he said "it's all in your head" and I said "so's everything" but he didn't get it

For somebody who doesn't do a lot of the things that most girls seem to find necessary in order to go outside (makeup, eyebrow plucking, extreme moisturizing, etc.) I spend an awful lot of time worrying about clothing. If I'm feeling uncomfortable or stressed out it can take me a truly inordinate amount of time to decide what to wear, and I frequently end up feeling twitchy in whatever I finally picked out. On a good day, though, clothing can be amusing. I like to sometimes dress up one of the frilly girly dresses I've picked up at the local thrift store for two dollars and perhaps paint my toenails, maybe flounce a little bit. But really, I'm laughing the whole time, because it feels like pure artifice. I call it wearing girl drag or femme drag, and it amuses me enough that I look forward even more to the summer heat.

But lately I've been feeling a lot more androgynous than I'm accustomed to. It's another thing that I'm truly appreciating for the first time, it seems. In the past when I've felt the most androgynous I generally recall feeling fairly unsexy; I suspect this goes back to self-doubt and my (unspoken and unthought, until just now) fear that unless I'm flashing some gender signals I'm passing under most people's radars, attraction-wise or even just attention-wise. I can be so quiet sometimes that I worry about never making an impression at all. I'm what you might call petite, 5'6" and a hundred and ten pounds (according to surveys the ideal woman is 5'7" and 110, which I personally find hilarious), with medium brown shoulder-length hair and glasses. For years I wore mostly nondescript clothing and kept my hair very short, which might have worked for me if it had felt like sexy androgyny but in retrospect made me look somewhat like a nerdier-than-normal librarian but not in a particularly hot way. But now, with longer hair than I've had in years and summer around the corner, I feel strangely unhooked from some of my prior appearance hangups.

My hair is down to my shoulders, but it doesn't make me feel girly. It reminds me (this is kind of weird) of a photograph I saw of Oscar Wilde, seated with his hands gripping a cane, wearing rich heavy clothing and radiating a kind of casual sensuality, his dark hair waving slightly around his face. It's not that I resemble him but that I feel decadent somehow, with this luxury of hair that I can run my fingers through. I've also been paying attention to my walk, the long strides and casual swagger that I get when I'm covering ground, comfortable in my own body and its efficiency. I've been noticing a desire to wear clothing that doesn't scream "girl", that doesn't emphasize what little breast I have or cut too low. When I do, I feel even more exposed than normal. Which sometimes is fun, I'll admit. But not all the time.

None of these are big changes and I suspect that I actually don't appear different to outside viewers, but I can feel the difference in attitude they provoke within myself. I feel slightly cocky, confidant. I walk differently, with my hips leading more as I move, and I look people in the eye more often. It's hard to describe, but I don't feel like I'm taking on a masculine gender when I leave some of my femininity behind; I feel almost slightly ungendered or maybe like gender is just an incidental aspect of myself, and it feels good. The confidence and pleasure make me more confident emotionally and mentally, and I think people can tell. I feel full of some sort of energy or drive lately that is pushing me to reconsider some pretty large chunks of my personal self, and it makes me feel like I'm vibrating sometimes. I feel like I just need something, words or caresses or noise, to come out of me, to balance the life that's twirling around inside of me with what's going out into the world. I feel full of potential energy, just waiting to turn into action.

I'm still planning to be girly this summer. But I plan on being other things too. I want to be playful with my self-presentation, in my understated way. I think most of this is in my head, but it doesn't really matter if it is; the way people see and feel about me is directly related to how I see and feel about myself, and so even if the changes in myself are subtle they end up being reflected and amplified in my attitude, my confidence, my general feeling of well-being. My happiness. If I do the things that make me happy, everything else in my life gets better. Why did it take me so long to figure that out?

the exciting conclusion

Usually, not too many people I know come to my concerts. Which is fine: not only do I totally understand that most people are really damn busy, but it can actually be a little awkward if they show up. What if I have a religious experience playing a show and the person who attended shrugs and looks away and says "Oh yeah, it was great..."? What if I feel like it was a waste of time and my audience member gushes? Awkward. But some shows I feel so proud of that I don't care, that it's enough that people are there and seeing what's happening. New music concerts in particular inspire both that feeling and Awkward Look-Away Moments, which is a fun combination.
We had our dal niente season closer Saturday night, and I'm still psyched about it. A whopping nine people from all different genres of my life showed up, mostly non-(classical-)musicians who had probably never been to a new music concert before, and all of them seemed to get something out of it. Enjoyment, a widened view of classical music, at least one piece that everybody liked (Vivier! Textural, and full of exciting string unisons), you know, whatever. It made me so happy, because the point of this music to me is less about pleasing audiences--although that's a bonus--and more about learning new things, finding beauty or joy or anger or wonder in unexpected sounds. I like pushing boundaries in my passive-ish way, and this music is inherently boundary-pushing.
Plus it was just a bad-ass concert. Well programed, alternating ensemble string orchestra and quartet pieces with solos, lots of exciting composers (Scelsi, Vivier, a cool quartet by Felipe Lara, solo cello piece by Saariajo, a world premier by our founding composer Kirsten Broberg, etc.), and for once it wasn't the mind-blowingly hardest thing I'd ever played. We put the concert together in three days, and it was an honest pleasure to play. I can't wait until next season.

my purpose in the grand scheme of things

I've been going through one of those phases lately where all anybody wants to talk about is sex. Which is totally fine by me... This time, there's an added aspect of this periodic happening: I've bought sex toys for four other people in the last two weeks. This is partially an offshoot of knowing the majority of the staff at a local feminist sex toy store; I can go hang out, buy a vibe, see someone (sometimes many someones) I know, and call it good.
But partially, since I seem to be spending all my time talking about sex anyway, I want everybody to be having good sex both by themselves (Betty Dodson-style) and with other people. So I've been buying bullet vibes (and more expensive ones, when reimbursement is forthcoming) and shipping them all over the place. It makes me happy.

as the world turns

I'm realizing this week that blogging more has drawn my attention to the cyclicity of my life. Is it spring or fall? Expect a post about how much I love to walk, followed a few weeks later (if it's spring) by one about biking. Winter? Soup recipes. April? Posts about flowers. End of May? Let's have another goodbye to orchestral playing!
But cyclicity isn't necessarily a bad thing. Flowers, walking, biking, music: these are all things I love, and I'm glad to periodically revisit them. I'm constantly re-assessing my relationships to things, re-articulating my thoughts about what I love and what I don't. I find it comforting that my life is stable enough that I can acknowledge it's cyclic nature and pay attention to the seasons and years passing. It makes me feel alert within my own life.
The other day I walked outside and had to seriously restrain myself from throwing my arms up into the warm air and spinning around in circles a few times. Because it's spring, and the feel of the breeze on my skin overwhelmed me and I felt my heart pump hard a few times, and I wanted to acknowledge those feelings with some sort of physical action. I didn't; I've indulged in triumphant spring arm raising a few times on back streets, but spinning on a crowded weekend street was a bit much for me. (I demonstrated the spin later for a co-worker and she laughed pretty hard, which made me a little glad I'd smothered my earlier instinct. Although I guess it would make my day if I saw somebody express physical joy like that, so maybe next time I should just do it.) I restrain the same impulse--the arm raising, not the spinning--on my bicycle when I break it out, which I haven't much yet because the weather is just perfect for walking and I'm a compulsive foot traveller when I get the chance. But I feel, once again, full to bursting. I love living in a place that has a spring because it makes me want to jump around, spin in circles, make a fool out of myself but not care because oh, the sunshine...!
I'm going to be nice to myself this summer. I'm excited. It's going to be good. It's going to be a spinning kind of year, I hope.

feeling unsteady

I haven't had terribly good cooking karma lately. I've been feeling a little apathetic in the kitchen, and I apparently have just entered one of those phases where I'm hungry all the time but nothing sounds even remotely appealing so I haven't been pushing myself. I'll be back on track far too soon, but for the moment I've been feeling a little stalled out, food-wise.
So recently I was flattered to be contacted via facebook by an acquaintance from Northwestern who wanted me to help her bake a cake for a mutual friend's birthday. I was totally psyched, as they say. I can't help but feel like you've crossed some sort of amateur cook line when people start asking you to help out with special events, you know? Also, this was an excellent time to talk her into helping me make these ridiculously decadent cupcakes, ones that caught my eye a few months ago but that I hadn't quite gotten the energy together to make just for the hell of it. I mean, making cookies just for the hell of it is one thing, but cupcakes filled with ganache and frosted, and requiring a significant amount of alcohol to be purchased just to get them made? That's a whole other level.
But I'm a total sucker for gimmicky foods. Show me a vegetable that's not the color I'm expecting (a white eggplant, just for example) and I will definitely squeal a little bit and possibly even buy it "just to see if it tastes different, you know?" So a cupcake that mimics an Irish Car Bomb (which yes, is a terribly insensitive name--smitten kitchen's comments are full of people pointing that out) was just right up my alley. The cake part of things has Guinness in it (let me tell you, a pot full of simmering beer and butter smells... interesting), and then you core each cupcake and fill it with a chocolate ganache containing whiskey (naturally). Frost the whole thing over with buttercream frosting with baileys in it, and you have a complete little alcoholic cupcake.
(Notes: The cookie cutter thing didn't work at all. I actually bought a set of graduated star cookie cutters just for these cupcakes, but we couldn't get it to work. We ended up just using knives. Also? Don't make the frosting and ganache the morning before and then stick them in the fridge all day. You'll just have to heat them up again.)
Frankly, I'm too lazy to post the entire rather lengthy recipe here; that's what links are for. I'm also probably too lazy to make these again except for special occasions. I haven't actually eaten a full cupcake yet--just plenty of each of the components--but I'm not sure it's going to measure up to the amount of work that went in. Although all things considered, these weren't so terribly bad. I made the ganache and frosting in the morning (cooking with whiskey and heavy cream at 9 AM is a good time) and we baked the cupcakes together at night. Coring, filling and frosting were fun; I think these might just be Party Cupcakes. If I ever actually go to a Superbowl party, these will be my contribution.

play it again, sam

As this orchestra season draws to a close, I am once again thinking about how being an orchestral player is seeping slowly (inevitably? unclear) out of my life. Some days that feels fine; I'm not really so much going anywhere with playing, just kind of keeping on keeping on, and I might actually make more money just working instead of having two to three different jobs at any single point in time, etc. But other days I know I'll miss it terribly if I leave entirely. Partially it's frustration: I spent more than a decade learning how to be an orchestral player, and if I leave than those skills will atrophy and become mostly useless. It feels good to do something I'm good at and know I'm good at--a rarity, for sure--and I hate the thought of moving on and forgetting about this part of myself.
But mostly I'll miss the heart-lift I get from playing exciting things. Sometimes now I sit in rehearsals and think about what a freaking weird job I have; I get to have emotional epiphanies in the middle of symphonies, I get to bite my lip at Tchaikovsky's trumpets and sweat out my anxieties over Stravinsky's rhythms. I get to feel like, for once in my life, I'm doing exactly the right thing at exactly the right time, and how often do you get to say that? I work as a cog, I give up my musical autonomy and to some extent my personal choice, to make sounds that can make your heart quake and are gone as quickly as they occur. I bring ephemeral joy to people I've never met. There's a purity of purpose there.
I'm not saying goodbye this time, because every time I do that it ends up not being the end at all. So I'm saying instead that I hope it hasn't all been for nothing, that I hope as I look back I can remember that all these years haven't been wasted if nothing else because of the joy they have sometimes brought me. I'm saying I love you, and I hope I see you again soon.

the weight of words

Right now, I don't want love. Even like, in a more than friendly way, would be pushing it. I have my pangs, certainly, but mostly I'm dedicated to being happy and content with myself, to learning more about how I connect with other people, and that's working out well. As when I went through this before, I'm making new friends, thinking new thoughts, and trying to learn as much from myself as I can.
BUT. Every time I sit on my bed with a large stack of books next to me, I think of this poem. The momentary pang at the end of a matter-of-fact reminiscence reminds me of now. Regardless of how I feel about love, I miss moments of connection sometimes.

Bay Poem from Berkeley
Sandra Cisneros

Mornings I still
reach for you before
opening my eyes.

An antique habit from
last summer when we pulled
each other into the heat of groin
and belly, slept with an arm
around the other.

The Texas sun was like that.
Like a body asleep beside you.

But when I open my eyes
to the flannel and down,
mist at the window and blue
light from the bay, I remember
where I am.

This weight
on the other side of the bed
is only books, not you. What
I said I loved more than you.
True.

Though these mornings
I wish books loved back.