Wildflower Heaven

Today I'm loving life. For no particular reason. I'm just happy. It's amazing what beauty surrounds me within a five-minute walk of our apartment.

And while I doubt all of them are actually wild, they sure do make me love spring, even though it's been the same weather (sunny and mild) since February.

The Soloist on NPR

I've become somewhat of an NPR junkie. Yesterday on Fresh Air, the most amazing story was featured. I was so touched by it that I sat in my car and listened for half an hour.

It was an interview with an LA Times journalist name Steve Lopez who befriended a street musician in downtown Los Angeles. It turns out that this man, Nathaniel Ayers, was once a student at Juilliard, and battled schizophrenia for a number of years and was homeless, living on Skid Row in downtown LA. Lopez saw his talent when he spotted him playing a two-string violin and decided to see if there was a way he could help the man. After writing a few columns about him in the LA Times, people started hearing about his story and donating instruments for Lopez to give to the man. Through playing music again (violin and cello), Ayers slowly decided to get help and reengage with the world. Lopez helped him in several other ways- finding him an apartment, getting him psychiatric help, and introducing him to musicians from the LA Philharmonic. Ayers is now taking lessons with musicians from the Philharmonic, and has goals to become a music therapist.

I'm not doing the story justice- you've got to listen to it for yourself on the NPR website here. The interview was featuring Lopez's book which came out yesterday entitled The Soloist: A Lost Dream, An Unlikely Friendship, and the Power of Music. And, there's a movie in the making- starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx! I don't know how to feel about that- but I like the fact that his story is being told. I know that it's shown me how much I've taken my mental health and musical training for granted.

Ode to the Veggies

It's day 21 of me and Paul's experiment with vegetarianism. It's actually a meat fast, the details of which I won't get into here. But basically, we gave up meat for 40 days and I thought I would evaluate how it's gone.

The first week I was loving it, feeling healthy, in love with the fresh California produce that I rummage through at farmer's markets, thinking this thing will open a whole new repertoire in my cooking that would have easily been neglected had we stuck to our normal diet. We eat quite a bit of meat on a normal basis, I've realized, especially since we got a Costco membership and a grill. Here's a sampling of what we might typically have on a daily basis for dinner.

-Pasta (usually the papardelle from TJ's) with my homemade bolognese sauce (which I would argue is the best in San Diego, a statement that is meant to tell you less about the quality of my cooking than the quality of the Italian food around here)
-Chinese style stir-fry usually at least once a week. Paul's favorite is beef, tofu, and tomato or mabu tofu, usually with bok choy or spinach on the side
-Fish (usually salmon, tilapia, or cod), with a side of garlicy roasted potatoes and mesclun salad mix
-Roasted chicken- I love to stuff it with some gooey truffle cheese and rub olive oil, salt and pepper all over it.
-Pork chop or tenderloin usually in a red-wine reduction, or steak on the grill (I think we usually have one of these every week)

Well, that's a rough sampling. Here's a couple things we've tried instead:

-Pasta (not with the bolognese). I tried my hand at a tomato and pureed chickpea sauce, with some organic arugula from the farmer's market thrown in. Something about that one didn't agree with my tummy.
-Eggplant parmesan. I found a great recipe in my Mario Batali cookbook that didn't require breading and frying the eggplant. It still took about two hours to prepare, but it came out quite tasty in my opinion and I was pretty proud of myself. Little did I know that Paul doesn't even like eggplant. I think it was the first thing I've ever cooked for him that he didn't really eat. And that hurt! Well, I didn't know he only liked it breaded, greasy and on top of pasta. I think eggplant is underrated.
-Sesame noodles. I don't really think these are an authentic Chinese dish. But you can't go wrong with peanut butter, sesame oil, and lots of scallions.
-Kimchee stew. This is the first time I cooked Korean food on my own. Granted, it was missing one of the essential ingredients- spam! I substituted some tofu and enoki mushrooms instead. It was actually pretty tasty.
-Risotto with five kinds of mushrooms (porcini, shitake, crimini, portabello, oyster). I'm a mushroom freak so I LOVED this one, but Paul wasn't that into it.
-Pizza- we usually make it ourselves with the trusty TJ pizza dough and some buffalo mozzarella, tomatoes, scallions, and basil

(above: our tasty signature pizza; brussel sprouts sauteed with shallots and olive oil; tofu, asparagus, and red pepper stir-fry; mini-heirloom tomato salad with lentils and avocados in balsamic vinegarette; potato, portabello, and artichoke casserole)

All in all, I think we've been keeping our meals pretty tasty despite the absence of meat. Eating out is a challenge, especially since eating at some of our favorite restaurants presents a serious temptation. Two from this weekend were tough- had to forgo the amazing burgers at the Stone Brewery in Escondido, and our favorite brunch spot, Americana in Del Mar, was a toughie- I love the eggs benedict (with prosciutto.....argh!). God is better than meat. 19 days to go.

On Practicing...and quitting

I just finished reading Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music by Glenn Kurtz. It's a memoir about a guy who has a dream to become an internationally renowned, world-touring classical guitarist. He goes to the New England Conservatory, graduates, and eventually quits the guitar, crushed that his dream of being at the top doesn't come true. Eventually, he goes on to pursue a Ph.D in literature at Stanford and ends up as a professor teaching lit to art students. And he also comes back to the guitar after 10 years of not playing and finally finds peace with it. Practicing eventually becomes more than a means to an end. It becomes a freeing form of self-expression that he does out of passion for the music itself rather than a pathway to greatness.

I was wary of the book at first- would this book make me want to quit, faced with the reality that there really is not room for another Segovia in 2008? But so much of it resonated with me and made me feel more positive about things. His honesty really struck me, as evidenced in this passage:

"Practicing can be a dream world in which you escape the reality of time. You believe that you have everything to do over again, that you have all the time in the world to achieve perfection. And every day we must practice. There is no other way to improve. Still, practicing, by itself, cheats you of half your life. Even if you are your only audience, music lives fully only in performance. Performance brings all the strands together, for a moment, joining the many conflicting voices with which music speaks- the joy, the frustration and anger, the loneliness, regret, and sudden elation. But unlike practice, every performance has an end. And without an end, music is just a fantasy. Now, returning to music, I hear how these tones equal my experience. Ringing and dying; my dream and its loss- together these define the boundaries of my ability, the high and the low, the edges I will always push against. Together they describe what music is for me, what "music" is, the full measure of my love."

I found this to be so true. The relationship between practicing and performing seems pretty straight-forward. Practicing is a means to an end, the end being the performance. Performance makes everything come out in the music that most of the time is not possible while you're practicing. Often times, an interpretation can spontaneously change in a performance because of the energy of that moment, the communication with the audience, and the intensity of the focus required to be fully involved in that piece of music. It can become more profound, beautiful, and revealing than you ever thought possible. Or, it can go completely awry and a memory slip can come up on something that you've played and known for years simply because you let self-doubt and fear control your playing for that moment. I've had both happen to me and I know that performing is not at all possible without many, many hours spent practicing. But is there a way to practice that conjures the essence of performing, so that half of my life is not spent preparing for something that ends right after the concert's over?

My personal struggle with practicing is about making something that I love into a form of work. Since music always came so naturally to me, I used to be able to fool my teachers into thinking I'd worked hard all week when really I practiced the day before my lesson and half an hour before my lesson. When I got to college, this was no longer possible and I knew that there came a point in my life where I had to start to work. Like, really work. I'm not a lazy person, really. I worked very hard at the things that I thought I was supposed to work hard at, like school. I was a great student in school. But I still find that I am a very bad music student. And now that I am a teacher too, I can see right through the ones who do as I used to do and practice right before their lesson day. And now that I am now my own teacher, there is no one to keep me accountable to what I do each day except for myself, which is a very difficult thing sometimes.

This is something that I have thought about for years and years, and there came a moment in a Juilliard practice room when I was so fed up with fingering and re-fingering a Bach suite that I cried tears of frustration over how futile, pointless, and irrelevant to the outside world this "work" seemed to be. After college, while my friends were working on Wall Street and getting jobs in the real world making money and moving money, I was stuck in this music bubble trying to figure out how guitar was relevant to everything else. Luckily, I had good friends at school who encouraged me and taught me that all of this "work", however tedious it could be at times, was delightful in the eyes of the Lord if my heart treated it as a form of worship. To know that God delights in my struggle to hone and cultivate this gift He's given me is what has made all the difference for me.

At times, I still desperately want a cubicle job where my expectations are clearly outlined and my deadlines are made for me. People always think I'm crazy for saying that. When I'm close to the edge (and this happened once last week) I start combing the job listings and wondering what else I could do with my life. It's mostly a pride issue, and I know that in the end it's also to prove to myself that I'm capable of other things, too. But as I've thought about it this week and as I gave a little "performance" to Paul while he was eating dinner last night, I feel more and more confirmed in my heart that I could never, ever quit. I will always play the guitar, always struggle with it, always teach it, and always love it just as I did when I was five years old. Maybe I'll never be Segovia, but I am going to take every opportunity that God gives me by storm as long as He gives me strength to.

Cabin Fever

The past few weeks my mind has been in a bit of a haze. Especially the week that we moved. It was not a hard or frustrating move- everything went smoothly and soon the new place was feeling like home. But I am a creature of habit, and the lack of order was probably what caused my mind to become so crowded and crazy.

Well, in the middle of all my mental blankness, I managed to get into a car accident. Ok, maybe you wouldn't call it a car accident. It was an accident. And it did involve my car. But it did not involve another car or another driver. Thank goodness. It did involve a wooden pillar in our parking structure. And it did result in a huge foot-long dent on my left front door and my left side mirror being knocked completely off. The mirror somehow hung on by a thread and we taped it back to the car so that I could still see (vaguely) out of the left side. It looked completely stupid and was a perpetual reminder of my carelessness and the $$ that will go down the tubes for the repair- all that, gone in about 2 seconds!

This week the car is in the shop being repaired, and I am stranded without a mode of transportation for getting out of our apartment. It was a good week to do it since my students are all mostly on spring break this week. I have a few that come to our place, so they are my only dose of human interaction each day. Days like this make me a little crazy. I feel like typing out long sentences on the computer that go something like "All work and no play makes Connie a dull girl." (that's a movie reference in case you have no idea what I'm talking about)

Anyway, this is a great excuse to make me buckle down and practice. I always want those periods of time which don't have any immediate deadlines so that I can work on learning some new music, or writing some arrangements. But when they come, I would rather do anything but work. Yesterday was halfway productive. Ask me how much progress I've made by Friday- but first check if I'm sane.