Schmanhattan and Me: Attumenent Process

So I have this rental upright piano in my living room. It was the first piece of furniture that I accumulated on moving here, and a testament to my priorities-- I will sleep on the FLOOR and live out of a SUITCASE for an inordinately long time, but by GOD there will be music! (Don't worry, since those initial days I have made a nice little nest of this apartment courtesy of Craigslist and the Ikea across the river in Blurzy. I even got a down comforter, a luxury that I had never allowed myself before but somehow could not resist on my last acquisitional spree. A few weeks ago I was complaining to my roommate that the comforter was maybe in fact a miscalculated investment, since its delicious properties of insulation were making it extremely difficult for me to get out of bed in the morning. From a space of such heavenly warmth and lightness, my quality of life could only go DOWNhill in the course of the day. [See what I did there?] At the same time, I wept for all those years that I had been deprived of downy pleasures without even knowing what I was missing. To this my roommate said, "Oh yeah, once you go down, you never go back," and then we dissolved into giggles because we weren't sure if we were talking about goose feathers anymore or what).

Ahem. Anyway, back to the piano. The instrument itself was delivered in a timely fashion, but the requisite tuning that was supposed to happen shortly after its arrival kept not happening. As in, the tuner (Vladimir) was supposed to contact me but didn't, and then I contacted the company for his number and called him, and then he said, "Hey I call you back in half hour when I am knowing better the schedule," but then he DIDN'T call me back and I forgot to follow up and then we repeated the same scenario about four times over the next few weeks and then I just kept going about my glamorous, bustling life as a grad student and before I knew it, several months had passed and the piano had gone from "needs a little work" to "officially janky."

Then, as if the Gods of Timbre and Intonation could bear this situation no longer, a Hungarian dude-- not the unreachable Vladimir-- called me and very efficiently set up a tuning. At long last! On the prescribed evening, he came up to my apartment with an arsenal of tools and got to work. He was a chatty guy;  in the course of the session, I learned from him that Mozart had been poisoned to death over several months by Salieri and this was clearly evidenced by the quality of Salieri's compositional output, which was "terrible and black, does not reflect any light, shows the soul of a murderer." (Hey, that would actually make a good movie plot, come to think of it). I also learned that my tuner was on his second marriage, because "as they say, we keep repeat same mistakes!"

But the most revelatory insight that the man had for me was this: "You know, your floors are verrry uneven."

Whoa. Yes, of course I knew that. I had noticed that all the time when I'd first moved in, how the crack of light under my bedroom door did not make a parallel strip but a long skinny triangle where the floor slanted down, how all of the kitchen cabinets were just slightly askew, how walking from the living room to the bathroom felt like having sea legs because here the wood bulged up a little, there it dipped, always throwing off my center of gravity. I loved it, the quirk, the old soul. My previous apartments in Schmindiana had all been '70s-era Soviet-block shoebox affairs with perfect right angles; while they had a certain charm borne of crappiness and collective student despair, they had not been around long enough to list, to sink, to become uniquely wonky through the erosion of time. I could not get over the wonk factor at first, and gushed about my crooked little Schmanhattan apartment to anyone who would listen.

Fast forward a few months to my Hungarian piano tuner pointing out the unevenness of the floors, whereupon I was shocked to realize that I NO LONGER NOTICED the unevenness of the floors, had not noticed it for quite some time, had at some point internalized the subtle geographies of my dwelling place and could navigate its idiosyncrasies on autopilot.

And with a start I began to catalog all of the aspects of This New Life that had seemed insurmountably foreign at one point but had quickly, or slowly, become routinized, ingrained. Little basic everyday things crept in first, like which key to use in which lock, which elevator button to push, how to swipe a metro card, which subway entrance to take to get to what platform. Then came the school things, like flashing my student ID to get into the library, remembering to carry cash because the first floor cafeteria doesn't do credit cards, typing my PUNY username and password into school computers-- ohhhh, I messed this one up so many times at first, my fingers deeply conditioned to input my Bleep U information, but then my typographical errors grew less frequent, old habits dying gently, until one day I did the unthinkable and inadvertently typed my PUNY info into my Bleep U account. OH SNAP. Cue the symbolism. And then one day I gave directions to a stranger off the top of my head because, well, I knew the lay of the hood. And at some juncture I started to have homicidal urges toward the molasses-y throngs of tourists that would envelop me on the three blocks between the train and school. Yes, people, I KNOW that this is a shopping district; yes, I KNOW that the Schlumpire State Building is right there and that it's tall and you're looking at it, which is why you keep bumping into me and taking up the whole sidewalk and oh great now you're posing for photos and making PEACE SIGNS and pardon me while I fucking murder you all because I need to get to the library right now and transcribe an anonymous 15th-century chanson, ok? Never mind that I had essentially been one of those hapless wide-eyed lemmings a few weeks prior.

I never thought that I would move to You Dork, let alone adjust to it. Popular opinion had, to me, depicted this city as the biggest, the happeningest, the everything-est, but also somewhat inhospitable to human life-- only the toughest could tough it out, like those strains of bacteria that can live in incredibly toxic conditions because their genetic structure is based on arsenic rather than carbon. You could get lost, become a sad anonymous bacterium in that roiling sea. This was my fear. But it turned out that the opposite was true, and that all I wanted was to be dropped into a shared space with every specimen of humanity imaginable. I wanted to look around and see impossibly beautiful people, sad broken people, people thinking brilliant crazy thoughts, people from backgrounds so drastically different from mine that I would have to scrap all prefabricated monologues about myself or the world were we ever to interact.

It was overwhelming at first, like the new set of keys and the new public transit system and the new email account, but then like those things it gradually became the fabric of my reality-- the teeming masses, the postmodern pastiche. In this pan-people stew there was no reason to be self-conscious anymore, because I fit somewhere on the people-spectrum just like everyone else. Probably not even too far from the center of the spectrum, nowhere near the whackjobbiest of the whackjobs. You have to understand that I'd always felt at odds with my surroundings before. Mismatched. An outlier, too energetic, too non-linear and heady, not enough of a diligent worker bee or a social Darwinist to hack it. But here half the population beat me at my own game of oddities and intensities and mercurial passions. And with this knowledge came a letting out of the proverbial corset that had always constricted my ribcage before, came a slowly regained ease of breathing, an acclimatization process that was almost imperceptible until one day I realized that I hadn't had a crying jag or an anxiety attack in a shockingly long time and it was maybe because the all-inclusive environment had seeped into my being and told me, "Hey, it's okay, you're not an alien on this planet, so no need to waste time feeling choked and misunderstood and why don't you just get out there and be a million percent you because nobody will notice or care otherwise?"

Doubtless the Hungarian piano tuner had not meant to kick off an elliptical self-reflective journey in me by pointing out the wobbliness of the floors in my apartment. He had only broached the subject for practical reasons, because over time, he explained, my instrument would be slightly compromised by the uneven surface. "Hokay," he said, "next time I come, I bring wood blocks to put under some of the legs. You remind me, okay?"  I told him I would indeed remind him, and then our session was done so I thanked him and showed him out of the building. Then I came back to sit at the piano, which was now fully itself and ready for business.

In the Kingdom of Schlockademe

OH HI GUYS! Been awhile. Sorry. You see, I was busy turning twenty-five and having Existential Crisis Number Infinity Googleplex Bajillion, because society has impressed upon my psyche that at this age I should really have it together, that I should NOT on occasion sleep until 11:38 AM just because I have nothing scheduled for the morning, that I should NOT watch the entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy Extended! Edition just because it's raining outside, that I should NOT open a bottle of seltzer haphazardly in my kitchen only to have it explode in every direction like a mini Yellowstone geyser that sprays all over the tile floor and causes me to slip and clunk my head and issue a stream of profanities so vile that it would make the children of South Park blush.

And yet I continue to conduct my life this way, stretches of torpor punctuated with bursts of frenzied activity, always on the brink of fucking up and always saving myself with a final do-or-die Herculean effort. Will it fade with getting older, or am I terminally wired this way? And who are those sleek, perfect people who always seem so on TOP of things? The ones who wake up at dawn's early light to go running, the ones who systematize their existences like an Excel spreadsheet and work indefatigably towards their goals and never seem ruffled by the world? I hate them. Should I hate them? Is it all a construct? Do they have secret seltzer debacles too? Do they cry in the shower because they're boring and they know it? Hmmm. Things to ponder from my new platform of maturity.

Another reason for my blogging absence was School, which has monopolized my writing energies lately. So in an attempt to make this [poor, neglected] bloglet actually reflect its title, this time I'm going to report on my experience as a budding young schllolar! If you haven't notice, my past entries have wandered all over the damn place-- ballet, summer camp, 9/11, the Id-- and I can't promise that this one won't also end up in, um, Middle Earth or something, but hey, what do you have against Hobbits anyway? They're kind of like graduate students when you get down to it, kind of like me, fresh-faced innocents with kinky hair who bow down to grizzled older men of great erudition and strong mystical female figures. Oh we Hobbits, mere children on a veritable suicide mission, caught up in the inexorable currents of [methodological] wars and [departmental] feuds, tramping across treacherous terrain against all odds only, at the end, to cast ourselves into a fiery crucible [of the job market and the publishing world]. And there's something about towers in this whole metaphor, too. You know, the Two Towers... the Ivory tower gone dark... evil flaming all-seeing eye of... your dissertation adviser? No? Too far? Did I kill the joke? Was there even a joke to begin with, or did I just brand myself a social pariah for all time by invoking Tolkien and graduate study in the same paragraph? Or are those things so profoundly uncool that they are cool now, like how communism and fascism eventually BECOME one another other on the political spectrum when carried out to their extremes even though they stem from opposite ideologies? I can't keep up.

Okay, okay, so my grad studentish life to date has involved precious few Orcs, giant flesh-eating spiders, Dark Lords, or sociopathic sub-humans. PUNY, as I will call it, is a friendlier place than I was anticipating, although it's not exactly your typical collegiate experience. It's located in the grittiest, most urrrrrban part of Schmanhattan, and "campus" is actually a converted department store building from the late nineteenth century. You have to get frisked by a security guard to get in. Nowhere to be found are verdant quads, leafy alcoves, statues of the university founders, or gaggles of undergrads. But did I mention how I don't mind any of this at all, because I HAD your typical collegiate experience for seven years and grew thoroughly sick of it, the cocoon, the holding pen, the entitled, lackadaisical students just waiting for life to really begin?

You're reading this and thinking, poor Alana. As a doctoral student, she's in the exact same boat and doesn't even know it yet. She'll wake up one day at the age of thirty-three and be like, "Whaaa-- wh-- what happened to my golden years? I guess... I wasted them all between the library and the shitty yuppie bar around the corner that I went to with some regularity to anaesthetize the nagging fear that what I was doing had no bearing on the real world and would not even result in material gains and meanwhile all of my peers had passed me by and were buying houses in the suburbs and producing offspring and smugly colluding on the secrets of adult life. Whoops should have thought that one through a little better."

THIS MAY HAVE HAPPENED had I attended another university-- perhaps, hmmmm, a private, more moneyed one that thought rather highly of itself, or one housed in a small sequestered hamlet of a town. Then it would be easier to dissociate from reality and suffer delusions of grandeur about my Very Important Intellectual Mission and eventually crack up. But PUNY, located as it is in the congested clusterfuck center of modern life and being as it is a public institution with a minor inferiority complex, seems designed to combat these tendencies. The faculty that I've encountered so far have been refreshingly honest about what it takes to become an academic these days. It's not just an extension of college, a protracted frat party, a leisurely lounge with a few Great Books. You must go to conferences. You must write prolifically and try to publish. You must have a presence in your department, build positive relationships with your teachers, and network and hobnob with other prominent people in your field when you can. You must teach, mostly to support yourself, but you also must remember that teaching is actually not the most important factor in eventually getting hired. Sometimes you must put aside the research interests that are nearest and dearest to your heart to produce something a little trendier, a little more Zeitgeist-y. And then, at the End of All Things, you might still come up empty-handed-- you might get an adjunct-type job with low salary and no benefits, or maybe you'll have no prospects at all because there are far more PhDs graduating every year than there are open tenure-track positions and it's all a big Ponzi scheme and they exploited you for cheap academic labor during your student years but now you're done, used up, and you'd better look for an alternate life path with all of those, um, infinitely marketable skills that you were honing in the library stacks. OY VEY.

We talked about some of these issues last winter in my interview before I'd even been accepted to PUNY. "Why do you want to get a PhD in Schmoozicology in this day and age?" asked The Faculty point-blank. They probably wanted to determine whether I actually understood what an academic career entailed or whether I was some overgrown maladjusted school-addicted shut-in who didn't know what to do with herself and wanted more time to stall. The question threw me slightly-- what? they're not interrogating me about late medieval polyphony or eighteenth-century compositional treatises or postwar schools of literary criticism? they actually want me to defend THEIR OWN FIELD to them?-- but then I took a breath and said my piece. It went something like this:

"Actually, I really don't need this degree. I've picked up enough random skills over the years to get by-- I can play piano for ballerinas, for singers, for church ladies, for whoever needs it. I can teach lessons, tutor people in schmoozic theory, tutor people in writing, teach English as a second language. Whatever. I'd make it happen. BUT I have this weird, intense, obsessive streak when it comes to understanding music-- what makes it tick and what led to its existence in the first place-- and I also have this weird, intense, obsessive streak when it comes to articulating things in writing. From what I know of your field, that's kind of what it's about. If there is even a remote chance that I can make a living doing that, even just some of the time, then I will take the opportunity."

Apparently that was good enough.

I was telling the truth, too, and it's still my truth. Everyone needs a fortress against chaos and fragmentation and apathy. For some people it's the organization, the Excel spreadsheet mode of life. For me it's complete absorption in ideas, a kind of deep contemplation that is directed both inward and outward, and then a creative act that arises from this contemplation. It takes me to this place where I've transcended my petty little existence for a while to connect to broader principles, and that's when I am open and receptive and maybe contributing something vaguely good to my small corner of the world. Even if it's just a single whole thought committed to writing, or two pages of Bach memorized and internalized and understood, or just a stupid blog post that I'm determined to see through to completion even though I can't quite find a graceful way to do that tonight.

Dispatches from the End Times

Where were we? Oh yes, I think I was in a bar somewhere consuming too many gin-and-tonics, swaying along to geezer music, and being a little bit of a sad sack. But all of that belongs to the Shroomington Era, about which I promised to dedicate ONE entry and one entry alone and now it's over, done, POW, and henceforth I will report exclusively on Life Version 3.0, this souped-up technicolor new state of being, and keep my meanderings far from the lugubrious Swamp of Past.

And I'm a terrible liar, because that will never happen, because every time I try to describe an isolated incident from, like, this morning, it inevitably connects to a tangled web of massiveness ending in some childhood revelation or a trip to the collective unconscious. That's just how I roll. A good friend of mine works in a smartypants Schmarvard cognitive neuroscience lab that is currently investigating hyperconnectivity between brain regions in subjects with synaethesia or perfect pitch. Apparently people with these traits are intensely associative, every experience lighting up some faraway neural correlate. I'm no synaesthete ("this is a condition where, say, you eat cheese and feel pain," Professor Schmartledge once explained) but I do have the pitchy thing going on for better or for worse, so maybe that helps to account for my loopy leaps in logic and sudden detours into remote psychological territory. If I could distill my deepest fascination, my driving obsession, down to one thing, it might be The Past-- my own and everyone else's. Memory, association, recollection, reconstruction. Not for nothing have I veered into schmoozicology, a field that concerns itself with historical objects and the formation of narrative around them. The other day I was looking at a dictionary of musical terminology from the fifteenth century-- in Latin, old musty pages, antiquated typesetting-- and the artifact had a weird mystical talisman-ish hold over me, like I was interacting with some sort-of- familiar yet also alien and irrecoverable culture. And then the other day we got to analyze a Bahler symphony in class and I FREAKED OUT over a section that was a clear depiction of memory in music, a sudden paranthetical, a dreamlike diversion into something identifiable to most listeners as a rustic simplicity (an idealization of the bygone days, the "pastoral", if you will). Bahler didn't by any means invent the device of musical reminiscence but he was SO damn good at it. I love those points of reference in music, those striking evocations accomplished much more rapidly than in words. They're everywhere, in Bahler, in Schlach, in Jilly Bowl, in terrible pop music that I won't admit to liking here.

Of course, history and memory are common preoccupations of every human being. I'm not special that way. How could anyone live NOT in a constant internal dialogue of "this is happening now, but it reminds me of..." ? Who is NOT captivated by family history, cultural origins? Even fucking Facebook is shamelessly capitalizing on people's past-obsessed tendencies these days. There's this new sidebar that will relay information like, "One year ago today you became friends with ___ !" or "On this day in 2009, your status was, 'Hazelnut coffee FTW,'" or, "Here's an unforgettable photo of you and X." Oh, the fake virtual nostalgia for our fake virtual lives! An artificially intelligent system dictates, through some algorithm, what "should" be meaningful to us and worthy of mental revisitation. I fear that for the Younger Generation raised at the teat of Facebook et al, this imposed artificial sentimentality will come to stand in for real experiential intensity. "Oh, REMEMBER WHEN we posed for those pictures so that we could upload them to social media to show everyone else how cool we are? Aww memories." This in place of sensual environmental cues that plunge us unwittingly back into a place of great personal significance. A smell that recalls a place you haven't thought about in ten years, the sound of someone's voice that sounds like someone else's voice and leads you with shocking clarity to some half-forgotten words that once arose from those vocal chords... but no, NO, let's forsake all of that richness for these shells of ourselves, these faux-signifiers pointing to intimacy and cultivated relationships but in reality attached to no real, resonant body of feeling. KIDS THESE DAYS.

And I am making apocalyptic, unfounded pronouncements. But hey, I am a YOU DORKER now, as of a little over a month, and we ("we!") have dealt with some End-Times-y sentiments of late. First my school auditorium fell victim to a flash flood, causing New Student Orientation to be pushed back by a week. Then there was the great East Coast Earthquake, which my roommate and I perceived as a small wobble ("hmmmm, is our wonderful yet slightly decrepit pre-war building listing slightly? Oh wait, that was a natural disaster? No way!") And then there was the hurricane brouhaha, in which we stocked up on bread, peanut butter, canned goods, bottled water, candles, flashlight batteries, and a few boozy options, and then settled in to wait for the Big One, checking the web incessantly all night for updates, jumping a little when a gust of wind rattled the windows, half scared and half morbidly excited for this thing to get cooking. I made myself a cocktail and wrote the longest blog post in the history of the genre (see below). Then I finally dozed off, waking at 3 PM to a world that was not nightmarishly ravaged and dystopian, but still a little drizzly.

These ominous Biblical rumblings characterized my first few weeks in the City, but mostly I was smitten with my new digs. So many tall buildings to crane my neck at, so many sketchy-ass neighborhoods to get lost in, so many people from both my recent and distant past to reconnect with. School started, and it looks to be promising yet terrifying-- as it IS grad school in the humanities, it has a certain inevitable amorphousness, a need to self-justify, but once I transcend the existential hand-wringing, it will become a deeply rewarding endeavor. I think. (At least that is how I feel right now, on Week 2. Five years to go).

So there has been honeymooning galore for me in this initial phase, yes, but also predicted doses of discomfort, alienation, and adriftness. I just can't be ON all the time. My smiling muscles start to seize up. I spew out all of my basic data on automatic to new people (what degree? where from? what neighborhood? what classes?) and they oblige me in the same way, and the whole thing gets exhausting, this foundational phase of networking that must take place before the connections become easy and natural. It doesn't help that I'm in a strange headspace due to the, shall we say, soap-operatic dimensions that my personal life attained in the past months on several fronts. Right now part of me doesn't even want to bother getting past the first phase of knowing someone new, because it's a slippery slope from "So where did you grow up?" to "Wow, I just traipsed naively through the MINEFIELD that is your neurological miswiring/ social dysfunction/ crazy baggage and HAHA that's ridiculous and kind of funny that I even managed to do that but wait, actually my right leg is blasted off. Okay, not my leg, but maybe like, my big toe, which fuuuuuck still hurts a lot and now I'm hopping around like a Looney Tunes character after an Acme product encounter and OUCH. MY TOE. GOD DAMN."

So, some days I want to frenetically forge new relationships. Other days I want to just stay under the covers, protect my remaining appendages from the perils of getting close to other people.

BUT. Speaking of explosions, and history and memory, and apocalyptic situations, and any other trope that has been vaguely thematized in this post... today is 9/11/11 and I'm newly living in the city where it happened, ten years ago. Dies illa. I didn't go to Ground Zero today, but paid my respects earlier in the week by going to a few free concerts of Bach funeral cantatas at the chapel directly across from the site. During the disaster, the chapel, which remained miraculously intact, had served as a refuge for relief workers; now, on the anniversary, the church had mounted an exhibition to commemorate those days. I saw photographs of exhausted men in tears, handwritten letters from children thanking them for their aid, printed transcripts of phone calls issued from inside the towers from people who never made it out. I had of course been affected by the attack when it happened, but I was thousands of miles away, in high school, and it seemed more like a disaster movie than a real event. And then "9/11" rather rapidly morphed into an abstraction, a trite, propaganda-laden shorthand for everything negative that transpired in my coming-of-age decade. For me, it took being IN the space and seeing the evidence to comprehend the tragedy on a personal level, to empathize with the individuals who had gotten caught up in this terrible thing.

Then the musical ensemble performed their Bach, and I got suddenly weepy because it was ethereally beautiful and all I could think about was my wonderful professor who taught me everything I know about that repertoire and who is 98% responsible for why I am where I am now, and how the last time I saw him was at his wife's memorial service in June after she'd died of lung cancer. And then post-concert I went home to an email informing me that a member of my (very small, close-knit) high school class had just passed away from a congenital illness.

Sometimes the universe whacks you over the head with the most clichéd and basic tenets of existence, like memento mori and Take Nothing for Granted. We're surrounded by shadows, always one millimeter away from disaster but usually oblivious to it, and all of this TIME rushes around us in unfathomable patterns and we don't even know what to do with it. We miss so much and it's just the way we are. We sit and fret and withhold and are parsimonious with ourselves until something rips the veil away to expose the fragility of life, and THEN we commune, suddenly compassionate in those times of need, but only then. Most of the time we're built to have blinders on, because otherwise we'd get nothing done; we'd be too overcome with Weltschmerz to even function.

But I'll try to hold these messages with me a little longer now, so that on those days when I want to disengage and curl up and live a cloistered half-life, I'll remember that time is a-wasting, tick-tock-tick, and that real growth occurs when we act authentically and bravely, even if this causes things to temporarily suck and toes to go missing and teeth to be gnashed and tears to be shed. See, the streets of life are bustling down there for a limited time only. I plan to go dancing on those streets, to wipe out spectacularly on those streets, and perhaps to lose some more limbs in the process. Because I've heard that they eventually grow back.

Don't cry for me, Schmindiana

I started this blogging project with a few distinct motivations: about 60 % to work on the craft of my writing in a non-intimidating venue before entering PhD World, 30 % to narcissistically detail the events of my life for friends and acquaintances without, you know, having to personally correspond with them or anything, and 10 % to have some kind of emotional outlet because I am too broke to afford therapy but GAH I probably need it because these past few months have been unrelentingly dramatic on all fronts and mostly in good ways but sometimes shit has to happen before the bright shiny new paths open up and sometimes the person subletting your apartment turns out to be mildly psychotic and bars you from entering your own living room at any time because the two of you have different cultural notions of space ownership and vastly different notions of how to speak to other human beings and then a screaming altercation breaks out and you're cast from your apartment into the parking lot in 98 degree heat with nowhere to go, tears streaming down your face, shaking with indignation, a total HOT MESS. 

But anyway. All I really meant to say was that this post may lean more toward the personally therapeutic than the eloquently styled. This is why: I have left Bleep U. after having been a student there for seven years, and have just moved to tropical-storm threatened YDC (You Dork City) to strike out in a new field. I know, I KNOW, what an obnoxiously stereotypical Young Person thing to do. Couldn't I have been a little more original in my life trajectory? Everyone does it, or talks about doing it, and I'm sure that there is absolutely no new observational ground to be broken in the genre of smallish-town-girl-uproots-herself-and-tries-to-make-it-in-the-Big-Schnapple. Please. But nonetheless I must personally come to terms with this momentous change, and therefore have accorded myself exactly one blog entry to wax nostalgic about the Bleep U. Era, to ponder the immutable rhythms of time, to contemplate notions of place and self... and all the rest of that crap.

To be honest, the implications of this move have not quite set in yet. I don't feel as emotionally sucker-punched as anticipated. Maybe I did most of the letting go when I was actually there, clearing out my locker and my teaching office, boxing up/ selling off/ throwing out my meager personal possessions, saying goodbye to various people piecemeal over the course of spring and summer. Or maybe-- more plausibly-- I'm in the denial stage, fully expecting to hop on a flight in a few days, ride the airport shuttle through vast stretches of cornfield, wheel my suitcase a few blocks back to my apartment in good old Snackwell Parish (incestuous stronghold of Bleep U. schmoozic students for generations), attend various stilted start-of-semester meetings, scowl at the influx of bright-eyed optimistic new blood, duck into Schitty Bakery for coffee / croissant and inevitable run-ins with everyone I know, cross the street to seek (in vain) a practice room in the teeming windowless circular building, flee to my closet-sized teaching studio in the highest room of the tallest tower and say hello to whoever else might be lurking up there, dig out my score of the Schlach two-and-three-part inventions and begin to work through them on the startlingly reverberant upright piano, let the unassailable logic of counterpoint wash over me, will myself into a place of calm acceptance at the prospect of yet another year here, start to brainstorm escape routes. OH WAIT.

It will sting like a motherfucking stinging nettle eventually, I know. My identity is rather deeply intertwined with this institution, probably more so than most other students who pass through. Prior to my seven-year student "tenure"-- and seven years in itself is a LONG time, enough time for Harry Potter's entire hero narrative to unfold, enough time for, like, twenty-nine generations of iThings to hit the market-- I spent two summers at Bleep U.'s pre-college piano intensive, a program that lured me in as a garden variety angsty maladjusted teen and spat me out the musical zealot we now know and love/ tolerate.

Things did not get off to a promising start, though. This is the story of my maiden voyage: fifteen-year-old me had boarded a connecting flight from the West Coast, through Chicago, and to Dingyanapolis, where I would take a shared cab for the hour-long ride to campus and check in at the dorms. Fifteen-year-old me had also purchased and consumed some "authentic" deep-dish Chicago pizza at the O'Hare airport. The suspect nature of this food and my natural predisposition to motion sickness culminated in a vomiting incident on the side of the highway in KKK-infested Schmindiana Nowheresville, an incident that sadly did not clear a wide berth for the outfit I was wearing. My mom had repeatedly told me to pack a change of clothes in my carry-on. Had I listened to her? OF COURSE NOT. She was my mom. So as penance for my adolescent hubris, I made a grand splash at Orientation that afternoon as the kid who had puked on herself.

The weeks that followed were a vast improvement over that first day; in fact, they may still hold the title of Best Time of My Life. The stars aligned in such a way that all at once I found my intellectual/ spiritual vocation and felt, for the first time, a complete sense of acceptance among my peers. The notebooks that I kept during this time attest to both facets of Awesome. In the front sections are meticulous records of lessons, masterclasses, and seminars, scribbled down in loopy cursive as I tried to absorb every morsel dispensed by teachers and invited speakers. Sonata form. Principles of postural alignment. Plagal cadences versus authentic cadences versus the ever-titillating Phrygian half-cadence. The psychology of performance anxiety. The Chopin etudes in (subjective) order of difficulty. Definitions of dodecaphony, aleatory, minimalism. And, delightfully, I still have notes from a guest masterclass by Teacher, as in he who became my beloved and influential professor for three years in grad school. Usually we don't have tangible relics of these first impressions; we have to rack our brains for vestiges of these individuals before they assumed important roles in our lives, and our recollections are by nature distorted through the lens of more recent interactions. But here, HERE was an unbiased account of what my future professor had to say about the C-sharp minor prelude and fugue (Book 1), the B Minor Rhapsody, and the A-flat minor Impromptu on a June afternoon in 2002. The ideas and vocabulary are unmistakeably his: the resoundingly true artistic convictions, the wry asides, the tinge of despair at our culture's descent into crassness. Oh Teacher, look at us now...

And then there were the BACK sections of my academy notebooks, which documented the social element of camp. Okay, so maybe I wasn't hanging on every word of every lecture all the time, because how then would I have had time to conduct so many illicit written dialogues with my peers? There are pages upon pages of gossip and doodles, caricatures of the faculty and their chain-smoking ways, discussions of who was ridiculously good at piano and would get into Toolyard and who liked who and who had sneaked out of the dorms to go skinny-dipping in the fountain, conjectures about which of the counselors were screwing and in what practice rooms and on what grand pianos and with what sound effects. (Years later, when a number of us became counselors ourselves and were sadly not carrying out such activities, I hoped that the students were at least concocting rumors at our expense). The in-jokes abounded, summer love blushed, and we all cried and were devastated when we had to leave and return to our non-utopian high school existences.

I was so taken with the place, apparently, that I came back, and came back again, and stayed, and then did another degree, and then oh what the hell tacked on another year, became part of the furniture, and it got to the point where Professor Schmartledge would see me in the hallway and query, in his briny Australian accent, "Shouldn't you be about DONE by now, Alaner?"

So, school was school. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Actually it never quite achieved the dizzying joie-de-vivre of summer camp, and it never plummeted to the depths of, say, seventh grade. But certainly there were peaks and valleys, and bat caves and vortices, and numerous other topographical features that typically characterize late adolescence / early adulthood / a burgeoning life in music. I was pretty insufferably gung-ho at the outset. Lessons with faculty with long impressive biographies! Let me show off how much I know to them! Music Theory is totally cool, guys! And choir? I LOVE choir! And boyfriends! I need lots of boyfriends to validate my existence and to function as receptacles for all of my intense feeling-y feelings! Also, alcohhhhhollllll! WEEEEED!!! And then, thunk. A lot of reality checks. The discovery that music performance entailed not just enthusiasm and talent but also crazy-intense, self-flagellating, oft-solitary dedication, and even after you busted your ass you were promised nothing in terms of recognition or material gains. The accompanying discovery that your relationships with your principal teachers were kind of like your romantic relationships-- i.e. all-consuming, usually not quite the right fit, plagued with communication problems, and headed for disaster. The realization that self-acceptance was a long and difficult road, one not always compatible with a career path of artistic martyrdom, and that the university system didn't really care about either your personal journey or your professional prospects as long as you chug-chug-chugged along the conveyor belt of Degrees R Us and paid all your bursar bills on time.

Anyway, let's summarize by the numbers.

Teachers:  I had three-and-a-half over the years (the "half" is for a sabbatical replacement). The first professed a distaste for most piano literature pre-1830 and an abiding love for Bill O'Reilly-- we had a messy breakup, to say the least. The next one cracked the whip and cracked it good, but eventually he deemed me too fragile and loopily intellectual to become one of the sleek competition thoroughbreds that he was in the business of grooming. So he sent me to Teacher the humanist, and there I happily stayed. (Teacher! It was you all along).

Living situations: I spent two years in the dorms and divided the remaining years among three different apartments. I always had roommates, some of whom remain dear friends and others of whom I probably don't need to run into ever again because we were about THIS close to killing each other. Good times were had in every place of residence, but for me most of the memories come from Snackwell Parish, that dumpy shoebox apartment complex where everybody lived at some point. (And I do mean everybody-- in its original incarnation, Snackwell housed some very prominent music faculty. Slowly it sank into decrepitude and became the official living quarters of broke-ass students).  Though I didn't officially move there until the grad school epoch, I was an honorary Snackwellian from the earliest days. There was always a party going on. It could be a legendary one in which the cops showed up and all the underagers cowered in somebody's bedroom with the lights out, afraid to draw breath-- or there was that one where a full-on fight broke out over someone's girlfriend and suddenly the whole living room crowd was engaged in a massive tug-of-war to restrain the warring factions. And then sometimes the parties were totally lame and I'd look around and realize that I knew everyone in the room and everything about them and I'd rather just go home and search for clips of Beethoven string quartets on YouTube and call my mom. But more memorable than the epic pan-musician gatherings were the spontaneous small groups or one-on-one interactions that Snackwell seemed to foster. It was here, in identically shaped but diversely furnished apartments, over tea or coffee or questionable mixed drinks, that many of my acquaintance-ships made the quantum leap to friendships. We played board games, we watched movies, we tried to cook stuff with varying degrees of success (an ice cream cake doused in flaming rum was the clear winner). One time we created an arsenal of water balloons and drove around campus ambushing sorority girls. It was a small college town: we were bored, we felt trapped, we were stressed and confused about our life paths, we didn't have a huge array of cultural events and hot bars to divert our attentions. So we manufactured our own ridiculousness, and in in the process built our support systems.

Identity crises: I had about five billion of these. On a daily basis, my thought process would run something to the effect of: Is Alana a) concert pianist material, b) an academic square peg trying to fit into a piano-shaped hole (ummm, that's what she said?), c) a writery creative type, or d) deluded, none of the above, the world's best dilettante? Ohhhhh, the navel-gazing. Part of it was me, and part of it had to do with the environment. Something in the atmosphere of the Bleep U. schmoozic school made me, and others, especially prone to insecurity. My theory: when you take a glut of talented individuals and plop them down in a remote location where the only real cultural life stems from the university, most of that ability just sits and stagnates, everyone whittling away at his or her craft with correspondingly little opportunity to actually put it into practice. And eventually everyone gets so exhausted from running on the hamster-wheel of degree requirements that networking outside the school system becomes an afterthought. Not to mention that inside the school system your primary department may be a wee bit dysfunctional... as in too busy squabbling over administrative responsibilities to communicate effectively with students, let alone assist them in career development. This is one reason why I stayed in school there for so long. I became increasingly inert. The more years I'd been there, the harder it was to conceive of possibilities on the fabled outside, and I had just enough funding as a graduate student to squeak by, so why not stick around a little longer, forestall the inevitable difficult decision-making? Thus the degrees piled up and I became, as a friend recently put it, a "lifer."

But I was lucky enough to become the favorite stepchild of several other departments over the years (choir, theory, schmoozicology). This did little to lessen my confusion about OMG what to do in life?! until one day in the second year of my Master's, the most intimidating and high-powered member of the schmoozicology faculty (Schmarvard Guy) sat me down in his office. He had been my professor for a semester and a half, and I was sure that I was in trouble with him somehow and that this would be a fearful day of reckoning. But to my intense surprise, he bluntly opined that I would be wasting my best abilities by languishing in the purgatory of performance grad school, and that I would make a better addition to the scholarly community and would probably be happier there. I rebuffed him and got all defensive. WHAT? Wasn't a life in academia the most purgatorial experience of them all? Yes, other teachers and mentors had suggested similar paths for me, but never so forcefully or tactlessly. And yet Schmarvard Guy was ALWAYS right about EVERYTHING-- I had noticed this in class; he had a formidably clear-headed view of the universe-- and it was only a matter of time before I conceded that his assessment of my character was spot-on. So in the end I took his advice and applied to PhD programs (a fun [not!] process detailed in my very first blog post). Here, finally, was my long-sought-after escape, my ticket out of this one-horse town, my chance to try out a field in which eccentricity and far-flung interests were maybe assets and not detriments.

And that is exactly why I'm in the Big City right now, typing away at 5 AM as a scary unprecedented storm system approaches. What better time to reminisce and process the last major chunk of my life than right now, when forces of nature have placed the entire East Coast under house arrest? I'm sipping a Dark 'n Stormy cocktail, listening to Bob Dylan's "Hurricane," and forcing all of my thoughts out into the ether before we lose power.

Natural disasters aside, I am so deliriously happy with the way things have worked out. Little signs keep cropping up that say, "Good call-- you're supposed to be here." Signs like my hilarious, proactive, and direct new teachers who I can already tell are going to give me the support and direction that I often missed back at Bleep U. Or my excellent apartment / roommate situation complete with an upright piano and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Or the presence of many other young up-and-coming musicians in my building and neighborhood-- it's an upgraded, more-fabulous extension of Snackwell where we can pretend to be grownups but retain some irresponsible behaviors.

Yes, I'll miss school. Yes, these were character-forming, crucial, young-adult years full of growth and first experiences. But towards the end, I felt like I'd wrung out the last few drops of what I could possibly gain from the environment. Most of my friends had left already. I was a known quantity in the school hierarchy, no longer upwardly mobile. I was getting jaded, on automatic a lot of the time, not quite my best self. I needed to go somewhere new and start from scratch, become a saucer-eyed, awestruck addition to the seething throng of humanity. Now I'm here and it's ON. Provided we don't all get washed away.

As noted earlier, my first moments at Bleep U. were defined by projectile vomit. My last night there, nearly a decade later, unfurled a little more elegantly. After a deeply stressful week that involved getting into a screaming match with my raging asshole of a subletter (see Paragraph 1) and moving all of my worldly belongings (Paragraph 3), I ended up at the only martini bar in town with a truly swell arrangement of people-- the last iteration of a quirky friend group that I always seemed to have. We ordered some classic cocktails. We shot the breeze per usual. I yammered on about my insane excitement for this next, radically different phase of life. And then the wonderful live musician at the bar consented to do a cover of my favorite favorite FAVORITE song, a woebegone Fink Ployd ballad. We sang along, boozy, croony, swoony-- I knew every word, of course, and it's one of those songs that adapts its meaning to whatever bittersweet life situation you find yourself in at the time. Every weird tight sensation in your chest, every half-regret and secret confession, everything you can't quite articulate finds expression in the simple strummed chords and sad suggestive lyrics. You remember exactly why pop music was invented and you fall off your elitist invulnerable pedestal, responding viscerally to the Common Man's language of melancholia. You use the song to feel everything that you need to feel, to say your proper, emotionally fraught farewell for which you can't quite find the words. You almost lose it a little bit right there, in front of everyone, but then you slap on a smile, buck up, and remember to keep your eyes on the road ahead. And then poof, the next day you're gone.

Life at the Chalet, Part Deux

I swear that I intended for the last post to be an actual description of my job-- there was a bullet-point outline in my head and everything. But then I got bogged down in the exposition, which in turn needed its own exposition, and then the whole thing morphed into a Russian Nesting Dolls situation wherein I was exploring the origins of my relationship with the dance world and delving into the creation myth of Alana the Ballet Pianist. I had entered a labyrinthine past walled with mirrors-- full-length BALLET mirrors in which were reflected various stages of my young balletic self. BOOM. Nine years old, performing a solo at the county fair to the Superman soundtrack. Later, going in for pointe shoe fittings with a woman named Candi. Doing barre to the entirety of Abbey Road with that one especially renowned and inspirational masterclass teacher. Learning Balanchine-ish neoclassical choreography to Corelli trio sonatas, set by an acerbic, paunchy middle-aged guest choreographer from the Bay Area. Lounging around with the other girls at one of the summer programs-- the summer immediately preceding 9/11, I remember now, weirdly, that last gasp of marshmallow-fluff innocuous Americana-- comparing our flexibility, watching Center Stage for the twenty-seventh time, doting on our token male comrade (a foul-mouthed, ferociously talented Hispanic kid from a hard-knock family whom we nicknamed "Bobbo"; he has now achieved professional success and recently appeared in DANCE Magazine as one of their "25 to watch").

And I'm off again. Sorry, sorry. All of my chapter-closing and new-phase-in-life-commencing has unleashed a wicked deluge of nostalgia and introspection. Mental furniture gets jostled around in the move. Random dusty memories spill out of shelves and desk drawers as everything shifts; I gather up these fragments to return them to their rightful, dormant places in my personal chronology, but the mere act of touch sets off a chain of associations and then I'm chasing scents, voices, faces to the outskirts of consciousness. It's fascinating, paralyzing, and sometimes gut-sockingly emotional. I've forgotten so much. I was that person? How did we get here? What else is lost and locked away?

But with great difficulty, I wrest myself back to the semi-present. Let's do this semi-bullet point style to stay on task.

*** My Working Environment: The Greater Schlockston Area ***

Although I'm a native Californian-- outwardly bubbly, health-conscious, astrologically inclined, etc.-- the East Coast has always beckoned me with promises of a pulsing cultural and intellectual life; this must be some kind of reverse Manifest Destiny. And now that I've lived there for a bit, I feel I could have almost been a Schlockstonian from the beginning. In fact, I'm related to a clan of them, which might explain my strange sense of familiarity. But no, THAT I can attribute to the widespread saturation of upper-middle-class students and young professionals, people exactly like me who read on the train and check their iPhones and frequent hipster cafes and chic little boutiques and hopping brunch spots. It's all a little too comfortable, actually. If I require a drugstore amenity, there's a CVS on every corner. Need cash? Bank of America is on every corner opposite CVS. Craving an avocado-arugula-walnut panini and some organic, fair-trade iced coffee? There are probably about five options in a ten-minute walking radius. Even as I benefit from these conveniences, I feel a niggling sense of don't-get-used-to-this. Maybe this stems from my many scrappy, frugal years in the Midwest in which I had to bum rides off of friends and acquaintances just to get shampoo, but I don't feel like I've earned the right to this easy lifestyle. Nor have all of my peers with their fancy liberal arts degrees and research marketing internships and whatever, who so confidently and unthinkingly don the mantle of adulthood. We're supposed to struggle and be poor and in the process stretch ourselves, forge our characters through not having access to everything we want all the time-- otherwise we'll completely skip over these growth-spurts-in-times-of-adversity and turn into soulless, entitled yuppie scum.

I sound like an asshole. I've been reading too much Paul Auster and William Burroughs at the Public Library on my breaks. They're so GRITTY and raw, says my inner late-to-bloom anarchic adolescent, the one who wants to rip away the insipid veil of modern civilization to reveal the seething existential nightmare below. Screw these young entrepreneurial guys on their Macs with their corporate doublespeak, these baby-voiced prissily-tweezed-eyebrowed girls on their way from Au Bon Pain to Zumba class. I want to talk to the bums, the crazies, the terminal fuckups and dark doppelgangers who lurk in every cultured enclave of the city. I want to stare into their sunken eyes and see my own naked dread reflected back. But then I also want an earl grey almond latte and a pear-ginger scone, and I want a ticket to see "Friends with Benefits," and somehow I manage to procure these things but stop short of engaging the seedy underbelly of society. And then my break is over anyway, and it's time to return to...

*** My Wonderful Artistic Escapist Job at the Schlockston Chalet ***

This has been great. I have no regrets. I actually really like playing the piano in this capacity, where I am absolutely necessary but not the center of attention. Required to be attentive and consistent yet not held to severe artistic scrutiny at all times-- in short, a utilitarian musician.

So this has been a day in the life:

1. I make a somewhat lengthy but not unpleasant morning commute from my sublet (in the 'burbs, nearer to Schmarvard) on the train, usually sucking down some strong coffee and reading the trashy free publication that gets handed out in the stations. The Ballet is downtown, a gorgeous four-story red brick building with half-moon windows looking into the city center; it contains 7 (!) studios, administrative offices, a locker room, a kitchenette, a physical therapy center, and a dance library of books, scores, videos, and periodicals. (I definitely spent a free hour watching a DVD of Balanchine's Jewels. And then Nureyev dancing in Giselle another day. And then a documentary about company life in the Paris Opera Ballet. What a resource!)

2. I play for my first block-- two technique classes, totaling three hours. The faculty rotates from day to day, and what a faculty it is. Several of them are current company dancers while others are older and retired, hailing from NYC Ballet or Europe or San Francisco or Canada. Despite their range of personalities and teaching philosophies, I have (shockingly) not had a negative experience with a single one of them. They're musical, cordial, and accommodating.

I've loved listening to their anecdotes and advice. I've learned about anatomical principles of balance, alignment, and rotation. Learned about the stylistic traits of Marius Petipa, George Balanchine, and other choreographic giants. Learned about corps work and company rehearsal etiquette. And then there was the one really hilarious, inspirational teacher who was hell-bent on getting these many docile and exceedingly well-bred students to stop going through the motions and actually emote in their dancing. In our age of texting and technological outsourcing of social interaction, he said, young people have lost the ability to be expressive with their physical selves. Facial muscles have atrophied. "LOLs" can be relayed with no outward conveyance of amusement. "You guys are so tame in real life!" he chastised. "You're like, 'I'm WILD on Facebook. THAT'S where my personality is." I quite literally-- in the flesh-- LOL'ed at that one, marking myself as a member of a slightly older generation.

3. After a break (in which I explore the city and denigrate the hipsters and yuppies from my critical pedestal, all the while knowing that this impulse actually comes from a place of self-loathing) I return for the afternoon/ evening block, another three hours of playing. This is the portion that mildly terrified me at first: repertoire class. As in, set choreography from canonic ballets, with set music. Music that I couldn't just manufacture on the spot to fit a classroom exercise ("hmmm, should I play the theme from Brahms' Handel Variations or 'When I'm Sixty-Four' for this tendu? Both would work...") No, for rep class I've had to... sight-read.

Some pianists have a natural proclivity for deciphering any piece of music placed before them and producing a recognizable rendition at a level close to their own playing abilities. I salute these pianists. I envy these pianists. I am not one of them. Some sort of trade off must have occurred long ago when the deities were doling out musical gifts : "We'll bestow a good ear, an innate expressiveness, and some degree of technical facility on this girl, but mix in a strain of performance anxiety and some FUNCTIONAL ILLITERACY just to even the score." I have, historically, frozen up bigtime when called upon to read at sight. There's an unforgivable time lag between decoding the visual symbols, hearing the music in my head, and physically rendering it on the keyboard. The catastrophically sputtering result bears little resemblance to my "real" (i.e. rehearsed or memorized) playing. People give me this look of "WTF how did you ever hack your way through three performance degrees at a prestigious university you can't even read music like W.T.F." and I wonder the same. But then part of me thinks that all is not lost. There was that one party where I, in some magical just-right state of inebriation, grabbed the Schumann concerto and read most of it rather smoothly. There was that OTHER party where, a little wine-sodden, I attempted a four-hand reduction of a Bach orchestral suite with a friend and made it through. Obviously a little bit of alcohol bequeathed me with new, fabulous talents. (Or more likely it just removed some psychological inhibitions and allowed me to process complex input more fluently. Whatever the reason, I resolved to keep drinking).

But alas, I could not show up in good conscience to my fabulous job having knocked back a few. I would have to just suck it up and try to produce some workable version of the scores placed in front of me. Luckily, the ballet rehearsal process usually involves reiteration of short increments, so I could kind of save face by scanning ahead as we repeated the first eight measures five times. Also luckily, some of the music was fairly intuitive and not too technically demanding. But unluckily, some of the music was Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev-- beautiful yet dense and difficult, and I committed some heinous crimes against those composers on first readings before coming up with passable faked versions. Still, over the course of the job, my sight-reading skills have progressed from "WTF no seriously WTF" to "hmmm, needs improvement." This is a big deal!

I was eventually assigned to a group of younger students who were set to perform an excerpt from "Sleeping Beauty." Man, did they work hard. Their teacher-- who actually hails from my university as well, though in a slightly earlier era-- was highly motivated, ablaze with pedagogical dedication, and the timbre of her rehearsals lifted my spirits every day. The girls would come curtsy to me individually afterward and say "Thank you." They asked me with awe how I moved my fingers so fast. I asked them how their feet were faring after so many hours of pointe work, and told them they were rock stars for all the work they were putting in. The teacher and I exchanged a few little gossipy departmental tidbits about Bleep University, and I started to feel strangely removed from that bureaucratically toxic, oft artistically flaccid environment that has so jaded me in recent times. I started to feel buzzy with a love for the arts, with a less-cantankerous opinion of the younger generation, with new personal potential, with being part of something bigger than myself.

I was sad when they asked me to stay on for the year and I couldn't. But the door is open for next summer, and I hope to maintain a relationship with this wonderful institution. Right now, You Dork City beckons with all its grit and excess and yuppiedom and sky-high real estate: I move to Poshington Blights on Saturday, with anticipation and trepidation for the many Schmoozicological / life adventures that await, but with ballet in my bones, in my ears, in my heart.

End scene.

Jobbing in Schlockston: Bunheads Revisited

Props if you made it through the inaugural post below; it was all just a lengthy rationalization for the fact that I feel a sudden burning need to blab about my life. And my life has actually been verging on interesting lately! There's the upcoming transition to studying Schmoozicology in the Big Exciting City, as I mentioned before, but in the meantime, I've undertaken a short-term job as a Schmoozician in a Medium-Sized Pretty Exciting City. It baffles me that I found legitimate employment as a pianist in these hard-knock times, in this cultural environment where the prevailing mentality is to torch anything resembling artistic frivolity, at this juncture in my life when I meant to graciously bow out of the "practicum" side of things and shack up in the Ivory Tower forever. And yet here I am, playing for a highly reputable institution that sounds a lot like "Schlockston Chalet."

This is how it happened: around late February of this year, it suddenly occurred to me that the PhD thing might not pan out, that the rather small net I had cast into the Gulf of Graduate School Admissions might not return any fish at all, let alone fat dripping fellowshippy fish. I had no other plans, and staying at my university was no longer an option (financially, practically, psychologically). One insomniac night as I lay curled in bed with my laptop, willing it to illuminate my life's purpose or at least its immediate future, I summoned up Google and typed "ballet pianist jobs."

Hi, I'm Alana and I'm a recovering bunhead. Really. Most of my extracurricular time between the ages of four and sixteen was spent in the ballet studio, with only a few pianistic interpolations here and there. When most kids my age were probably discovering the joys of smoking pot, I was learning how to tape my toes for pointe work and debating the merits of Freed versus Grishko shoes. I did math homework backstage during rehearsals for The Nutcracker, dressed as a harlequin or a snowflake or a Russian peasant stereotype. And let's not even talk about the balletic adaptations of The Pied Piper of Hamelin and The Red Pony in which I participated, shall we? Then there were the serious summer intensives-- boot-camp technique all morning, masterclasses with so-and-so from Big Company X, classical variations, character dance, choreography, workshop performances.

I had a love/ hate relationship with the whole thing, the blistered feet and throbbing muscles, the endorphin rush of flying across the room at the end of class, the cattiness of the other girls, the ritualistic Zen of barre every day, the body-image issues that inevitably came up. Eventually I backed off.  I started to identify as a music kid (zany / brainy rather than girl jock) and changed my long-term aspirations. A career as a pianist, I thought, would have greater longevity than dance (very true) and would exact less of a psychological toll (HAHAHA). And so off I went to Schmoozic School, but the language of ballet had made its way into my permanent physical memory. I could never forget turnout, arm positions, the exact amount of force necessary to pull off a triple pirouette. Barefoot, sprawled on my dorm room floor with a music theory assignment, I'd subconsciously flex and stretch my arches. An empty hallway would beckon me to tour-jete down its length. It's not that I wanted to DO ballet again in any serious way-- I was busy, I was lazy, I didn't want to scrutinize my not-really-so-buff-and-petite-anymore physique in the studio mirror every day and start to flirt with bullshit thoughts like "if I restricted myself to 1,200 calories a day..." -- but deep down, I never fell out of love with the art form.

It made sense, then, to start playing for ballet department classes in college. The faculty there were always on the lookout for pianists, and my background in dance was appealing to them-- I already knew the vocabulary of ballet and the structure of technique class, so that would eliminate a lot of explanation on their part. Still, at first I struggled. This job required a  different skill set from what I was being trained for in school. Instead of memorizing and obsessively polishing a small prescribed repertoire, I had to spontaneously produce music that would be appropriate for a given exercise. The instructor would demonstrate a combination, (hopefully) implying the rhythmic gesture of the step, and I would need to find a musical match in a matter of seconds. It didn't take me long to realize that improvisation was much more efficient in this setting than reading from sheet music.

In a few weeks, I hit my stride, and then the job got fun. I plundered the entire Western canon for dance-appropriate music, shamelessly paraphrasing anything from Bach violin partita movements to Beethoven symphonies to Joplin rags. It was hack-work at its finest, but also an excellent learning tool. I was refining my ear, harmonizing melodies and transitioning between various keys on the spot. I was learning about phrase lengths because ballet class was square square square, everything in symmetrical eight-count groupings, so I really had to lop off those two extra measures of that Mozart aria and fumble a klutzy cadence of my own making or the dancers and I would be hopelessly misaligned. I began to categorize dance types in my mind for speedy reference: gavottes worked for Tendu, sicilianos or sarabandes for Adagio, military marches for Battement, sea shanties for Petite Allegro, etc. etc. Then I started to notice that these rhythms and "topics" cropped up in my own solo repertoire. They were all over the place, embedded into big concert works that ostensibly weren't meant to be danced to but that still had roots in dancey ideas.  I started to visualize the choreography that might accompany these little units-- the timing, the accentuation, the contour of the steps-- and tweaked my musical interpretations accordingly. I started to think that every musician should cultivate an intimate knowledge of dance, so intertwined were the two.

As for the in-studio playing itself, I became proficient after months of rote repetition. Guest teachers came, liked my playing, gave me their contact information, and offered me short-term jobs. I could never accept these positions due to prior commitments or logistical issues, but it was nice to know that I had found a weird little niche in the arts world, a niche that was NOT clogged with a surfeit of hugely overqualified pianists.

Anyway, that is the ultra-long FLASHBACK! version of how I came to be Googling "ballet pianist jobs" at 1 AM on a gloomy winter night.

A few things turned up. A professional company in Duesseldorf required "the services of a highly experienced ballet pianist for collaboration in contemporary works." Hmmm, interesting, but scary with the language block and the work visa and the probably-insane sight reading and the hardcore-looking artistic director. Then there was a "Miss Shelley's School of Dance" -type institution that needed a player for tap and musical theatre classes. Ummm, just back away slowly and let some Glee-hard have the job instead. And then there was a posting from the school of the famous Schlockston Chalet. They had a rare opening for a full-time pianist with public performance opportunities and health benefits. THAT COULD BE COOL. I drafted a quick resume, sent it into the internet abyss, and returned to my fretful existence.

I never expected anything to materialize, but before I knew it, I was on the phone with the music department head discussing my credentials. And then I was in Schlockston playing for the artistic director, a former principal of New York City Ballet who looked like a Pre-Raphaelite goddess. And then I was reading an email offering me a trial summer position, which was actually ideal because the grad school thing had magically sorted itself out by that point but I had no summer plans, and I had just been about to mail off a few music festival applications and be out a few hundred dollars but come to think of it, I was kind of OVER the festival thing and why not accept a real paying gig that could put my highly idiosyncratic musical skills to use? And then I was looking for sublets in Schlockston, and now I am actually IN Schlockston, two-and-a-half weeks into this fantastic, albeit slightly exhausting job. But that's a post unto itself.

Here's a teaser: "Ladies, this is BALLET! You need to express yourselves! Send me a text message with your FACE!"

Welcome to the Schlock Academy, or, She Blogs Again

Long,  long ago, ca. 2004- 2007, I blogged prolifically along with the rest of the 13-to-30-year-old demographic. Oh how we loved the medium. We could be as narcissistic or confessional or soapboxy or charmingly irreverent as the internet would allow, and the internet was indeed endlessly permissive.  At some point, though, I fell off the blogging wagon. It was passé, I thought; everyone was doing it; it was a pale and facile excuse for self-expression; nobody had anything to say that hadn't been articulated with greater insight in literature or journalism.

My generation seemed to concur, and around the time that I was deleting every incriminating entry to my name, there was a mass defection from the blogosphere. Now we knew better, right? The Web was a scary place where creepy voyeurs and potential employers lurked, just waiting for us to voluntarily feed information to them.

Only I'm lying; we were never really that self-aware. What actually happened was that our attention spans could no longer support lengthy discourse. With the rise of the Facebook status and the Tweet, we could still broadcast our quotidian activities, internal states, passive-aggressively veiled personal dramas, etc., to a captive audience, but now we could disperse these juicy bits in one-sentence increments! Gone was the laborious craftsmanship that blogging entailed, the multi-paragraph scheme, the dramatic trajectory, the opening hook and the concluding zinger, the pitch-perfect TITLE to unify the whole post. Now ours was a culture of quick hits-- single witticisms or Koan-like cryptic fragments. Or song lyrics.

While this mode of expression provided its own challenges, mostly it just made us stupider. And by us I mean me. I would scan half of a food blog post about creamed spinach and suddenly find myself on a FailSite, because looking at a photo of an unintentionally phallic children's toy exhausted my cognitive reserves less than did reading about the culinary properties of bechamel sauce. I couldn't sit still and read a five-paged article in TIME magazine on why powerful men are chauvinistic pigs (and I really wanted to know! It took me two days and I only retained a little bit of information.The cutesy graphs and tables helped; they always do, especially when at the expense of R. Kelly). Denser scholarly texts did not even stand a chance. And then I was really in trouble, because I decided to apply to PhD programs in Schmoozicology, an obscure corner of the humanities. Prior to this I had been on the track of Schmoozic Performance, which presented its own formidable issues of focus and self-discipline, but now I would be trying for a field the very core of which was reading, critical thinking, and LENGTHY prose composition.

Oh, it was brutal. Slogging through academic articles and dissertations was hard enough when I scarcely had the intellectual stamina to watch a complete episode of Jersey Shore (though now that I think that my occasional failure to see the Shore through to its greasy end was more a function of nameless existential dread than of ADD). But then I had to WRITE, and it had to be GOOD. I had to say things, true things, that nobody had articulated before and that people might care about knowing. I had to buttress the true things with other true things. And I had to accomplish all of this in attractive, sophisticated language for twenty-five pages.

I almost didn't make it. The sentences bloomed in my mind, nuanced, linear, full of essential truths, and then they died hard on the computer screen. Stutters and malapropisms, tortured syntax, obfuscation of meaning until I had no idea what I was even trying to argue anymore. Backspace and stare at the blinking cursor again, or dart off to a LOLsite to give my brain a break. I never updated my Facebook status so frequently; why was it so much easier to manufacture clever one-liners about my mental deterioration that to just push through the damn paper that was the cause of such?

All of this culminated in an all-nighter fueled by mate, black tea, and not enough food, in which I sat at the kitchen table/ the couch, alternately, sometimes squeezing out convoluted multi-clause German-style sentences, sometimes flying through chunks of my outline because I just got on a roll. Around 9 AM I could no longer see straight and my heart was doing a skittery little dance, like it was trying to jet over to the right side of my ribcage. I knew I had to write a few paragraphs about Hummel and his pedagogical treatise, and I knew exactly what information needed to be covered and in what order, but the computer screen hurt my eyes and I tried to form words and now my heart felt like a maraca in the grasp of a pissed-off toddler. At that point my roommate groggily emerged. "I'm so TIRED still," she said, and then surveyed me. I must have looked deranged. "Whoa, are you okay?" "..... Uh. No," I said. "I think I need... some food... or some sleep... or to go to the doctor." She shoved a cinnamon raisin bagel at me, saying that she had to go to school but to call if I needed medical attention.

To finish the rest of the story briefly: the bagel restored my equilibrium somewhat, I wrote the goddamn paper, and after a few more months of anxiety and teeth-gnashing, I was accepted to a good PhD program in a Big Exciting City with FUNDING. I wept with relief, felt elated at the dazzling future that lay before me, and then realized with leaden certainty that I would repeat the all-nighter-Yerba-Mate-cinnamon-raisin panic fest again and again for the REST OF MY LIFE if I did not change my ways. And the way that most needed changing, aside from my general procrastination and adrenaline junkie-ness, was my fluency as a writer.

So this was all a very roundabout way of saying that blogging seems like a natural stepping stone back into the kingdom of higher-order thinking and analytical writing. The public forum will ensure that I adhere to some standards of sentence construction and comprehensibility, while the casual nature of the medium will allow me some wiggle room (you know, to say things like "wiggle room" or worse. That's what she said). And so I christen this place the Schlock Academy-- "academy" because that is where I'm going, possibly never to resurface, and "Schlock" ("something of shoddy or inferior quality") because none of the writing here will be Pulitzer material or even terribly original. This is just a place to get back into the groove of thinking and typing. And, as a side effect, it's a nice way to cope with a weird, emotionally turbulent time in my life when everything is changing and I'm getting thwacked in the forehead with Life Lessons every time I just want to go to CVS or something. It's the standard Young Person story of unrest, exploration, self-absorption, option paralysis in a privileged but irremediably fractured world... the kind of story that merits more space and development that the Tweet/ Status Update/ Information Byte will allow, but that rarely aspires to literary or philosophical heights due to its well-trodden content and inherently colloquial tone. Ergo blog.