I feel like I've been productive on a lot of mini-projects this week. One notable one is that I've practiced the piano the past four days in a row, after a hiatus of several months of non-practice. This latest hiatus was prefaced by my having the accidental misfortune of being overheard in my ungraceful plonking (that situation also being the first practice after a long hiatus) by a friend of ours who is a music professor. Such ill luck.
My fragile music ego became discouraged at the slightest, most innocent comment about how I should be practicing--I had not set out to be overheard by anyone except Rob, who kindly puts up with my endless repetition of Hanon exercises and classical music he's not particularly fond of in order to hear the piano get some use, with slim hopes that I will one day get enough practice and confidence to play something with him while he accompanies on the electric bass. Anyway, I wasn't in the mood to play anything for a few months after that, but I've been reading An Equal Music by Vikram Seth and it put me in a more musical frame of mind.
What I've found is that practicing for about half an hour in the morning--after breakfast and coffee but before attempting anything productive--is a good way for me to transition from laziness into work mode. And I definitely need to start being in hard-core work mode. This semester I will be: TA/grader for Rob's online Art Appreciation class; continuing my very part-time contract with Riverside School for the Arts; taking a mixed media painting class at the JC; continuing (and hopefully finishing) my document-editing project at the Office of Ed; and, of course, writing as much as possible.
Fortunately, I'm well on the way to finishing the short story revision I've been working on, although I feel like I'm at a sticking point with my current YA novel. In the latest chapter, people got into major arguments and I'm not sure I'm very happy with the way the arguments are written. So now I feel kind of blah about it. But in a day or so I should be capable of forcing myself to plug away at it again.
2 comments:
Hey, I didn't know you played!!
I've been dying to play the piano this week. I'm nowhere near even as proficient as you sound -- I took piano lessons for about three weeks when I was, oh, eleven -- but I love to play, and I've been waiting for us to get the carpet yanked and the floors redone so we can get a little spinet or something. How very cool and artsy and well rounded you are.
Okay. You've inspired me. I'm blogging you to waste time; I'm going to submit - right this VERY second - a book proposal to the mailbox.
crossed fingers.
I am definitely all about the spinets. We were lucky to sort of inherit the piano that was in Rob's parents' house --they weren't using it, so they very kindly offered it to us. It's a Wurlitzer. Of course, I'm not a piano snob, so as long as I like the sound and feel, I'm happy just to have one around!
I got out of practice while in college, and it's really nice, now, to play just purely for enjoyment.
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