mass havoc

When I got to work this morning, six ceiling tiles had become soaked with water due to a sink overflowing upstairs and fallen, covering two different computers with water and bits of tile and significantly impacting the way we functioned all day.
I bring this up not because it's incredibly important, but because it seems like it goes along with my life right now. Things are happening every which way that I have no way of preparing adequately for and that impact the way I'm functioning. I've written about some of them (Tabitha's illness (she's much better now, and thank you to everyone who asked me how she's faring), the end of Civic) and others I haven't for personal reasons or because I simply don't have the words for them yet. (Or because I haven't gotten around to it. Expect some news regarding the Dominican Republic soon.) I feel like, in some ways, the future has become a mystery. Where will I be in two weeks, a month, a year? What will I be doing? Who will I be? It's so impossible to say. But I sincerely hope that all of this current turmoil is leading to better things for me, and maybe even a higher degree of ultimate clarity about my life. I'm sorry to be so vague, but it's hard for me to articulate this feeling and the reasons behind it. But if I were a fortune teller, here's what I might say to me: "There is travel and much upheaval in your future. Maybe also mysterious strangers." But really, isn't that true most of the time?

circling around to the same old places

After a frantic 5:30 AM taxi ride to the emergency room, Tabitha was fully admitted into a nearby hospital on Thursday. She's still there, and they appear to still have no idea what's wrong with her. So far we've been told uterine cyst, kidney stone, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, plain old gas, and urinary tract infection, as well as being told that she was going to be transferred to another hospital where her insurance is more effective (which means she's getting charged ungodly amounts of money as we speak) followed by an announcement about fifteen minutes later that they were going to issue medication for IBS and send her home. (Hint: this didn't happen. We debated later whether or not that doctor actually mentioned his decision to anyone other than us.)
It's just frustrating that so little seems to have actually happened. I haven't spent a lot of time in hospitals proper (more in emergency rooms, and even that is limited), and I'm sure that they do a wonderful job but god, it can be hard to tell. Every order or change takes approximately 2 hours to go through; if Tabby is nauseous and miserable, it takes half an hour for a nurse to respond to the call button, another half an hour before a doctor is called, another hour before somebody comes in and gives her yet another anti-nausea shot. Then there's the mixed diagnoses, which, god, at this point I just wish they'd find something the hell wrong already. I'm afraid they're going to keep her there indefinitely, I'm afraid that all the medication is why she's still nauseous and unable to eat, I'm afraid that she's going to be bankrupt for the next twenty years because it costs so damn much to lay in a bed all day being served gross food that you can't even eat while the occasional doctor who wanders in just looks confused. I think I've been spoiled by those television hospital shows where half the time somebody walks in and spouts some symptoms and immediately a doctor says "Oh, it's this crazy rare syndrome you've never heard of!" Of course, half the time on those shows they're wrong and something goes horribly awry, so I guess I should be happy with slow-and-unsure.
We're hoping she'll get out today, prognosis or no. But I'm not holding my breath.

this could be considered an elegy

I had my last civic concert last night, which could conceivably be seen as an end to my life as a career musician. I've no plans to stop playing anytime soon, but it's fairly doubtful that I will ever again make the majority of my income from my music. As such, it was a fairly major event for me, and in many ways a sad one. I've truly loved my life in music, even when I thought I was going to freakin' die if I had to play, say, Mahler 1 ever ever ever again. (I did, and it was fine.) And it's difficult for me to give up on a dream that I've been cherishing for just over a decade. I remember exactly when I decided that this was what I wanted: I was in Las Vegas at a music festival in the summer of 1997, and Scott Yoo, one of our mentors and teachers and a passionate and opinionated violinist and conductor, asked the crowd of students around him whether this was what they wanted to do. That music festival was the first time really that I'd been surrounded by brilliant and older people who absolutely loved what they did, and it inspired me. I said yes, this is it for me, and I never really let that go until now.
But alas, sometimes a fifteen-year-old girls dreams have to be put to sleep. As much as I love music, and as much as it hurts me to think about possibly never experiencing certain things again -- the joy and clarity of Mozart with a great orchestra, the intense emotional output of a Shostakovitch string quartet, the absolute clarity of playing Stravinsky well (an anal, detail-oriented person's wet dream) -- I feel like it's time to move on. For every good Mozart moment there are thirty absolutely awful ones, and I don't have to constitution anymore to stick it out. Nor am I suited to the audition circuit; one of my teachers at Northwestern constantly told me that I was an excellent orchestra player but I'd never win a job because I just wasn't a soloist. As unkind as this could sound, I'm inclined to agree with him.
So while I'll miss this dream, I am starting to look for new ones. I am starting to think more about going the librarian route, or maybe something else will come my way. In the meantime, I'll keep playing my weird-ass contemporary music (slide whistles, anyone?) and doing whatever else I can. Chamber music will hopefully still exist in my life, as will gigs and maybe even the occasional Mozart moment.

zoom!

I have a new computer, courtesy of my fantastic parents! I feel like an internet god, shooting all over the place at the speed of light. Unfortunately, this is by far the best thing that's happened to me today, but sometimes that happens. Maybe this is a sign that things are headed up.

six words

This will be short, because I'm starving and at the library. As soon as I fix my computer there will be more, including perhaps a picture, and I will read the memoirs everybody else wrote. But here's my six-word memoir, finally.

Being quiet can be very educational.

king kong

I've been watching old episodes of this tv show, Veronica Mars, which is about a high school student (Kristen Bell) who helps her father (Enrico Colatoni) out at his detective agency, solving local mysteries while trying to solve the murder of her best friend and searching for her runaway mother. Okay, so it's decent and fairly addictive, as it would pretty much have to be to be in order for me to watch more than one episode in a sitting. I get kind of annoyed at the high school aspect of things sometimes, things like our hard-bitten heroine pining over her last homecoming dance or how she can't eat lunch with her old crowd of snobby rich assholes anymore. Partially it's because, however realistic those emotions are when you're in high school, they're kind of boring and repetitive when you're not. The other part is, as Tabitha pointed out, I didn't give a shit particularly about homecoming anyway even when I was in high school. It is kind of fascinating (for me, anyway) to really think about high school; I have a hard time remembering what it was like to really live under somebody else's ideas of what I could and couldn't do, to not be living my own life. But anyway...
What's really getting to me is the racial issues that underlie the plot but are not necessarily discussed. All the rich assholes are white (and the notably rich characters are almost all assholes at least part of the time, with occasional redeeming or sympathetic moments), all the poor kids are black or latino; in fact pretty much all of the black characters (including teachers and such) are poor. While this may or may not be somewhat realistic, it's never pointed out, never discussed. Veronica has two people within the show that she continually counts on as friends: Weevil, a latino motorcycle gang leader, and Wallace, a black guy (a new kid at school) that works in the local convenience store. At the beginning of the series, I actually thought Veronica and the poor black kid were going to hook up; instead they abruptly become platonic best friends, she dates yet another white asshole and he dates one of the only black female characters on the show, who's main part of the action is that she gets swindled by some local kids running a transparent internet scam. She disappears after the all important homecoming dance, which is particularly irritating to me. It's like she's a bit part just so Wallace can be with somebody for an episode instead of being a kind of nonsexualized sidekick for the whole season.
All of this is whatever. I feel kind of like I'm being racist for just pointing out that who everybody ends up with seems completely predictable in tvland. But there have been a few moments that have really given me significant pause. The first involves Wallace: he does something proactive, I can't even remember what, and Veronica calls him King Kong. (This buzzed me particularly hard because of my friend Raquel's recent post about the shape issue of Vogue, which featured a cover picture of a slim white woman and a muscular, pissed-looking black athlete.) The second is a power struggle between a rich white asshole character, Weevil, and a not-rich black teacher. Although the white asshole character initiates almost all of the shit that passes between the three, the teacher aims pretty much all of his derogatory comments (and many are extremely low blows, including classist remarks and completely unnecessary shit-talking) at Weevil. Weevil points this out: "You talk to me in class and I respond, and we both fail our tests. You talk back to the teacher and I laugh, and we both get detention." The anger between Weevil and the teacher is pretty damn palpable; it was probably the most realistic thing I've seen on the show so far.
I don't know what any of this means. Am I reading too much into it? Am I not? I just wish they'd talk about it, even a tiny bit.

I'd gesture back, but you might run me down

I finally managed to retrieve my stranded bike today due to the fortuitous overlapping of a day off and a day with decent sunny weather. But on my way home, as I was crossing a busy six-cornered intersection (where three streets pass through one point and it's generally a little nerve-wracking to ride a bike through), I heard honking and turned to see a white middle-aged man in a pickup truck gesturing angrily at me.
Of course, that kind of ruined the ride for me. I spent the rest of the trip home wondering what I could possibly have done to this man to make him react like that (I was riding over on the side, as much out of traffic as I could be, and making my way across the intersection with all due haste when the event occurred). Does he just have a grudge against bikers in general, and I happened to not fit in with his idea of what should be happening at that particular intersection? Chicago's drivers and bikers have what I presume is a typically contentious big-city relationship; there are just too many people trying to get too many places and not watching as well as they could be. When the city recently passed laws designed to protect bikers, mostly consisting of fines and other legal reprimands for things like dooring people or not leaving enough space between a moving car and a moving bicycle, there was an outpouring of comments from drivers asking whether bikers would start being similarly punished for blatantly breaking traffic laws and even endangering drivers through reckless behavior.
Even though I've mostly been a biker in this city, I can definitely see the point. (Or part of the point: I still think it's stupid and annoying to give bikers tickets for running stoplights in the middle of the night or not coming to a complete stop just before a hill, but I also think that we should probably try to follow at least the common-sense types of laws. I just tend to treat them more as guidelines.) Traffic here is bad, and I've definitely seen lots of bikers do things on the road that caused more inconvenience for others than I could personally take responsibility for if I were to consider behaving the same way. But at the same time, I ride in constant fear of being doored, hit, run off the road, and yelled at just for my presence. I guess all I'm saying is, I won't cut you off in traffic and slow you down too much if you don't knock me off my bike or gesture rudely when all I'm trying to do is cross the street and behave like the car that the law pretends that I am.