Am I here?
Do you ever fear that you may have turned invisible overnight? Or that you are like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense? I say this only because I have sent a number of emails/messages this week that have been totally ignored, or at least they have been unreturned. No, this is not a passive aggressive nudge to anyone who reads this blog, because none of you are in the club of people who have decided to deny my existence this week.
Maybe the cosmos has told everyone to leave me alone because I should really be practicing for my audition tomorrow, not putzing around...darn Cosmos, such a task master.
This is probably just a symptom if irrational pre-audition paranoia. I mean, at any other time, a day or two would seem like a perfectly reasonable amount of time in which to respond to a message. But my current state of mind - the one that has crazy fears that I will just completely forget how to play the cello, or that I somehow got the date of the audition totally wrong - keeps insisting that this is an unacceptably long turnaround time.
Okay, I have sufficiently distracted myself for 10 minutes. Back to practicing! Or, back to not actually existing....
"Apple Blossom" by The White Stripes is a fantastic song
1. I think I have mentioned before that I really don't like it when other people have my name? How I like to think that I am the only Holly? Psychoanalyze this however you will. Now, obviously, I know there are other Hollys. For the most part, they represent the name well...Holly Go Lightly (both the character from Breakfast at Tiffany's AND the indie musician), Holly Hunter, Buddy Holly. But why...WHY must there be a Playboy playmate named Holly who is now, at age 27, marrying Hugh Hefner? She is besmirching what I like to think of as a dignified name. I would expect this from a Brandi, a Chastity, even a Tiffani, but a Holly? A Holly who spells her name properly, not with an "i"?!? (PS, no offense to anyone named Brandi, Chastity or Tiffani. Chastity Bono is obviously an exception to the rule that Chastity is a stripper name)
2. I discovered two days ago that Barbra Streisand is an amazing singer. I had never really watched any of her movies or listened to any of her music because of her diva image, but I watched "Funny Girl" and I was blown away. She is like Judy Garland, only better, probably because she was never horribly addicted to drugs. This significantly strengthens the theory that I am a gay man on the inside.
3. Did anyone else watch Eddie Izzard's new show Riches on FX? It was so good. When did Eddie Izzard get so hot? He has always been attractive, but never like this!
4. "What is the What" by Dave Eggers is a fantastic book.
5. Happy St. Patrick's Day! Celebrate safely.
Misanthrope McGee
If I can finish this post by midnight, I will be sticking to my new year's resolution (the one about updating my blog more than once a month). I can't help it if the month of February was uneventful! The highlight was definitely my trip to Milwaukee, and most of the people who read this were there.
Uneventful does not exactly equal boring, though. Deferring grad school for a year was the most educationally beneficial decision I ever made. Instead of going to school this year, I've been doing nothing but practicing, taking lessons, teaching, listening to music and reading library books. Horrible February weather only enhanced my singularity of purpose. In the past few weeks, I have become more and more certain that I am learning more independently than I did in all four years of college. This has been extremely rewarding and enjoyable, but it is not exactly good for my disposition. By the end of high school, I was already cynical about most of society's institutions, but now I'm pretty much convinced that they are pointless and evil. But they are a necessary evil. When it comes down to it, I have to get a master's degree, but after this year of musical utopia, going back to school is going to be unpleasant if not unbearable. Maybe I could try to overload credits and get it over with in one year, like ripping off a band-aid....
What do you all think after graduating from college? Is it all it's cracked up to be? Is it worth the money? (obviously it is in the sense that you make more money with a college degree than without one, but is the cost of a private college vs. a state school worth it?)
I have no segueway for this, but what is with people who still talk to teachers from high school? I think anybody from Wheeling would agree that I was one of the world's biggest teacher's pets, but you don't see me emailing and going out for coffee with them 5 years later. How do high school teachers even remember students for more than a year? I suspect that I am maybe not a good person in this respect. I really only worked hard in high school to get A's. I could not have cared less about 90% of the material. And I acted nice to all the teachers, but in retrospect, I really did not like or respect more than one or two. Does this make me hollow? Phony? Machiavellian? One of my students told me she gets into arguments with teachers all the time, and my advice to her was, "Well, you just have to act fakely nice, but then get your mom to complain to the school." Was that bad? Whatever, I'm not going to tell her that she has to respect her teachers, especially not now that people I went to high school with who are kind of stupid are now teaching in high schools. (Obviously, Katie is NOT one of these people. Any kid who gets Katie as a teacher should thank Jesus at least 50 times a day.)
Have a lovely day!!
