Add a dash of patience

Christmas is almost here, and I'm becoming more anxious, excited, and relieved by the day. I will finally get back home again! My grand plans include, simply, spending time with my family (including the dogs and cat) and friends. I miss my PA friends a great deal. As for my non-MI and non-PA friends, well, yeah. Eventually I'll see you again. :)

In many ways I think that Christmas is a kind of homecoming. It's about remembering what you really value and reconnecting with your roots. I change in small ways from year to year, and Christmas gives me the opportunity to compare my latest self with my older self in a familiar context. The context is familiar because I'm back in the house I grew up in and on break from many of the pressures from school. When I begin to look back and compare, I find that I am amused at the type of presents that no longer amuse me as well as the ones that still do. I enjoy seeing the changes in my friends over the years -- several of my high school friends are married or engaged now. I pray differently now than I used to, but sometimes I'm amazed and/or dismayed at how similar my requests and struggles are from year to year. And even though I love celebrating Christmas with my parents and bro and puppies, I am starting to look forward to celebrating Christmas with a spouse and a family of my own. This "family" shall, of course, include several golden retrievers...;)

Recordings

I was reading this article today, and it set me to thinking. My thoughts are:

1. I understand the author's point. But having the bar there or not there doesn't really affect me unless I'm listening to the piece for the very first time. If I'm listening to a piece I've already heard before, I may be lost in the music but I still have a general sense for the time-based location of the current passage. In other words, I have developed an intrinsic counter that is not at all unlike an electronic counter.

2. One of the most fascinating things about listening to a new (previously unheard) piece of music is that you do abandon clock time and you fall into musical time. You don't know when the piece will end. You don' t know if and when previous melodic themes will be woven into the piece at a later point. You don't know which instruments will have supporting roles or solos (okay, with the occasional exception of concertos...)

3. The ideas in this article can be applied to all sorts of neat things, like personal development or conversations or friendships. Clock time is not equal to development time, or conversation time, or friendship time. A lot of time I find myself wanting answers about life...but if I had those answers, I wouldn't be as intrigued and on-the-edge-of-my-seat about my life.

4. Yes, I'm comparing life to listening to a new piece of classical music...I realize that I am insane. :) Let it be known that my life is NOT a Haydn piece (my life is not boring). It is NOT a Mozart piece (my life is not predictable). I hope that it isn't a John Cage piece, or a minimalist piece, or anything that's too wacky and interesting only from the sense of patterns and formulas and algorithms. I don't think that I want my life to be any type of a concerto (I'm really not comfortable with solos that continue throughout an entire piece of music, though occasional solos are certainly fine and fun even). I'll have to think more about what classical music might fit my life...it will be a fun exercise. Creative suggestions are welcome. :)

5. I'll also have to consider the possibility that my life isn't classical music at all...maybe it's hip-hop!! ;)

Once upon a time...

...there was a handbell group that toured the greater Michigan area in search of the perfect audience. Okay, not really. We just play at any place that will take us in and feed us. Yes, it's handbell tour weekend, which means that we play 4 concerts in 4 days. Friday we went to St. Claire, and yesterday we were in Toledo, Ohio. Today have a concert in Eaton Rapids, and tomorrow we have one in a nursing home in Lansing. It's been an...interesting...weekend so far. :) Our concert friday was a little bit scary. And by a little bit, I mean a lot. Luckily, last night's concert was considerably better, and I'm hoping that the upward trend continues as we play more concerts.

It's funny how 4-hour rehearsals (with our director, Jane, continously pushing us to get better) cause us to get better slowly over time whereas a really scary experience in front of an audience causes us to whip ourselves into shape virtually overnight. I definitely notice the effect in myself. In rehearsals, I do a good job of recognizing and vowing to work on the musical passages that consistently are difficult for me. Meanwhile, the little mistakes that I make sporadically go by virtually unnoticed in the long-term. For example, when I play a C instead of a C# in measure 21, I think "d'oh!" but if it has never happened before, I attribute it to fatigue, I don't worry about it too much, and I forget about it quickly. But in a concert, all errors are equally bad. It doesn't matter whether or not the error is new. It doesn't matter if the error is a page-turning error or a key signature error or a not-watching-the-director error. Each error I make takes away from the musicality of the piece of music (unless it's a highly creative and ingenious error...but I don't have enough jazz training to do that). It's amazing -- I can remember just about every error that I made in last night's concert -- and I can guarantee that I'll be anticipating those places in the music and being extra careful to play correctly. It makes me wonder how many of these same errors I've made in rehearsals before and have promptly forgotten because it was merely rehearsal and merely a "silly" mistake. And it's funny how many parallels we can draw between music and real life...:)

Oh! And I liked the church we played at in Toledo yesterday. There were cool organ pipes in the balcony. Yay for organ pipes. And I met someone who has worked with Dr. Payn (my bell director at Bucknell), so we struck up a conversation about DP's wonderfully artistic conducting style. AND, right before my bell group walked onto stage, the pastor of the church made some brief comments...INCLUDING telling us the score of the PSU-MSU game (3-0 at that point)!!!

In other news, I had a great morning on friday. I attended an absolutely incredible zoology seminar that morning. The seminar was given by a job candidate for the zoology department, and she was a good speaker. And her research is so incredibly cool. She's been documenting genetic chimerism in marmosets. What does that mean? Basically, marmosets have a high frequency of fraternal twinning. During early development inside the mother, the fraternal twins will occasionally exchange genetic information (chimerism). This has some way-cool implications for genetically-based cooperation and conflict (which is, in my opinion, one of the coolest topics in biology. Not that I'm biased). For an example, say this exchange of genetic info takes place between a male and a female twin. Then the male has his sister's genetic info. Later in life, he mates with a female in the population...but due to the the random segregation of genes in meiosis, he passes along his sister's traits to his future progeny. For the new baby marmoset, now, its genetic father is actually its aunt!! So cool...and this job candidate lady is now examining the implications of genetic chimerism on aspects of parental and alloparental care (for example, does the aunt/genetic father of the baby hold it more often than "normal" aunt marmosets do to their nieces? her work to date suggests that this may be so). Anyway, I'm not summarizing the talk very well here, but I'll just say that it's probably one of the top 3 coolest talks (on any subject) I've ever attended.

The job talk seminar was also very cute. I got into the seminar room and noticed this vase full of roses of all different colors sitting on a display case in the back of the room. My one committee member noticed me looking at it and remarked that the flowers had just arrived -- the job candidate's husband had ordered them to be shipped to the zoology department in time for her talk. I couldn't believe how cute that was...maybe I've just grown too accustomed to academia being uber-professional.

And for my one friend...I have two words. Rabid. Wolf. :)

Hide and Seek

One of my most favorite games as a kid was (is?) hide and seek. Since I usually played it with the same group of people, we put a lot of time and energy into finding the very best places to hide and the best ways to be sneaky about finding people (we always played the variant in which the hiders are allowed to freely move about and change hiding spots). I still remember my two favorite hiding "spots" in my house. The first spot was underneath the dining room table. When all four chairs were tucked in, I could just manage to fit right under the table but on top of the chair seats, such that the tablecloth draped over the edge completely covered me from sight. The second was in the coat closet. We kept our winter boots in there on the floor, and Mom had this one pair of boots that went up to her knees. So I'd put my feet in her boots and then wrap myself in a long coat on one of the hangers, so that anyone who peeked in still just saw a row of boots on the floor and a row of coats along the wall. Oh, and the only reason that I'm revealing these secret locations now is that my body and my feet are too big to squeeze into any of those spots anymore. :)

One thing I remember well about hide and seek is that I highly preferred hiding to seeking. In fact, sometimes when I was "it," I'd simply hide and wait for one of the hiders to walk by as they were changing locations. Ah, that was fun.

I think that this tendency to prefer hiding to seeking has carried over into a lot of the rest of my life. But unfortunately, I don't think that hiding is a good strategy in the real world. It works for a little while, and maybe in some circumstances better than others, but then it just gets lonely. And if I put all of my creative effort into finding good hiding spaces or strategies, I'm probably missing out on a lot of cool opportunities. But in real life, if I'm not hiding, does that imply that I'm seeking? Not necessarily, I suppose. Seeking takes extra extra energy...wonderful! :) And then there's the added worry about what exactly it is that I'm seeking...

I guess that I can't go wrong with the advice in this song (I think the lyrics come from some book or something):
"Seek ye first the kingdom of God
And his righteousness..."

Ack, now I can hear my 3rd grade teacher singing this song...apparently this has been a good night for nostalgia to take root.

So true...

This is my favorite tv-based quote of the week:

"We'll simply set a new course for that empty region over there. Near that black-ish hole-ish thing."
~Futurama

Hehehe...I don't even watch Futurama, but a friend likes to keep me updated with the good quotes from that show, and I'm more than happy to listen! Anyway, this quote reminds me of my life sometimes. I hate it when I think that I detect a trap ahead and I fall into it anyway. This seems to occur regularly in the grad school setting, and I'm getting better with it over time. "It" refers to both detecting the black hole and preventing myself from steering towards the black hole. But, I still have a VERY long way to go. Let's just say that I'm not a big fan of "black-ish hole-ish" consequences.

But setting the seriousness aside, the quote is definitely funny on its own. I should come up with a list of favorite quotes from some of my favorite shows. Unfortunately, when I don't write them down right away, I tend to forget them. But here are a few that I love:

"If you boys try anything, ANYTHING, I will be ON you like a rainbow on an oil slick."
~Hal, from Malcolm in the Middle

"They taste like burning!"
~Ralph Wiggum, from the Simpsons (in response to a question about the taste of some berries he tried)

"I was imprisoned for a crime I didn't even commit! Attempted murder--now, seriously, what is that? Do they give a Nobel Prize for attempted chemistry?"
~Sideshow Bob, from the Simpsons. And actually I like just about any Sideshow Bob quote. :)

"Bart, don't make fun of grad students. They just made a terrible life choice."
~Marge Simpson

"Dear Lord: The gods have been good to me. For the first time in my life, everything is absolutely perfect just the way it is. So here's the deal: You freeze everything the way it is, and I won't ask for anything more. If that is OK, please give me absolutely no sign. (*nothing happens*)... OK, deal. In gratitude, I present you this offering of cookies and milk. If you want me to eat them for you, give me no sign. (*nothing happens*)... Thy will be done."
~Homer Simpson

Bart: Oh, I'm starving! Mom, can we go Catholic so we can get communion wafers and booze?
Marge: No, no one's going Catholic. Three children is enough, thank you.