A. Playing the violin
B. Suffering from medication effects that make my entire body hurt from head to toe.
C. On my hands and knees mopping the floor.
D. All of the above, and I am saying something much less printable.
E. None of the above, and I am doing something much less printable.
You pick.
(WARNING: This post may veer off into annoying exclamation points. Like this!)
This past business trip to DC turned out to be a little expensive.
I finally bought My. Own. Violin.
MINE!
A REAL VIOLIN!
FOR ME!
An actual, respectable violin, as opposed to the vaguely violin-shaped-object I had been playing.
And it comes in TODAY!
I went to Potter’s Violins in Bethesda, which turned out to be thankfully a brief bus ride from the Bethesda Metro station, and on my way from Rockville to the airport. I almost felt like a poseur even walking in the door. I have been playing for less than a year, I know NOTHING about what I am doing other than I have a good tonal ear. I planned the side trip based on a recommendation from my teacher, and a few reviews in music magazines.
They were blessedly kind and patient and helpful without once being condescending. They helped me range the selection of appropriate instruments by tone, played for me, pointed out the finer points of deciding what sound was best for me, and treated me like a real violinist. I am very grateful for their kindness. I learned more about selecting and maintaining violins in that hour than I think I could have in weeks on the internet.
The violin I bought is a student violin - I have no illusions regarding where it rates on the incredibly large spectrum of instruments. But it is a violin with a little bit of soul. It is a violin that wants to be loved and sings when you touch it. I know that sounds silly, but it’s the closest I can come to explaining the feeling I get from handling it. And the bow! A bow that actually knows the difference between a whisper and a wail. I am in ecstasy, I tell you!
I also know that in a few years, I will likely replace it with another violin, of even better quality. I will never be playing the six and seven figure instruments that real virtuosos use, but every player, if you progress “outplays” their violin and suddenly finds themselves looking to the next price bracket.
But shhhhhh. Don’t talk about that now.
For now, I am seriously in love.
Okay. Something very weird just happened when I upgraded to Wordpress 2.3.3. Somehow a bunch of rather random characters are showing up in my posts. I am going to see what I can do to fix the problem.
However - in the meantime, rest assured, that while I am the typo Queen in many respects, the current issues are NOT a result of my brain racing faster than my fingers.
Update:
I have found a fix for the problem. Now I have to fix the things I screwed up while I was finding the fix. Beware of random characters appearing and disappearing as I sort this out.
I think I will actually make it to the TWO MONTH MARK. That is, the two month mark of milking your questions for material. God Bless You All.
Steph asks:
You have an amazingly eloquent voice. Have you ever wanted to write fiction? If so, what kind? I think you’d be a great storyteller.
First - HOLY SHIT, thanks. From someone who actually has an honest-to-god creative imagination, that’s a real compliment.
Have I wanted to write fiction? Oh yes. I love telling stories. LOVE IT.
But the biggest stumbling block for me thus far has been insurmountable.
It is a complete and utter lack of imagination.
Don’t get me wrong - I know my strengths. If you are looking for someone to evoke an atmosphere in as few words as possible, I’m your huckleberry. I love to paint with words. I love to use the colors and nuances of everyday language to evoke that sigh of memory from the imagination of every person that reads them. The moods of the written word fascinate and move me. And I like to do it sparingly, in little passages like haiku, where every reader reads the unwritten spaces from their own past.
However, if one expects stories to have little things like, um, A PLOT, with an identifiable beginning, middle and end, then I fall seriously short in the storytelling department.
I am a good storyteller when the story is there to tell. Just like with everything else I do, I need a big picture guy. I need someone who has this vision of broad bold strokes that tells me “Go there!” and hands me the detail brush and lets me work my magic. Genre doesn’t matter. The KIND of story is only the vehicle for touching the human mind and heart; they differ only in the strings you pull to get you there. Give me a story and I will paint you a symphony. But when it comes to crafting it out of whole cloth, the art completely eludes me.
That’s why I stick to non-fiction. The stories are already there, waiting for, sometimes demanding, the face and the voice my fingers can give them.
We went up Wye Mountain today to get a little of spring at the Daffodil Festival. For you big city folks, this will seem a little, well, less than cosmopolitan. The local Methodist Church (on whose grounds the eponymous flowers reside) sells a bit of barbeque and sodas. There is a small craft barn selling the usual assortment of country birdhouses and baby pillows. But the attraction is definitely the daffodils. Over three acres of them.
Daffodils to pick. Daffodil bulbs to buy. But mostly to just enjoy, and of course, to take pictures in:
Deceptively angelic, isn’t he?
I got him early.
He spent the rest of the day looking more like this:
There’s only so much light and rainbows a boy can take.
Just to clarify who you are - you were the one getting on the Yellow line northbound at Chinatown as I was getting off at about 10:00 last night.
It pains me, that I, not a native Washingtonian, must lecture you on proper Metro etiquette.
However, since you have chosen to ignore all of the announced requests to allow exiting passengers to debark BEFORE entering the train, I feel I should reiterate this necessary point of manners a little more graphically.
If you STILL do not have memory of this occurance, please check the backpack you used as a battering ram for your entrance onto the train for the 30-inch section of long red hair that you tore away with you during the collision. I believe the scalp is still attached.
And, although I do not have the daily experience with Metro etiquette that you do, I feel on more comfortable ground with the following:
If you forcibly collide with someone (who, incidentally HAD the right of way), and cause them bodily injury, a simple “excuse me” or “beg pardon” will go a long, long way toward making you seem less like a thoughtless b****.
And because I know my manners:
Thank you, for your attention.
In case you don’t remember, since I am getting far afoot from my plea for questions (I say, in a cheap ploy to milk as much time as I can get from this exercise), Cormac asked:
The game we play emphasizes the concept of honor. Rather interestingly, I have yet to find two people that have the same definition of that concept. I’d be very interested to know how you define it.
I could cop out and give you the old “pornography” maxim:
I can’t tell you what it is, but I know it when I see it.
It’s hard to give you a definition in a single, throw off phrase if you are serious about it. I am not going to tell you I have any great wisdom to impart on the concept of honor, because it’s something I struggle to articulate well.
I guess it’s easier for me to tell you how to be an honorable person, rather than define what honor is as a noun.
Speak the truth, but speak it in a way that does not cause unnecessary pain.?
Some people think they are doing the world a favor by being brutally honest, and they use this as a cloak for simple sadism. The?honesty is a precious commodity, but so is mercy. Truth is never an excuse for cruelty.
Do not make promises lightly, and when you do make them, treat them with the gravity they deserve.
Be a person of your Word, and keep the capital in front of it. Don’t promise something you are unable or unwilling to deliver. In the eagerness to please, we tend to make promises beyond our abilities to keep them. There is nothing wrong with honestly evaluating your ability to be true to a promise and deciding you cannot make one. But if you do, follow through.
Offer each and every human being your respect until they show you they don’t deserve it.
This is where I get horribly un-medieval about the concept of honor. Thankfully, the SCA gives me an excuse by presenting the assumption that we are all of the noble class, and I can dispense with the ingrained inequalities of the class concept.
That being said, in general, I think this is the biggest place where people who profess to be honorable get it all wrong. They start with the proposition that their respect has to be earned. The inherent assumption in this places them in a place above to the “earnee”. They automatically assume their own superiority. This doesn’t really fit in with my concept of honor.
By starting with the opposite, that all human beings are placed upon this earth with purpose, and that my life is not inherently worth more than anyone elses, I offer respect to each person, until they have the chance to earn my disapprobation. And I find that more often, respect is returned where it is given. If you want to be respected, offer it. Do not expect it to be given to you automatically and expect everyone else to earn yours. This is an attitude that is so prevalent, it’s almost the norm rather than the exception. It is a reciprocal thing, and should be treated as such.
But I think mainly, in a nutshell, my concept on honor is best described as this:
Try not to make messes, but if you make a mess, clean it up.
That is at the center of my definition of honor. We are imperfect, flawed beings with ONE perspective to view the world - our own. We are not omniscient. None of us have the corner on rectitude. We will make mistakes. We will make misjudgements. We will hurt other people, intentionally or not.
Own your shit and clean it up. Don’t make excuses, even when there are excuses to be made. And do not ever forget that pain is oblivious to intention. If you caused it, it doesn’t matter what you meant to do, the hurt is just as real. You should take your responsibility and man up to it.
Admitting a mistake will never tarnish your reputation as much as refusing to own up to one you did not intend.
Count on it.
I am working on one of those deep, thoughtful posts, but I just had a quick announcement I wanted to make:
I am in love with Corinne Bailey Rae.
If she weren’t much younger than me, totally out of my league, and, well, female, I would totally have her children - I mean, if I could still HAVE children, but it’s the thought that counts, right?
Sigh. And I thought I was too old for girl-crushes.
I finally, FINALLY, get to take a few days off, and I just have to go and catch a cold. Why could I have just PREDICTED this?
Sunday I took a handful of OTC cold medications, and in a couple of hours I felt human enough to take my son to see a matinee of the movie “Enchanted” at the dollar theaters. I love dollar theaters. Ours even has a half-price “matinee”. When you only pay $1.50 for a family of three, you don’t care if you splurge a bit on the popcorn and drinks.
Halfway through the movie (which is about a cartoon princess come to life in Manhattan, if you are among the uninitiated), my son climbed up into my lap, took my face in his warm, sticky, popcorn-scented little hands, and maneuvered himself completely between myself and the screen, just to be sure he had my complete attention.
“Mommy?”
“Mmm-hmmm. Yes, Harry?”
“Mommy? Are you a Princess?”
SLOOOOOOSH.
That sound, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, was the sound of an average-sized middle aged woman melting into a pool of mommy-goo on the theater floor.
As I am home on a little comp time, after having no days off for almost a month, I guess it would be a good time to answer A.M.’s question:
So what motivated you to get a Phd and NOT teach? (I’m headed that way, but I’m definitely in the minority in my program.)
Welcome to the minority all over. It seems like we churn out PhD’s in all disciplines for the purpose of churning out even MORE PhD’s. The only excuse I have for my field (I am a biochemist), is that we are generally expected to turn out useful research in the process - research that ostensibly benefits mankind.
Truthfully, I didn’t have a career path in mind when I got my PhD. I got my PhD purely because I loved what I did. I loved science, I loved research, and I didn’t want to stop. I swore I would keep going to school as long as I could get somebody else (in my case, the NSF, and the “Food for the 21st Century” program) to pay for it. My original research program was into the mechanisms of host-microbe interactions. I am fascinated by life at the interface. I started out in plants, researching ways to co-opt plant-bacteria relationships to increase plant yields. I ended up, through a twisty path, researching the mechanisms of Staphylococcus aureus virulence, to understand ways to combat MRSA infections.
But ultimately, my career path kind of chose me. It took me twelve years to get my undergraduate degrees. I have two - Biology and Chemistry - and a minor in Mathematics. That’s part of the reason it took so long. I am indecisive and interested in too many things. By the time I started my graduate degree, which took me six years to complete, I was thirty years old. You do the math.
Here I was, 36, divorced for two years, and starting life all over again. I gave up every financial asset I owned in the divorce by choice and I was looking at middle age with no preparations for my financial future. As much as I loved to teach, I was looking at five to six years on underpaid post-docs, followed by a tenure race while I was in my forties. In the face of another several years of ramen noodles and a zero-balance bank account, academics really lost its luster.
So I applied for post-doc positions in industry, government, and research-only institutions. They tend to be higher paid, and lead more directly into positions with security and real money. I landed two post-docs in a row at the Southern Regional Research Center in New Orleans, and, to my surprise, got an offer for a teaching/research position at a small college in northern Louisiana. I might just have ended up in academics after all.
And then, two things happened rather rapidly.
First, I became pregnant, against all odds, at forty. The assistant professorship I was offered wanted me to start two weeks after my son’s due date, and was not able or willing to be flexible about it. I had to send them my declination, with regrets.
Then, on the day I was to return to my post-doc from maternity leave, Katrina struck New Orleans and my life changed completely. The research program I spent over three years building was gone, my house was destroyed, and I was in evacuation 450 miles from home, with a two month old baby, and a dubious employment and financial future.
When the offer came to jump careers one more time, I couldn’t leap fast enough. I was given the rare opportunity to start over without starting from square one. My job pays well enough that I can put a little away for my son’s future, and my own, if we live modestly. It has the flexibility to give me a career, and still have time to be the mother to my son that I want to be. I really couldn’t have dreamed a better situation.
So, there’s the long answer. The short answer is that, contrary to my reputation among my friends as an, ahem, “detail oriented” planner, I have pretty much just let life sweep me where it took me, with a generous dose of prayer and a wink to the Supreme Being. And somehow, it has always taken me where I needed to be.
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