Music-Related Melancholia

Once upon a time, on Saturday, I attended Kurt Bestor's annual Christmas show with my little brother.  First things first: I loved it, and my little brother is officially the best.  Or was for at least a minute or two on Saturday. ;)  Second things second: these things always make me wistful.

I suppose I should specify: by 'these things,' I mean musical performances.  Some musical performances.  Mostly musical performances that involve a flute or a piano in pretty much any capacity.

It's not entirely untrue to say that I have a certain...overexaggerative....streak.  I am a queen of hyperbole.  And sometimes it's for comedy, but sometimes I actually mean it.  I honest-to-goodness mean whatever over-the-top thing I'm saying sometimes--not as often as I once did, but still.

This is where the wistfulness comes in, I suppose.

I took instrument lessons: piano, flute.  As I recall, I mostly behaved myself during my piano lessons but I often acted like a little terror in the course of my flute lessons.  I have since learned that karma's a very real thing.  A few years ago, I agreed to teach flute lessons to the younger sister of a high school friend--and darned if she wasn't as much a terror as I'd been back when!  Maybe more!

Anyhow.

Lessons.  I took them.  And I used to imagine, I used to dream, that one day I'd be good enough I'd be famous.  But here's the thing: I never stuck with any one thing long enough to excel enough.  My attention span wavered, and while it's true I'm still a perfectly adequate piano player and that I still know which end of a flute is which... none of my big dreams ever came true.

I remember, 15 or so years ago, going into the Capitol Theatre with my parents for the first touring play I ever saw there: The King and I, with Hayley Mills.  (For the record, Ms. Mills is nice and all, but I'm pretty sure I would've preferred anyone else be Anna.)  Anyhow, I remember looking for the first few minutes into the pit, and thinking: "Someday I'll do that.  Someday I'll be good enough to play in the pit."

But I didn't, and I won't, and sometimes that makes me a little bit sad.

Yet mixed in with that sadness is an appreciation of what they're doing: I've taken lessons, I know it's not easy.  And I love good performances that much more (and also loathe terrible performances to distraction) because of those lessons.  I'm thankful I had parents who let me have them, thankful for growing up in an atmosphere that frequently involved music in the background.

Still sometimes I can't help but wonder if I make--aloud or internally--claims to myself that will never be fulfilled, claims that might result in more bittersweet experiences at some point in the future.  It's not even that I think I'd go back and apply myself more.  I don't think I'd be a better flute student.  I still think that counting out pesky rhythms before playing them on the piano is quite frequently a shame.  (So maybe I wasn't the greatest of piano students.  I remember an exasperated teacher who lamented not that I had no rhythm, but that I seemed to make the rhythm I preferred...)

But nevertheless, I had dreams.  Without any follow-through.

And all of a sudden, my pattern of flunking at something like Nanowrimo begins to make a lot of sense to me: I do this.  I'm in a pattern.  I've been in a pattern for a long, long time.  A pattern where I think big and then go small, when I need to dare to believe that I'm just as overexaggeratedly amazing as I claim to be.

Me and My iPod

For a great long while, I was incredibly adamant that I didn't want to own an iPod. One of my biggest reasons for not wanting the iPod was that I saw too many people who too fully tuned out the rest of the world as soon as they placed the earbuds in their ears. I like being aware of my surroundings. As a half-blind person, it's never been a good thing when I've gotten so wrapped in something that I stopped paying attention to where I was going. I've had my share of bruises, cuts, and sprains to prove it. (Worse yet: the solid majority of these pratfalls always seemed to happen when there was an attractive, single male nearby to witness my moment of glorious clumsiness. The nice ones, I've learned, walk over to check that you're all right. The rude ones snicker and/or ignore you.)

Except that I caved a while ago and acquired an iPod (my first iPod was free, a brick of a thing handed down to me from my father--seriously, I think you could seriously have maimed someone with that iPod...when it died, I had to replace it with a Nano because I couldn't imagine life iPodless), and now I find that I love it for precisely that reason: it creates its own little world I can safely insulate myself in.

It's a wonderful tool when I want to be fully preoccupied with my own thoughts or with one particular type of action (like, say, writing...or cleaning). The music literally playing in my head becomes a background soundtrack for whatever I'm doing and allows me to fully ensconce myself in whatever I'm doing.

Sometimes I wonder if the me from back then, were she to see iPod-insulated-me now, would ruefully shake her head and mourn...

Going, Doing, Being: A Small Svithe

Today's musical number in my parent's sacrament meeting was a lovely arrangement of "I'll Go Where You Want Me to Go"--a former ward member arranged and sang it. He did something vaguely familiar that I believe I'd heard at the end before, combining all the key verbs from each song so that it ended with, "I'll go, and I'll do, and I'll be what you want me to be."

And it struck me: some (not all, but some) of the struggles I've faced are a direct result of my insistence on being, going, and doing what I want to do. And let's face it, someone else has better vision here. More eternal vision.

I hope to be better in the future at going, doing, being at the direction of someone infinitely wiser than I am.

Another Slap in the Face from a Hymn

"Be thou humble in thy calling, and the Lord thy God shall teach thee / To serve his children gladly with a pure and gentle love." Hymn 130

I often find myself called upon to play the "organ" in Sacrament meeting. (The "organ" is actually a digital piano--a finicky, finicky digital piano that will make organesque sounds when you push the proper button.) And so I often find myself playing preludes and postludes. I don't plan which hymns I'll be playing; instead I prefer a far more intuitive method of randomly flipping the hymn book open and playing whichever hymn my eye falls on first.

A bit of backstory here: I recently (well, recently ish) received a call to serve as my ward's family history co-chair. I teach a class, act as a consultant, and supervise a committee (which, right now, has one member aside from myself). With recent changes in temple policy, my bishopric members also hope for me to encourage the acquisition of names so we can perform baptisms for the dead at any given time of day. More specifically, they've requested I figure out how to have 75 family names prepared for a November temple excursion.

My male counterpart has essentially been a no-show, and the one remaining committee member has been a person I struggle not only to understand, but not to be annoyed with. I know that in accepting my calling, I essentially agreed to become a part of her life. And she's willing to accept responsibilities. She's enthused about family history work. And yet I've still struggled to figure out how to work with her. In fact, I've sort of avoided meeting with her lest I fall prey to hours and hours of story about her life troubles.

And then yesterday morning, I flipped to this hymn and felt roundly chastised: between my school load, my work load, and my calling load, I've felt more than a little stressed. Some of that burden lifted last week after Ward Council meeting when the temple committee co-chair pulled me aside to ask what he and his committee members could do to help; he (rightly, in my opinion) figures that the goals of our committees are intertwined.

But as I started reading through the second verse while I played, I mentally cringed more than a little. Part of the stress I feel has been directly correlated to attempting to be a one-woman committee, and I don't have to be. And it occurred to me that in making an effort to work with this sister, I have an opportunity to learn how to understand someone. Perhaps even how to love someone.

I Have Finally Joined the Digital Age

Once upon a time, I'll admit I felt a small sense of superiority when people would send me prompts or quizzes: answer these questions by setting your iPod on random! As I ignored them, I thought to myself how I was not enslaved to technology--and that though I blogged, Facebooked, and checked my e-mail almost neurotically too often--I was not a slave to Apple. I was just fine with my music being played on my stereo. And though I've technically had iTunes on my computer for a while, it was more as a favor to my brother than it was anything else. He, after all, has been enthralled with his iPod since he came home from his mission last July.

And then it happened: I acquired an iPod. But I'll have to admit to a small sense of superiority still, because I didn't pay for it. My dad passed his old iPod to me when he invested in his iPhone. (He's an IT director. He loves his toys. And really, after watching him watch my older brother play with his iPhone...well, we all knew it was only a matter of time.)

When my dad offered his, I accepted it in the spirit it was intended: both my dad and my younger brother, after all, felt that it was high time for me to join the digital age and listen to my music the same way everyone else does. I'll admit it comes in handy when I want to listen to my music but I don't want to disturb the others in my household.

But I'm scared, and this is why. I have a good friend who wears his iPod around campus-any time he's not in class and not at work, and he becomes completely oblivious to the world around him. He gets so absorbed in his music that he doesn't notice anything else going on. Short of a bomb threat (and I'm not so sure about that), I can't think of anything that would divert his attention away from his music once he's put his headphones in.

I'd like to be aware, personally.

And also, to be quite honest, I don't want to become so attached to my iPod that I'm like the guy I walked home behind (for part of the walk, anyway) the other day: jamming out tunelessly (although, to be honest, I can carry a tune) to my music so loudly that other passersby can't help but notice, stare, and a chuckle a little.

In short, I guess we'll see how this goes.

Also, I'll still probably ignore any prompt that tells me to set my iPod to random and then answer the questions based on the songs that crop up. I just might (might, mind you--I'm not making any promises here) feel a little bit guiltier about ignoring them.