retrospective

I have to write something to distance myself from that last post. I keep thinking about deleting it, but I'm still horrified enough that somehow I haven't done it yet.
I'm moving again tomorrow, this time to a whole new house instead of just down the hall. I won't deny that in most ways I truly hate moving: the hassle, the stress, the packing, the unpacking (way worse)... But in some masochistic way I also like going through all my crap. It's interesting to see where I've been, and I'm such a packrat that it's almost all still here with me. I'm finally getting to the point that I'm donating my high school clothes to thrift stores, but that's about as far as I've been able to go. Anyway, I'm happy with this particular move. I'm happy with the person I'm moving in with, and I'm excited to enter this new part of my life. Moving on doesn't have to be bad.

ack

Seen on the profile of a random person who tried to friend me on MySpace:
"I Eat More Pussy Than Cervical Cancer!"
WTF?

convergence

Following up my last post about fashion writing and Cinderella, I found this article in my Yahoo news. (I get pop culture news headlines in one email account and serious news in the other. Most of the time anything really important comes up on both. This time, instead of news about the shootings in Virginia, there was this.) I found the mixture of consumerism (both in terms of weddings and Disney), assumptions about brides, and product branding fairly disturbing.
Notably creepy quotes:
"Women often start their gown shopping with the idea that they want to be different from everyone else, but they change their tune once they start trying on dresses. "Looking like Cinderella is probably something they never considered before they got engaged, but then the traditional side almost always comes out. It's hard to resist romance and sparkle," Kelly said."

"But Disney's Mooney points out that a woman's first impression of love often comes from an animated character and it's hard to completely erase that from her mind. "If you think about who the first person who teaches you about love, romance and Prince Charming is, it probably happened between the ages of 2-5 and included Disney.""

it's all about the dress

First off, this week my friend Raquel has written both a lovely tribute of sorts to Kurt Vonnegut and a great rumination on fashion and fashion writing in terms of social responsibility and art. I love reading her fashion stuff because it makes even me (who has never had more than a very passing interest in the world of fashion) interested and informed-feeling, not only about fashion, but about the underlying assumptions that it rests on. Short summary: she's awesome, and you should check it out.
Secondly, I've been playing in Loyola University's production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella this week, which has been kind of interesting. I've always really liked folk/fairy tales, and it can be so fascinating to look at them as an adult. Mostly, this one has just made me realize that A) this particular story is full of weird details that are only believable by extreme suspension of disbelief and more faith in magic than I currently possess, and B) Rodgers and Hammerstein are soooooo cheesy. But anyway... I sit in the pit wondering, why doesn't Cinderella leave her stepmother? (She says in the play that her father wouldn't like it if he were alive. There's also how a young beautiful single woman would make her way in the world and the perils she would face.) Where is the story taking place? How could the shoe possibly fit just one person? Does she have size 11 2/3 feet or something? Why does the prince fail to recognize his true love immediately? A change of clothing seems far too much along the lines of Clark Kent for my taste. But aside from weird story stuff, the musical also has some really aweful lines. My favorite is when the fairy godmother is trying to convince the steward to try the shoe on Cinderella. Her persuasion consists of this line: "Well, she is a girl." There's also the song entitled "Do I love you because you're beautiful?" Aside from being a terrible song lyric/title, that seems to kind of sum it all up for me. Like many fairy tales (especially, perhaps, the watered-down versions we treat our kids to), this comes down to physical appearance. The two lovebirds are smitten with an idea of each other far more than their actual personalities, it seems. Even though they spend some time seeming to deny it (I can't hear most of the actual lyrics because I'm playing) that seems to be the final verdict.

details

So of course my trip had its ups and downs... It was utterly fantastic seeing Erica and Maya and Lauren and my little sister. Being there made me realize that I never really re-created that level of community here, which I guess is neither here nor there, but it certainly made me nostalgic. I love my friends here dearly, but due to people having things like work and kids, and perhaps also due to the sheer size of Chicago (as opposed to Tucson, where we could basically all bike to each other's houses in short periods of time all year long), I have never really found people that I see every day. I can see it when I watch my Tucson friends talking; there's some level of intimacy and connection that is much more difficult to achieve when you only see people once a week/month/whatever. (I felt this enough to trigger a crying jag, helped along by extreme tiredness and some outside stresses, on Erica's couch. Whoops.)
But anyway, the audition went well, and then it didn't. I made it through the first round (which would have been more impressive if there had been more than nine people there, but still), but then they only gave me about 10 minutes to prepare for the second round. So of course I got flustered and rushed-feeling and panicked, which led to me playing poorly in the second round. So again, ah well.
Around these things there were old episodes of Northern Exposure, an unusual amount of clothes shopping, a ten-mile hike up Wasson Peak, and some pretty good food. A happy trip. I don't know how many more times I'll really be there, and so there was kind of an air of finality. My sister will be there for a few years yet, but many of my friends are moving/have moved, and I'm so rarely in Arizona anyway... Yeah.

too bad

Well, I won't be moving to Tucson next year. And I was so looking forward to living in the Mabel house and having a warm sunny winter! Ah well. More on my trip later.

ahhhhh

I'm leaving my house to catch a train to a plane to go to Tucson in about five hours. God help me. And thank goodness that this week at least is over.

Yo-Yo vs. Jesus

I got issued my slide whistle last night. It's purple :)
I also had a really ridiculous lesson to prepare for my audition. We didn't start until about 10:30 or 10:40 at night, and we ended at 1 in the morning. Near the end, my fingers were so tired and sore that I was all fumbly. Of course, that's when we got to "Don Juan" and the Bartok concerto. (For the non-musicians: really hard pieces.) And then I had a quartet rehearsal at 9:30 this morning. Ugh.
When I check one of my yahoo email accounts, my opening page has a bunch of links to yahoo enertainment news. Usually it's "Britney blah blah blah", "Paris Hilton blah blah blah", but recently there has been an influx of links to articles about classical music. Last week there was a flat-out concert review, and this week there was an interview with David Finckle (the cellist from the Emerson String Quartet, a nice man who my friend Gary nearly killed driving around in a van in Tucson a few years ago) about Rostropovitch, a famous old cellist. Which is cool, but it seems like these might have less-than-average appeal to the typical yahoo user? Do lots of people know who Rostropovitch is? (As a musician, I never know what a non-musician might know about classical music. For instance, apparently everybody in the world knows who Yo-Yo Ma is. I've found that if I ask a non-musician if they've heard of him, they will look at me in disgust as if I've just asked them if they've heard of Jesus or something. But Rostropovitch? I dunno.) Anyway, that's probably not all that interesting to anybody but me, so I'm done now.
I guess I should go see if anything I played last night stuck around in my head. In a week I'll be in Tucson.