My life goes on in endless song; or, BS takes a moment to breathe

Tonight, on the way back from rehearsal, I stopped by CVS to pick up a soda for my roommate, who is exhausted by unpacking and was craving. I grabbed one for myself, and only noticed when I took a sip a half hour later that it was Diet Wild Cherry Pepsi. 

Then, I went to make a salad (my one meal today was consumed at the family-owned Italian restaurant down the street as I sat with the staff, watching the Euro 2012 Final and exclaiming rude things in Italian at the screen). As I cut into the avocado I had bought earlier today, I noticed that its flesh had gone brown.

The fact that these are the two biggest disappointments  I faced today may be a sign that, for the moment, my mood is in an upswing. 

That's not to say that life is not completely overwhelming. Having finally found a roommate to share the (relatively inexpensive, but still inconvenient when paid out of one's minimal income) rent and bills, I cleaned the apartment to allow her some space to move her things in. Moving is always messy, and one always seems to have so many more belongings than one needs until they are removed from their cardboard boxes and put away. Movers are also very messy--the amount of dirt tracked in as they unloaded box after box after box actually rendered one floor-runner basically unusable (bought at Goodwill and easily replaceable but still, gentlemen, wipe your damn feet) and left me itching to vacuum the floor. My knee-jerk reaction was panic. However, after 24 hours or so had elapsed, it became clear to me that my new roommate is potentially the most organized person I have ever met, in addition to having more energy for unpacking and sorting than I had ever imagined possible, and is getting on admirably in a situation that would have reduced me to a useless puddle of anxious tears within half an hour. I expect that my previously-spartan little apartment will look considerably more lived-in (in a good way, a way that says "people actually live here and have real-people lives" rather than messy) by week's end. Even in my room I have managed to set up a small workspace that doubles as a sewing table and home office. 

And, oh, am I sewing. A shop in my hometown, owned by a high school friend, has agreed to sell some of the purses I make, so I have very suddenly found myself needing to treat sewing as a Real (very-part-time) Job. As things are still being unpacked however, there is no place at present to set up an ironing board. Tomorrow I ship out my first two bags, with plans to make as many more as possible during our five-day break from Don Giovanni rehearsals and send them home with Mom when she visits.

Don Giovanni is also taking up significant brain-space at the moment. I blame the combination of Mozart writing obnoxiously catchy melodies and having to repeat those melodies so frequently in rehearsal. I've always had an affinity for this opera over all of the others Mozart wrote, mostly because it gives me so many Feelings--I've got a whole other blog entry locked away in my brain concerning the characters and how the trap with Giovanni is to fall back on convention when it comes to characterization rather than letting the characters sort of develop themselves--and, to be honest, I would say that characters like Leporello or Elvira or Zerlina or even Giovanni do a fair job of asserting their own personalities, desires, motivations, quirks, &c., and the best thing to do when portraying one of those roles is not to try and impose your own limitations on them. There are so many angles from which to consider Don Giovanni, and even twelve years after the first time I watched it, I am still fascinated by the intricate ways in which the characters interact (but mostly Elvira and Leporello, who put up with more of Giovanni's shit than anyone else in the show), and I still start shuddering when the statue begins speaking. Every. Single. Time. Because a damn statue comes to life. And that statue is vindictive as hell (uh, literally). And that is terrifying.

"So why then, Bee," you may be asking, "when your life is hectic and full of crazy, did you take an interview for a part-time barista position?" 

The answer: masochism. Obviously.

But--and this is the strangest thing--I know that I am busy. Intellectually, I am able to look at my GoogleCalendar (the fact that I rely on GoogleCalendar to remind me that I must, twice a day, eat something, Bee, you are not capable of photosynthesis, is probably a good indication of just how busy I am) and say to myself, "Damn, there's not a lot of free time there." But, as I experience everyday life, it is the busiest days and weeks when I feel the most free and easygoing. I suppose this can be chalked up to momentum, to the fact that when I have so much to do my thought process speeds up and it is as if the events of my day go by in slow-motion. With that in mind, knowing that I feel the most centered and comfortable when I have a set of goals to achieve in a specified amount of time, why the hell not try to find a second job, one that can keep me from having too much time to think (which inevitably leads to overanalyzing, which often leads to panicking about Who am I and what am I going to do with my life?!) after this show wraps?

And, of course, all this positive thinking could go to hell tomorrow. This is another thing I know intellectually. But right now my cat is ridiculous (especially when she tries to intimidate my roommate's cat by hissing, which is more adorable than menacing), there is someone to talk to, my monthly financial burden has just been slashed in half, Dave Eggers just released a new book, and it is thunderstorm season in Chicago. Yes, life could definitely be worse.

Sumer is icumen in

Well, then, as threatened ages ago, I skipped town for the duration of the NATO Summit, which, as I saw on the news, was equal parts riot (in the area immediately surrounding McCormick Place) and deserted (everywhere else).

As a matter of fact, I found myself in Orlando, Florida for a week, navigating all the typical tourist attractions on my own, even swinging by Universal's Islands of Adventure for a day, since how on earth is someone so unrepentantly geeky as me supposed to pass up the opportunity to visit fake-Hogwarts? It was hot and humid--in Florida! imagine!--and, as such, I drank gallons of water, did multiple passes on any Disney ride with a short enough line (air conditioning is golden, even if it means riding a slow-moving cart through the most terrifying moments of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), and even passed up the chance to see Micky Dolenz perform at Epcot (to be honest, Micky, m'dear, I'd prefer to remember you the way you were, and I certainly won't wait for two hours in someplace with no shade for nostalgia's sake).

(As I was finishing that last sentence, the timer went off on my bread machine, and I had to wander to the kitchen to knead the dough and set it out for a second rise on the stovetop. Consequently, I have lost my train of thought. Where was I?)

(Ah. Yes. Florida.)

The excursion to Orlando combined my old love of traveling alone and my new love of traveling off-season--and, of course, airports are the worst, but everyone hates the awkwardness of going barefoot through O'Hare security and having to repackage shampoo and conditioner into travel-sized containers, so I figure my adventures with air travel can be inferred by the reader rather than stated outright--but I digress. Traveling alone. It is the best. No passive-aggressive shilly-shallying is necessary in order to make dinner plans and, for that matter, restaurant wait times are significantly reduced when seeking a table for one as opposed to, oh, four or five. None of the hassle of coming up with a daily itinerary which can be agreed upon by all members of the party. No fighting over the TV remote at one in the morning when you want to flip between a replay of the day's Rays game and the latest Game of Thrones episode. And, of course, on the day when it was hellishly hot and even the combination of coffee, water, and the two doses of Tylenol Extra Strength I purchased at Epcot's Germany pavilion failed to make a dent in what may have been the Worst Headache Ever, I was able to head back to the hotel and sleep without having to explain anything to anyone. Because it was just me.

By the way, grown-ups and potential Disney travelers, I can tell you from experience that, although Epcot has a reputation for being the most boring of the four parks in Orlando, it is also where they keep the booze. While my only hands-on experience was grabbing a glass of prosecco at the Italy pavilion while waiting out a rainstorm, I saw more than a few margarita stands, and not just in the Mexico pavilion. Have at it, lovers of delicious alcoholic fun and parents of unruly children!

But every vacation inevitably comes to an end, and so it was with the complete panic that marks my existence that I realized, upon checking my phone after lunch on my last day in Florida, that my flight had been rescheduled to depart two and a half hours earlier than I had planned. And, oh, I ran--well, drove, and then walked with great haste, and then cried a little when the ticket agent couldn't find my reservation. Because I am BS, and my life is chaos, and this sort of thing is a fairly common occurrence.

I can't say that life has been too thrilling since I returned to Chicago, although summer seems to have arrived, signaling the beginning of three months of constant skirt-wearing. I work, I sleep, I have strange dreams which are probably brought on by the heat (last night: I had recently become a vampire and was distressed at the fact that blood, which could be purchased on tap at any neighborhood bar, tasted like watered-down V-8 juice), I yell at my cat for sitting on the kitchen counter. Most of my Chicago-based friends seem to be either out of town or busy with Grown-Up Responsibilities, so I have taken to re-reading the A Song of Ice and Fire series and marathoning episodes of How I Met Your Mother.

One new thing in my life--opera-related, of course, because when is it not?--is a sudden interest in singing French arias from the Romantic period. I don't know if other musicians are like this, but I tend to favor music from different stylistic periods according to a seasonal schedule. In the spring, of course, it is Baroque opera, where everything is fresh and energetic and awake after the long months of cold, dark, moody winter (German and Italian verisimo, usually--lots of Strauss and Puccini). And in the summer, I just want to sing in French. My current fixation is "Adieu, notre petite table" from Massenet's Manon, although next week it could be "Ah, je veux vivre" or--I don't know. Whatever. For right now, it's Manon, who is possibly the most amoral fictional character I have ever loved.

And, to be honest, at this point I've run out of things to say, and I'm just waiting for my bread to finish baking so I can go to sleep. Twenty-five minutes to go.

Thank you and good night.

The Heights and the Depths, pt. I; or, the triumphs and trials of being BS

Well.

There is enough to say about the past few weeks, I think, to fill three or four blog entries. Suffice it to say that at the moment I feel very much as if I am living the part of Through the Looking Glass where Alice and the Red Queen have to run as fast as they can to stay exactly where they are, and while I'm not proud to say that I have been flighty and inconsistent and rapid mood swings have caused me to lash out at people  who absolutely don't deserve it, I am very pleased to have survived. So far.

First, the good: March provided me with about a thousand opportunities to hear early music. This was due partially to the fact that the Lyric's last production of the year was Handel's Rinaldo, featuring not one, not two, but three countertenors. A countertenor, for the uninitiated, sounds like this or this, and sings roles traditionally written for castrati--and I'll just let you Google that one on your own, because I don't feel like going into particulars about the methods and socio-political reasons behind the rise of the castrato voice in liturgical and secular music in the 16th and 17th centuries just now.

Never one to pass up the rare opportunity to see a countertenor In The Live (as opposed to on a CD, YouTube, or Met HD Simulcast, which is rare enough), I purchased the cheapest, nosebleediest tickets I could find for the first show which fell on a night off from Elijah rehearsal. A friend whose husband was covering the role sung by this fellow had warned me about the "loopiness" of the staging--something about a giant floating harpsichord with balloons attached--and, yes, the soprano heroine did spend approximately half the opera imprisoned in said floating harpsichord, but damn if the cast didn't take some of the most out-there staging I've seen and run with it. Rinaldo Team Chicago: I salute you for your commitment to duty, and while I'm sure it felt ridiculous, it looked amazing. In fact, it looked so amazing that I purchased tickets to see it again the following Friday and, during first intermission, sneaked from the upper balcony to the orchestra level so I could pay closer attention to the staging. The audience, apart from the destroyers-of-fun who walked out after the first act (we didn't want you there anyway), loved it, and, at one point, broke into applause three times during the opening aria of Act II.

Chicago's Baroque Band also presented two concerts featuring Maestro Harry Bicket (the conductor for Lyric's Rinaldo) and countertenor Iestyn Davies, who sang the role of Eustazio--thankfully, I have a friend who keeps abreast of local early music happenings and was able to let me know about this event before it happened. On March 9 we drove down to Hyde Park to see the first of these performances, featuring nearly two hours of Handel arias accompanied by a period-instrument orchestra. I believe my brain shorted out at some point during this performance, because all the description I can offer of this event can be expressed only in the form of an animated GIF:

For a couple of weeks, I was floating three inches off the ground. Handel! Countertenors! Improbably complicated plot devices! Coloratura with back-up dancers! All of this was a beautiful and welcome distraction from the looming sense of dread concerning my impending loss of health care coverage and the US government's apparent growing disregard for policies which benefit the majority of its constituency. Everything was going to be okay, and, with Holy Week coming up, I could at least take a one-off church gig to cover the extra money I spent in March in order to afford tickets to Rinaldo (twice!) and the Baroque Band concert. If I wasn't completely content (and who ever is, really?), at least I was hopeful for the future.

If past experience has taught me anything, however, it is that, the moment you begin to feel as if everything is going to be all right after all, some shock will come to drop the floor out from under you. This sudden sensation of falling is something to which I ought to be accustomed by now, but, yet again, it caught me completely off-guard . . . 

( . . . To be continued . . . )

Opera-tunity knocks; or, What BS has been up to all this time

It's Business Time in the life of BS--and by "business" I mean busy-ness, which is not the same thing at all.

Unsurprising though this may be, as it's my chosen professional field, music has taken over my life once more. With Elijah rehearsals beginning at American Chamber Opera and both NATSAA (National Association of Teachers of Singing Artist Awards) and NATS (National Association of Teachers of Singing) competitions looming in the too-near future, what I have been up to is singing. And thinking about singing. And learning new music to sing. And listening to other people sing. And planning to go hear other people sing. That is to say, it's nice when your obsessions and compulsions complement each other: my current obsession is opera; its related compulsion is seeing operas. It all works out very easily, you see.

I do feel a little sorry for the people who follow me on Tumblr and Twitter, especially those who aren't musically-inclined, because I've been spamming YouTube links of my favorite singers lately. Then again, my roommate, who I finally wheedled into seeing a Met HD Simulcast with me (first Faust, then, upon her insistence, The Enchanted Island) seems to have taken very quickly to Joyce DiDonato and Luca Pisaroni, so at least I'm in no danger of being smothered in my sleep by a housemate sick of my constant cries of, "Jonas Kaufmann's hair! My god, his hair!"

Don't even try to act surprised that I included an illustrative example.

It is true, though, that I am experiencing a resurgence of love for opera. To be fair, I was never really indifferent to it, but the sudden ease of its access (performing with ACO, being able to attend the Chicago Lyric Opera, finally learning about the Met HD Simulcasts) has caused me to fall in love all over again. Since October, I have seen two live performances in which I was not a participant (the Lyric's Lucia di Lammermoor and Aida) and three not-live performances (Anna Bolena, Faust, and The Enchanted Island). I have been listening to the Sutherland/Pavarotti/Caballe recording of Turandot on the bus--this is mostly due to the fact that the first act is terrifying and I am afraid to listen to it at home alone when it is dark (I had the same problem with Poe's album Haunted).

This process of re-discovery leads, naturally, to a lot of Feelings, which can sometimes be difficult. I realize that in our society it is, for some reason, not cool to be enthusiastic about things, but when I go to the opera to spend four hours sitting in the dark having all these emotions forcibly drawn out of my body, slowly, and I leave exhausted and wired all at the same time--after seeing Anna Bolena I walked home from the movie theater, two miles in the cold--I can't help but let some of it spill out. It's like falling in love, except the honeymoon phase never ends. It's amazing. I am unapologetically enthusiastic about opera. Do I want to curl up inside "E lucevan le stelle" (here, if you've never had the pleasure) and never leave? Yes. I could live in that damn aria these days.

It makes me sad sometimes to think of how many misconceptions there are about opera, even among my friends and family. Here's the thing: opera isn't boring, or outdated, or "too long" (well--most of it, but for the sake of argument, let's ignore Wagner for right now). Interestingly, a lot of people who tell me that they can't sit through an opera because it's too long have no issue with watching a football game, which is the one place I can think of where thirty seconds can last for twenty minutes. Opera isn't always depressing, although I'm perfectly willing to let Mario Cavaradossi or Salome break my heart on a regular basis. It is okay to enjoy yourself at the opera; it is even okay to laugh. This is something I recently re-learned as I laughed out loud through a good portion of The Enchanted Island or giggled while showing my roommate YouTube videos of Leporello's Catalogue Aria from Don Giovanni (one of my favorite recent performances of which can be seen here). The best part of opera is that it not only depicts the complete range of human emotion, but makes you feel those emotions, too: giddiness, despair, terror, hope. I often feel that the entire second act of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor is written to feel like a nightmare you can't wake up from, and that the audience is dragged alone for the ride like Lucia, almost carried to the altar for a wedding in which she doesn't want to be a participant. It's no surprise that Lucia goes crazy, since the constant spinning in the music, the gradually accelerating tempo, and wildly distorted recalled melodies make even the audience feel disoriented.

Incidentally, today I was feeling especially positive after my voice lesson and as one the baristas (a friend of mine) was taking my order, she said, "You look really happy, is there a guy?" I laughed. "No, no guy. There's almost never a guy, really. Just opera."

Oh by golly; or, BS does Christmas

Christmas Eve! The holidays snuck up on me this year, probably due to the fact that I was working up until two days ago, so everything seems to be happening very suddenly. For example, wrapping presents! Well. Wrapping one, and writing IOUs for the two I haven't yet finished, because nothing says Christmas like an IOU in a box. 

What else says Christmas? My mother watching 2012 political ads promoting the Republican Presidential candidates, all of whom seem to be increasingly crazyface. Ron Paul has apparently ripped off a Ford Truck commercial. This is the latest news from the S house this afternoon. This holiday season, I am most thankful for politically progressive parents, especially my blog-reading mother. I wish as many people paid this much attention to political goings-on, as opposed to repeating the hated words: "I just really don't like politics." Well, yes, most people don't like politics, but as the goings-on of the government affect us on a daily basis, we should be involved, or at least aware of what is going on.

But I digress. It is Christmastime, and I am a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant looking to celebrate. I should point out right now that it has been a long time since Christmas represented anything terribly religious (the birth of Jesus not being anywhere near the most important event in Christianity--that distinction belongs to either the death or resurrection, in my opinion--and said birth not having even occurred on December 25, in any case), but rather a time of year to gather with friends and family and do nice things for each other. Colored lights, hot spiced wine, and animated holiday specials are also involved. To that end, I would like to share with you, dear reader(s), a list of my five favorite movies to watch at Christmas time. Aaaaand awayyyy we go:

1. A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)

A friend of mine once told me that, as a child, he had never seen the end of A Charlie Brown Christmas. "We had a VHS tape of all of these Christmas specials--Rudolph, Frosty the Snowman--and Charlie Brown was the last one, but the tape ran out five minutes from the end of the special, which made it really depressing: 'You suck, Charlie Brown. Go die. Aaaaaand, scene.'" I always thought the last five minutes felt a little tacked on, myself, but I do appreciate the character of Charlie Brown and his disillusionment with the modern commercialization and commodification of Christmas, and Schroeder's squabbling with Lucy Van Pelt over "Jingle Bells" makes me giggle every time I watch it. Charlie Brown, congratulations: you have made the list.

2. The Snowman (1982)

The Snowman, based on the children's book by Raymond Briggs, is the first video I remember watching as a child every winter. It is not, strictly speaking, Christmas-specific, but where stories about children befriending magically animated snowmen are concerned, I prefer this to the old Frosty the Snowman cartoons. As a child, I watched this 20-minute-long animated short on a beat-up VHS tape my parents had owned since, I assumed, the invention of the VCR. As an adult, I sought it out on DVD and now make friends and family watch it every year at wintertime. The plot, which follows a young boy and the snowman he has built as they sneak out of the house without waking the boy's parents, fly through the air to a snowman dance, and meet Father Christmas, is told entirely without dialogue, but through music. "Walking in the Air," the song which accompanies their flight to the North Pole, is still one of the most gorgeous pieces of music I have ever heard.

3. How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966)

Firstly, I am absolutely not talking about the 2000 live-action film of the same name, starring Jim Carrey in the title role. That movie was awful, and does not even deserve to be considered in the same league as the 1966 TV special. So, to the explanation: I will confess to occasionally exhibiting Grinchlike tendencies during the holidays--a bit more subtle than Ebenezer Scrooge, I am less apt to "Bah Humbug!"than to wince at the noise from screaming children opening their toys, saying, "Oh my God, will you please shut up?!" This year, however, I am living with a roommate who is brilliant at living with a Grinch and insisted that we put up Christmas decorations, including multicolored lights with candy canes hanging from them, two days after Halloween, thereby effectively forcing me into the Christmas spirit. Also, we bake a lot, and baking makes me think of winter holidays. Since then, my heart has apparently grown three sizes from its previous two-sizes-too-small, because I cry at just about everything remotely sentimental. So, there. This is probably my favorite of all the Christmas TV specials, and not just because I find the stop-motion claymation specials from the 1960s and 70s incredibly creepy.

4. Peter and the Wolf (2006)

I am aware that Peter and the Wolf is not, strictly speaking, a Christmas film, but for some reason I always find myself watching it during the winter holidays, possibly because it is set during the Russian winter and features several characters who are animals and believe they are people? I guess? Either way, as the daughter of two musicians, I have always been aware of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, been able to sing all of the themes and identify their corresponding instruments, and have watched/listened to about a thousand different versions. Suzie Templeton's 2006 stop-motion animation is my favorite of all those I have seen. Maybe this preference is due to the fact that this version removes the traditional narrative voice-over, thus de-cluttering the story and allowing the music to move the plot along. I do know that I like the ending, which is unlike any Peter and the Wolf I have ever seen, and which tends more towards gritty realism than tacked-on happy endings. Either way, this animated short is stark and funny and sad and beautiful, and I look forward to forcing my friends and family to watch it with me for many years to come.

5. Nativity! (2009)

This one is a bit of a late edition, as I just recently had occasion to watch it when it was made available for Instant Streaming on Netflix. And oh. my. God. Martin Freeman, whom I have long considered to be The Perfect Human Being, stars as Paul Maddens, a failed actor-turned-primary-school-teacher, who has developed an antagonist relationship toward Christmas after being chucked my his girlfriend on Christmas Day but is nonetheless selected to direct a group of misfit students in the school's Nativity play, assisted by a character best described by the words "idiot man-child." And then everything goes horribly wrong. I laughed until I cried, and then I cried because it was all so heart-warming (again with the unexpected warming of my cold, black heart), and then I laughed a little more. I have loved Martin Freeman since he was Tim Canterbury on The Office, and I'm so pleased that he's finally getting a bit of international recognition with the success of Sherlock and the upcoming Hobbit films. So, Nativity? Watch it. The DVD isn't available in the United States (I've looked), but it is on Netflix.

And now I must be away, as it is about time to order the Traditional Christmas Burrito from the local biker bar/Mexican restaurant. No, I am not joking, except about the "Traditional" bit. My family, you guys. My family.

In which BS substitutes coffee for food and sleep

 We have reached the last seven days of my Masters degree.

Well. It had better be only seven days, because I can't take much more of this.

To use a baseball metaphor, I am rounding third base and hoping not to stumble on the home stretch, because the only dugout here is more school, and I have neither money nor patience for that. I haven't written here in ages. This is largely due to the research project which has consumed my life for the past few weeks. Those of you who know me in real life are aware that I tend to, as my voice teacher said yesterday, "amp myself up" when preparing for a major event. In terms of actual recent events, what this means is that the other night I called my mother at 3am the other day (it was 6am for her, so not as heinous as it could have been) to tell her I was quitting graduate school. And she, of course, reminded me that if I quit grad school with nine days left, she would kill me herself. After four consecutive days of about three hours of sleep per night, I nearly cried in my voice lesson yesterday and my teacher told me to be strong because I'm fully capable of finishing in time, and to just "get her done." So I suppose I should count myself lucky to have two of the baddassest ladies on the planet to remind me in no uncertain terms that this is something I have got to get done, or else.

After two years of graduate school, I'm finding that I'm tougher than I ever thought I could be. This is something I don't always believe, especially when I'm tired. But, look! Look at all the impossible things I have done since October!

• Learned to sew
• Learned an opera role in three weeks, then performed it two weeks later
• Maintained a GPA above 3.7 in the midst of the most stressful time of my life
• Made some sense of the theoretical writings of Arnold Schoenberg
• Removed myself from an unhealthy situation in a way that was assertive, without making a scene

So, final M.M. research project, bring it on. I'm going to kick your ass, and then I am going to move to Chicago and have All The Good Times, and you can stay in Seattle and wallow in academia until the paper you are written on yellows and falls apart.

(I might be losing it, just a little bit)

The concept of the Pile of Good Things has become fairly integral to my survival these past few days. Knitting is my calm-the-hell-down activity--I'm working on a slipcover for my MacBook with an intarsia alto clef on the front. I subscribed to mlb.tv so I can watch the Tigers, although thus far I have used it mostly to re-watch videos of horrific baseball injuries, like Buster Posey's destroyed ankle and Marlon Byrd getting hit in the face--this makes me feel better about my own life, which is admittedly a little bit sadistic. Oh, and I finally watched Team Starkid's most recent musical, Starship, whose song "Status Quo" has become somewhat of an anthem for me in recent days, so thanks for that, Darren Criss and affiliated Starkids.

The plan for the next few days: breathe. Breathe. And try not to die, self. It would be a waste to have put myself through so much for nothing.

Now I Understand; or, Appreciating Vincent

Oh, I am going to get made fun of for this.

My IRL friends know that I've been threatening to do this for a while, but I wanted to finish reading Vincent Van Gogh's letters to Theo before sitting down to do an appreciation post.

It's sort of a joke among my friends that I am in love with Vincent Van Gogh. But, for goodness' sake, just look at the man. Those eyes! The self portrait above is from spring 1887, and it has been my favorite of his since I saw it hanging in the Art Institute of Chicago when I was visiting the city for post-grad auditions. I had been having a particularly rough time of it--trying to keep up with classes while simultaneously preparing for a recital and steeling myself for the possibility of rejection from any or all of the programs to which I was applying was beginning to wear me down. So, of course, I decided to walk up Michigan Avenue and look at some art.

The story of Van Gogh's life has always been particularly poignant for me because, like him, I know how it feels to hate your art, to work yourself half to death in the pursuit of perfection and never get there, to feel misunderstood and unappreciated and lost. I feel emotions very intensely, which I'm sure is common among creative types, and this can result in some severe mood swings (although I have never gone so far as to cut off a part of my ear in one of my more manic moods--that sort of stunt can be pulled only once, and he got to it first).

So, while working one day at the Art Library, I took it upon myself to check out a collection of translations of the letters which Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo between 1873 and his death in 1890. And, more than anything, I was struck by how optimistic he seemed to be. While acknowledging that the world was often disappointing and sad, he seems to have--at least until Christmas 1888, when he performed the act that everyone seems to remember him by--an amazing amount of positivity and resilience.

I finished reading his letters on Thursday, sitting in the main lobby of the School of Music. And then I cried, frustrated that things could have gone so wrong for someone so talented and initially positive that he felt he had no other way out. I have dog-eared some excerpts, because I want someone else to know that Vincent Van Gogh was more than just a madman who hacked off part of his ear and then shot himself--some of these letters, I feel I could have written myself, and, although his story is sad, it's nice to know that, no matter how alone life sometimes feels, someone else has felt the same way.

Dated April 3, 1878
And I believe that we also agreed on this point, that one must especially have the end in mind, and that the victory one would gain after a whole life of work and effort is better than one that is gained sooner. Whoever lives sincerely and encounters much trouble and disappointment, but is not bowed down by them, is worth more than the one who has always sailed before the wind and has only known relative prosperity. For who are those that show some sign of higher life? They are those to whom may be applied the words: "Laboureurs, votre vie est triste, laboureurs, vous souffrez dans la vie, laboureurs, vous êtes bien-heureux." (Labourers, your life is sad, labourers, you suffer in this life, labourers, you are blessed!)

The second half of July, 1882
I should want to show by my work what there is in the heart of such an eccentric man, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is, notwithstanding everything, founded less on anger than on love, founded more on serenity than on passion. It is true that I am often in the greatest misery, but still there is within me a calm pure harmony and music.

Dated February 8, 1883
Sometimes I cannot believe that I am only thirty years old, I feel so much older. I feel older only when I think that most people who know me consider me a failure, and how it really might be so, if some things do not change for the better; and when I think it might be so, I feel it so vividly that it quite depresses me and makes me as downhearted as if it were really so. In a calmer and more normal mood I am sometimes glad that thirty years have passed, and not without teaching me something for the future, and I feel strength and energy for the next thirty years, if I should live that long. And in my imagination I see years of serious work before me, and happier ones than the first thirty.

Mid-March, 1883
You write in your letter sometimes which I sometimes feel also: "Sometimes I do not know how I shall pull through." Look here, I often feel the same in more than one respect, not only in financial things, but in art itself, and in life in general. But do you think that something exceptional? Don't you think ever man with a little pluck and energy has those moments? Moments of melancholy, of distress, of anguish, I think we all have them, more or less, and it is a condition of every conscious human life . . . And sometimes there comes relief, sometimes there comes new inner energy and one rises up from it, till at last, some day, one perhaps doesn't rise up any more . . . but that is nothing extraordinary, and I repeat, such is the common human fate, in my opinion.