a new life

It is amazing how quickly one can just walk out of a life.  “Welcome to your new life,”Jeoffrey said as I began to struggle with my second paper jam in the famed RISO machine.  Yes, it is a new life.  For the first time in my adult life without being a student, I am working primarily in an office.  It has been a little over 20 years since I first started working as a professional singer, 25 since I taught my first piano student and 26 since I was first paid to accompany someone on the piano.  I’ve also spent 15 years directing various musical ensembles. 

I turned 40 less than a month ago, and this is the first birthday that I have been unhappy to see.  Looking at my life thus far, I have loved my work. On the whole, I have loved the people I work with. Over the past year I have lived apart from my partner.  We’ve been together for over eight years now.  Circumstances aligned to make his moving to another city for a job inevitable.  I resisted.  I held on.  I spent a year in a dingy little apartment sleeping next to my piano and doing as much work as I could while I was there so that I could spirit off to be with him and our pets as much as possible. 

Again, I loved my job.  Child of a mismatched coupled whose marriage seemed to never have been happy, I swore I would never give up my life for a man.  Never.  I considered these jobs as my prized possessions, as my life.  Over the course of the year and through the inevitable march of time, the luster of these activities dimmed.  My professional singing life was plagued my social unease and personal insecurity.  I loved to sing, but I often distrusted many of my colleagues.  My inadequacies as a teacher magnified in my mind so that I would find myself praying for a good successor who could fulfill all of the needs for these children that I myself felt I was failing to do. 

Over the course of the year apart, I prayed for the right situation.  I dreamed of a perfect situation, thinking that with enough work and preparation I could land in a new city with a situation as great as that which I had developed over years in the old city.  I applied and interviewed and auditioned for many jobs.  I applied for jobs in which my training, experience and years of graduate school would say I was qualified for.  Some jobs were offered, but for salaries that were insulting or under conditions where I was certain I could not have been an effective teacher or leader.  Finally, as I had given in to starting another year in the old place but this time with a large commute, everything opened up.  It was quick and hardly painless, but as I look on the events of the past week there is a strange sense of déjà vu and almost inevitability about them.

In wondering about one’s future, in musing about ‘how will this part of my life end?’ sometimes there comes a quick small thought, and you think to yourself with almost horror, oh no.  I don’t or I won’t leave like that. I’ll be this or more that.  I’ll do it right.  And then, sometimes years later, that actual thing happens and in a dim place inside you remember that reflection of the future that came unbidden once some time ago.

Then in the next moment, you realize that what you had feared may have happened, but the earth is still turning.  The sun still comes up in the morning, and the dog needs to be walked.  In the next moment you see that the majority of external circumstances in your life that you had claimed as yourself no longer apply.  But here you sit.  And really it doesn’t seem so bad so far.  You start to wonder if those notions you’ve held about yourself make it easier or harder to relate to others.  (You look at the dog sleeping and pray she wasn’t poisoned by one of the many dangerous looking things on the street that you tried unsuccessfully to keep her away from.) 

You know that you’ve had a rich and full life in other places, and you pray that you will be able to build one in this new place, even if it doesn’t look like the ones before did.  Somewhere inside you think that you really don’t want that again.  It was fantastic, but in retrospect my life in LA resembled an arc.  It started very low with those first few months in an ill-advised doctoral program where I weekly considered just piling my stuff back into the Hyundai and driving back across the country to New York, that shining past where I imagined all had been wonderful.

I didn’t pack up.  I stuck it out, worked the four simultaneous jobs, eeked by until I found better employment.  By that time I had personal reasons to stay.  Work came. Clarity helped me to jettison unnecessary graduate school. Professional opportunities came.  High profile opportunities even, and all the while I could step back and see the trajectory of the arc.  I could see where it would most likely go, yet I rode it all the same.  I resisted but persisted.

It was time to go.  I week ago, through my crazy tears on the phone to my boss, I finally admitted the inevitable out loud. Finally there was at least a financial net to catch me, and I jumped. 

Waiting for the end of the world

 

End times.  How many sects have come and gone predicting the imminent end times?  We are still living with the writings of Jesus’ followers that predict the end times in apocalyptic color.  You must watch for the master will come in the night and take one but not the other. How many sects have come and gone with their warnings of the fire, judgment or alien landing around the corner?  They wipe themselves out when their fervor does not come to fruition as they believed.  Sometimes they wipe themselves out in anticipation.  

Los Angeles in the 21^st century is obsessed with The Big One; a modern day doomsday fantasy with  science as the new gospel backing the obsession.  When the 5.1 hit while LAMC was on stage last Saturday, I fully confess to letting my own personal quake fantasies go nuts.  While I did my best to keep my eyes on Dutoit – the choral benches rolling beneath us – I imagined what else might be going on.  I did not remain fully present in the performance.  The audience’s noises were bigger than the rolling and some did leave, though we did not stop.  I also remember thinking that I would rather be there at the concert hall than almost anywhere else.  It is a big modern building, only 10 years old, where everything would have had to have been designed and constructed with earthquakes in mind.  Even the big façade pipes on the organ are designed to move rather than break in a quake.  

So, yes, it was cool.  I secretly congratulated myself on having the luck to have been on this call to be able to have such an experience to add to my trove of personal stories.  Even though they too shall fade, my stories are one of my largest collections of earthly riches, things I stock up on and accumulate, like too many dresses or sweaters, to the neglect of other more important matters.

When I got to my car, I was silently thankful that nothing more had happened than what did.  My car was still there, unharmed and ready to take me home to a wonderful boyfriend and two colorful quadrupeds.  Life in Los Angeles continues as it has pretty much uninterrupted since the white man first came.  I may take more seriously, though, the call to prepare and fill a few water bottles to store in the back of a closet, just in case.

Why I tell no one about this blog

From time to time I think about this blog and what I have written, and I want to share it.  Yet, I feel that if I knew certain people were looking at it I would feel the urge to censor what I write.  Part of me longs to be known yet another part of me feels a great freedom in what and how I write by virtue of the fact that I have told no one I know about the blog.  Which is of greater value to me?  For the time being, it is still the freedom.  If I stranger were to read what I write, this doesn't seem to scare me. For those I know to read what I write feels like an act of public exhibitionism.

Being Chosen

My recent singing enterprises, and certainly since I last wrote in my Blog Inconnue, have been more successful by a certain standard.  I've been working to focus my energies in better directions, and lo and behold, good things just started happening!  I've been singing much more, being paid for it and/or appreciated much more and the work I have been doing is in general much more fulfilling than the majority of projects that had been occupying my time before. I am very thankful for all of this. 

Within one of the organizations I sing for I have recently been what you could call 'promoted' for next year.  This means many more concerts and more money.  Again, I am delighted, but this organization has a very stratified hierarchy amongst it's singers.  For me to make this jump means that someone else is still waiting.  It also means that those already of the higher status may now be looking at me as a potential threat to their own status as defined by number of gigs, solos, 'first calls', etc. 

The major difference for me between this year and previous years, is I've been working not to look at the world so much through my lenses of desire for the esteem of others.  I've been able to focus more in the moments of music making without so much of this other crap consuming my mind.  I've been a lot happier. 

Today in this organization's last commitment for the season, I was singled out as one of a few to double another part.  Normally the same groups of people do these things, but today I was suddenly one of them.  This is not a big deal, but in a large and status conscious group, I know that I would have been thinking things if someone I didn't know who had been quietly singing away for a while but not sticking out was suddenly named instead of me!  Why her?  I am a better singer than she is.  I have a better voice.  I KNOW I would have been thinking these poisonous things or wondering then if she had been promoted in some way, because those on the lower levels don't know who is joining the higher ranks for the coming year until they go to sign in for the first gig of the new season, see their name on the same old side of the roster and see their friend's name on the other side. 

Even in this moment I think to myself, what madness this is!  Worse than this is the fear that I will come to perceive myself as somehow 'special' because of a move up the totem or a singling out. 

I've been down this path before.  I've been the 'flavor of the month' with solos and opportunities I may or may not have been ready for and I've been a vocal pariah held responsible for many things out of my control.  Truth has never been in either of these extreme perceptions, but I fear falling under a spell.  I love singing and singing with others, but a choir can be a seductive organism.  They have their own codes and ways of speaking.  They often develop great pride in themselves and think that others see them as importantly as they see themselves.  How I have been down this road!!  I don't want to do it again.  I want to sing, connect to God through that song, maybe move someone and then leave it there.  I don't want to start valuing myself again based on the skewed criteria of the choral mob.  Oh, how I've done this before, and how hard it has been when it is all gone - the community, the job, the reinforcement, the sense of who I believed myself to be!  I know I am not that.  I enjoy singing and the act of singing makes me feel great joy, but I AM NOT anyone else's view of me or my perception of their perception of me.  Can I jump onto this wheel again, enjoy the ride but yet stay centered in my awareness that I am not any of this??

Dad's Maxims

Dad's Maxims

1) Heat Rises
2) Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
3) Ninety percent of life is just showing up.
4) He who controls the language controls the debate.

I woke up this morning thinking about these little sayings that my dad has always repeated as absolute principles of his universe. Perhaps I am reminded of these because I suffered through some of the latest Republican debate last night. All of them seemed to apply directly.

#4 - He who controls the language controls the debate.

Since the democrats have adopted the language of the far right, I really have no hope in any outcomes that I would desire since the battle seems to already be lost. ("Entitlement Programs" like Social Security, unemployment insurance and medicare should be defined as "earned benefits" from a lifetime of work. "Obamacare" is used by the right and left as a term for the very weak and misguided attempts to put a band aid on one of the major crises in this country.)

#3 - Ninety Percent of Life is Just Showing Up.

With apologies to Woody Allen, to whom my dad never gave any credit, the Republicans last night showed up. (Look how much this did for Dennis Kucinich four years ago. It did, however, give him more prominence to make him a lightning rod for the Dems and a tempting target for GOP gerrymandering. I still love Dennis. Sigh.)

#2 - Power Corrupts, Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely

Newt Gingrich - Do we remember what was he doing with regard to his own dying wife and his new girlfriend while he was impeaching Clinton for a blow job? How much exactly is his line of credit at Tiffany's? At what exotic locations was he vacationing while his campaign staff was left holding the bag and looking for funds without his assistance?

Michele Bachmann - How much money has your husband's clinic with questionable social aims received from the government? How is this consistent with your professed ideology?

Ron Paul - He actually seems pretty consistent, but he never seems to have had any power, so I guess this doesn't apply here.

Gov. Romney - He has run away from every position that made him a fair to middling Govenor as opposed to atrocious, so perhaps his is more of a desire for power corrupting.

Gov. Perry - He calls himself a Christian but is proud of executing other human beings?

#1 - Heat Rises

Gov. Perry seems to be topping the polls these days.

On writing and hidden sparks

From before the time I could write or read, I was dictating stories to my mother. I wanted to be a writer. There were worlds in my mind, worlds upon worlds clamouring to get out, just waiting for me to sit with pen to paper or fingers to keys to release them. Other possible career ideas came and went, but that one idea stayed fixed until the point I decided to consciously follow music. Even then, the idea wasn’t discarded. Rather it was placed on the back shelf for a time after other experiences that were to come.

Three degrees in music, four separate state driver’s licenses, many jobs and a few broken hearts later, this little spark is still within me. When things are quiet, when I am alone or still, it returns. It pulls on my heart like God speaking to John in the New Testament saying, “WRITE.” I feel my self pulling away. Is it fear? Is it this great wall that has always separated me from experiencing my life and others fully? This fundamental separation from others that I have always felt, is it the problem or is it a gift that allows me to step back, analyze and write my perceptions?

A number of people from my past have made trenchant and mainly unsolicited observations on this characteristic of mine. One was a conducting teacher who said of my work, that it was as if I was conducting from behind a veil. Early in my teaching career after getting particularly excited about something, one of my students said something to the effect of “now we see who you really are” after almost two years at that school. In graduate studies, my voice teacher was always trying to draw me out through various energy exercises and new age techniques. A therapist asked me once, “what is it that you get out of fence sitting?”

Yet, somehow this kernel inside of me that desires to write feels real when so many other things do not. I don’t know how to go to the next step, or what that next step might be, but it connects me to deep emotion inside myself even on days when I feel that I have no capacity to feel. Is it Corinthians that says that the things that are unseen are the eternal ones?

In some ways I fear that I have lost my creativity. Thirty odd years of life have brought me to a place where I no longer create worlds inside my head. What I create is what I live in and what I’ve created is what I have lived through. These are the stories I now have to tell. But this is where I stop. Be it lack of confidence, fear or simply the belief that my stories would just be an egotistical exhibition, I stop. I don’t write. Or if I do write, I get lost. I try to be too big, too epic so that I loose my way and can’t finish. What I do write feels so personal to me that I can’t detach myself from it and release it into the world and I become lost in worrying about the perceptions of others.

Is any of this related? Where is the way out of this? What is my error? How do I “lift the veil?”

After a colleague is fired

We are "o.k." That is what we say. The looks pass between us. There is a strange openness, an open acknowledgment that any of us could be the next. We make eye contact, but the boss does not. He seems to have gained more of a connection to his preaching, his passion in the midst of his choices, yet he does not really look at us. Do we look at him? Do we dare to try to make that type of connection through the eye?

The disappeared. If it can happen to the woman who ran this place, it can happen to any of us. After the brutality of abruptness, we are left with that truth in the center of our minds.

Yet, this is not about a job ended. This feeling inside of us and between us is not about budget or shortfalls, not about streamlining to focus on the mission of this workplace, not about a difficult choice. It is about trust. We, the staff, trusted our leader to deal with us honestly and forthrightly. We trusted that our jobs were secure as he said they were back in the Fall. We trusted that when tough choices would come, he would treat us with the same dignity and respect that he professes by talking openly with us about problems and potential consequences. Then after such honesty, it would be time for him to assume the responsibility of painful decisions. With this special trust built by hard honesty, we could have been primed to grow stronger.

Inscrutable is the word I currently think of when I see this man. So rarely do we glimpse what he actually feels! All we are left with for our judgments are his words. Words are tricky, ambiguous little things, especially when 90% of human communication is independent of them. Each interprets what they see and hear according to their own filter, so when real action is taken we are all surprised by the result and what we now imagine must be inside of him.