Here’s a general update, besides cereal and stuff.
I think I’ve finally reached the stage that I admired in my twenty-four/five/six/seven-year-old roommates, which I perceived as general comfortableness in your own skin, a healthy, steady sense of self, and a general sense of purpose. Occasional big decisions, life changes, starvation for attention, worries, and tears are completely acceptable, but not as a 24/7 state of being.
So I'm totally unmotivated to write very much these days, and I think it’s because I have officially exited my quarter-life crisis. I have no daunting self-anomalies to figure out with pen and pad, except that my back hurts and who will give me shoulder rubs when I’m traveling?
Daily haps: I did make a goal to practice 4 hours per day/20 hours per week in preparation for this upcoming bass recital. I accomplished that goal my first week, and the second week I was pretty close, but I found as I got behind between Monday and Wednesday last week, I totally freaked out. Panic. I couldn’t have fun with friends at dinner or make conversation without thinking, “I have to practice I have to practice I have to practice, what am I DOING?” and I was making myself miserable, timing my practice to the minute, agonizing over missed shifts and double stops.
This is exactly why I switched majors after three years of performance at school. Right before I should have been giving my junior recital, I exhausted myself with the constant figure of a string bass hovering over my head, threatening to stab me through the heart with an endpin if I didn’t spend every waking moment thinking, breathing, and playing him. I had a little breakup with my then-new bass, James Robin, and I thought if I just stopped practicing all together, it might be better for my psyche. This was the year of a major emotional meltdown anyway, so who needed the extra stress? Not me.
This same guilt-complex/self-abasement/perfectionist/broo-haha mentality started slipping in, sending me into that psychological vortex, and then it’s like, well why am I doing this? Why give a recital? Am I doing this just to say I did it? So I can write it on the www like that makes it legit? So I can put my face on a poster? So I can check it off the list of my life’s to-dos? Do I even like music?
Annnnnd . . . sure, I do. It’s like the rough skin on my elbow that makes it comfortable to rest on rough carpet. The green on the top of the carrot. Fingernail clippers. Oodles of noodles under red sauce. Something like that. So now James Robin and I are chums again, and we have a more relaxed relationship after much meditation mid-week, and progress is slow, but steady.
I haven’t practiced yet today, but I did go to an intense step-aerobics/turbo-kick class from 6:00-7:30 this morning, took a great nap, had lunch with Sam (grilled cheese with purple onion and fresh basil from the garden on Sam’s homemade, simple, and sweet whole wheat bread with a baby romaine salad with feta, onion, cranberries, and vinaigrette—mmmm I know), wrote four pages of copy on customs brokerage and freight forwarding for a client, and rehearsed with Dr. Asplund and Curtis of the Locust Trio for Thursday’s evening of experimental music at the Penny Royale, downtown Provo at 8:00pm (see you there)!
As far as the “question” of practice goes, I used to wonder how anyone in their right mind could or would want to practice so many hours a day. Why would you want to lock yourself in a little room for hours on end when you could be talking with someone face to face? How does 20 or 200 or 2,000 hours of practice alone in a room compare to a 1.3 hour recital for, say, 100 attendees? Or .5 hours of meaningful conversation? Can you calculate impact in terms of hours per person per song per note per emotional surge? What does it matter? What’s with existentialism? Why do we wake up every morning? What does one breath mean versus five million breaths? Short hair or long hair? Pencil or pen? Cat or cradle?
Ask me when July 25th has passed if it matters, and I will say yes. I won’t ask anymore questions.
Let’s see . . . other haps. Sam and I are still two bumps on a log. Peas in a pod. Strike-anywhere matches. We went on a really beautiful, short, and tough hike this last Saturday with Sam’s dad up to a waterfall near/in American Fork Canyon. We saw The Giver at BYU. Our friends the Winfields brought a duckling visit a bit ago and it swam in our sink. We like our friends. We watched the movie Doubt three times in one week. We made BBQ chicken pizza yesterday. We went to church. Oh, yesterday I went to the Swahili ward/branch in Salt Lake for a friend’s baby blessing, and it was really awesome. I want to buy an African dress. I also went to a tour meeting and President Monson was there, our prophet, and he told us wives to make food and put it in the freezer while we're away from our husbands. He said to write down what we feel after we perform.
I noticed this weekend that in the blur of daily happenings, I have trouble distinguishing between unique and memorable occurrences and the mundane things. Budding tomatoes and a radio interview with the Russian man who created Tetris seem as striking as a meeting with the prophet in attendance or a chess game with Sam or a bass lesson with Brother Hansen or a sleepover at the in-laws or a duckling in the sink or a story from high school junior year or a memory from novel.
Should there be a hierarchy?
And that's the latest news.
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