I once told someone that half the stuff I know about my extended family I get from reading the papers, and this time it's happening again because my cousin is apparently stuck in Lebanon. Kudos to her, must be quite a ride.
This week I ended placement, which means hello essay, hello form filling and money claiming and goodbye Stitch. The last one, I still cannot believe, am still getting over, is such a relief, I can't believe I made it through without killing myself.
This week I ended quartet performance at the concourse, and made it through giving the opera introductions, without killing the audience. Or myself. It was surprisingly fun, and I think it was the epitome of reverse music education because I felt I was educating myself instead of educating them. Oh well maybe a bit of both. Anyway it was a lot more fun this time, maybe because we had more people dropping by (Thank you all who came!), more quirky people in the audience, and more encouraging people! I realised that the westerners are so much more spontaneous in showing appreciation and/or delight, some locals looked like they were there to digest their food or something.
And now I am hopeless hooked on the movie version of Rent the musical, immorality, hedonism, catchy tunes and all. It's such a vice, but I don't know why I identify so much with it. It's the whole living in the moment, concentrate on your art and bochup the corporate working world thing that unleashed the hopelessly idealistic side of me, probably repressed in light of more practical considerations such as money. Repressed also due to the pressures of "I can't be doing nothing tangibly productive with my life and education".
Which brings me to the sobering reflection of what I've learnt during placement - I can't do the whole 9 to 5 thing. The lack of stimulation was painful, half the time I was pacing in the room, literally pacing up and down, in circles, sitting in different corners, positions, walking up and down the corridor, taking the lift down and up again. Even though I had cases, had to do readings and summary recordings and a process recording and plan and conduct a workshop, and fend off Stitch's nonsense, it wasn't enough. Not that there wasn't enough to do, it just felt like something was lacking. And that something was filled by the teaching and the playing and the rehearsing. So in a way I survived because I cheated - I had all these other escape mechanisms from the absolute mundanity of work.
LateNightAstrologer has been talking about Jennifer Tham's quote of "You don't choose Music, but Music chose you", and as much as I don't like how that sounds like soul possession, I think I agree. It's like, it's the only thing that plagues me, the only thing I feel totally inadequate doing, but enjoy it because of precisely that reason. It's like a privilege endowed on you, and you hate yourself for ruining it, but at the same time you're hooked to those moments when something clicks and you do okay. Alright doing okay is an understatement. Doing okay makes you feel like you could jump over the moon.
