it's all talk
4.14.2004
Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you MY HOUSE (well, it belongs to me, Yaron, Marcus, and Alex) for the 2004-2005 school year!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
TA-DA!!!
Yaron got teary-eyed when we took the walk from the the Science Library to Home Avenue.
I'm totally putting up a hammock.
We're going to be seniors?!?!?! ¶ 20:28
TA-DA!!!
Yaron got teary-eyed when we took the walk from the the Science Library to Home Avenue.
I'm totally putting up a hammock.
We're going to be seniors?!?!?! ¶ 20:28
4.13.2004
Wesleyan has reached that point in its school year where class sessions move at a snail's pace while life itself happens before you ever realized it was right there in front of you. In class, I look alternately at the clock and the ever-greening library lawn through the windows, praying for 4:00pm. I registered for next year's classes today, and will pick a house for Yaron, Marcus, Alex and myself tomorrow. These weeks, nothing has been about what everyone's doing right this moment; it's all about the future. Seniors are finishing their theses and essays, juniors are slowly realizing that they're reaching the end of their undergraduate careers, sophomores are declaring their majors, and freshmen are imagining how much crazier their next three years could be.
The transitions that my peers are going through have affected me more so than the transitions that I, myself, am about to undergo. I mean, I have a vague idea where I'm going, and it's my life that I'm thinking about, so I can make its path seem normal and almost mundane. But I have friends who are graduating, teachers who are leaving, mentors who are moving on. Jay's taking fall semester off to tour. Jazz Orchestra's been cancelled 'til the Spring. Taylor is finishing his master's this semester, is getting married this summer, has made enough gig money to live on through September, and has found a place to live in Brooklyn. Classmates and friends are graduating, and while none of those moving along are soul mates (and the ones who do verge on that status are staying in Middletown for another year), pondering where they'll all be after a few years out leaves me perplexed and quiet. Last night Yaron said he felt settled here. I agreed. We have our routines, our relationships, our work, our hobbies, our play.
That's what I'm really worried about music next year; I'm afraid that I'll lose steam without Jay and Taylor. We performed at another school today, and I felt like I hit it this time in a way that I didn't last Thursday. Coming in the last time on the bridge of _Almost Like Being in Love_, I made it my own in front of a crowd. I know that I can make these tunes my own, I do it in rehearsal and for fun all the time, but last week I froze up and stuck to the head of the tune for the most part because I got shy. But this time, I released. It felt good. The band felt it, too. After we wrapped up our set, one of the teachers, a fifty-something woman with that oh-so-lovely short blonde perm came up to me. "You should be on American Idol!" she exclaimed over and over, "You're better than all those young people on there!" I held her hand, looked her in the eyes, and thanked her.
The band had a good laugh over that moment while we were packing up, and while I would never be caught dead on American Idol, nor do I know whether I could actually make it in that let's-see-how-many-scales-I-can-run-through-on-this-one-phrase-and-I-grew-up-listening-to-Rhythm-Nation world, I'll take her statement as a compliment on my stage presence.
Oh stage presence, bane of my existence. But we're becoming friends, the microphone and I.
And another great moment today: in the van, driving back to Wesleyan with Taylor, he asked me what kind of leader I was on my sports teams in high school and college.
"The quiet example," I told him. And that's really how I play music too. I need to do more than that, I need to take more chances. That's why he liked what I did vocally on the last part of the tune. He and Jay, standing in the back of the auditorium, turned to look at each other simultaneously because they both knew that I had just clicked onstage, he said. They smiled, nodded. I was oblivious to it all until I heard the story in the car.
Their moment is one that I've been reliving in my head since then. I didn't see it when I happened, because I was looking at the crowd and not at them, but knowing that they heard something extraordinary, and and they then had a collective reaction to it, makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. When I try to explain to him how I want to do music more than anything, but am scared as hell about it, I get nothing but positive feedback. It's starting to rub off on my psyche; let's hope that continues.
Amina Claudine Myers performed in NYC this weekend, the Times said. Totally random. She's so aloof. I want to move to the city soon. I want to get my name in the weekend Times.
I should wrap up this post because it is getting long and I have a paper to write. But after registration today, my tentative schedule for Fall 2004 is:
Comparative Political Parties
Nationalism
Gendering Music from a Cross-Cultural Perspective (sooooo Wes-ish, but I'm super-excited)
Opera and Oratorio Ensemble
I also plan on adding a class on British Lit from Enlightenment to Modernism, as well as Braxton's large ensemble (I just might bring the clarinet for that). I tried to get into a class on Liberation Theology in the Americas and Africa (which would be a fabulous thing to take given my interests in Brazilian land reform), but it was unavailable for non-Religion majors. If my thesis proposal gets approved (fingers crossed! I find out at the end of this month!), then I get to take a thesis tutorial and I will drop... Something. Yaron tells me I should get an honorary music degree. I wouldn't mind. He also told me at dinner tonight that he wishes I could live twice. Once for music, and once for academia. I wouldn't object to that, either.
It's funny: last year I was making my course choices based on marketability: math, econ, stat. Those are important things, I enjoy learning them, but now that I'm understanding that I'm verging on my last year at a liberal arts institution, I want to jump into that liberal arts curriculum and, as I told Yaron, decrease my chances of getting a lucrative job. I just want to feel good. I chose the music class over a course on international trade. That was a hard thing to do, but I feel better for it. ¶ 22:22
The transitions that my peers are going through have affected me more so than the transitions that I, myself, am about to undergo. I mean, I have a vague idea where I'm going, and it's my life that I'm thinking about, so I can make its path seem normal and almost mundane. But I have friends who are graduating, teachers who are leaving, mentors who are moving on. Jay's taking fall semester off to tour. Jazz Orchestra's been cancelled 'til the Spring. Taylor is finishing his master's this semester, is getting married this summer, has made enough gig money to live on through September, and has found a place to live in Brooklyn. Classmates and friends are graduating, and while none of those moving along are soul mates (and the ones who do verge on that status are staying in Middletown for another year), pondering where they'll all be after a few years out leaves me perplexed and quiet. Last night Yaron said he felt settled here. I agreed. We have our routines, our relationships, our work, our hobbies, our play.
That's what I'm really worried about music next year; I'm afraid that I'll lose steam without Jay and Taylor. We performed at another school today, and I felt like I hit it this time in a way that I didn't last Thursday. Coming in the last time on the bridge of _Almost Like Being in Love_, I made it my own in front of a crowd. I know that I can make these tunes my own, I do it in rehearsal and for fun all the time, but last week I froze up and stuck to the head of the tune for the most part because I got shy. But this time, I released. It felt good. The band felt it, too. After we wrapped up our set, one of the teachers, a fifty-something woman with that oh-so-lovely short blonde perm came up to me. "You should be on American Idol!" she exclaimed over and over, "You're better than all those young people on there!" I held her hand, looked her in the eyes, and thanked her.
The band had a good laugh over that moment while we were packing up, and while I would never be caught dead on American Idol, nor do I know whether I could actually make it in that let's-see-how-many-scales-I-can-run-through-on-this-one-phrase-and-I-grew-up-listening-to-Rhythm-Nation world, I'll take her statement as a compliment on my stage presence.
Oh stage presence, bane of my existence. But we're becoming friends, the microphone and I.
And another great moment today: in the van, driving back to Wesleyan with Taylor, he asked me what kind of leader I was on my sports teams in high school and college.
"The quiet example," I told him. And that's really how I play music too. I need to do more than that, I need to take more chances. That's why he liked what I did vocally on the last part of the tune. He and Jay, standing in the back of the auditorium, turned to look at each other simultaneously because they both knew that I had just clicked onstage, he said. They smiled, nodded. I was oblivious to it all until I heard the story in the car.
Their moment is one that I've been reliving in my head since then. I didn't see it when I happened, because I was looking at the crowd and not at them, but knowing that they heard something extraordinary, and and they then had a collective reaction to it, makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. When I try to explain to him how I want to do music more than anything, but am scared as hell about it, I get nothing but positive feedback. It's starting to rub off on my psyche; let's hope that continues.
Amina Claudine Myers performed in NYC this weekend, the Times said. Totally random. She's so aloof. I want to move to the city soon. I want to get my name in the weekend Times.
I should wrap up this post because it is getting long and I have a paper to write. But after registration today, my tentative schedule for Fall 2004 is:
Comparative Political Parties
Nationalism
Gendering Music from a Cross-Cultural Perspective (sooooo Wes-ish, but I'm super-excited)
Opera and Oratorio Ensemble
I also plan on adding a class on British Lit from Enlightenment to Modernism, as well as Braxton's large ensemble (I just might bring the clarinet for that). I tried to get into a class on Liberation Theology in the Americas and Africa (which would be a fabulous thing to take given my interests in Brazilian land reform), but it was unavailable for non-Religion majors. If my thesis proposal gets approved (fingers crossed! I find out at the end of this month!), then I get to take a thesis tutorial and I will drop... Something. Yaron tells me I should get an honorary music degree. I wouldn't mind. He also told me at dinner tonight that he wishes I could live twice. Once for music, and once for academia. I wouldn't object to that, either.
It's funny: last year I was making my course choices based on marketability: math, econ, stat. Those are important things, I enjoy learning them, but now that I'm understanding that I'm verging on my last year at a liberal arts institution, I want to jump into that liberal arts curriculum and, as I told Yaron, decrease my chances of getting a lucrative job. I just want to feel good. I chose the music class over a course on international trade. That was a hard thing to do, but I feel better for it. ¶ 22:22
