It's Only A Paper Rose

I've been slacking on piano of late. I had no access to one when I was in Arizona--we were staying in a 5,000 square foot fully-furnished rental mansion with a giant kitchen and pool and hot tub and rec room with air hockey and pool tables and there wasn't a single musical instrument in the entire house. (The snob in me thinks "no wonder these people have an entire bookshelf of right-wing political propaganda", heh.) As it happened, the venue my brother-in-law had rented for the wedding had three pianos, including a beautiful grand in the front foyer; I was there early for family pictures and of course I had to try it out. This resulted in a flurry of texts to my piano-teacher friend:

Me: "Suddenly I see why you're constantly on me about keeping my fingers arched. Those keys are way heavier when there's a big long lever attached."
Him: "Yeah playing on a grand is a whole different experience :)"
Me: "Probably doesn't count as "playing" when you're just picking out a few scales and failing to get the eighths in "Let It Be" to sound properly. More practice for me! When I have a keyboard again."
Him: "ohh but that so counts as playing. I miss the feel and sound of a grand!!"
Me: "I think I kind of hate it because there's no way to be inconspicuous. So everyone hears all my mistakes. {laughing crying face}"

Anyway, my schedule's been jam-packed since I got back and I was also fighting off a cold, so it wasn't until yesterday that I got back to practicing...directly after three hours of massage work, which I also haven't done in a while. Doing something that requires hand strength and dexterity and mental focus after three hours of doing something that requires hand strength and dexterity and mental focus...what can go wrong? But it was where I could fit it in my day, so I plonked my butt down and did it. My hands and arms are a little sore today but that's why ibuprofen was invented.

In other news, I'm trying to figure out what to do about my social media consumption. I never thought I'd be one of those people going on Facebook fasts--I have a lot of friends who live all over the world, and Facebook is super convenient as a reliable way to keep in touch with them. Up until now, when I noticed I wasn't enjoying my Facebook experience as much, I was able to go through and mute a bunch of people and hide the more obnoxious ads and things got better, but lately that strategy seems to be creating diminishing returns. I think some of it's the political atmosphere, which I feel a little bad about withdrawing from--people are upset about legitimate issues, and I don't blame them for needing a place to vent/speak about their causes!--but there's only so much anger (even righteous anger) that I can deal with. I've noticed that a lot of my more thoughtful/less actively political friends (who are the ones I tend to most enjoy interacting with) have been posting less, and of my remaining friends I've mostly been seeing either political posts or cat pictures; no idea if this is just what they're posting or if it's Facebook's algorithm, but either way I don't feel like it's terribly good-quality connection.

For now I'm trying to make an active practice of reducing my scrolling time; I'm going to try and redirect my energy into stuff like reading. I'm a little concerned about how isolating this is, though, and I don't feel I can drop FB entirely (it's sort of necessary for making connections in the yoga community). Maybe I'll see if I can pick up letter-writing again. Or even emails. I miss exchanging long-form communication with people, although I totally get why most folks don't want to spend the time. I'm grateful for my small community here on DW, for just that reason - longer-form posting encourages thoughtfulness and consideration in a way that microblogging really doesn't. I wish more of my favorite Facebook people would think about coming over here, but most of them are probably busy parenting or career-ing or otherwise having a life, heh.

As I mentioned on Wednesday, it's been a pretty physically intense week; in addition to work picking up and getting back into the regular Sculpt swing, Brian and I both got flat bike tires on subsequent nights, so the time I planned to rest after class yesterday were instead spent walking back-and-forth between our house and the bike shop multiple times. (We were a little afraid it'd been vandalism; we'd discovered both flats when our bikes were parked in the same spot outside the yoga studio, around the same time of evening. Fortunately it turns out to just have been bad luck; mine was a pinch flat, probably from the local road construction tearing up the pavement, and in his case he'd run over a piece of broken glass. Chicago streets strike again!) Then in the evening I decided to hit a hot yoga class to unwind my muscles after Wednesday's Sculpt class, so by the time I woke up this morning I was feeling pretty wrecked.

Today, on the other hand, has been pleasantly quiet. It's cold and snowy outside (first snow of the season), but inside we have books, and Netflix, and a fireplace, and a couch with big fuzzy blankets to nap on. It's also, at least for me, been a day for reflecting on disconnections, and mortality, and how best to support people I care for. (Two friends are going through a messy breakup. Another friend may or may not have lung cancer, pending a biopsy. I got an email from Jim Rothfuss' daughter with information about his memorial service, which I actually could make it to - it's in Wisconsin, about a three-hour drive from here. But I'm genuinely not sure if I'd be welcome; the email was sent to everyone in his contact list, I'm unlikely to know anyone else there, and I don't know that 'random person no one else knows showing up to memorial service' is the best plan.) Somewhat entertainingly, Brian and I have date night plans to go see Fun Home, a musical based on Alison Bechdel's "family tragicomic" about growing up in a dysfunctional family that ran a funeral home; it seems an appropriate choice for the general tenor of the day - sometimes life is awful, but we find the opportunities for connection and support and humor and keep on trucking anyway.

I'm debating what to do about piano lessons. I was really looking forward to learning from my friend I'd worked out a trade with - he gave lessons for years, and is a patient teacher as well as an extremely skilled pianist. But we got through exactly one lesson and then his personal life started falling apart, and the last couple of times we've planned to get together he's had to cancel. (We were supposed to have tea today and assess whether this was a week-or-two delay or an "I can't take on another responsibility right now" situation, but given that he had to cancel this as well, I guess I have my answer.) I have another friend who offered to give lessons and would probably be happy to trade, although I don't know offhand what her experience is with teaching or what her schedule is like. I need someone who can be consistent; I do best with some kind of weekly accountability and the structure of a lesson plan, although of course I like to have my own input as well. Possibly the most promising option was suggested by a friend whose landlords are professional music teachers; she lives in the same building with them, says they're cool people, and apparently they're also marathon runners so they'd probably be down for a massage trade, heh. We'll see how it shakes out.

I've been debating whether to write anything about this here, both because it's intensely personal and because I feel like I've mostly processed it at this point. But I'd like to have it down in something resembling a narrative; I'm slowly accepting that musicianhood is a fundamental chunk of my identity. (Which is something that anyone who's known me a while - especially while I'm in the throes of learning a new instrument - could have told me, but that I'm only really processing in chunks. Ah, self-discovery.) It feels like the real question, though, is where to start. As with most thorny questions of identity, past and present are all knotted together, and untangling them is difficult.

I think I'll start with a bit of common narrative advice, and begin as close to the end as possible.

So, last week I bought an electric piano. Nothing fancy, just a Casio Privia, a line known for being a solid choice for beginners. (The other strong contender was a Yamaha - it had a slightly warmer and fuller sound - but the Privia line has scaled weighted hammers attached to the keys to make it feel far more like an acoustic piano; the mechanical resistance on the Yamaha just felt mushy by comparison. Plus the Yamaha was finished in a high-gloss coat that attracted fingerprints and dust like whoa.) Slight brag: I was originally going to buy the entry-level keyboard for $500, but Guitar Center had the electric piano version (same footprint as the keyboard, but with a built-in stand with pedals and a fancy cover to slide down over the keys) for $600 because the new model had just come out. I inquired about it, and the only one they had left was the floor model...so they gave it to me for $560. Sold!

I got it home and set it up in the spare bedroom, and made arrangements with my pianist friend for lessons. I even did a little refreshing on the basics via YouTube, no problem. And then I went to write about it here in my blog, and all my paralyzing ambivalence about music began to kick in - to use the metaphor from Come As You Are, I could feel my flock of birds start to wheel about in different directions. Rather than try to push through or ignore the feeling like I usually do, I took the book's advice and began listening to each bird (i.e. my assumptions and experiences and values) and writing out what it had to say. Some particularly relevant ones:

--I love music. I love making music. I love learning music. It's right up there with bodywork and storytelling as things I'd say are fundamental to my identity. "Musician" is one of the few role descriptors that's felt right to me for my entire life.

--To become a real musician, I have to go through years of rigorous training, with teachers who berate and humiliate me until everything I play/sing is perfect.

--Becoming a real musician requires hours of disciplined practice every single day. Scales, drills, repetitions. Each new song needs to be completely perfect before it's ever performed.

--Performing in front of a live audience is one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences in my life.

--Real musicians are always hustling. Gigs are few, good-paying gigs even fewer. The only way to make a living at music is to be poor and constantly working, traveling to work, or practicing.

--Following from the above assumptions, being a real musician is both amazing and absolutely miserable.

--The only worthwhile way to be a musician is to be a "real" musician; otherwise you're just a hobbyist and a dabbler and you'll never actually be any good.

--Fun is completely incidental to music. If you're having a good time jamming with friends or trading techniques, this is nice but not real musicianship.

Yeah, can any of you tell that my mother was classically trained? :P

As with most such sets of assumptions, these are of course ridiculous and contradictory when written out. But I'm not sure I can convey exactly how much emotion I had invested in them. To borrow another metaphor from Come As You Are (for a book about sexuality I'm seeing an awful lot of personal value from the non-sexy bits), these plants were pretty deeply rooted in my mental garden - some from my own experiences, a lot from the messages I got growing up with my mother and her own ambivalence towards musicianship. Pulling them up was fraught, to say the least; I spent about twenty minutes simultaneously crying and laughing with fear and rage and relief and anger and amusement at the sheer ridiculousness of all of it. It was more than a little terrifying - at one point I wanted to put my fist through the wall. I never get that angry!

I think, on some level, part of the fear was/is that pulling up those plants (i.e. facing these assumptions and letting myself feel the associated emotions) would mean that I'd no longer have any desire to pursue music - without that internal pushback, would I still have any kind of passion for it? It's a little early to tell, but I don't think that's the case; I'm still practicing, albeit at my basic fifteen-minutes-a-day level. (It's not hours of discipline, but I've seen real results with it. I got to be quite a competent guitarist by setting a rule that I had to play fifteen minutes each day, and if I felt like doing more, great.) I'm hoping that, now that I've pulled up this particularly stubborn patch, I'll have an opportunity to replace it with positive assumptions and experiences. (There's no reason someone who plays as a hobby isn't a 'real' musician! Jamming with friends is 'real' music! Even if I never perform professionally and just play for friends, that's still a worthwhile endeavour!) But at the very least, I don't feel that paralyzing sense of self-hatred and fear anymore when I think about how much I still have to learn, or how I might go about pursuing music in the future. And that feels like a big step in the right direction.

On a related note (haha), I'm thinking about getting some kind of music-themed tattoo - sort of a promise to myself that I'm a 'real' musician, even without classical training or a performing career. Have you seen any particularly interesting designs? Tell me about them!