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.