How Long Has This Been Going On?

I've been in "unemployment" since the 1st of November, and have done very little in the intervening 4 or so weeks, including publishing posts on this blog. What has happened...?

I've finished my law degree!!! My grades for my final two papers came out this week, and I have officially finished. And quite well too, my average grade was around an A this year, which beats any of my other years at university, including my first year, which I thought was pretty good at the time...

I'm graduating in just over a week! I've got relatives coming over to watch the parade and the ceremony, which is very exciting. And then when they leave in January, I'm going with them for a month or so to just really relax before I start work.

What else? Don't really know, it's all been a bit of a haze of swimming, then not swimming, swimming, then not... I decided I was going to start swimming again, after about 6 years of not stepping within 100m of a pool, and I nearly drowned because I had forgotten how to breathe lol. It took a while to regain that skill. Especially when I breathe with my nose under water instead of my mouth. Strange fish...

So at the moment it is just taking things one step at a time, deciding whether to sign up to Facebook, whether to sleep, whether to change banks (don't get me started on the banking industry), what to wear for graduation.

Decisions. What to do, what to do... and there's about 2 and a half months more of this.

The Way You Sip Your Tea

There's a joke that back in the day parishioners would dry out their used tea bags to send to missionaries overseas as part of their effort to support them. But reusing teabags is something no one seems to understand or do except me.

I was drinking a cup of tea the other day and thought that I might try reusing the tea bag, because my tea was very strong, and the bag looked like it still had some life in it. So I made another cup and it was a perfectly fine cup of tea. The third wasn't too great though, it tasted like milky water, which is, I suppose, what it is to a lot of people.

But the art in reusing a tea bag is in drying it out. I left a tea bag to dry instead of reusing it straightaway, and the second (and third) cup was as strong as the first. Unfortunately, the tea bag got thrown out by someone in the family because it ain't a good look to have a collection of labelled tea bags when people are about to be visiting you ("and this one is from last week, Earl Grey..."). So while I think it could have done a fourth cup, I have yet to been able to try it.

Another thing which is a big no-no is leaving the bag in when milk is added. The government departments in NZ advocate putting in the milk before adding the hot water, but when you do that, the tea bag gets milk in it. And you don't want to leave a milky tea bag around to dry because you'd be starting a science project if you do it. And when you put in milk before the hot water, it will automatically cool the hot water, meaning the tea will not be as hot and will take longer to infuse.

So take out the tea bag before putting in the milk. And when the tea bag does get really ick, you can just throw it into the compost bin (it's just leaves after all). My mum does this part, but she takes the bag out after milk, so technically it's not just vegetation that's going into the bin.

But digressing onto other matters, nothing much has happened in the last couple of weeks that is worth saying. I injured my knee again (it's an old sports injury), so have been sitting around studying because there's not much else to do during study week and you're immobile. In a way it's a blessing in disguise. But other than that, not much...

Oh, Gee! Oh, Joy!

Yesterday was a day of many lasts: last day at uni (ever), last 8.30 lecture (thankfully), last tutors' lunch (which I missed because of a meeting that ran overtime), last lecturer evaluation form, last terms test, last coffee with one of my best friends, last lunch in the Law School cafe... and then I remembered there was one more 'last' to come. I have an exam in a couple of weeks. But only a couple of weeks...

It's amazing how time flies. I'm graduating with one degree in December this year, with another next year, I'm starting full-time work early next year. It didn't seem that long ago I was just at high school... but it has been 5 years. And it's been a long time. And I leave the uni phase of my life with mixed feelings.

IT'S OVER!!! I can't believe I made it...

But enough reminiscing. It's going to be a great couple of weeks leading up to the exams, and it's going to be a great almost-4 months of holiday after that. I've only got the one exam, so I'm going to study slowly and relaxingly. My study buddy is really on to it despite being really busy, so I'm going to do some harder slog in the next week so that when we meet for study I have lots to contribute. After the exam, I'm going to do some work for the university for a week or so, and then it's pure holiday until my grandparents come for my graduation, and then the Christmas season will be upon us. In mid-January the grandparents are going back, and I'm going with them to see my god-cousin (son of my mother's god-sister, who is like an aunt to me), and enjoy the first week of Chinese New Year (if my calculations are right). Then back to Welly 2 days before I start work...

Joke of the week: Three girls stood in front of a mirror which would zap you and make you disappear if you said something to it which was untrue. The first girl, a brunette, went in front of the mirror and said, "I think I am the smartest person in the world", and immediately she was zapped and disappeared. The next girl, a redhead, went in front of the mirror and said, "I think I am the most beautiful girl in the world," and she too got zapped and disappeared. The last girl, a blonde (you knew it would be, ay?), went before the mirror and said, "I think...", and she disappeared.

I Can't Be Bothered Now

I am so glad it's over. I never have to play the piano ever again (unless I have failed one component, and I hope I haven't).

Everything went OK, can't say it was fantastic, nor was it abysmal. Bach was nice, Mozart first movement a bit too fast, but not as much as in the competition, second movement bored even me to tears, but it was in time (does that compensate for anything?), third movement was OK, a few too many mistakes than I would be happy with, Chopin was OK but for the mistakes, Gershwin was great as usual.

The Viva Voce was disarmingly simple, and I think I stressed myself out about it so much that I couldn't see the wood from the trees and said some totally stupid things before calming down and saying things in sentences. The sight-reading (it's called a Quick Study- yeah right) was fine... until it came to performing it. I played it through twice reasonably well in the 5 minutes preparation time, but when the real thing came, I screwed up the rhythm in the canon in a jazz style (who ever heard of that?), and everything sort of fell to bits after that. But hopefully I did well enough to warrant a pass.

It doesn't help to wake up the next morning with a headache from the celebratory drink or few (brother: "it's called a hangover"), and then realise that I actually did know how to play that jazz bass rhythm. In fact, I had played a whole piece with that rhythm throughout it. Makes you want to find a wall and knock your head against it, except that it would hurt. Oh, and then survive on Coke the whole day so that it will corrode my insides. Just joking- Coke is just about the only substance that can keep me going when I'm knackered. "Must be holy chips or something" (Pedro in Napoleon Dynamite- the ultimate cool person's movie). Actually it's probably the caffeine and the copious quantities of sugar. Hey, that's a nice bit of alliteration there. Tehe.

Oh well, at least it's over. And I can start studying again. And perhaps clear up the war zone that is my bedroom. You don't know how relieved I am. Where's a wall when you need one?!

Nice Work If You Can Get It

"Integrity is a lofty attitude assumed by someone who is unemployed" Oscar Levant (one of the foremost Gershwin interpretators, and his close friend)

A family friend recently told us that their child had recently gotten a job working for the tax department. The family friend was very happy that the child was now employed, with a job paying well in excess of the average income of a NZer ($24000pa), and would be getting a rise in 6 months if they were still there, especially since the child (actually the child is quite grown, older than me by a few years) had no qualification vaguely related to tax or any associated discipline (law/economics/accounting etc) and had no experience in tax whatsoever. However, the child was not very happy: the job was not one he enjoyed, nor trained in, nor one which he found fulfilling.

But what irks me is when people complain about how their life sucks when they don't count their blessings, or when they don't realise that often the source of the unhappiness is the person themselves. For me personally, I would love to one day work in the public sector: good salary, 9-5 work days, no free overtime, no time sheets... it sounds like a good job to have, perhaps after the slog of the private sector and when you want to slow down to do other things. That child should know that not everyone in NZ gets the opportunity to earn that sort of money. Also, people who study subjects at university that are not in great demand should realise that they either need to be very good or need to find some other job that is unrelated to their area of study. If you study English Lit you should figure it out that you can either teach or flip burgers at Macca's. I personally love English Lit, but there are only so many English Lit jobs out there, and unless you are the best, you're probably not going to get one of them.

People see their jobs as an extension of themselves. As I was saying to my parents the other day, it looks like people these days have an inverted Maslow mentality: the desire to have the necessities is no longer the foremost consideration for people, but the desire for self-actualisation, to find something that allows you to find yourself and to show everyone else how the real you looks like (even though you probably don't know what that is, and if you really did you probably wouldn't like it). Having enough money to pay for food and rent is now secondary to doing whatever your heart desires. That's all very nice, but knowing (or searching) yourself is not very useful when you're shivering in the street in sub-zero temperatures and it's raining and all you have are apple cores (I know people who eat apple cores, but that's another story). A job is a job is a job: something for you to do to earn money so that you can do stuff. And it's a good thing to do. Not everything you do in life will be fun or immediately fulfilling, but you do it because it is good and right. Like medicine.

As for me, I am truly blessed to have a job ready for me once I graduate, and the job is with some great people, the pay is decent (although not as much as this child's pay- yet), and it's what I want to do.

On a tangent note, I really like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I learnt it in a marketing paper I had to do at university ages ago, and it nicely sums up what marketers try to do. I find that almost everyone subscribes to the upside down pyramid. That is the curse of prosperity- having so much that you don't know what's important because you've never had to ask...

"Money is not everything. However, without money you have nothing" Chinese proverb

He Loves and She Loves

I had my piano competition/festival recital today and yesterday. I played my Bach Prelude and Fugue on Friday, and the rest of my programme on Saturday (today). I hate recitals and playing in public.

The Bach Prelude was horrible. I put in rubato (variations in speed), which I had never done before, but felt I had to do because everyone else did. This resulted in an uneven, and decidedly un -serene performance. The Fugue was orright, could have had better clarity between voices, but it was rather bland and void of expression to compensate for the rather bipolar excesses of the Prelude. All the other performers played with a great deal of pedal (which I vehemently disagree with when playing Bach- thankfully at least my brain didn't tell me to put it in) and rubato, some to the other extreme from me, making it sound like a bad Romantic piece. Which the adjudicator liked. It's probably quite clear what I think. Needless to say I didn't win...

The other performance went a bit better. The Mozart first movement was played too fast, but I carried it off (it sounds better that way anyway, although I got told off (deservedly, I must confess) by my teacher for not playing within my capabilities at the time resulting in some mistakes that weren't there before. Second movement was orright, third was super, albeit with mistakes. Chopin was beautiful, also albeit with mistakes. I love the theme in the Nocturne, but it always seemed to me the contrasting B section, with its conrapuntal textures and its almost unrestrained fury, seemed a bit too contrasting. But the adjudicator liked it. And the Gershwin, he loved, and I loved. It was beautiful.

So I didn't get 1st prize. But I still got a prize, which was nice. The most important thing I got out of it was knowing that I hated public performances, and that I would never do it again. The stage fright is terrible. My hands shake noticeably, I start biting my nails, I run to the toilet several times, even though I don't need to go. When I am up there, I forget where I am, and have to stop to find my place on the score (even though, since I am playing from the score and not from memory, I should know exactly where I am), I mistime my page turns. It's horrible. I have never been a great public speaker, and I am no better as a performer. The neurotic in me comes out and it doesn't bode well for me at all. After my piano teacher's end of year concert, I will not perform in any more competitions or concerts or anything public unless there is some good reason for doing so. I hate it. I get nightmares from it.

Ugh.

I May Cry "No, No, No, No", But...

Ok, I'm quoting Gershwin out of context, but I have been having musical dreams recently. Which is rather disturbing, considering that I usually dream about totally irrelevant stuff.

The night before my piano tuner came for my piano's tuning, I had a dream that I sat down to play, and realised that the piano was a lot shorter than I remember (I've got a professional class Yamaha, they don't get much bigger than that). After confirming that I had not gone through a delayed growth spurt, I realised that it was a totally different piano, a shorter Yamaha that is NOT very good, and was just like one a friend of mine has (totally untuned, with the dampening pedal permanently down- it's just wrong, but that's another story), and that I ended up playing like that friend's kid (not that I have ever heard the kid play, but I have my preconceived and totally baseless impressions). And it turned out that my dad had exchanged my piano for a much cheaper and vastly inferior one with the piano tuner (who also happens to be the one whom we bought our piano from in the first place) because we needed the money (don't ask me what for, I can't remember). And I had to go and get money to redeem my piano back. Had a Dorothy feeling about it. But it was a very upsetting dream.

On a happier, if slightly bizarre, note, I had a random dream about playing the Mozart slow movement. I have been reading Mozart's letter to his pater, and he had written about how this slow movement was just like a girl who was playing it. I vaguely remember (or imagined) that Mozart saw his music in colours, where each piece was a colour, and each phrase was a shade of that colour. In my dream, I was walking around a house playing the slow movement as I saw each phrase appear on a painting on a wall. In the end, someone put all the paintings together on a large wall and the music looked so beautiful on paper that I started writing it down... and then I woke up. Can't remember much of what the actual colourings were, except that they were dark reds and rich purples.

I think I'm becoming a bit of an aesthetic (no, that's not someone who believes there is no God), trying to play it the way that the composer played it, the way they meant it. You can play Bach (or anyone else for that matter) as notes rather than music, but I think once you appreciate where the composer is coming from, and what he's trying to do in a particular piece (and it doesn't need to be a change-the-world thing), when you understand the philosophy behind it, and when this shows in your interpretation, it will just sound right. As Stokowski once famously said, "we write black marks on white paper- the mere facts of frequency; but music is a communication much more subtle than mere facts. The best a composer can do when within him he hears a great melody is to put it on paper. We call it music, but that is not music; that is only paper. Some believe that one should merely mechanically reporduce the marks on the paper, but I do not believe in that. One must go much further than that. We must defend the composer against the mechanical conception of life which is becoming more and more strong today." Our task as musicians is to go beyond looking at the mere notes, and to breathe life, as the composer intended, into it. And just like in acting, or painting, or in any other art, one's ability to do that is the difference between the exceptional and the ordinary.

Four weeks to recital, two weeks to festival competition... *gulp*

What Causes That?

I better explain myself and what I'm doing (not that I'm entirely clear myself).

I live in New Zealand, and have done so for more than half of my life. I have also spent some time in South East Asia. I study not music, but law and accounting, and I'm just finishing off my final papers right now (yippee!).

That's actually not entirely true, I am studying for a DipABRSM in piano performance, but have never done music at university. My exam is in about a month's time, and it's quite scary to think that 11 months of hard work will culminate in an hour-long 'exam'. I finished Grade 8 years ago, and had always wanted to do a diploma, if for no other reason than to prove to myself that I could actually play well if I tried harder (I'm a last minute crammer when it comes to study, and that doesn't tend to work too well with piano exams and concerts). It also means that I am more able to find work as a piano teacher if I get sick of my desk job. And also, it adds to my superiority complex (and believe me, it's big). The thing is, lots of people get to Grade 8 in piano or whatever, and then they stop and never go near a piano again, which is a great pity. And I don't want to be like that. My performance for that is in about a month's time, and I'm playing in a couple of competitions in the time leading up to that. So it's all go from here...

And I love Gershwin!!! He is a genius... Aside from Gershwin, I also love musicals, JS Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Darius Milhaud, and Glenn Gould (another great "GG"). But that's stuff to talk about another day.

How did I get hooked into Gershwin? It's a long story... I was watching The Les Mis 10th anniversary concert, and I was listening to Ruthie Henshall as Fantine sing "I Dreamed A Dream", and I thought she had a very nice voice so I went on a big search for music by her. She had recorded a Gershwin CD called "Love Is Here To Stay"(which is sadly out of print, I would dearly love to get it), and a couple of others (which I have). BUT I found she was in the cast recording of the London production for "Crazy For You", a musical loosely based on Gershwin's "Girl Crazy" with a whole lot of other Gershwin music tossed in (like the Concerto in F, third movement, and The Man I Love as a bridge between scene changes). And that was the beginning of the craze...

Fast forward a year or so, when it came to choosing the programme for my diploma, I saw that Gershwin's piano transcriptions of "The Man I Love" and "I Got Rhythm" were on the list, and I had to play it... To be honest, I had only heard "The Man I Love" only a couple of times and thought it was orright, and I figured it was worth it to be able to play "I Got Rhythm", but now I really like "The Man I Love", even more than "I Got Rhythm". But they are both up there in my Gershwin top 10.

Aside from that, I'm also playing JS Bach's Prelude and Fugue in F minor BWV 857, Mozart's piano sonata in C major K309, and Chopin's Nocturne in E major Op 62, No 2. It's such nice music *sigh*. Which reminds me, I better go practise before my lesson.

The inspiration...

I'm A Poached Egg
by George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin

Way back in Noah's Ark,
When couples came to park,
It is stated
They were fated
To be truly mated.

And so I dreamed a little dream:
Like them we’d be a team,
The tightest two-some
Hist’ry could reveal;
But the way you act of late
Had made me feel that

I’m a poached egg without a piece of toast,
Yorkshire pudding without a beef to roast,
I’m a haunted house that hasn’t got a ghost
When I’m without you.

I’m a mouse-trap without a piece of cheese,
I’m Vienna without the Viennese,
I’m Da Vinci without the Mona Lis’,
I’m skies without blue.

When you don’t hang around
I’m a kangaroo without a hop.
When will you show me
that as Romeo I’m not a flop?

I’m a western without a hitching post,
I’m a network without a coast to coast,
Just a poached egg without a piece of toast,
Each time I’m without you.

I’m Las Vegas without a slot machine,
I’m a gypsy without a tambourine,
I’m Napoleon without a Josephine
When I’m without you.

I’m a letter without the right address,
I’m a sandwich with only watercress,
I’m a tenant, the kind they dispossess,
I’m bill without coo.

There comes a time I don’t know
If I’m I or a wrestling match.
The way you treat me,
They’ll greet me at the booby hatch.

I’m a lawyer who never won a case,
I’m a missile that can’t get into space,
Just a poached egg with egg upon its face,
Each time I’m without you.