a day in the life

awake seven minutes before the alarm; I lay spread-eagled across the bed, my face shoved into a pillow, not wanting to sacrifice an extra second under the covers. I am up for an 8:15 PT appointment; the lunch I pack -- a generous handful of almonds and two blood oranges -- is governed by the extreme lack of food in the house. there's oatmeal, which I eat with the remainder of the nuts in the can -- a metal can that somehow the ants, the goddamned ants, have infiltrated.

I try to be early to PT but instead I'm on time, which means the ten minutes I have on the bike cut into my appointment. which actually doesn't matter, except that I've had two back-to-back nightmares about being late to my session; in the dream, chris points to the foam roller and tells me to use it, since I'm late and he doesn't have time to work on me. I read ten pages of my book while I'm pedaling and wonder idly, are my legs getting fatter? chris wipes down the table and calls me over. it's been two weeks. I am still not running. 'how's it going?' he asks, in the way he does, and I shrug. I haven't done my exercises as diligently, having lost motivation because I'm not able to see the progress without running. fighting discouragement requires more energy than I have some days. he has me do calf raises on each leg, first the injured one and then the ... slightly less injured one. chris says, "I expect everyone to be able to do ten; my runners should be able to do twenty, and the olympians, thirty." I do twenty on both legs but the effort makes the injured one ache. "now hop up and down. can you go for a minute?" and I can't. I make it thirty seconds, barely, and the pain is back. "on your back," he commands, and pats the table. he works my left psoas, which has been killing me again from so much chair time at the office, and he reprimands me for not doing my quad stretches. he works my left quad so hard that twelve hours later, it's still red and sore; I won't be able to touch it for days. but underneath, the muscle finally stops feeling like a wad of high-tensile rope. I flip over so he can scrutinize my injured calf. like an expert, he puts his thumb directly into the hurt spot, rotten like an apple. it takes forever to release, and when he works his way lower down my leg the pain is so excruciating, I have to focus on a spot on the floor and clutch the edges of the table, afraid I will scream. as he works, chris talks to a guy nearby who's doing his exercises. "this might take me a little longer than usual, are you in a hurry?" and then, "watch your shoulder posture, dave." as painful as it is on the table, most mornings I feel sorry to have to leave this place.

when he's through, we talk a little. "no running until you can hop up and down for at least two minutes without pain. if it hurts when you're walking, don't even think about running." I nod. "that leg is a problem," he says, simply. "if insurance weren't an issue, I'd see you at least twice a week." at ninety dollars a session, it's the most expensive massage I could get, but also the best. but I can't afford twice a week; I've already hit my yearly FSA limit -- $700.

I leave and find a text from my sister. "flight itinerary for may in your email!" she says. may = portland half marathon. I write back. "I may be cheering you on from the sidelines."

I get a big coffee on my way in to the office.



at the office, it's more of the same. galileo kicks the crap out of me. it's just me and the score and one of the handful of parts left to check. measure after measure, note after note until my whole face feels tired from the effort. I write the opera blog. I tweak tomorrow night's recital program. I eat candy. although I haven't observed lent since I was probably nine years old, this year I swore off baked goods. I just needed a reason not to eat so much goddamned cake.

I curse whoever was let loose with an electric eraser on the clarinet part, and perform low-grade music librarian magic.



I stay at the office until 3, and then drive to the copy shop to run the program. then home, where I proofread the penultimate string book, sitting at my coffee table, listening with one ear to the end of terminator, which is on TV for the third time this week. I eat a salad, make a pot of coffee. I finish the viola part at 7:30 and type out my letter for the day.

I drive to the grocery store, singing adele on repeat. when I walk in the door I realize I've left my wallet at home. I drive home. I drive back to the store. I throw what essentially amounts to $60 in produce in my cart.

at home, I put the food away, make a sandwich, and get back in the car. it's 10 PM. I head back to the office, because there's a pile of music to copy and bind, and if I wait until the morning it will stymie my whole day. late night in the office means I can wear comfy pants, a messy ponytail, and my headphones. I dance to adele at the copy machine. I am exhausted. my desk is a mess. I'm hungry, despite the sandwich.




there's still so much to do. I can't even think about it. this is my umpteenth late night in the office in the last few weeks.

with one enormous exception, the parts are done.



the enormous exception is the keyboard part. the keyboard for galileo is single-handedly ruining my life.

it's 12:04 AM. I'm still at the office. I'm so tired I can't see straight. when all of this is done, the reward is to spend a day at the museum, among the bright, enormous rothkos.

a long weekend: sleeping until 10, brunch, john cage, horse hair, rain, blankets, movies, coffee, legos, strippers, a hangover, a glass of wine, a game of thrones, candy, letters, envelopes, bad TV, a walk, a dusty old typewriter, a conversation with an old friend, a long-overdue trip to the bank / mall / food store / library, a half-zipped riding boot, clean breeches, mud, dirt, seeds, weeds.

at the garden paul, in the plot next to mine, constructs a cold frame. I am surprised to see anyone there. my brussels sprouts have totally sprouted; the buds have opened into tiny mini cabbages. all the work to grow them and I let them go all winter. I walk over and call, "I guess it's about that time!" and paul says, "it is not! it is too damn early! why is it so warm outside?" and he has the truth of it, actually, but just the same, the peas have to go in soon.

when I write my letters in the morning, I experience a moment of panic at night. and then relief, such relief.

my hair is just about long enough for a single ponytail, for the first time in more than three years. and I still don't know: grow or cut. I just don't know.

on my computer there's a file that contains a list of every person I've ever kissed. romantically, I mean. I wrote them down about five years ago, when it occurred to me that someday I might not be able to remember. I keep it current. there's no real use for this kind of information but forgetting is maybe the thing I fear most in life.

the number of people on the list surprises me. whether it's because it's small or big, I honestly don't know.

.

I always stay up too late.

mostly noise

"The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is, why do I think it's not beautiful? And very shortly you discover that there is no reason." -- John Cage

Last night, my good friend Rob, the opera's associate music director/chorusmaster/principal coach/assistant conductor (yes, all of those things), performed in a concert of John Cage music, in celebration of the composer's 100th birthday. I went because he is dear to me and I wanted to support him; otherwise, I was not that into the idea of a whole night of weirdly plonky, random music. Or so I thought.



The performance was equal parts concert and art installation; performances occurred simultaneously throughout the building for the duration of the three-hour event. The building itself was lovely, an old warehouse space: white walls, old wood floors, mostly darkened save for some wall lighting and the glow of stand lights. The space, unheated, was chilly; colder in the adjoining garage, where Rob sang. At the entrance, twelve record players were set up and playing, surrounded by piles of extra records; the piece, 33 1/3, is designed to be controlled by the audience, who can change the records or manipulate the machines at will -- or just let them play. They all blare simultaneously, and the music selection is irrelevant.

The first true performance of the evening -- but that's not the right way to say it, really, since 33 1/3 is a performance too... the first staged performance? the first live performance? I don't even know -- was Credo in Us, one of Cage's early works, which calls for four musicians playing prepared piano, tin cans, hand buzzers, tom toms, and a radio and phonograph. The piece is rhythmic and driving, and frankly, really cool; the radio and phonograph both play whatever the performers choose, though Cage suggested perhaps Dvorak, Sibelius, Shostakovich, or Beethoven. Last night the performance included snippets of Turandot. I watched the page turner for the piece and thought, "Now there is a job I would not want; by comparison, Mussorgsky is a breeze."



In the adjoining garage space, chairs were set up in a loose elongated oval ("It's whale-shaped!" Rob said), facing each other. Litany for the Whale is antiphonal, sung by two baritones, plainchant. The singers sing the sounds of W-H-A-L-E. The space was very live; when the singing began I was surprised for a moment, mistakenly thinking it was amplified. Call and response, over and over. So very different from the rhythmic Credo, so quiet. I sat and watched the other people listening, watched them settle into understanding what the piece was doing; heard the creaking of chairs; watched the tenor of the room change. In the row facing me, most of the people had their eyes closed. One man had pushed his glasses up onto his forehead. A hipster had a bemused smile on his face. A petite woman with long, unruly curls sat tensely, as if maybe she thought she should have gone upstairs to see another work instead. The whalesong went on for twenty five minutes. I can still hear it in my mind.



I thought Cage to be sort of a joke, which is maybe how you perceive him when you learn about him as a 19-year-old in a music history course you are obligated to take in order to receive your degree. I feel sorry for that now. Sometimes it seems my whole life is about learning to open my eyes. You know, it's funny: I am that crazy person in the theater who gets a nervous twitch whenever there is any ambient noise in performance. I hate when people rustle their programs too much, or wear crinkly coats, or have jangly bracelets, or if there is too much coughing or whispering. It's not necessarily that I think the music is sacrosanct; it's more that I hate being pulled out of the experience of listening, and I suppose my ability to hone in on the music is maybe kind of weak if it can be derailed by the sound of a raincoat, but whatever. Simultaneously, I love outdoor concerts -- particularly classical music concerts -- because there is no real sanctity to the sound at all, by virtue of the environment itself. They are not austere. People come and go, they talk, they eat sandwiches and lay on blankets, there are trucks going by. It's just music. I like that. I thought a lot last night about the sacredness or lack thereof in performance, whether there is some music that you should hold sacred and some you shouldn't; whether we take it all too seriously. Not that Cage didn't take it seriously -- indeed, he took it very seriously. But if he had been in that NY Phil performance of Mahler a few weeks ago, he probably would have delighted at that errant, riot-inducing cell phone ring. The thing about attending a performance of Cage's music is that you pretty much can't get it wrong. You can't clap at the wrong time or make too much noise, or too little; you don't have to worry about sirens going by or whether the space is too live. In one absolutely lovely moment, we were standing watching the performance of Fourteen, for various instruments and piano, with the piano strings being bowed using a piece of fishing line. The instrumentalists each have aleatoric passages to play, with the only directive being to play them quietly and to almost never drown out the sound of the piano. As the musicians played, from far behind us, on the other end of the space, Carlos Kalmar, the Oregon Symphony's music director, was performing Lecture on Nothing, which is just that -- a lecture. He had been reading out loud at the desk for over an hour, and finally, not long after Fourteen started, he fell to silence. There was applause from those people still seated nearby. Some of us standing on the opposite end of the room clapped as well. The music on our end continued. Four or five minutes later, Carlos began talking again; the silence had been scripted into the lecture. I grinned. Above the haunting sound of the bowed piano, Carlos's voice, his accent a hard-to-imitate combination of Argentinian and Austrian, floated; the lecture talked about making a corporation called 'Happiness, Inc.,' how everyone who joined would be president; how all you needed to do to join was to smash 100 records; how in Texas there was a woman who told him there was no music there, because in Texas they had recordings, and how recordings were the death of music. All of this overhead, in his accent, mixing with the music. Next to me my friend Bob said, "At any moment I feel like he may launch into Green Eggs and Ham." It was so wonderful.



There was Postcard from Heaven, a piece for 1-20 harps. In this case, I think I counted fourteen, though it might have been fifteen, but at any rate FOURTEEN HARPS. All in a circle, all in one room, all of them simultaneously playing a series of ragas, first quietly and then louder, punctuated by the sounds of hard objects against the sound pegs, by rapid swipes and plucks, and then eventually dwindling to the sound of all the harpists rubbing the sheet music itself onto the strings. The sound of fourteen harps, rather than being lovely, instead brought to mind the picture of a maniacal doll coming, perhaps, to eat you with bared teeth at any moment.

While downstairs there was a second performance of Credo (several of the works were performed multiple times, including Litany for the Whale), upstairs two musicians were performing Inlets, a piece for four conch shells and the sound of fire. There were two microphones, two speakers, a table with four shells, and a basin of water. The musicians filled the shells and tipped them slowly into the basin. Drip drip drip. Inlets was inspired by the weather of the Pacific Northwest, from Cage's time in Seattle. Drip drip drip. It was surprisingly lovely.



And lastly, 4'33". At the start of the night I sat in the space and wrote my letter for the day, and in it I said, "I can't decide whether to stay for 4'33". On the one hand, when do you ever get to experience a performance of it? On the other hand, do I really need to hang around for 2 1/2 hours to watch four and a half minutes of staged silence?" Of course, transformed by the rest of the evening, I was eager to stay. A string quartet and a pianist set up; the first violin had a timer on her phone. The room grew quiet, almost reverent. On cue, the musicians opened their scores. I wondered if anyone in the audience would deliberately make noise in an effort to insert themselves into the piece (a thing I considered, to be frank), but no one did; we all stood very transfixed, listening to the sounds in the next room of people's footsteps, the clinking of an occasional dish, the murmur of speech; the sounds which, of course, are the piece itself. At the appointed time, the musicians turned to the second movement. I was filled with a wild, giddy delight. Around me, everyone was watching the musicians. When they finally closed their music, it came as a surprise; it was impossible to believe four and a half minutes had passed. The violinist held up her timer to show us. We all sort of shook ourselves off, the way you do after you've just been crying during a movie, and disbanded. I came over to the executive director, who subs in our violin section sometimes, and I hugged her twice. "I don't think I have ever attended a better performance," I said, and that is the truth. I cannot even believe it.



The full set list, or what I can remember of it:
33 1/3
Credo in Us
Litany for the Whale
Lecture on Nothing
Muoyce
Apartment House 1776
Music for Marcel Duchamp
Inlets
Fourteen
Postcard From Heaven
4'33"

Afterwards the three of us had beers at the strip club half a block down the street. Because that's how we roll.

from Steinbeck: A Life in Letters

New York
November 10, 1958

Dear Thom:

We had your letter this morning. I will answer it from my point of view and of course Elaine will from hers.

First—if you are in love—that’s a good thing—that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you.

Second—There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you—of kindness and consideration and respect—not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.

You say this is not puppy love. If you feel so deeply—of course it isn’t puppy love.

But I don’t think you were asking me what you feel. You know better than anyone. What you wanted me to help you with is what to do about it—and that I can tell you.

Glory in it for one thing and be very glad and grateful for it.

The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it.

If you love someone—there is no possible harm in saying so—only you must remember that some people are very shy and sometimes the saying must take that shyness into consideration.

Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also.

It sometimes happens that what you feel is not returned for one reason or another—but that does not make your feeling less valuable and good.

Lastly, I know your feeling because I have it and I’m glad you have it.

We will be glad to meet Susan. She will be very welcome. But Elaine will make all such arrangements because that is her province and she will be very glad to. She knows about love too and maybe she can give you more help than I can.

And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens—The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.

Love,
Fa