I can't handle alcohol the way I used to be able to. One beer and I'm pleasantly warm. Two, I want to curl up and go to sleep. I don't bother with liquor any more, really--it's too expensive and too easy to drink just a little more than I should and get dizzy (the point of dizziness happens much earlier these days, as well).
How did I get to be so domestic? Maybe it's just the after-effect of extreme busyness in my everyday life, and the feeling of laziness that sets in immediately upon returning home. Sometimes people ask me if I'd like to go out and, honestly, I'd rather have a nap. I've been more regimented about my schoolwork lately, especially this final research project which is taking over my life. I've set up a system of rewards for manageable tasks, such as, "You can go get a glass of orange juice once you've finished reading this scholarly article," or "When this outline is finished, you can watch another hour of the new BBC adaptation of Emma." I try to keep fruit and granola and yogurt in the house, because that's what I crave when I'm stressed, but if I'm especially hungry, I can be bothered to manage a passable tuna curry couscous. I ought to knit more--I've just sold another hat on my Etsy shop this weekend and one of the baristas at the coffee shop I was in this morning came over to mention that she loved my fingerless mittens and asked if I had a card so she could possibly order a pair as a gift. I was on a tear this winter when I had so little to do, but now my life consists mainly of sleep-coffee-work-research-sleep, so I might need to block out more time to make a significant dent in my stash before I have to move.
(And I just stopped typing for a full twenty minutes to look at intarsia charts on Ravelry. Nerd, nerd, nerd.)
The arduous process of job- and apartment-hunting has begun again, well in advance of my cross-country move. To do this week? Revise resume. Write cover letter. Send resume and cover letter to prospective employer. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. And as for apartment hunting, I'm talking to friends who either live in Seattle or know people who do, and hoping to find a room-share, because I never want to pay $800/month for an apartment again, as long as I can help it. At least not while buying cheese is an activity which demands a substantial amount of financial planning-ahead (cheese is expensive).
And in the meantime, there's this bloody research project to worry about. I have promised my adviser two to three completed lecture outlines by Thursday, which means that the next two nights are effectively blocked off for study-times. How do I work Libby Larsen's Try Me, Good King into a lecture about female composers in the 20th century? What are the notable features of Poulenc's Tel Jour, Telle Nuit? How on earth am I going to frame an argument that Hugo Wolf's Lieder are composed with minimalist sensibilities? At least identifying and cataloging Baroque ornaments won't be terribly complicated, and there's a substantial amount of research that's already been done on the construction of a 19th-century operatic Mad Scene. Good grief, academia. You're going to kill me.
The anxiety dreams are back, of course. Two nights ago, I dreamed that I murdered someone who had been harassing me on the street, and then had to hide the body by burning it. I am sure that my subconscious is trying to alert me to the fact that I feel trapped in a bad situation, and extremely limited in my abilities to deal with it. I woke up knowing that it was a dream, thank goodness, since I'm barely capable of crushing a spider (I usually try to trap them and free them outside, bleeding heart that I am), but the feeling of having been forced by circumstance into doing something far outside my moral code haunted me all day yesterday, and made it difficult to sleep. I don't know what I dreamed last night, but this morning my quilt was all askew, and one of my socks was missing. I keep saying to myself, you're standing on third and there's just ninety feet between you and home plate, all you need is a base hit to right field and you'll be able to make it home. The anxiety, and the dreams that inevitably accompany it, has an end-point, and the expiration date on this emotional mess is 3 July. So this is me, pushing through the final six weeks of my graduate degree and hoping to God that I don't lose my mind before I'm a Master of Music.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Pile of Good Things; or, Trusting the Doctor
The way I see it, every life is a pile of good things and bad things. Hey. (hugs Amy) The good things don't always soften the bad things, but vice-versa, the bad things don't necessarily spoil the good things and make them unimportant. -Doctor Who, 5x10: "Vincent and the Doctor"
The strangest thing: I realized recently that, for the first time ever, I am happy where I am employed. Reason number a-whole-lot for this: my supervisor, who smiles almost constantly, takes pictures of beautiful things with her iPhone to share with other people, and who today, upon coming back from lunch, set a two-headed dandelion on the circulation desk and inquired whether I was at all religious, and, if so, whether I thought there was a philosophical reason for unusual and wonderful things like that dandelion or if I believed, like her, that things are sometimes "good for no reason."
And maybe they are, you know? Maybe, in the same way that good things can happen for no reason, sometimes the bad things that happen aren't the result of some misdeed or sin of our own, but truly random. It has been my opinion for some time now that whatever higher intelligence exists, it is more of an architect than an author: the pieces have been put in place and the experiment has been set into motion, but our actions are our own, and our future is based on the consequences (good or bad) of our decisions, not on some predetermined path set before us at birth by some old bearded man living in the sky.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the Pile of Good Things, and trying to focus on that. Yesterday, I turned 25 years old, I am preparing to move across the country--again--and the uncertainty of not having a place to live or a job in my new home is terrifying. But there are so many good things in the world! These things are as small as getting to sleep in on Monday and Wednesday mornings or getting to walk past cherry blossoms on the Quad on my way to class, or as profound as listening to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony or reading the letters Van Gogh sent to his brother and thinking, someone, somewhere, who I have never met, got it. The final few weeks of my Masters Degree are going to be hectic and packed full, and it's remembering small, happy things that keep me motivated when I'm absolutely exhausted.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
What is that great yellow thing in the sky?
And very suddenly, after what seems like ages stuck under cloud cover and kept damp by a constant rain that sometimes dwindles to a drizzle and occasionally escalates to a torrent, the sun has returned to Seattle. It's quite warm again, not yet, but the presence of natural light is cheering. Last weekend I pulled up all of the blinds in my apartment and was reminded just how much sunlight my wall-of-windows lets in. I left them open and lay on the futon to nap like a cat stretched out in the sun.
At work, the circulation desk faces a wall of tall windows that look out onto the Quad, where the cherry trees are in bloom. The first day of sunlight, last Friday, the scene looked like a campus cook-out, minus the barbecues: students reading as they lay on blankets, cross-legged and eating lunch in the grass, taking photographs of each other perched in the branches of the trees among the blossoms. Sunday it was windy, and a large number of blossoms were blown off the trees and were carried around in the air like giant snowflakes. Yesterday, as I walked to work, I passed a rehearsing string quartet and an undergrad dressed like George Washington, pretending to chop down one of the cherry trees with a cardboard axe.
I often get frustrated with Seattle, but despite the overwhelming passive-aggression and the constant winter drizzle, one thing I love about this city is the fact that no one seems to take a sunny day for granted.
Paula and I have been about town lately, desperate to soak up as much culture as possible. In the past four days alone, we have seen a movie and a play, both deeply moving and in completely different ways.
I will admit to having been initially skeptical about The King's Speech, especially after it trounced my Oscar-favorite, True Grit (I was impressed with The Social Network, but it also failed to make me sympathize with any of the characters, and without that connection, I did not feel the film was as effective as it could have been). However, it was showing at the Metro across from my old apartment building, we had a free Saturday night, and Paula and I are both self-professed to have been born on the wrong continent. And, oh. My goodness. As she said to me after we had left the theater, "A movie has to make you really, really care about the characters immediately, or it spends the rest of its time trying to build up to that. And in his first speech, you're there. You hurt for him. You're Helena Bonham Carter, sitting there and wanting so badly to give him a hug, but you can't." The best thing about The King's Speech, I think, is that it could have been really, intensely dry, another costume-drama Merchant & Ivory biopic about the lives of British royalty. But it wasn't. Instead of presenting King George VI as an uptight royal with an unfortunate speech impediment, this film--and especially Colin Firth, who was heartbreaking--portrayed him as a man with a wife who loved and supported him, forced into a role he did not want by events beyond his control. The scene in which he reveals to Geoffrey Rush's character a major traumatic event from his childhood gutted me--it wasn't dwelt upon, but neither was it a one-off statement. One sung line, which I won't reveal here in case any of my three readers haven't seen the film yet, added an entire new aspect to the character.
And then there was Frankenstein.* Paula and I planned this excursion for weeks, and bought our tickets well in advance--good on us, as the performance we saw was completely sold out. Frankenstein was a recorded performance of the London National Theater production, directed by Danny Boyle (who, although he won an Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire, will always be "the fellow who directed 28 Days Later" to me), and starring Jonny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch, who alternated nightly the roles of Frankenstein and the Creature. Unlike The King's Speech, which broke my heart and then put it back together again so completely that I wanted to give the entire world a hug afterward, Frankenstein broke me down entirely and then kept going. There is an extended sequence at the very beginning of the play in which the Creature is "born" and then must learn quickly how to use his limbs--this is how the audience is drawn into immediate sympathy with him. When he finally manages to hold himself upright, the audience feels his sense of triumph. When he is immediately rejected by his horrified creator, who has not witnessed the rapidity of his ability to learn, we feel his despair. The troubling thing about being endeared to a character so quickly is that when the Creature begins to emulate what he perceives to be human action, seeking revenge against his abusers and committing unspeakable acts of violence (during one of which I had to hide my eyes, because I could not watch), the audience's collective gut gives a sudden wrench. Benedict Cumberbatch, whose sociopathic detective I loved in Sherlock, horrified me as the Creature, and exhausted me emotionally. This is, I'm sure, the effect Danny Boyle was hoping to create in his production, and I admire him for it. Also incredibly effective was the production's use of music--this is something at which Boyle's productions excel (I am thinking particularly of 28 Days Later and the scene in which the uninfected travel on foot to find Jim's parents, who they learn have committed suicide, all set to a solo female vocalist singing "Abide With Me" a capella). The sunrise. The sunrise! It was beautiful, even when you knew that everything was about to go terribly wrong. I was still very sad when I returned home from the theater, and needed to listen to Beethoven and look at the paintings of Van Gogh to even begin to set my emotions back to rights.
I'm feeling terribly philosophical today, but more or less at peace with the world. Maybe it's the sunlight and the flowers and the fact that I listened to the finale from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on the bus to work this morning. Either way, I am less concerned about how the events of this evening (recital jury, recital dress-rehearsal, &c.) will turn out.
*The trailer for Danny Boyle's Frankenstein can be seen here on YouTube.
At work, the circulation desk faces a wall of tall windows that look out onto the Quad, where the cherry trees are in bloom. The first day of sunlight, last Friday, the scene looked like a campus cook-out, minus the barbecues: students reading as they lay on blankets, cross-legged and eating lunch in the grass, taking photographs of each other perched in the branches of the trees among the blossoms. Sunday it was windy, and a large number of blossoms were blown off the trees and were carried around in the air like giant snowflakes. Yesterday, as I walked to work, I passed a rehearsing string quartet and an undergrad dressed like George Washington, pretending to chop down one of the cherry trees with a cardboard axe.
I often get frustrated with Seattle, but despite the overwhelming passive-aggression and the constant winter drizzle, one thing I love about this city is the fact that no one seems to take a sunny day for granted.
Paula and I have been about town lately, desperate to soak up as much culture as possible. In the past four days alone, we have seen a movie and a play, both deeply moving and in completely different ways.
I will admit to having been initially skeptical about The King's Speech, especially after it trounced my Oscar-favorite, True Grit (I was impressed with The Social Network, but it also failed to make me sympathize with any of the characters, and without that connection, I did not feel the film was as effective as it could have been). However, it was showing at the Metro across from my old apartment building, we had a free Saturday night, and Paula and I are both self-professed to have been born on the wrong continent. And, oh. My goodness. As she said to me after we had left the theater, "A movie has to make you really, really care about the characters immediately, or it spends the rest of its time trying to build up to that. And in his first speech, you're there. You hurt for him. You're Helena Bonham Carter, sitting there and wanting so badly to give him a hug, but you can't." The best thing about The King's Speech, I think, is that it could have been really, intensely dry, another costume-drama Merchant & Ivory biopic about the lives of British royalty. But it wasn't. Instead of presenting King George VI as an uptight royal with an unfortunate speech impediment, this film--and especially Colin Firth, who was heartbreaking--portrayed him as a man with a wife who loved and supported him, forced into a role he did not want by events beyond his control. The scene in which he reveals to Geoffrey Rush's character a major traumatic event from his childhood gutted me--it wasn't dwelt upon, but neither was it a one-off statement. One sung line, which I won't reveal here in case any of my three readers haven't seen the film yet, added an entire new aspect to the character.
And then there was Frankenstein.* Paula and I planned this excursion for weeks, and bought our tickets well in advance--good on us, as the performance we saw was completely sold out. Frankenstein was a recorded performance of the London National Theater production, directed by Danny Boyle (who, although he won an Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire, will always be "the fellow who directed 28 Days Later" to me), and starring Jonny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch, who alternated nightly the roles of Frankenstein and the Creature. Unlike The King's Speech, which broke my heart and then put it back together again so completely that I wanted to give the entire world a hug afterward, Frankenstein broke me down entirely and then kept going. There is an extended sequence at the very beginning of the play in which the Creature is "born" and then must learn quickly how to use his limbs--this is how the audience is drawn into immediate sympathy with him. When he finally manages to hold himself upright, the audience feels his sense of triumph. When he is immediately rejected by his horrified creator, who has not witnessed the rapidity of his ability to learn, we feel his despair. The troubling thing about being endeared to a character so quickly is that when the Creature begins to emulate what he perceives to be human action, seeking revenge against his abusers and committing unspeakable acts of violence (during one of which I had to hide my eyes, because I could not watch), the audience's collective gut gives a sudden wrench. Benedict Cumberbatch, whose sociopathic detective I loved in Sherlock, horrified me as the Creature, and exhausted me emotionally. This is, I'm sure, the effect Danny Boyle was hoping to create in his production, and I admire him for it. Also incredibly effective was the production's use of music--this is something at which Boyle's productions excel (I am thinking particularly of 28 Days Later and the scene in which the uninfected travel on foot to find Jim's parents, who they learn have committed suicide, all set to a solo female vocalist singing "Abide With Me" a capella). The sunrise. The sunrise! It was beautiful, even when you knew that everything was about to go terribly wrong. I was still very sad when I returned home from the theater, and needed to listen to Beethoven and look at the paintings of Van Gogh to even begin to set my emotions back to rights.
I'm feeling terribly philosophical today, but more or less at peace with the world. Maybe it's the sunlight and the flowers and the fact that I listened to the finale from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on the bus to work this morning. Either way, I am less concerned about how the events of this evening (recital jury, recital dress-rehearsal, &c.) will turn out.
*The trailer for Danny Boyle's Frankenstein can be seen here on YouTube.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Rounding third base; or, stitches on the home stretch
Senioritis? Again?
It's hard to stay motivated these days, and I'm not sure if it can even be properly termed "senioritis," but what I do know is that I am in the second week of my last quarter of school, ever, and that thought is almost incomprehensible. I've been in school for longer than I can remember. Even during my gap year between college and grad school, I attended classes at a university. So the prospect of being done with academia is . . . strange.
My horoscope today--I don't necessarily believe in them, but I check it in the morning via a free app I downloaded to my phone, mostly because reading something first thing after waking up helps me gain coherence a little more quickly--says,
You are about to close a chapter--some aspect of your life that was difficult is coming to a close. Despite the challenges you faced and the hurt or sadness you experienced during this phase, you came away with a wealth of insight. As you end this part of your story, you will feel a sense of relief. Soon, you will also feel a sense of anticipation and excitement, because you are about to turn the page to a whole new and vey wonderful chapter. With what you've learned, you have the power to transform the rest of your life into a magical journey. Use discretion in the choices you make.
Difficult? Definitely. The strange thing is, my course load now is significantly lighter than it has been for as long as I can remember. I'm ticking the last few graduation requirements off my list, and they're easy ones. This morning, I learned that I had passed the French language exam required by my Masters program--one less thing. I am giving my Masters voice recital on April 16--just over a week. What remains, then, is
1) preparing 10 mini-lectures about various topics relating to music
2) piano proficiency exam (to do: gain fluency in 4-octave double-handed scales)
3) opera workshop performance (after which I will hop a plane home to go to a wedding the next day)
And that's it. Clearly I'm having some trouble staying motivated.
Unrelated, but no less irritating: I wonder what it says about our society or the state of the arts or whatever that the music we are most exposed to is either heavily auto-tuned (see: Rebecca Black, Glee, most pop music) or completely out-of-tune (see: the Truvia commercial I just watched). As a musician, I wonder, do other people just not notice things like this, or do they just not care?
It's hard to stay motivated these days, and I'm not sure if it can even be properly termed "senioritis," but what I do know is that I am in the second week of my last quarter of school, ever, and that thought is almost incomprehensible. I've been in school for longer than I can remember. Even during my gap year between college and grad school, I attended classes at a university. So the prospect of being done with academia is . . . strange.
My horoscope today--I don't necessarily believe in them, but I check it in the morning via a free app I downloaded to my phone, mostly because reading something first thing after waking up helps me gain coherence a little more quickly--says,
You are about to close a chapter--some aspect of your life that was difficult is coming to a close. Despite the challenges you faced and the hurt or sadness you experienced during this phase, you came away with a wealth of insight. As you end this part of your story, you will feel a sense of relief. Soon, you will also feel a sense of anticipation and excitement, because you are about to turn the page to a whole new and vey wonderful chapter. With what you've learned, you have the power to transform the rest of your life into a magical journey. Use discretion in the choices you make.
Difficult? Definitely. The strange thing is, my course load now is significantly lighter than it has been for as long as I can remember. I'm ticking the last few graduation requirements off my list, and they're easy ones. This morning, I learned that I had passed the French language exam required by my Masters program--one less thing. I am giving my Masters voice recital on April 16--just over a week. What remains, then, is
1) preparing 10 mini-lectures about various topics relating to music
2) piano proficiency exam (to do: gain fluency in 4-octave double-handed scales)
3) opera workshop performance (after which I will hop a plane home to go to a wedding the next day)
And that's it. Clearly I'm having some trouble staying motivated.
Unrelated, but no less irritating: I wonder what it says about our society or the state of the arts or whatever that the music we are most exposed to is either heavily auto-tuned (see: Rebecca Black, Glee, most pop music) or completely out-of-tune (see: the Truvia commercial I just watched). As a musician, I wonder, do other people just not notice things like this, or do they just not care?
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Da-DUM.
For as long as I can remember, I have had incredibly strange, very vivid dreams. When I'm stressed (which is always), they get even stranger.
Last night, I dreamed that I was in one of the later installments of a shark creature-feature movie franchise, and my character was being written out. There was no script, but I had read the plot description and knew that my character would be eaten by a shark after falling off a boat. I gradually became aware that this writing-out involved being actually eaten by a shark after my two companions were devoured. So, sitting in half of a rowboat, which was, for some reason, in the middle of the ocean, I thought, "Well, shit." Shortly thereafter I was rescued by a cruise ship, which I then refused to leave for fear of fulfilling the plot point which would end in my demise.
So, subconscious? I'm aware that I'm facing another scary cross-country move, but please stop reminding me how anxious about it I am. Thanks.
Last night, I dreamed that I was in one of the later installments of a shark creature-feature movie franchise, and my character was being written out. There was no script, but I had read the plot description and knew that my character would be eaten by a shark after falling off a boat. I gradually became aware that this writing-out involved being actually eaten by a shark after my two companions were devoured. So, sitting in half of a rowboat, which was, for some reason, in the middle of the ocean, I thought, "Well, shit." Shortly thereafter I was rescued by a cruise ship, which I then refused to leave for fear of fulfilling the plot point which would end in my demise.
So, subconscious? I'm aware that I'm facing another scary cross-country move, but please stop reminding me how anxious about it I am. Thanks.
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