day, it’s been since my last post. Where has this quarantine gone? (Don’t answer that. It’s not a good answer.) Reading my last entry, it’s startling how much/little things have changed. I bragged about finally getting on board the Alison Roman bandwagon a month before she said some dumb stuff and was momentarily canceled. (Has she been un-canceled? Jury’s still out.)

Immediately after said cancelation, the world experienced a resurgence of the powerful social earthquake that is the BLM movement. This time it was longer and more sustained, with lasting aftershocks, reckonings from every corner of every industry, calls for awareness and accountability. I hope this earthquake doesn’t subside until every inch of this scorched earth on which our country was founded is razed and redistributed equitably. I’m also too much of a realist to pin too many visions on hope. This is a fundamental failing on my part, but also on the part of a country that has disappointed me too many times to the point where I dare no longer hope.

I’m now on Day 194 of my Duolingo streak. The jury is likewise inconclusive on whether or not I have in fact gotten better at French.

Life in my little corner improved significantly on August 1, when we brought home the new love of our life, Oscar the goldendoodle. I’ll spare you the goopy details and photos because that’s what Instagram is for, but he is calm and loving and brilliant and perfect. He is napping at my feet as I type this. The morning sky undims from hazy ink to lazy gray. A film of lukewarm coffee on my tongue, bitter and earthy, the taste of home and untapped creative potential.

Our new routine, humdrum yet comforting in its predictability, revolves around Oscar’s micturition and defecation habits. Each morning before he leaves for work, Mike takes him for a morning poop/pee walk, followed by coffee/cuddles. I get up an hour later and feed him breakfast in his Kong in his crate, which gives me enough time to brush my teeth/wash my face/put on sweats and take him to the park. He plays with the neighborhood dogs for an hour each morning, and that knocks him out for the rest of the morning so I can work in peace until lunch. Then another short walk, Kong lunch in the crate (sometimes accompanied with a bully stick, other assorted chew toys, and a looped recording of our voices on occasions when I need to leave the house for a few hours), evening park play date, dinner, pre-bed poop/pee walk. A truly charmed life.

Musically, I have been involved in the Atlanta Opera’s upcoming production of the Kaiser of Atlantis, an outdoor, socially-distanced telling of the tale of an egomaniacal dictator who plunges his subjects into a hellscape of pain and war from which they cannot escape, not even by dying. Innocence is lost. Artists suffer.

A little too on the nose? It’s interesting that the performances will be on either side of the November 3 election, so we will see in real time whether life imitates art, in either direction–whether we experience redemption and solace from our suffering or if we are plunged into four more years of darkness and loss.

Brighter side–and always end on a brighter side, like the ever-lightening day, now the color of a dishwater latte–I am so happy to be making music again. As long as I bury my head in my work, which in this case is the proverbial sand and I am the ostrich, I will get through this in one piece. Maybe I’ll be a little dustier, maybe desperate for some fresh air and water, but I’ll be intact.

Apr 10, 2020

Where Things Stand

Updated: Feb 9, 2021

How’s everyone doing? Are we hanging in there? Surviving? That’s pretty much the best we can hope for at this point. If you’re one of those people who’s using this downtime to be productive and start life-changing non-food-related projects, shut up. Everyone hates you.

Last weekend I baked all the things and we got fat. Then for Passover I made matzah crack and Alison Roman’s garlicky braised short ribs and now they’re quite possibly my new favorite meat dish ever. It took me a couple years to get onboard the Alison Roman train, but consider me a first-class passenger now, if not a full-fledged conductor.

When I ran out of steam with the cooking and baking and dishes (so many dishes! A Sisyphean battle of scrubbing and wiping and deluding myself that maybe tomorrow will be the day that I finally oil my poor abused cutting boards) and was forced to face the yawning chasm of uncertainty before me, well…let’s just say it wasn’t great.

The absence of concerts means the absence of concrete musical goals for me to work on, and the absence of practicing just puts me in a generally sour mood. Every time I try to throw myself into a new piece I end up half-learning it and then dropping it because why bother? I wish I could be one of those people who could just practice for their own personal growth, but I’m not that evolved yet. I’m too pragmatic. I need a reason.

Instead, this week I got into a DuoLingo leaderboard battle with some schmo who thought he could dethrone me from my 1st place position in the Amethyst league. The first day of the week we were neck and neck, and then he kept upping the limit, to the point where he was about 500 points ahead of me. I was all ready to accept defeat and finish with a silver medal this week. It’s fine, I kept telling myself, this is good for you. You have to learn how to lose. Second place is perfectly adequate.

Then Tuesday night I got a little drunk off the leftover wine I was using in the short ribs and a steely Cabernet-infused resolve washed over me and I spent the next [number redacted because it’s incredibly embarrassing] hours determined to crush this guy’s spirit. I went from 500 points behind to nearly 1000 points ahead of him and then flopped into bed, smug and nearly sober (that’s how long I stayed up), my brain still conjugating random French verbs.

So that’s where I’m at. Don’t judge. We’re all doing the best we can.

Apr 2, 2020

Snippets of Normal

Today, I put on a blazer and pants that didn’t have an elastic waistband. I blow dried my hair and put on makeup and earrings. I walked to Whole Foods. There was a security guard stopping people at the door to make sure social distancing protocol was being observed. I bought parchment paper, turbinado sugar, buttermilk. Let us eat cake, am I right? Off with my head.

It was a beautiful spring day, the trees showing off an impossible key lime green as if someone had turned the saturation way up on the Instagram filter. In this time of anxiety and uncertainty, I am determined to appreciate the little things.

I think I have reached the Stress Baking portion of this quarantine. The foray into bread-making a couple weeks ago was a mere foreshock; now we bake in earnest. There’s already a disk of pecan sandy dough chilling in the fridge. They’ll go into the oven after I finish teaching and will be served after dinner which is spinach pesto and cacio e pepe potatoes. I might not have any concerts for the foreseeable future, but I’ll be damned if I can’t have carbs.

Mar 25, 2020

Quaran-Scenes, pt. 1

My first post of 2020 comes in the midst of a global pandemic, a plague of near farcical proportions, a plot Hollywood would reject as being too farfetched. It may seem like writing is a last priority, something to do only when public health mandates shut down the gigs, the travel, the dinner parties. When the cabin fever has crescendoed to a peak (though it may be insensitive to joke about fevers and peaks these days) and you can’t bear the thought of putting together a jigsaw puzzle or pulling out an adult coloring book. Anything but that. Ergo, blogging.

The truth couldn’t be more opposite. If anything, words carry so much power for me that I can’t bring myself to put anything out there unless I have something compelling to share. There is so much drivel on the Internet these days; why add, however negligibly, to the deluge?

I realize that this coming from someone who as a teenager prided herself on adoxography — elegant writing about a base or trivial subject — is laughable. After all, I’ve been known to wax ecstatic about my manic caffeine/alcohol mood swings at least half a dozen times in this compost pile of a chronicle. Trivia is kind of my thing. Therefore, instead of hiding my true persona behind a wall of silence, I’m gonna Sheryl Sandberg Lean In to it, so today I bring you (perhaps the first of many, many installments, since this curve is nowhere close to flattening) Quaran-Scenes, pt. 1.

1. A rousing game of Bananagrams quickly devolved into us using every tile in the game to craft a German word that describes the feeling one gets, under quarantine, of hopelessness and yet camaraderie in knowing that we’re all united in our isolation and subsequent destitution.

2. When in doubt, bake some bread and drink some wine. Carbo-load for all those home fitness videos you’re no doubt blazing through. Also, liquor stores remain essential businesses because we all know the second they shut down, The Purge is upon us.

3. Been putting these babies to good use lately. As much as it sucks not being able to work, finally having some time to crack open these bad boys has been a welcome diversion from the existential crisis looming just beyond the threshold of the to-do list.

4. Here we have a rare glimpse of the Task-Oriented Boyfriend in captivity. Like others in his species, this type of Boyfriend does not do well in idle times, requiring many projects to keep himself from going crazy. He does not share my aversion to puzzles of the jigsaw variety, and here we see him toiling over a 1000 piece largely monochromatic monstrosity which he has inexplicably chosen to put together with zero help from the picture on the box. When asked why he would do such a thing and whether such a choice makes him a certifiable psychopath, he shrugs and says, “Yeah, it makes it more difficult.”

Nov 9, 2019

Lessons in Music and Life

This entry is shamelessly copied/pasted from a blog post I wrote for ensemble vim. Come to our concert tomorrow if you want to hear some mind-bending music and life-altering poetry.

_______________________

Like great art, my greatest music lessons always had a universality to them. They were focused not so much on how to play the instrument, but on how the music interacts within the limits of physics above the subatomic level. My teacher liked to discuss physics a lot in our lessons. Everything was about momentum, centrifugal/centripetal force, antigravity, the cosmos. Posters of dazzling images from the Hubble telescope plastered his studio walls. Each time I left that room I felt a heady sense of communion with the forces of art and nature, the vastness of the universe presenting itself to me in the grumbling fanfare of a Beethoven sonata or Brahms concerto.

Leading up to ensemble vim’s inaugural concert this weekend (Sunday at 4, Kellett Chapel, don’t be late!), I wanted to share three key things I’ve learned from my decades of music lessons. It’s taken years of self-study and measured reflection to let these aphorisms gel into something like a personal manifesto. If these tenets are all that stuck with me from my student days, I’ll consider it a victory. They may seem simplistic, trite even, something you might find on a school motivational poster or scattered around the home of someone with too much “Live, Laugh, Love” decor. I encourage you to see past my admittedly uninventive bullet points to the meat of the message. All three of these lessons can be applied microscopically, to specific musical problems, and macroscopically, to life, the universe, and everything (shout-out to Douglas Adams, because I’m a nerd like that):

Listen

So many of life’s problems would be alleviated if everyone listened a little better. Not just more; better. Don’t put on a sympathetic “I’m listening” face while inside you’re secretly crafting a witty anecdote or devastating comeback to parry as soon as your dialogue partner shuts up (I’ve been just as guilty of this as all of you). Really listening means setting your ego aside and valuing what others contribute to the conversation with no expectation of changing their mind or the topic. If most people did this, 24-hour news networks would go out of business overnight.

I’ve been in countless chamber music and orchestral settings where it’s so clear that everyone is so wrapped up in their own individual part that they have no clue how it fits in with the rest of the group. Only after several rehearsals—of listening to the other parts, understanding the big picture—does it finally start to click. First of all, this can be remedied with better score study on the individual’s part. Learning your own part out of context from the piece as a whole is lazy and ineffective. It must also be so terrifying to show up to the first rehearsal without any idea of how the rest of the piece sounds. “Welp, I hope everyone is counting exactly the way I am! Here goes nothing…” Guaranteed recipe for crashing and burning. Been guilty of this too. It doesn’t take long before you realize people don’t like to work with these types of folk.

Expect the Unexpected

Life throws you curveballs. In a high-stakes, nervous-energy performance setting, things will inevitably stray from the controlled setting of your practice room. Plan for this. Practice playing in front of audiences. Prepare your music twice as well as you think you need to. Things will probably still go off course. That’s life. You can control your own part in it, but the chances of you being able to control anyone else’s decisions, their preparation, their dedication, are about as good as your chance of winning the Mega-Millions. Focus on being as solid as you can be in your part. And listen. And adjust.

Sometimes, in life and music, situations happen that are entirely beyond any preparation you could have done. The sudden illness of a family member, the snapping of an E string right in the middle of a big solo, the winning of the aforesaid Mega-Millions (in which case, congrats, can I have just like a couple mil? Even one would be great). The person who is adaptable and willing to accept the situation and spring into action to accommodate these new challenges will always fare better than the one who wrings their hands and proceeds to throw themselves the pity party of the century. There is a time and place for wallowing. But during that time you spent kvetching about how orchestral auditions are rigged and the system is broken, Caroline* was busy practicing her face off and winning that job you wanted. If you always play the victim, you’ll always be the victim.

*totally made up name, not based on fact

Timing is Everything

This might be the most clichéd of all the adages, but also (I think) the most important, and something I’ve lived by for a long time. My teacher, the one so enamored of physics and the universe, took an Einsteinian approach to rhythm. Instead of conceiving of time as a fixed constant, as we were all taught to do as dutiful young music students (one, two, three, four, turn that metronome on and turn your brain off and stick with it, dammit!), he understood that there was room to bend and compress the phrase, as long as it stayed within the larger metric parameters. I can’t stress the importance of this last clause enough. One of my biggest musical pet peeves is when a performer clearly has no sense of the rhythmic structure, and has just approximated the rhythm or taken time here and there because the spirit moved them, or (heaven forbid) “That’s now everyone else does it.” Is that what the composer wrote? Could you achieve the same result while attempting to stay faithful to the instructions on the page?

People conceive of time differently. The nature of one’s instrument will have an effect on this; percussive instruments (I’ll include piano in this for categorical purposes, but this is a philosophical pondering for another blog post) have an immediate reaction from the time the note is played to its acceptance by the ear. Winds and brass require a level of anticipation because they have to account for this pesky thing called breathing. Similarly for string players, where there is a slight delay as bow drags across string. I lament the fact that many beginner students of these disciplines don’t spend enough time on rhythm. It makes sense; with problems like intonation and bowing and just trying to make a pleasing sound (have you ever been to a beginner strings recital? You brave soul, you), it’s no wonder rhythm takes lower billing. I always tell my students that rhythm is the single-most important aspect of music. Just like in life, if you meet the right person at the wrong time, technically they’re the wrong person; in music, if you play the right note at the wrong time, it’s the wrong note. You can imagine this is amplified by comical degrees when it comes to playing in a new music ensemble.

Personally, I believe all beginner music students should learn rhythm like a percussionist. I’ll fight anyone on this, so come at me, bro.

There it is. If you stuck with me through all of this and you’re not my lovely boyfriend who I made proof-read this, thank you, and I hope you got something out of it. Also, why? I should probably shower and head to rehearsal. Atlanta traffic is always an exercise in expecting the unexpected, and I pride myself (in professional situations only!) on always arriving on time.

Sep 17, 2019

Can’t Tuna Fish

I’m writing this as my piano tuner hammers away downstairs on a particularly wonky E3, stabbing the note over and over into the key bed, demonstrating precisely how not to make a beautiful sound. Just about two more weeks left of relative calm, composure, and diligent preparation until October and November arrive like a coupla jerks, sending me into exhaustion mode and this poor blog back into a post-less purgatory.

D4…D4…slightly sharper D4…D4!!!

I’ve often wondered about what tuning pianos does to one’s psyche. Zeroing in on minute changes of pitch, fractions of a hair different on either end, 88 times per piano, 3-4ish times a day. It’s gotta be doing damage on a neurological level. I’d ask my tuner, but A) I’m way too shy and B) knowing me, I’d try to be super casual about it and somehow end up offending him in some way.

So I sit upstairs and twiddle my thumbs (which is essentially what this blog has turned into, a thumb-twiddling of sorts) and wait for him to finish…C4…C4!…and make to-do lists and think about score studying until he completes his perfunctory note-jabbing and leaves me in peace with my miraculously well-tempered instrument and that innuendo would work so much better if I were a man.

#procrastiblogging

Sep 4, 2019

Forward and Upward

This is an open letter to a recent work relationship turned sour.

I wish it didn’t have to end like this, but after repeatedly im- and- explicitly taking advantage of my kindness and vulnerability, I had to walk away. Enough is enough. I sincerely hope you learn from this situation, but history and experience tell me that it is highly unlikely you’ll change at all, and that’s a damn shame–both because your organization could be so much better, and because the people you serve deserve better. I deserved better.

You’ll never read this, just like you never read any of my emails or took seriously any of my feedback that would have benefited the organization. Maybe you thought I was being out of line. Maybe you wanted to keep me in my place, using me as a run-of-the-mill accompanist whose role frankly could have been filled by someone with passable high school level piano skills.

I realize now this was my own fault. I continually find myself falling into the trap of settling for what’s easy, available, and comfortable. It’s a beguiling trap, to be sure. When you’re in a new town with few connections and work options, it’s easy to reach for the first thing that’s offered. Now I know better. You were quick to snap me up because your turnover is so astronomical. No one in their right mind stays for long.

It’s going to catch up to you. You’ve already developed a reputation amongst reputable players in the community, those with talent and influence who know better than to get involved. Now I know better as well. This is a lesson learned for me: not to settle for anything less than what I know I’m worth, to reach for things that are uncomfortable and not quite within my grasp.

Like Mr. Fleisher always said, “Forward and upward.” Just like always, everything he taught had a double meaning. It was never just about piano lessons. It was a lesson in living.

#goodriddance #forwardandupward

Jul 31, 2019

Quotidian

Nowadays it’s starting to seem as if the only time I write in this is when I’m under the influence of caffeine or alcohol, and this post shall be no different. The two substances are an apt metaphor for the far ends of that precarious parabola called manic depression, on which I currently happen to be skewing far to the manic side.

After spending the bulk of July traveling to various corners of the northern hemisphere–I’ll spare you the boring details because no one wants to hear stories about your vacation, Karen, not even your mother, there’s a reason she’s been ignoring your FaceTime calls–I’m back in Atlanta for a whole three weeks! I spent all day today getting my affairs in order, doing the busywork of settling back into normal life, unpacking-laundry-emails-errands and got through all of it so painlessly, dare I say even pleasantly, that on my walk home from the bank/post office I decided to treat myself to a nitro cold brew and here we are.

My performance schedule is starting to fill up. After two years of relative purgatory in this new city I’m finally more or less (work-wise) where I left off in Baltimore, and I’m at a point where I am comfortable saying no to some things again.

Work doesn’t officially start up for another couple weeks, but in the meantime I would really like to keep this momentum going, which means making daily to-do lists (is there anything better than checking off a task from a to-do list? I submit that there is not), weekly meal plans, morning runs before the temperature turns infernal, routine practice schedules, and nightly yoga and meditation. I think I’ve mentioned on here before that the older I get, the more I require every single detail of my life to be running smoothly lest the macrocosm be disturbed. One domino gets moved out of place, and the whole chain breaks. I’m not sure if this fastidiousness is healthy, per se, but as long as I can manage my control freak tendencies in a way that doesn’t directly harm me or anyone else, I’ll chalk it up as a win.

#coffee #todolists #grateful #bebetter #life

May 20, 2019

I’m Back! (Aided By Wine)

It is almost midnight. Monday is about to segue into Tuesday, and I have had just enough red wine to the point where the warm itchy glow is radiating through me, a hug of inflammation, a Cabernet cardigan.

Today was a banner day. If every day were like today, I may very well have transcended this mortal coil and graduated to nirvana. The peace and happiness I’m feeling right now can’t even be completely attributed to the wine, although that certainly helps. 

A quick catch-up, since I’ve been so neglectful as of late. We’ve been in the new house for two and a half months now. It’s everything we’ve wanted and more. Summer is officially here (at least weather-wise), these next couple weeks are a happy blend of work and play, and exciting things are on the horizon.

Today I practiced and cleaned and rehearsed some chamber music for the Atlanta Music Project HQ ribbon-cutting and worked out and MIKE AND I BOOKED A DREAM VACATION TO NEW ZEALAND AND TAHITI and drank wine and read Brahms and Schumann and Mozart quartets with a few ASO musicians and I am just on cloud nine because this is pretty much all I want to do in life, plus or minus this wine because I’m starting to get really seriously itchy, and could it be possible that I’m allergic to red wine?! Perish the thought. 

Pardon the mania. It’s just that the next time I get into a funk—which could be next week or tomorrow or in a few minutes, for that matter—I want to refer back to this post and remember how ecstatic I once was, how a few talented colleagues, an endlessly supportive boyfriend, and some tiny black dots scribbled by dead German dudes could elicit such unbridled joy in me. This, Marie Kondo, this right here—this is what sparks joy. I never want to let this feeling go.

#happy #joy #chambermusic #bestday #wine

Feb 7, 2019

Like Sands Through the Hourglass

Three weeks ago to the hour, we were having our semi-regular lunch date at that pasta place in Vinings when you looked down at your phone and your mouth dropped open.

“What?” I inquired, dumbly.

“They accepted the offer.”

Three and a half weeks ago, we met with a realtor you’d found while house-browsing on Trulia. It was more or less a weekend whim. We’d found a handful of places we liked and decided to see them in person. Just something to do on a lazy Saturday. We fell in love with the first one. An offer was made, then accepted with no objection or counter.

Two and a half weeks ago, we went back to the house for the home inspection. With the exception of a few minor details, there was nothing catastrophic. I spent the majority of the time measuring room dimensions and getting excited about how many chamber music parties I’d be able to host in the main room.

Time seems to be accelerating. This week I’m making my solo debut with the Atlanta Symphony. In less than a week I’m turning 30. By this time next week we will be vacationing in (probably) freezing New York City, and I couldn’t be more excited.

Closing date is March 4.

#soarethedaysofourlives

Jan 1, 2019

Countdown: Twenty, Nineteen…

2019 is mere hours old. It’s still wet behind the ears. Barely post-partum.

Speaking of post-partum, pardon me—I haven’t posted since September. (That wordplay works better when spoken aloud.) But to be honest I’ve done longer stretches of blog drought and I probably will again.

Is there any uglier aural tableau than “blog drought”? Like a drain clogged with hair and unnecessary adjectives.

Like most other days, I spent today (or rather, yesterday afternoon, but since I’m still awake right now yesterday is still today) focusing on one thing when I ought to have been working on a great many others. Unlike most other days, I am oddly proud of what I accomplished, and to be honest I’m not really sure why. This project was the lovechild of boredom, a calendrical earworm, and a sudden urge to clone myself into a barbershop quartet. Never mind that I am technologically challenged and vocally limited. I’m no Jacob Collier, nor do I ever hope to be, but I birthed a musical creature from my mouth and it didn’t involve pushing any black-and-white buttons. So there it is.

I guess I am easily entertained.

New Year’s Eve Video

Sep 6, 2018

Welp, there it is.

It’s just as I expected. Zero to sixty. Well, more like thirty-five. Summers are always weird like that. Especially this summer; new place (who dis?), few friends, fewer gigs. Just me and the crickets and the stifling humidity.

Then, bang! September hits and it’s off to the races (and West Paces, ha ha shhh) and between that and the upcoming gigs and abundant trips, a nice blend of business and pleasure, and I’m more or less settling back into my unconventional routine-less routine. I think it’s in the lazy perfectionist’s nature to work harder when there are more things on her plate. (Yes, I’ve decided to speak for all lazy perfectionists.) When my schedule is free and clear, there’s no incentive to get things done quickly, no looming deadline kicking your butt into gear, no threat of public humiliation (just private shame, which I bury under heaps of coffee-stained New Yorkers and crossword puzzles).

I guess I should be practicing right now though, or making pasta sauce, or working out, or all of the above! At the same time! This blog post is such a disaster. If you’ve read all the way up to now, thank you, but also, why?

#September #taskavoidance #procrastiblogging

Jul 24, 2018

Daily Constitutional

This morning I went on a seven-mile walk from the apartment through Piedmont Park along the Beltline all the way to Krog Street Market and beyond, to where the sidewalk ends. The oppressive mugginess of an Atlanta July had already cast a stifling pall over the 7am haze. Even the sun seemed bleary-eyed and lethargic. Midtown was exploding vertically before my very eyes, the views in every direction obstructed by a spindly forest of scaffolding. The sounds of progress followed me around like a loyal pet. Everywhere construction projects jackhammered and drilled and bulldozed, accompanied by a chorus of smaller but no less arduous workers–the lawn-mowers, painters, roofers that kept the already-constructed establishments looking spiffy so as to delay their inevitable demolition in order to make way for newer, bigger, shinier iterations.

In a couple months I will look back on these days nostalgically, missing the time when I was able to take a leisurely two hour walk, slowing down the pace of life even as life around me rushed by at light speed. I used to be–let’s face it, still am–so anxious about keeping up with other people, measuring myself by the yardstick of their accomplishments, viewing their successes as a sign of my own shortcomings. It’s a toxic way of living. At the same time I was losing my sense of self and purpose, trying to fit into a prescribed mold that didn’t suit me. Now, as I crest the hill toward the summit of a new decade and look back at the valley of my twenties, strewn with the rattlesnakes of bad decisions and scorpions of naive over-confidence and boulders upon endless boulders of undying hope, I understand that it’s finally time to relinquish control. The more you try to control something, the more it evades you. The mountain remains constant, even as the cities around it spawn and spread and sprawl, an urban fungus of consumerism and light pollution. You should endeavor to reach the top of the mountain. But eventually you’ll have to come back down.

I should go on walks more often.

#Atlanta #ruminations #illuminations

Jul 19, 2018

Inertia

It’s basic physics. An object at rest stays at rest. Until the days and weeks bleed into one another. Until the object begins to bleed into the furniture, desperately wishing to be a less definite state of matter, to ooze into the bedsheets or dissipate and dance among the dust motes so as to prolong the insurmountable task of peeling oneself out of bed and getting the day started.

Whether faced with a mountain of obligations or none, the reaction is always the same: no reaction. Inertia. Paralysis. Every day achieving the bare minimum levels of hygiene and exercise and nourishment deemed necessary to seem surface-level functional. Going through motions any time an outside force acts upon the object at rest, its kinetic deadlines and emails and (the horror) phone calls momentarily defibrillating the object into action. Otherwise, still. Static. Stagnant.

The object’s days at rest are numbered, and the object doesn’t know how to feel about this. On the one hand, the object has learned that, when left to its own devices, the object does not operate well with little to no structure. On the other hand, the object worries that, once it resumes a life of routine and busywork, sure, it will once again give the object’s life a semblance of superficial meaning, but when all’s said and done, isn’t busyness, a la Kierkegaard, the sign of an unhappy, purposeless object?

So first, small steps. Make a list. Accomplish tasks. Rinse, repeat.

#resurgence #rebirth #stillness #motion #movement #rest

May 31, 2018

Mission Person’s Report

When I was a kid, practicing the piano was a chore. I always loved the final result, of performing in front of people, but the amount of work required to get there was done begrudgingly, with little enthusiasm. I wanted to be an artist, and then a writer. I spent hours every day in my room, filling up spiral-bound notebooks with pencil sketches and snippets of stories. I dabbled in acrylics, charcoals, pastels, and photography. I wrote the beginning of a sweeping epic fantasy novel with a strong female protagonist long before I knew what feminism was.

Once I decided to pursue music in college, my other artistic aspirations fell by the wayside. While I don’t regret my career choice, a part of me has always missed that feeling of stretching my imagination in extra-musical ways. I started to wonder why artists today were so isolated in their own endeavors; I had no idea what my fellow creatives in the visual, literary, film, and dance fields were up to. I wanted to know.

At the same time, I was struggling with a crisis of entitlement. I had always felt music was a selfish life choice. Who was I to do what I loved all day long, with no regard to the bigger problems at hand? Was I really making a difference? All my life, I’ve been hearing about how classical music is dying, audiences aren’t showing up, people are disinterested.

Soon it became clear to me that this couldn’t be further from the truth. There is a huge audience out there; you just have to bring the show to them. We no longer live in an age where access to entertainment was available only to the moneyed and privileged few. So how can we keep approaching concerts the same way we did a hundred years ago? Why would anyone pay money to dress up and sit silently in a stuffy hall when Netflix exists?

The arts have a unique ability to unite people from every culture, creed, and class. A struggling single mother could benefit from getting lost in a Beethoven sonata just as much as, if not more than, her tech mogul counterpart. Children whose families and schools do not have the means to provide them an arts education are often the ones with the most to say, yet their voices have been stifled. American prisons are overflowing with people who have been told to relinquish their rights to beauty, humanity, and hope.

This is a broken system. Access to the arts is a fundamental human right, not a privilege. It is what separates man from beast; without it, we are merely animal.

May 24, 2018

Just an Idea Man

Getting started is the hardest step. You have big visions and goals and believe so strongly in this thing you’re trying to build, this thing that as of now only exists inside your weird, inscrutable, oft-caffeinated brain, a thing you’ve voiced aloud to maybe a dozen-or-so people who’ve all made noises of support back at you, but because you are self-deprecating to a fault you think the subtext is always an eye-roll and a “Yeah, good luck with that.”

Then you start doing the actual research. Crafting a mission statement, learning the legalese, boggling at the countless mind-numbing red-tape-y hurdles that require surmounting before you can even start fundraising. You realize that as much as you want to do this all on your own, you need to relinquish your inner (and outer) control freak and ask for help.

Why do they have to make it so hard for people to do good?

#nonprofit #artsadvocacy #socialchange #artsintegration

Apr 29, 2018

Burr-ning Down the House

Last night I saw Bill Burr at the Fox. From my perch in the Upper Dress Circle, squeezed between my none-too-diminutive boyfriend on the right and to my left a hulking tree of a man who devoured all the armrests and radiated body heat like a giant blue star, I peered down at the bald, irascible comedian while my face veered into hurts-from-laughing-too-much territory.

Burr traversed his well-known shtick–“Politically Incorrect But I See His Point And Hey We’re All Sort Of Thinking It Anyway”–dismantling everything from the state of the #MeToo movement: “I was sexually assaulted last year when this woman came off stage right as I was about to go on, and she flicked me right in the tip of my dick. Where’s my hashtag?” / “Does anyone out there really feel physically threatened by Aziz Ansari?” to the state of Georgia: “What kills me about you guys is that you look down on Alabama. That’s like people from Vermont looking down on New Hampshire” / “It must be hard to be stuck with that accent, everyone just automatically knocks 40 points off your IQ” and peppering his rants with disclaimers of the “angry-because-I-can’t-adequately-express-my-emotions” variety. He was even more pitiable because the whole time he was nursing a cold, often pausing mid-rant to cough into his sleeve, a box of Kleenex propped next to his water bottle.

Even more fascinating than watching Burr’s act was observing the assortment of crowd he seemed to draw. Homogeneous only in skin color (come to think of it, apart from myself, I don’t remember spotting a single other non-white person in the audience), they seemed to come in all ages and from all points on the socioeconomic spectrum. Before the show, the crowd lining up to pass through the theater’s metal detectors was a curious blend of preppy, gangly teenage boys; their college-age counterparts (some of them un-ironically sporting MAGA hats); male twenty-somethings in identical J. Crew button-downs accompanied by their well-coiffed, over-dressed, over-perfumed dates (most of whom probably had no idea what they were getting themselves into and would most likely spend the evening only pretending to enjoy themselves, if that); nerdy hipsters whose wan pallor betrayed a fervent aversion to outdoor activities; and middle-aged couples in suits and pearls, still keeping up the facade of Southern propriety whilst willingly paying a deranged, stark-raving Yankee to defecate all over their Bible-belt morals.

The house was packed, the laughter generous, and as I sat there grinning as much from his subversiveness as his comedic wit, I couldn’t help but recognize how someone like Burr is in the unique position of being adopted by both political wings. He dismantles arguments on both sides and has publicly shown distaste for both parties, yet each side fancies him a champion of their specific cause, an ally who ridicules the opposing team and tells it like it is. It’s disheartening to note that, as far as we’ve come, you still need to be a white man in order for your jokes to be taken as gospel, to not only be seen as more than quaint observational humor but brandished as examples of serious political discourse on both sides of the aisle. It’s an interesting position to be in, but Burr seems to have taken it all in stride, wielding his power as he’s always done–with anger in his heart and indignation on his tongue.

#BillBurr #review #whitepeople #somanywhitepeople

Apr 26, 2018

Broken But Not Bent

I’m typing this on the freshly cracked screen of my iPad Pro, which I foolishly propped on the edge of the counter yesterday, whereby it face-planted and shattered into a spectacular web of shards and sadness. My iPad now looks like the title card of a Black Mirror episode. I’m inflicting microscopic cuts on my fingers every time I swipe across the screen, no doubt sending teeny tiny splinters of glass zooming into my bloodstream where they shall remain dormant to wreak havoc at a later date. That’s how dedicated I am about staying current with this blog. 

April is drawing to a close, and with it the bulk of my concert prep. I need to be careful, though, because as excited as I am to have a slight break from the grind, I need to focus on bigger picture goals and not let myself get bogged down in inertia, which is what always ends up happening when I have a bit of a lull. I need to find ways to trick myself into practicing; otherwise I simply won’t, and gradually I’ll become more and more out of shape and consequently more and more cranky and unpleasant, and I’ll alienate all my friends, and my lovely saint of a boyfriend will wonder what he did to deserve such a peach of a partner.

Shame that I had to choose a career that was so congruous with my own self-worth. I can’t help but think about this cracked screen as a metaphor for the challenges of this past year; there are a few nicks in the armor, some cosmetic blemishes, but underneath the machine is operating just fine, and I can’t let a couple superficial scratches distract me from the things that are really important.

I didn’t mean for this post to get all treacly and preachy. (Treachy?) I’m not even sure anyone out there is listening. (Hello? If you’re reading this, can you just drop me a line and let me know you’re out there? That this jumble of code isn’t just hanging out in the ether, all theoretical and tree-falls-in-the-woods-like? Thanks. You’re super.)

Apr 12, 2018

Auto Died Act

I’m awake past my bedtime–a regular occurrence since I upped my daily coffee intake, shocker of all shockers–and since I don’t want to edit my recording but I still want to have done something marginally more productive than reading vapid news stories, I will transcribe a journal entry from last weekend for your viewing pleasure. And also because I haven’t written in awhile, so here’s a bunch of long-overdue word vomit:

April 7, 2018

I underwent a harrowing experience yesterday. Now, by normal standards this experience would be considered unexceptional, even mundane, but because of my sheltered existence wherein nothing traumatic of note has thus far occurred (and here i am knocking on the largest piece of wood), this event rates as harrowing.

The short version is that my tire blew out as I was driving down I-75 South. Mundane, right? People blow out their tires all the time.

The longer, more melodramatic version that played out before me, a novice in all adventures adverse, was that there was a deafening bang, followed by lots of loud, ominous crunching as my car began shuddering violently. I was in the second lane from the left, desperately signaling that I needed to move over, but drivers sped around me impatiently as I white-knuckled the steering wheel, my car bucking and shaking so much my teeth rattled. Bear in mind this entire time I had no idea what was happening, having never had so much as a flat tire. It felt like something had fallen out from beneath the car, and I was now dragging it along at 60mph, no doubt sending sparks flying. I smelled burning rubber and metal.

I finally managed to pull over to the shoulder, but that didn’t give me much solace. Mike always warned me that that was the most dangerous place to pull over, the worst trauma patients he saw were always shoulder-of-highway casualties. Always try to exit if you can help it. I thought about this as I sat helplessly in my car, mere meters from the exit ramp, vehicles zooming by inches to my left, my tiny two-door rocking from their velocity.

At this point I recall being unusually calm. I wasn’t panicking, and with the exception of a few choice swear words (all of which, let’s face it, were part of my everyday driving vernacular) and the fact that my car was on the verge of imminent collapse, you’d be hard-pressed to find anything wrong with the scene.

I called Mike at work, which made me feel even more wretched and helpless because I knew he was in the OR and there was little he could do, but because he is a saint, and I am a child, he patiently walked me through the next steps: call a tow truck, find a repair shop, Lyft home.

By the time the truck arrived, half an hour later, I had found an auto shop, filed an insurance claim, postponed a rehearsal I had later that afternoon (my duo partner and her boyfriend insisted upon meeting me at the repair shop and taking me home, so they deserve an enormous shout-out, thanks Stoosh), and complained to my sister.

The driver of the tow truck was a gnarled old man with a gruff demeanor, grease-blackened hands, and face wrinkles so deep it’s as if they’d been etched in wood. He graciously helped me up into the truck while he strapped my car to the truck bed. That was the first time I got a proper look at the damage firsthand. Strips of shredded rubber flopped where my tire had once been, curled and chewed, glistening like bundles of frayed electrical wire.

I was still calm as I sat in the front seat of the tow truck, its floor caked with what looked like centuries of dirt, not minding the filth, even reassured and charmed by it. The repair shop was only a mile away (lucky for me, since the towing service charged by the mile), and my friends arrived just as I was wrapping up the paperwork. We celebrated my rescue by going to a Jewish deli, because if anyone understands suffering it’s the Jews, and also bagels.

As far as adverse experiences go, I’ll admit this one was pretty benign. I’d even venture so far as to say it was a good bad experience. No one was hurt, damage control went as smoothly as possible (I may speak too soon on this matter; let’s wait till I see the bill), it was a beautiful sunny day, I ate a bagel, and we still managed to rehearse Mozart and Beethoven that afternoon.

By the time rehearsal was over, exhaustion washed over me, a primal, bone-permeating weariness. I tried to edit my recording, but the software was frustrating, and I gave up after a few half-assed attempts at syncing the audio and video. When Mike got home a couple hours later, the calm, light-hearted demeanor I’d affected up till then melted and I became a soppy, vulnerable mess, sobbing into his scrubs while he hugged me.

Today I woke up at 4:30am to catch a flight to Baltimore for a concert this evening. I wasn’t even particularly tired; it’s as if the fatigue of yesterday was so profound and penetrating, it would henceforth take a lot more than a mere lack of sleep to topple me.

I’m writing this on the plane. I have to pee. I also had to pee while I was waiting for the tow truck yesterday. I pretty much always have to pee. Someone on this flight smells like salt and vinegar potato chips, which normally wouldn’t be that remarkable, but it’s a jarring odor to confront at seven in the morning.

PRESENT DAY

A couple post scripts regarding the car situation: I flew back to Atlanta Sunday afternoon, dog-tired and worried about what to do about a car while mine was being fixed; of course my lame insurance didn’t cover rental costs. Upon my arrival home, Mike presented me with a set of keys. He’d borrowed his friends’ spare Corolla, gotten it washed, filled up the tank, got our building management to outfit the car with a garage pass, and it was now mine to use until my car was back in business. I hugged my boyfriend and cried on him for the second time that weekend. I don’t deserve him.

Secondly, the day after the accident (though not really an accident, right? More of an incident), I read John Seabrook’s personal history in the New Yorker about his experience driving on black ice. He wrote about how, in those brief moments when he lost control of the car, his mind remained sharp and focused and calm, and time seemed to slow down. If I were more inclined toward superstition, I would posit that there was a larger meaning to this beyond mere coincidence or Baader Meinhof phenomenon. But since I’ve never been one to dwell on happenstance, and since all this transcribing is finally driving me to drowse, I shall leave it at that and return to you in a couple weeks (or perhaps, optimistically, sooner) with raised spirits and a raised glass brimming with spirits.

#caraccident #Mike #introspection #autospection

Mar 5, 2018

On the road again

Last week was filled with exciting meetings and new opportunities and a little too much weekend fun, and now I’m paying for it with a relatively sluggish start to my Monday, but laundry’s done and workout’s done and bags are packed and a disappointing practice session is behind me. Tonight I fly out to Spokane, WA for a couple days to play with the symphony there, and after my last concert on Thursday I hop right back on the plane and hightail it to Baltimore, where I have a chamber music concert on Sunday. No rest for the weary! This is what you love to do! Keep repeating it until you start to believe it.

Feb 23, 2018

Ripple effect

You start to notice the most incremental changes. Walking with less of a slouch. The loosening of your jaw as you white-knuckle through rush-hour perimeter traffic. Hell, you even mind the traffic a little less. Your mood is better. More optimistic.

It might have to do with the fact that it was a tropical 77 degrees in Atlanta today. Springtime in February. Punxsutawney Phil has no jurisdiction here in the South. You walk the Beltline from Midtown to Inman Park to meet a friend for dinner. The Beltline is more packed than you’d ever seen it. Joggers weaving through lazily-strolling couples and ladies coupled with baby strollers and leisurely cyclists and speed-demon cyclists. You pick up conversation snippets of the privileged, gentrified variety. Dull and mundane, the sort of idle chatter you’d normally consider tedious and eye roll-worthy. Today you find it downright quaint, nearly–dare you say it–pleasant.

At dinner, you talk about life, art, social change. Making a difference. Being a difference. Being different. Wine helps. Dulls the intellect a bit, but replaces it with earnestness in spades. (Earnestness, The Importance of Being.)

You leave the restaurant and hop back on the Beltline, now shrouded in night. There’s a lightness and looseness in your step, bequeathed by wine. The breeze is cool and fragrant. A half-moon hangs over the glittering city like a proud mama surveilling her brood from afar. You take the scenic route through Piedmont Park, now deserted and dark save for the tangerine glow of the street lamps, their light bathed in watercolored halos, Monet-ized by your wined-up vision.

You breathe deep and remember to cherish these moments, and you are grateful, but you also know the happy moments are always fleeting, and there is always more work to be done, and now you are home and you are nursing a comically large bottle of water and now it is time to commence construction on the unpaved roads ahead of you.

#stillinspired #dogood #bebetter #breathe

Feb 22, 2018

Fanfare for the Uncommon Man

Last night at the gym I listened to Joe Rogan’s podcast interview with David Goggins, and I’ll be damned if it wasn’t one of the most inspiring interviews I’ve ever heard. In short, and at the risk of glossing over his many unbelievable accomplishments, it is your typical underdog story amplified to nearly farcical proportions. Difficult childhood, dreams of joining the military, fail, fail, fail more, found himself at nearly 300 pounds at age 24 working as an exterminator, decided to turn everything around (“From then on I was going to do the opposite of everything I did before”), failed some more, but eventually lost the weight and joined the Navy SEALs, doing an unprecedented three Hell Weeks in a single year (failed the first one, accomplished the next two). Then he turned his attention to ultra-marathons (his account of running his first 100-miler is equal parts awe-inspiring and stomach-turning), running (among many others) a 205-mile race in 39 hours. He also holds the world record for most number of pull-ups done in a 24-hour period (4,025). Of course, through all this, he was injured more, and then overcame those injuries (my main takeaway from the podcast was that I need to start doing yoga again, and pronto; stretching is no joke, people!).

What resonated with me the most was that Goggins insisted he wasn’t special, he wasn’t equipped with some magical go-getter gene that made him able to accomplish all this. If anything, it was the complete opposite. He doesn’t enjoy running. He doesn’t enjoy corporeally punishing himself to and beyond the brink of physical possibility. But he realizes that that’s what it takes to overcome those adolescent demons that kept telling him he was worthless, that he’d never amount to anything. So he proves to himself, through astonishing feats of willpower and mental cajones, that he is more than that stuttering abused child, more than that obese exterminator.

Don’t do something because you’re good at it. That’s weak sauce. Seek to make your weaknesses your strengths. Challenge all those doubts in your head telling you to give up, and keep pushing ahead. Embrace failure (this is the easier-said-than-done part for me. Failure has always been the boogeyman under the bed, and I’m self-swaddled under the covers, petrified). ”Be uncommon amongst uncommon people.” Do this every day. Make every day better than the one before. Then stretch.

#DavidGoggins #inspiration #stretch

Feb 7, 2018

Konmari for social media

After nearly a year of hemming and hawing, I finally deleted my Facebook account today. This means that by year’s end, I’ll have finished penning that novel, collection of short stories, book of cartoons, and learned a couple dozen concerti, right? Right?

Feb 5, 2018

Blank state

I’m turning twenty-nine in a week and change, which would be terrifying except that, like joy or ecstasy or despair, fear is an emotion with which I no longer seem to identify. After all of last year’s change and upheaval, the dust settled on 2018 and I find myself struggling to feel much of anything. I’m neither content nor discontent, not happy, not sad, just sort of a blank, numb automaton carrying out each day’s tasks, forcing out productivity in a vacuum. With each passing day, my doubt grows about whether or not it all makes any difference. So far, the city of Atlanta has shown a staggering amount of disinterest in my presence. “It takes time,” is the refrain I keep hearing from sympathetic ears probably sick to death of my kvetching, but the more I’m here the more I’m beginning to realize that there just isn’t that much interest in classical music around here. This is the city of hip-hop, and, increasingly, film. Maybe it’s time to diversify. If anyone knows any hip-hop artists who need to spice up their beats with some sick classical piano licks, hit me up. I’ll be here, getting older and not feeling a thing.

#tired

Jan 9, 2018

A change is (maybe) gonna come

“So this is the new year

And I don’t feel any different”

And I really don’t. We are now a week and a half into this arbitrary new metric of time, and I’m here quoting a song that I’ve been listening to for half my life. I’m still blogging in fits and spurts like I’ve been doing since the good old days of Livejournal. I’m still idealistic and temperamental and confused as ever, and in many ways infinitely more so. I have reached new heights (depths?) of laziness and procrastination, my previous physical immobility spilling over into a psychological apathy that is equal parts ennui and curiosity at just how long I can put things off before it starts to feel dangerous. Like a sick game of truth or dare I’m always playing with myself. With all this time at my disposal and a dearth of impending deadlines, that constant fear that used to nip at my heels has subsided, but who knew fear was such a necessary motivator for me? Unhealthy, sure, but vital. Without fear egging me on, that emotional manifestation of the recurring nightmare where I’m about to play Rach 3 or Prok 3 or ‘tok 3 (OK that one’s a stretch) onstage but have no idea how it goes, I’m just stuck somewhere between the start and finish line, languishing in slow motion while everyone races by me in real time. I know I must be waiting for something, but the answers never come.

#newyear #oldme #deathcab

Dec 11, 2017

Gotta hurry up and jot all this down before I run out of coffee and the manic episode subsides

Now that I’ve begun a self-imposed regimen of partial mobility (unbeknownst to my doctor and to the chagrin and bemusement of my saintly boyfriend, who is doing his best to be a supportive boyfriend and a non-judgmental doctor), a glimmer of hope has been reintroduced into my daily routine. I’ve once again resumed planning for future projects. The apartment has returned to an acceptable level of tidiness, even though it still takes me nearly twice as long to hobble around putting things away and placing them in pleasing perpendicular angles to one another. (I know I have many issues, and I should probably see someone about them, but since I can’t afford that, this blog will have to do. The eternal void that is the Internet shall be my therapist, and we’ll be collectively worse off once this is all over.)

I’ve been having a lot of thoughts, as is my wont when I have oodles of downtime wherein my idling brain, naturally ambitious and prone to dissatisfaction with its present circumstances whatever they happen to be, itches to make contact with a tangible, meaningful goal. I thought back to the last time I allowed myself to be truly creative, without fear of rejection, failure, or boredom. You know when that was? Over a decade ago. I must have been 13-14-15, right after I dropped out of middle school and before I began preparing for music school auditions. Every new day brought an unbridled output of reading, writing, drawing, every day, for hours on end, I didn’t have an agenda and wasn’t worried about who would see my work or whether or not I was going to make any money with it. None of those projects ever really amounted to anything–I have always been my own worst critic and had a bad habit of abandoning writing projects halfway through because I thought they were no good–but the fact is I was doing it, every day, writing, sketching, experimenting with all sorts of media. I worked on a sweeping epic fantasy novel with a royal female protagonist. It was, in my delusional fifteen-year-old mind, a hybrid of Ken Follett and J.K. Rowling. (When Eragon was published, I remembered feelings of jealousy and contempt upon learning that the author had been in his teens.) I dabbled with charcoals and pastels and photography. I tried to teach myself Photoshop before it was even really a thing.

That unabashed creative license, free from the restrictions imposed by adulthood (and shielded from the distractions of Facebook and Netflix) made those years some of the happiest of my life. Then I grew up. My focus shifted and narrowed, and I set aside those other creative passions in favor of music. I’ve often thought about picking up those old hobbies again, dusting off the old chops and building up that old callous I used to have on my finger from holding a pencil so often. Something always held me back; either a fear that I would be wasting my time, that it would detract from my musical pursuits, or perhaps that I would discover I wasn’t good enough to cut it, and it would no longer bring me joy. And here I think we are arriving at the main thesis of my perfectionist persona that has been holding me back for all this time: I am good at the things I enjoy, but what if I only enjoy them because I am good at them?

I have no regrets with my decision to focus on music, but lately I have wondered if perhaps my relinquishment of those other artistic outlets was premature. I have always and will continue to believe that music is a universal language that is able to transcend the bounds of perceptible thought. But what good is a language when no one is listening? Maybe it’s time to switch the method of communication.

#epiphany #maniccynicism #nostalgia

Dec 8, 2017

This rant brought to you by Lagavulin

I broke my ankle hiking a month ago, but it feels like years have passed since I was able to move around with ease and run and jump without fear of breaking something. Has it only been a month? Limited mobility is a drag I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

OK, the Scotch has taken the edge off a little bit already, so this rant isn’t going to be as animated as it would have been had I been writing twenty minutes ago from the parking lot that was 10th St. Allow me to explain.

It snowed in Atlanta today. And by snowed, I mean an hour and a half of steady flurries bookended by mild to moderate rain. Definitely unpleasant, but nothing catastrophic. But judging by the poor display of driving I saw on my way to and from Emory this afternoon, you’d think the apocalypse was nigh. Keep in mind that the drivers in this city are terrible under the best meteorological circumstances. Add a little frosted cloud powder to the equation and it’s unmitigated chaos. It took me 45 minutes to drive four miles (plus another fifteen minute walk from the garage to the performing arts center, in slippery snow-slush, on a broken ankle no less, shhh don’t tell my doctor) to have a five minute meeting where I was basically just told a bunch of stuff I already knew. Then another 45 minute drive home.

I know this is all sounding very grandparent-y, when-I-was-your-age-I-walked-twenty-miles-uphill-in-a-blizzard-both-ways kind of ornery, but that’s how I feel right now. I have no reason to, because even in my crippled state I’ve managed to find some work and continue to book gigs and more or less doing OK for myself. I knew the process would be slow, and I honestly didn’t expect to start getting work as early as I did. But I am not a patient person, and this ankle fracture coupled with trying to start over in a new city has been an exercise in infinite patience. I’ll get through it, if it doesn’t kill me first.

#rant #Scotch #broken

Nov 10, 2017

Cleaning House

With powerful men in Hollywood dropping like flies amid a relentless barrage of accusations of sexual misconduct varying in hue from Harassment Chartreuse to Assault Hangover-Poop-Black, it leads me to wonder how many other fields will follow suit (the glaring exception being the executive branch of our government, which is apparently exempt from even the most basic laws of humanity, much less morality or actual judiciary law).

The music business, after all, is just another branch of the entertainment field, and though classical musicians are held to an invisible loftier standard, anyone who’s watched a handful of “Mozart in the Jungle” episodes or been to any classical summer music festival anywhere in the world would beg to drastically lower said standard.

Classical music is teeming with a cast of temperamental, perverse, whimsical, sexually repressed-and/or-depraved maniacs (and I proudly include myself in this crowd) who are somehow egotistical and delusional enough to think that an intelligent, discerning portion of the population care about what they have to say or play. Sounds like Hollywood, right? But the nascent history of Hollywood male indiscretion, barely a century old, is a mere fledgling compared to the hundreds of years men–re: old white men–have dominated the classical music industry, shaping its course, abusing their power and stifling countless voices along the way.

I’ve been in the business long enough to hear countless sickening stories, and have even collected a few of my own. I’m not ready to share them yet, but this power imbalance has shaped the very way I interact with colleagues and potential clients. Finding that I have to be polite and sweet to people I find morally (and musically) reprehensible because they hold the key to the gigs. Wondering if I’m only being hired based on my visual appeal rather than my musical ability. I have been luckier than most. For the most part I have been fortunate to have older male mentors who have respected me as a musician first, and have championed my playing because they believed in my art. But it only takes one person to shatter that illusion, to make you feel like an object, something to be looked at and not heard. Even people who mean well, their comments leave indelible grooves in the psyche: “Your playing is fantastic, and it doesn’t hurt that you’re so pretty!” It’s a compliment. And it’s belittling.

I am both thrilled and appalled by the men and women who have spoken out against their aggressors; thrilled because it’s about damn time, appalled by the sheer number of incidents, and the unspoken implication of countless more behind the scenes who, like me, aren’t ready or willing to talk about it just yet. Let this be a call to arms. I hear you. We hear you. Speak.

#louisCK #harveyweinstein #kevinspacey #etc #etcetc #etcetcetc #classicalmusicsdirtylittlesecret #oldwhitedudesinpower #why #Imaybealittleangry

Nov 2, 2017

Mea culpa, Dear Reader

At least it wasn’t quite as long as my last hiatus.

I’ve been a little busy! Since June, I have been to Iceland, the Czech Republic, France, Austria, San Jose, Atlanta, North Carolina, New York, Detroit, Maine, St. Louis, Hawaii, D.C., Norfolk, Richmond, China, San Francisco, Spokane, and Baltimore. I officially moved to Atlanta in September.

Frankly, I’m a little terrified. In Baltimore I had a built-in network of school and friends and colleagues. Finding work was easy. The living was easy. Everybody knew my name. Baltimore was my “Summertime” and “Cheers”, since we’re mixing aphorisms. So naturally I got bored with it and decided a change was in order.

So Michael Bae (get ready for a lot more where that came from, Internet) and I moved to an amazing high-rise in the heart of midtown with ridiculous skyline views and amenities up the wazoo. (Up? Out? Was always confused as to the direction of wazoo content emanation.) There have been consecutive days where, when I get busy with practicing, I don’t even leave the building. The gym’s upstairs, the free coffee machine is downstairs, and I trot merrily to and fro in my luxury hamster wheel, vacillating between learning a bunch of notes and despairing that I’ll never find work again. Baeowulf* has been patient and supportive throughout, and we have never been closer.

Life is great. Truly. I’m only being half sarcastic. This shake-up was exactly what I needed to get me out of the unmotivated funk in which I’d been festering. My eternal grass-is-greener mentality will always try to sabotage me by convincing me that I made the wrong move. My early precocity and eagerness to please blossomed into a paralyzing perfectionist streak that prevented me from attempting anything unless I was certain to excel at it. Unfortunately, that meant that I simply didn’t even try for fear of failure and rejection.

That ends now, hopefully. (Hey, we’re making breakthroughs, but we still gotta be realistic.) I will do better. I will try harder. Starting with updating this blog more regularly, even if I’m the only person who reads it, which, judging by my Google Analytics page, is highly probable.

*Told you.

#changes #breakthrough #Baethoven

May 25, 2017

Style > Substance (?)

I am thisclose to deleting my Facebook.

The social media platform has always been a bottom-feeding time succubus, rife with attention-starved sycophants, starting with silly collegiate antics in the mid-aughts and these days populated more and more with older people sharing disgusting food videos and chain emails circa 1998. Then, ever since the Mephistophelean circus that was last year’s presidential election, all of a sudden Facebook was overrun with couch activists on both sides of the aisle screaming into an incorrigible void until my news feed resembled the Greatest Hits of Pathetic Youtube Comments Brought to You By Trolls ‘R Us.

We have reached a tipping point where we are bombarded by so much information at such alarming rates, most of it trivial, at best harmless and at worst humanity-condemning, that there is no possible hope of taming the beast. We have already gone over the brink. The center cannot hold.

One of these days I’ll gather enough courage to pull off the Facebook Band-Aid instead of letting said Band-Aid sort of half-dangle as I mindlessly pick at the never-healed scab. When that day finally comes I will toss the Band-Aid into the trash, relish my newfound freedom until the pain becomes too unbearable, and promptly proceed to dress the gaping wound with an Instagram tourniquet.

#facebook

May 16, 2017

I Should Be Doing A Million Other Things

After a chilly first half of May, summer arrived with a sweaty vengeance this morning as I ran early morning errands and tried to organize my life before the Big Migration.

Now I sit, pantsless, clad only in the boyfriend’s oversized T-shirt, sipping hot lemon water and Chinese tea, enjoying the green sunlight filtered through the trees in the park, enjoying the relative quiet, enjoying this perfect apartment; one of the last times I will do so.

Summer brings a peripatetic lifestyle of European adventures and California weddings and various concerts and doubtless lack of sleep and my first foray into homelessness and living out of a suitcase for at least two months. The flighty, possession-loathing part of me rejoices. The safe, rational, levelheaded part of me wonders if I should be taking more precautions and planning a bit better. But the flighty, possession-loathing part of me pushes the other part out of the way, throws all her stuff into the garbage, hops on a plane, and says good night and good luck to rational thinking.

#summer #migration

Apr 20, 2017

Slow and steady; Newtonian musings

I’m always teetering on a precipice between action and ennui. If an object at rest stays at rest for too long, can it ever gain enough momentum to catch up? The over-confident hare thought he had the answer to this, but we all know how that turned out.

Mar 24, 2017

Hiatus from hiatus

Can it really even be called a hiatus after seven months of neglect? Are there any readers left? Were there ever any to begin with? Is this blog the equivalent of the proverbial tree falling in the forest? Hello, forest. I’m back.

Upon reopening this abandoned chronicle, I found a saved, unpublished draft from September about my adventures dog-sitting for my parents. It’s been so long since I last posted that that dog has been gone (RIP Callie, you were a good dog even when you were a terrible dog) for going on five months. In the interim, life continues to vacillate between humdrum routine and wild, unpredictable change. The irony is, no one really points out how much humdrum routine is actually involved when trying to achieve wild, unpredictable change. Ah, the magical mundanity of bureaucracy.

Onward and upward! See you in another seven months.

Aug 16, 2016

Siren song

In a turbulent sea of uncertainty, your instinct is to cling to the raft of routine, hoping it will guide you safely home to shore when in reality there is no shore, no safety, no home, just never-ending sea, an endless expanse of wonderful doubt and questions, so you might as well dive in and go for a swim.

Jul 6, 2016

Reading Kathryn Schulz’s “Being Wrong” Is Messing With My Brain In The Most Horrible Way

This might just be the maca powder that I mixed into my morning parfait talking, or the physio/psycho-logical anticipation that builds from the sensation of having to pee really bad (I think I’ve drunk no fewer than three pots of tea already this AM), or maybe I’m just on a manic upswing after spending the latter part of yesterday in the doldrums (which I inexplicably proceeded to remedy by watching, back-to-back, two of the most one-two-gut-punch-faith-in-humanity-shattering films in recent memory–Room and Spotlight), but my mind is racing with several new project ideas that I need to hurry up and start working on before I let them slip by like the countless opportunities that have been carried away in time’s ambling but relentless current while I sit passively on my log of security, stubbornly moored to my fears of failure/success/rejection/acceptance while the cacophony of creative pursuits–currently a jumble of story ideas and writing pitches and repertoire selections and French verb conjugations–crescendos in my head, desperately clamoring, like the pee in my bladder, for release and relief.

Jun 30, 2016

Too much of a good thing

Even as the world crumbles around me, my week has been a good one, replete with friends and food and pool parties and getting lost on a hike while trampling through dense, thorny underbrush ‘neath driving rain, and practicing and reading and shopping and bourbon and late nights and Netflix and catching up on sleep. It’s so easy to grow complacent and impatient with this leisurely lifestyle as I try to battle the human nature of being dissatisfied with one’s circumstances, whatever they may be. Even as I write this, I recognize that this post is positively Livejournalesque in terms of quality of content (re: angsty teen whining about nonexistent woes), but I’m going to stet it because dammit, this is my blog, and if my vapid writing prompts are the worst of my problems, I think I’m doing OK.

Now I think I’ll take a bike ride down to a little bakery in Fells Point and while away the afternoon with coffee and a book.

#summer #sleepyhappy

Jun 23, 2016

Resignation

My general preference is to refrain from political discourse in this forum, since there’s something decidedly Stalinist about commingling art with politics, but I feel the need to break that rule for just a second to express my bitter outrage, profound sadness, and complete lack of surprise at the events currently unfolding in this country.

It is a cloudy, mild Thursday with a chance of afternoon rain. I am sitting at my desk. Coffee buzzes pleasantly through my bloodstream. Birds chirp outside the window. The unmistakeable growl of a fleet of police helicopters circling above Mount Vernon Square permeates this otherwise tranquil landscape.

The verdict just came in this morning: the officer driving the police van in which Freddie Gray died was found not guilty of all charges. So now, the city erupts. Rightly so. Sirens scream, a metaphorical voice of blatant injustice once again falling on deaf ears. The jackhammery flapping of the whirlybirds drowns out the helpless cries of the real birds and the tweets of the indignant masses. Forty-five minutes away in the District of Columbia, the Senate has devolved into complete chaos as our lawmakers continue to shirk their duties by refusing to pass gun-control measures in the wake of the latest massacre du jour and fleeing the Capitol in the dead of night like the spineless cowards that they are.

I wish I could say that I was shocked and saddened by the events in Orlando, and by the Goodson verdict, and by the bullheaded refusal of the powers that be in our government to affect any sort of positive sociopolitical change, but the grim truth is that I have become so desensitized to this dystopian reality we live in that it’s hard for me to feel much of anything anymore. Of course I am angry. But it is a quiet, simmering anger, and I am the frog in the pot, numb and dumb to the fact that I am being slowly boiled alive.

Or–since we are dabbling in bleak animal metaphors–I am the ostrich, burying my head in the sand of Chopin, Sartre, shopping, and Shaun T. I will continue to go about my daily routine as if everything around me were perfectly normal, and you know what? It is. This is the new normal, this chaos, this rage. My once youthful, politically active naivete has been displaced by a world-weary cynicism. As I see it, after the helicopter dust settles, it will be business as usual. Nothing will change. And if the rest of the country refuses to change, why should I?

#cynicism #tired #FreddieGray #Orlando #dystopia #anger #helplessness

May 23, 2016

Summer Skin; Plans

That’ll teach me to drink coffee at 8pm.

Tonight, in an attempt to combat low barometric pressure-induced lethargy and wade through an insurmountable amount of music, I sipped some of the stuff after a near week-long hiatus from it, and that is how I got here, huddled under the covers ’round midnight but wide awake, the glow of the yellow light-filtered computer screen casting a sepia shadow over my stupid blank face as I feverishly make travel plans and career plans and online shop and Google “private mortgage insurance” and await with caffeinated anticipation the adventures of the impending summer.

#deathcabforcutie #decafforcoffee #summer

Apr 15, 2016

All the feels

Sometimes a piece of writing can incite inspiration and spark imagination, the sheer scope of its brilliance motivating you to achieve similar greatness in your own work. Other times you read something so cleverly crafted yet accessible that it provokes envy, equal parts admiration and disgust, feelings of I-could-have-written-this-why-didn’t-I-think-of-this. You read on with the morbid curiosity of one who delights in ego-deflation. Once you reach the ending, doubtless containing that perfectly-worded summation which seems both revelatory and inexorable, you fling the piece down defiantly, experiencing a mixture of relief, loss, exhaustion. You feel the need for a cigarette or perhaps a nap.

#inspiration #masochism #writing #everyarticleyoureadintheNewYorker

Apr 13, 2016

Spring in your step

One moment you are trapped in a waking nightmare of unceasing work, feeling all sorts of futilistic about the absurdity of the Sisyphean tasks on your docket, wondering whether any of it makes any sort of difference, feeling grumpy or, worse, utterly numb, unsatisfied with your personal relationships and your inability of late to connect with anyone in a meaningful way, feeling bored, unfulfilled, unchallenged, unmotivated, all the un’s.

Then the sun, warm and ebullient, offers you its hand, and you allow yourself to take a walk under its benevolence, soak in the minty scent of fresh lawn clippings, admire the shy audacity of nascent crocuses. You climb a tree. You are out of practice–it’s been years–but you do it anyway. The bark rubs grouchily against your skin, scatter-plotting your arms with bruises and tearing a sizeable chunk out of your palm flesh. You don’t care. You are exhilarated. After that you get coffee and your spirits are further lifted.

#coffee #climbingtrees #walking #spring

Apr 6, 2016

Human Conditioning

Caught in an endless loop of working too much and being cranky about not having any time off, and when I do, panicking that I’m not working enough and wishing I could be more productive. I know I ain’t special. Everyone feels this way; we have a national workaholic epidemic on our hands. Until we stop treating busy-ness as a badge of honor, we’re just going to feel terrible about ourselves until our ulcers finally burst and drown us in a torrent of stomach acid and unshakable malaise.

#work

Mar 19, 2016

A Warm Gun

Saturday late morning, cloudy, mid-40’s, sitting in my quiet apartment double-fisting hot lemon water and tieguanyin tea, the kind that comes in those vacuum-sealed baggies, and that look like contraband. It could just be the HIIT high talking, my muscles so spent from a morning of kettle-belling and mountain-climbing that they’ve left me in a contented stupor, but I’d like to snapshot this moment in my life because it may well be the last time where I’ll feel as if I truly, pardon the cliche, have it all.

That’s not meant to sound as dramatic as it does, and that moment could last a month, or it could last for years. But here we are, staunchly planted in 2016, and here I am, wavering around the beginning of the end of my mid-twenties, and I’ve somehow conned people into giving me a living wage for the most improbable of services. Playing music? How quaint. How bourgeois. Sometimes it feels as if I’m playing a huge trick on everyone, and they just haven’t wised up to it yet.

In my spare time I read (lately it’s been Knausgaard, couldn’t you tell?), and have dinner parties and chamber music salons, and occasionally engage in that most curious custom that is mainly the purview of basic white girls, brunch, and every month or so I make sure to take a mini-vacation somewhere (I call them my disappearances) to appease my insatiable wanderlust. My personal life is, to paraphrase Ron Swanson, “Epic. And private.”

All this to say that, cynic though I may be, I am generally a pretty happy person, so the next time I find myself pummeling down a social media shame spiral, I should direct myself to this post and tell myself to snap out of it and go eat some avocado toast.

Jan 24, 2016

Hygge

All quiet. The sun peeks through the blinds like a tentative visitor. It woke me from my ravenous slumber and I stumbled downstairs to put on the kettle, eyes swollen with sleep, body practically levitating from the happiness that is ten hours of shut-eye and an obligation-free weekend.

Yesterday as the snow fell I morphed into a pajama-clad creature of productivity, vacuuming, dusting, cooking, practicing, quietly gulping pot after pot of tea with “Making a Murderer” as intermittent background soundtrack and engrossing companion (albeit a rather bleak one). Bread was baked. Clothing was organized. Every now and then I would glance out the windows, the blinds rolled all the way up so as to get the full effect of the snowscape, and cluck disapprovingly at the poor saps who thought it’d be a good idea to go play outside in the middle of a blizzard. Silly rabbits. Then I would shuffle off in my fuzzy slippers to go dust another bookshelf.

During the night, an anonymous good Samaritan took it upon himself to scrape the snow off my car, so now it sits conspicuously naked among columns of giant oblong marshmallows.

#snow #happy #WinterofChoo #Blizzard2016

Jan 22, 2016

Snow Laughing Matter

Faithful readers (all two and a half of them) of this word receptacle will recall how I tend to wax romantic about snow days. That proclivity has not diminished; if anything, it’s grown even stronger, inversely proportional to my aversion of late to all other things romantic. The snow day is the mistress of the status quo–an affair with one’s regularly scheduled life, deliciously clandestine, like cheating time itself. Stolen solitude.

The snow hasn’t yet begun, but the air is thick with an entire city’s dread and/or excitement for the impending blizzard. They are already saying it will rival the storm of 2010, and I sure hope it does. I hope it starts snowing and never stops. I’m all set to hunker down and hibernate for a very long time. A leisurely morning of reading Bach partitas gave way to a high intensity gym session (bike+row+Shaun T should be the new Ironman, IMO). Now, fueled by Indian buffet and strong coffee, I’ve got some laundry going and am about to commence mopping and vacuuming. Practice, read, write, lather, rinse, repeat. I might organize my closet and do a clothing purge. I might finally get around to scrubbing the grout in my bathroom.

You see, I’ve got big plans.

I’ve got ingredients for tomato soup and grilled cheese on slices of homemade bread, and chocolate chip cookies, and mulled cider. There are plenty of candles in case the power goes out. Doesn’t yoga by candlelight sound like just about the most yuppie activity you’ve ever heard of? Tant pis, because that might need to happen.

I could soliloquize on how the snow is a metaphor for blank slates and fresh starts and–as the first few flakes begin to flutter outside my window–is very much a representation of my ambitions for the coming year, but these comparisons are well-trod and I won’t bore my 2.5 readers with my second rate attempts at allusion. Besides, it’s time to toss the laundry in the dryer and carry on with my wintry tryst.

#snow #happy #WinterofChoo

Jan 11, 2016

Hope

The novelty of the young year has yet to wear off, so even as I shiver under layers of sweater and cup my chapped hands around countless mugs of tea while the bleak midwinter wind challenges my beleaguered heater to another duel, I bask in the warmth of optimism and new opportunity. Just as Mr. Costanza announced his “Summer of George,” I hereby proclaim this the “Winter of Choo.” First orders of business: wrap myself inside a hot bath and catch up on some reading and some zees. Downtime is the scurf of productivity.

#plans #WinterofChoo

Nov 17, 2015

Sentiment

This post is a treacly one, runneth over with sentimentality and rife with platitudes. If you are lucky enough, as I am, to have people in your life who inspire you, challenge you, light a fire in your belly and motivate you to think deeper, create more, and see out of a different lens, then for the love of all that is right and good hang on to them and appreciate their existence every day, forever and ever amen. Life’s too short to fritter away your time with dull folk. Keep learning, for the moment you lose your thirst for knowledge is the moment you stop growing and start dying.

Stay thirsty, my friends. (But please, refrain from quenching that thirst with margaritas, because the result will be this agave-sweetened ode to how great everyone in my life is, and who the hell likes to read about happy people, anyway?)

#grateful #friends #margs

Oct 15, 2015

Doubt

Funny how self-sabotage works. One day you’re waking up and going for a run and having that first cup of coffee while autumn sunlight bathes your apartment in hope and possibilities–because, after all, that light is just a metaphor for your future; bright, full of potential–and your endorphins are off-the-chain nutso and you dance naked in the mirror to feminist hip-hop. Euphoric and ambitious, you are convinced you will one day save the world with your words and music and killer abs. Then you put on your grown-up suit and head off to work, another long twelve-hour drop in the bucket amongst a sea of buckets.

The next day, during your lunch break, you are sitting on a sun-drenched park bench in a wooded glen, and you are questioning everything. In your quest to remain financially solvent, have you lost your way creatively? Do you find joy in your day-to-day work anymore? Is it hindering your world-saving quest? Sure, you can afford to travel and buy nice things, but the catch-22 is that you’re so busy you have no time for any of it. And after a string of endless twelve-hour days, it’s hard to get home and still have enough energy for world-saving pursuits of happiness.

You realize these thoughts are no different than those of every other first-world millennial on this side of ever. And now you’re late for work.

P.S. May be time for a website overhaul…stay tuned.

Jul 29, 2015

Bask

Lazy days in Richmond filled with beer and Malaysian ramen and tater tots and excellent friends gave way to stunning alpine vistas and playing music under tents, in the open air, mornings spent traipsing around the Blue Ridge Mountains, maybe a rehearsal or two in the afternoon, some reading by the pool, then retreating in the gray crepuscule to your sprawling log cabin in the woods (built ca. 1837) for simmering mugs of spiced tea and an immodest dose of HGTV.

Returning to Baltimore thrusts you right into the midst of its Pride festivities, a symphony of sweat and skin, stickily hugging friends spied along the parade route, dizzily dancing through the blur of color and pleather and feather, all vibrant with love and melting slightly under the afternoon sun. Sunday was spent poolside in the ruins of an old mill, converted into businesses and restaurants and a Roman-inspired swimming area.

Dinner parties with vibrant summer produce, fresh berries and cream, baking blueberry pie, lounging around a pool overlooking a sprawling field, watching a family of deer graze a stone’s throw from you as you graze on hummus and sip on rosé and beautiful conversation, then drink in beautiful-er serenades of Chopin nocturnes ’round midnight, sambuca for a nightcap, in bed way past your bedtime but it’s fine because you have a whole day to relax and nap and have dreadfully dull musings on the beauty of your neighborhood, its cobblestones slick and saturated from a summer storm, the park quiet save for a stray dog walker.

You lament the twilight of July, for August brings the beginning of the end of summer, and you’ve never been good with endings of any kind.

#summer #happy #Richmond #Baltimore

Jul 16, 2015

Calliope’s Muse

Nostalgia has always had a profound effect on me, to the point where I am unable to objectively discern “good” from “bad”. Case in point: as I sit here with my morning tea, sifting through the organizational nightmare that is my iTunes library, trying to build a road trip playlist for next week, one in every few tracks conjures up a fond memory. Sometimes the memory is concrete; I can’t pass up The Doors without thinking of driving around town in the summer of 2005, sixteen and newly-licensed, staying out past curfew, blasting “Light My Fire” through the overworked car stereo. Sometimes I just feel an ephemeral warm fuzziness; Damien Rice’s “Cannonball” plaintively wailing about a time in my life when my main musical influence was Seth Cohen from “The OC”. The tracks themselves may or may not be aligned with my current musical tastes, but that is beside the point. And lest I digress into a soapbox-mounting sermon on the intricate subtleties of subjectivity in music, which I shall save for another time (perhaps when I’ve imbibed something a bit stronger than tea), I will simply reiterate that taste goes out the window when nostalgia comes into play.

A garage punk band from St. Louis that I was certain I had “discovered” (not to brag, but I was a hipster before it was cool. Then I came to my senses). An electronic mix made by an ex-boyfriend, back in the nascence of autotune. An alt-rock track that I would blast every morning as an alarm during college, which I’m sure drove my roommate crazy. None are necessarily musically good or bad, but all fall into the same category of “This song played a role in my personal development, therefore it is good”.

So, needless to say, this playlist is quickly turning into an aural representation of the show “Hoarders”.

#music #nostalgia #roadtrip

Jun 29, 2015

Omen

Soft like fingers gliding through silk hair, the breeze lilts and dips, whispers in your ear like sweet nothings from a sylph, playfully retreats, returns with urgency like an impatient pet tugging on the hem of your skirt. The clouds today are something right out of a Vermeer, blanketing the sky with puffs of angry god gray, backlit by diffused golden sunlight. Lazy and warm, catnaps and light reading and coziness, the embodiment of the Danish “hygge”. Life is wonderful and everything is going right and you’re fit to burst from wave after wave of dizzying happiness so why do you still sit around with that nagging feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop why oh why do you do that stop that.

Jun 4, 2015

Breather

Ah, the return of the summer schedule. That harried, underfed me in my last post is but a distant unrecognizable memory, dethroned by a lazy, hedonistic thrill-seeker with summer fever and boatloads of free time. (Thrill-seeker is perhaps a bit of a rhetorical stretch, since my idea of thrilling is baking pies while top-lung-jamming out to Stevie Wonder, and having enough time in my day to read multiple New Yorker articles.)

Catching up with old friends, making new ones, eating oodles of good food (summer produce is vibrant and irresistible, second only to fall produce, and very often it’s a toss-up), imbibing a bounty of beautiful wines and spirits, waking up before the alarm, leisurely breakfasts, reading, gymming, Netflixing. (Finally hopped on the Breaking Bad-wagon, and what a ride it has been. Three episodes to go in Season 4. What’s that I just heard? Oh, that would be the collective “Ohhhh shit” of those in the know. Yeah, yeah, I know. I ain’t seen nothing yet. Just I wait.)

#summer #happy

Apr 18, 2015

Home Stretch

This month is one long, unbroken chain of rehearsals and work and more rehearsals and concerts and other concerts and do not think I’m complaining because I am definitely not because I get to play glorious music all day long and for some reason I’m being paid to do it, so I rush from one event to the next subsisting on naught but water and KIND bars (the most effective diet is the one where you literally do not have time to eat real meals) but there’s a spring in my step and spring’s in the air, the windows are flung open always and the sun is brilliant and my piano is finally tuned and now I have about forty precious minutes to practice before I have to head to the second concert of the day (one down, two to go) and then there’ll be a nice, heavy glass of Scotch waiting for me at the end of the finish line.

#music #Scotch

Apr 10, 2015

Between the lines

What a terrible burden

It is

To go through life feeling

As though

Everyone is expecting

Something

Of you.

Mar 26, 2015

C8H10N4O2

For me, coffee and productivity go hand in hand. On the rare days that I allow myself to drink it, I seem to accomplish everything. Fueled by a mere twelve ounces of this mysterious, mercurial nectar, I go from 6am workouts to rehearsals to work to house-cleaning to laundry to practicing to cooking to more rehearsals without so much as a heavy-lidded eye or drowsy head nod. But because of its numerous adverse effects on me, I seldom partake of the stuff. So according to the transitive property, productivity and I very much do not go hand in hand. It is a misfortune that distresses me greatly.

#coffee #coffeecoffee