Category Archives: Random thoughts

Quarantine, Random thoughts, Teaching

Career musings

It’s tough being a freelancer. Or maybe I should say, it was tough? I have had several phases of my career, and this latest one is certainly less stressful in many ways.

I started out as a full-time orchestra player, right out of grad school. I also taught and added in extra gigs and tried to make as much money as possible to start paying off student loans and start saving. I was young and had energy, drive, and a great love of music. My job tried to take that away from me, and ultimately I made a very personal choice to leave. I haven’t regretted that choice, though I sometimes wonder what my life would be like if I had stayed.

I then spent a few years being a more full-time freelancer and teaching in the Cleveland area. I played all the gigs I could, was a member of up to 5 different regional orchestras, and spent a lot of time driving to and from with small groups of friends. It felt very temporary, but it was a lot of fun and I had a large amount of satisfying and fulfilling musical experiences. I worked nearly every day and worked long hours, and it had its ups and downs.

I moved to St Louis then, and hoped to continue in  much the same way, but there weren’t the same opportunities…there weren’t 5 or more regional orchestras in driving distance, and in fact only one really, and that wasn’t even really within driving distance, so I tried to up my teaching and did what I could. I played a bunch of gigs, here and there, everywhere, trying to get my name out there, and ended up being really busy as well, but not having that many satisfying or fulfilling musical experiences. Truthfully my great love is orchestral playing, but my second great love is doing things my way, and the two are hard to reconcile.

I talked with a student yesterday who had her first full orchestra playing experience before her lesson, and she described it as overwhelming. It is! I recall my first time playing in an orchestra (with winds and percussion and all) and it is overwhelming, the sound is unlike anything you can ever experience, but it is amazing. As I’ve gotten older, I have come to terms with the fact that that just isn’t something I will do very much in my life, if at all, and that just might be okay. It’s a hard thing to come to terms with, honestly, but getting upset over a $150 gig that takes up two nights a week isn’t the same as playing a Shostakovich Symphony with a group.

I have a lot of thoughts about orchestral musicians, and what work is worth, and the music world, and they are often jumbled, every changing, and not without a little bit of bitterness but also with love and hope. I won’t share most of them here, but I will just say this: I’m tired of the stress, and I’m tired of the hustle. I have been busier teaching than I’ve ever been in my life, but it’s so much happier. I miss seeing colleagues, but I don’t miss feeling so replaceable and being belittled.

I have a group I’ve played with for years that I have debated quitting for awhile, because of how it makes me feel. Sometimes I really enjoy it, and other times I feel taken advantage of. I’ve been yelled at, I’ve had a score thrown at me by the conductor, and to add insult to injury, my position wasn’t even considered worth mentioning to a new contractor. Nothing about the group ever made me feel good as a person (or hadn’t in a long time), but I hung on because I occasionally enjoyed playing the music…that’s how my performing career has felt over the past few years, maybe since I moved here.

That’s not to say that every experience has been that way, but enough for me to say, enough. I read other musicians who say how much they miss playing together. Maybe I’ve made other musicians feel bad as well, but I don’t miss being made to feel bad. I don’t miss pouring my playing into a job only to be passed over in the future to somebody new or somebody who grew up here, or somebody who was more “connected.” Maybe people read this blog and say, well, she doesn’t want to be hired anyway, she has a bad attitude, but there have been years that I have said yes to every single job I could, showed up early and prepared, practiced for hours and hours, and that didn’t matter either. And then once I stopped working, during the pandemic, I didn’t miss it. I filled up my schedule with students and there I am.

I have thought about this because there are gigs coming back. Now, some of those are an easy no, because, well, there’s a pandemic. But how to balance it? There are people I do want to play with, and there will be jobs I do want to take, but there will also be ones I don’t want to take. I know if I say no jobs will dry up, but they also dry up when I say yes, so I’m not living in fear anymore.

I’m being honest here, because this is a tough profession, and you should all know it. I don’t want the accolades and the pressure anymore. I’m tired of it. I don’t miss the audiences. Maybe that will change, maybe I’ll want something different in a few years, I don’t know. Maybe once the pandemic is over I won’t be afraid of crowds anymore, but maybe I’m just tired. I know I play well enough to play anything I want, and I’m okay with that. I’ll always be asked first if I play in the St Louis Symphony, and unless the answer is yes people won’t ever think I’m any good, so who cares what they think anyway?

So, those are my current career musings. I added it up and I’m currently teaching about 40 hours a week, counting a little bit of driving around, but not counting grading or admin work. No wonder I feel so busy! We’ll see what I decide to do next fall (I think I need to drop something) but for now, I’ll just work and work, which is something I’ve always been good at, and I will hope that I make a positive impact on some of my students. I’m not going to pretend that music is some sacred thing, that being a music teacher or musician makes me a better person, because I think that’s rationalizing something that we are worried we are wasting our time doing. (A good friend once said, “Musicians always think they are doing the Lord’s Work” and that made me think!) I think music is worthwhile and it is fun to play the violin. I think learning to play an instrument is good thing for kids to do and helps them in their lives overall and that’s a good enough reason.

But that would be going off on another tangent, so I’ll just say…lots more students to teach today, and then a nice weekend of relaxing and trying to do something fun in the cold and during the pandemic before another long week of teaching.

What about you? Do you feel like the pandemic has made you second guess your life choices or change your trajectory or work-life balance?

Deep Thoughts, Quarantine, Random thoughts

Rainy Day

We’ve had some snow here, finally, though no snow day. And today I think all the snow is going to get washed away with rain…the weather says currently we are having a frozen mix but it just looks like rain to me so I think my app is a little off.

The weekend ahead is like all of the weekends, nothing really going on after my Saturday morning CAD (Improvisation) Class. I’ve been enjoying teaching two classes a week to a small amount of students, though I need a few more to really make it fun for everybody. Time will tell though, I’m sure.

This week was difficult as far as being exhausted and headache-y. The fall semester started up for both of my colleges so I had a full schedule, lots of computer time, plus getting up around 5:30 am to get to my before school classes in person three days a week. I am going to three different elementary schools in my district each week to teach one small class (ranges from 2 to 4 students). The district is good in that we are only teaching kids who are already in the same classroom, and we leave before the rest of the kids show up for the day. But it’s still a lot of being around people, compared to not being around people at all. I also started teaching a small ensemble class in person, only 4 of us total in a very large room.

The good news is that my parents and two of my sisters have gotten their first vaccination shots. I’m happy for them, but I’m a little jealous that other states are already inoculating teachers and Missouri says it’ll be a few more months. It’s odd, reading news stories about how children need to be back in school and we need to get teachers vaccinated so they can return to the classroom…they are back here in Missouri, with varying degrees of being allowed to work from home and varying degrees of how many students are back. My district is good in that they require mask wearing (no issues with the kids and that) and that they seem to be doing a good job contact tracing all illnesses. But still, it’s a risk, and the only thing I could have done to avoid the risk was to quit my job.

It’s also odd seeing people so upset about places reopening indoor dining here and there…I can’t imagine eating indoors at a restaurant. I just can’t. I haven’t eaten a meal with anybody except Louie since it got cold (we had a few outdoor get-togethers with friends earlier) and I haven’t eaten a meal indoors with anybody since my sister Leslie and her family left after visiting in early September. We knew their visit was a bit risky but they had been limiting their exposure at that point and so had we. Once Louie went back into the classroom in the fall I felt our risk as a couple was higher and now that we are both in person 4 to 5 times a week I continue to believe that any level of socializing outside of our house, barring some sort of very spaced/distanced outdoor activity would be incredibly irresponsible. It is both our responsibility not to bring COVID home from work but also not to take it there.

How do you all deal with the isolation? I spend entirely too much time online, yet I feel like that is one of my limited connections to people. I feel pretty isolated from any friends I had before, and I had already been feeling like most of those friendships were surfacey and limited anyway. Other friendships seemed to be based more on doing things which will likely return when doing things returns…I’d love to have a few more friends I could talk to, but I don’t feel like scheduling more zoom meetings, and sometimes texting feels exhausting. My work schedule this school year has been pretty exhausting, and though having the weekends free helps recover, I find myself just wanting to spend the weekend lying around reading and don’t have the energy for anything more, including social interaction of any form. Likely this is a bit of depression, but I’m hoping it’s all due to circumstances and will change with the change of weather, if nothing else.

I’ve been enjoying reading a ton of mystery novels lately. I like to find a long series and read the whole thing, so I get to experience one character finding dead body after dead body and helping the (often bumbling) detective solve the case. I particularly enjoy novels set in another country, usually England (currently reading a second series on the Isle of Mann, which is now on my list of places to visit someday.) I find reading is a nice break from hearing violin over the internet and it’s a quiet activity to do lying down.

I often wake up in the middle of the night stressed out about my work schedule and the future. The days are long, but absolutely possible, but I think it’s just getting up so early that gets me, and I (especially in the middle of the night) worry. I just worry, about the future of my career, the future of our country, and of our planet.

But I guess we will all continue pushing through, and keeping on. I think I’m just tired and need a change of scenery but that’s unlikely until after the school year finishes, so I’ll manage. I always remind myself many people have lived through worse, and while that’s true, it is pretty stressful living through a pandemic, dealing with the stress and worries of the coup and civil unrest (I find I cry a lot more often after January 6, it was some sort of breaking point for me), and trying to make it all work and hold it together all the time to be strong for the students. It’s a lot! I know other people have different or similar concerns, but we are all going through a lot right now.

Christmas, Random thoughts

Undecorating

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Undecorating for Christmas is far less exciting. I did most of it yesterday, and just have to take down the tree today at some point and put the boxes away.

My last post was perhaps a little negative. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret any time I spent playing music with other people, particularly my quartet over the past few years. I was just realizing (for the umpteenth time) that chamber music has never been my great love, and that I don’t miss playing in small ensembles.

I have missed playing in large ensembles for a long time, but the orchestral world being what it is, both difficult to procure a position and seemingly quite difficult to enjoy that position after you have it…I am fine with my current lot in life.

Today is my last official day of vacation , even though I’ve been ramping up my work each day, at least from the perspective of answering and sending emails, and I even practiced violin a bit yesterday. Over the break, I did other work stuff besides emails, such as submitting grades and setting up courses in Canvas, but I have to say that overall it was amazingly relaxing.

I watched some Great British Baking Show while doing cross-stitch. I read several good books, including Jodi Picoult’s The Book of Two Ways, Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, Katharine McGee’s American Royals and Majesty. Louie and I rewatched the entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy, watched the latest season of Cobra Kai, and are working our way through Schitt’s Creek (two thoughts, why did we wait so long, and of course everybody’s favorite character is David!). I did a lot of cooking and baking, I did some organizing and decluttering though nothing major, and I did a good amount of workouts. We went on a few hikes and walks as well.

We woke up New Year’s morning to a bit of ice storm debris…I forgot to mention this before.

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The neighbor’s tree had lost some branches into our yard. Luckily it didn’t seem to cause any damage and Louie was able to saw the branches down easily enough.

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The other day we went to Cliff Cave park to walk around. There were more people there than we would have liked, and a few too many groups of people who didn’t see fit to step to the side (rather than walking 2 or 3 abreast) OR wear masks, but we had ours to put on when needed. I’m always more concerned with people who might be walking or running in front of us for any length of time than I am with people who are just walking by, but still, it’s a pandemic and it’s not hard to give space on a wide path.

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Very large trees! That’s the Mississippi River.

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A picture of Louie taking a picture.

So tomorrow I’m back to teaching. I am both looking forward to it and not looking forward to it. Louie tells me I can’t retire yet, so I guess I’ll log into zoom inside. I originally set up my schedule to start on Wednesday rather than Monday because I was supposed to do jury duty. I started worrying about it a week ago and got a postponement of a year, but they did end up canceling the week (due to COVID) anyway. I guess this time next year I’ll be complaining about jury duty, and I’ll have to miss some work for it (as usual) but I’m glad to have another year. I was originally scheduled to do it in June, then September which I postponed to January. It’s a mess, isn’t it.

One last collection of thoughts. Headaches. Back in early 2020 I finally saw a doctor about some bad headaches I’d been getting, which I started calling migraines. I don’t know sometime, whether it’s a normal headache or a migraine, or if people get headaches like I do, or if they are all migraines. In any case, I got some nice prescription medicine that I end up taking about 2 days a month on average for a headache. The medicine tends to work really well, though the side effects are that I feel fuzzy for an hour or more, and generally a bit more tired and thirsty. It’s a decent trade off though, and I’m glad to have the medicine. I can usually feel the headache disappearing into fuzziness in my body, and that’s a real relief. I’m dealing with one right now, which I suspect is also a bit stress related, between pandemic worries, political concerns, and the worries of going to in person teaching next week and getting back online as well…

How is your week at work going? I’m assuming most people are back to work this week after having had some time off, though I know most people don’t get to take two weeks off like I was able to this year. This year there is no spring break from college, it’s just a slog to the end, so wish us luck!

Random thoughts

Vacation Time

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I decided to take two weeks off from teaching, which coincided with the days off from my school job. It’s not the same as all the schools, of course, and some students are very conscientious about life and don’t want any weeks off at all, but I think I needed the break.

It’s weird being IN the break, in a pandemic. I’m not used to having so much time off at home. Usually I go places when I’m off work (why wouldn’t you, with limited vacation time, of course you travel if you can afford it) so this is probably the longest I’ve been at home with nothing to do in a decade or more.

I’m glad I’m taking the break though. I could have taught some these first few days of the week, I’m sure, as most students are simply around, and the weather isn’t so great that people are dying to get out of the house. But I think taking a little break is good, and important, and soon enough we’ll be back to having lessons every week and school and that will go all the way through May, which seems like a few very long way away, but will likely fly by.

I am returning to “in-person” teaching for my school job. I say returning, but since it is a new job, I have never taught in-person there, so I’m a little nervous but excited about it. I’ll only be seeing students two mornings a week and the other two are online still. I feel reasonably good about the school’s precautions: I’ll be teaching a very small amount of students and the students stay in their classrooms. In school, they have only been staying with the other students in their classrooms, so we will teach the students in their classroom. The other thing that is good is that I’ll be there early, before school starts, so hardly anyone will be there and by the time all the students in the school are arriving, I’m leaving. And the school has done a good job keeping the numbers low and they don’t hesitate to quarantine classrooms as needed, which would involve me if necessary. I’m sure some of my in-person days will end up being online or canceled due to this sort of thing, but I am feeling pretty good about returning, and I’m looking forward to it (except for the cold, early morning commutes).

Teaching online for my private students will continue though, because it’s just too much, obviously, to have anybody come to the house, and I see too many kids spread out across various districts. I’m not sure when this will end…I needed a break from hearing violin over the internet though…it doesn’t help my headaches, being on the computer all day long.

We went to the Missouri History Museum on Saturday morning. We were probably two of about 10 total people that were there, so it ended up seeming like a good thing to do. I wanted to see the exhibit “Beyond the Ballot” which was about various women from St Louis or living in St Louis who helped or encouraged women’s rights over the years. I learned quite a lot, and then promptly forgot a large swath of it. One thing that stuck with me was that when St Louis become part of the United States (after the Louisiana Purchase) women lost a lot of rights they had previously had, such as the ability to purchase and own property. It’s amazing how horrible the United States has been in terms of white male supremacy for its entire life, and that as much as we are taught that it was same everywhere, I keep learning that it wasn’t.

After that we walked around Forest Park for awhile, which was lovely.

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After that we watched entirely too much TV and that was it for the day. I did start getting back into cross-stitch after taking off from it the entire pandemic! I was really gung-ho about cross-stitch last fall, and then did too much over last Christmas break, and hurt my hand a bit, so I took a break, for evidently about a year.

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I finished this little ornament which I had just barely started before. I also started on another project and have taken stock of what I’ve got on hand and what I want to do next.

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Sunday we went out to Greensfelder County Park and hiked the Eagle Run Trail, which is a really nice trail for the area, about 3.5 miles, nothing too steep but not too boring. It was a bit muddy in places, but nothing too bad. We did run into another couple who said there were places that were practically impassable, but I think we lucked out on a different path than they had been on. IMG_7473

This creek had frozen and then the ice was all broken up when we saw it.

Hiking in Missouri is, as always, mostly just wandering in the woods, but after spending most of the day in your own house, it’s a nice thing to do, wander around the woods.

After hiking on Sunday I did some things around the house and then did the weekly “roll call” zoom meeting with my family. It was my parent’s anniversary (52 years!) so we all had a nice time chatting about Christmas and seeing all the gifts we and other people had given my 6 year old niece. My nephew has learned how to say “bye-bye” on calls, so at the end he gets really excited and yells it a lot and it’s hysterical, I guess ending the call is his favorite part.

Oh, and yesterday my aunt’s box of cookies was delivered, yay! Only one more to go, with no word on it.

Today I have a dentist appointment: I called up yesterday to make my next appointment and they had one the next day, why not! And my jury duty I thought I had next week is now postponed a year (I started worrying and sent a concerned email and they just postponed it a year) so I just have a small handful of things to do: get grades in for my school job, write one thing for another job I’m doing, and at some point I have some things to do for an online pedagogy class I’m taking, but I think I’ll put those off until after the New Year. Otherwise, more needlepoint, cooking, working out, and reading. I could be doing a lot more things around the house, but that all just seems like NOT vacation to me. I did clean out one closet, and perhaps I’ll do one more closet that needs it before school starts up again, but also, maybe I won’t.

How are you doing? What are you up to over the holidays?

Random thoughts

The days are long, but oh my goodness the months are short

And sometimes the days don’t even feel that long!

I thought I’d just pop in really quick to say hello. I worked through the weekend, but only because I took a really great online teaching seminar. I have a small addiction to online seminars, but hey, it’s not like there are any concerts to spend my money on. Well, actually the symphony here is putting on some small scale concerts, but I haven’t considered this because 1) they are only selling 100 tickets or something and 2) I don’t want to be inside with 100 people for an hour. Besides which, I’ve learned a ton, and my lessons are full of even more stuff for kids to learn.

Every time I think I get some great ideas figured out on how to teach and help my students get better, wrenches get thrown in. It’s not a straight line from, accept new student, make them commit to practicing 5 to 7 days a week, move on. Life happens, and even families with the best of intentions have issues with practicing regularly. So there is always a lot of troubleshooting! I also probably have a few students who I should encourage to move elsewhere, but it’s most for attendance issues. I do bug my students about their practicing, I ask them how much they practice and how often, and they sometimes get defensive, but it’s not a privacy thing…practicing between lessons is the only way to make any progress. A weekly music lesson won’t do a damn thing without practice in between.

Anyway, the weather has been really lovely lately. I’m still waiting on two butternut squash from the garden, but nothing else seems to be growing anymore.

I’m working on an interesting project this month with a local college, doing music for a play. It’s not going to be a live performance, due to COVID, but a sort of radio-style performance in which I will play some violin music in between scenes and acts and such. Rehearsals will be on the weekends (see, I get to work weekends again, haha!) and I’m looking forward to starting this weekend. It’ll mean I won’t have my free weekends almost all month, but it isn’t a huge time commitment. The director is the woman who wrote the Runaway Cupcake which I played in a few years ago, and she was great to work with, so I’m both nervous and looking forward to it.

Well, I’d better get moving on my day. I had off this morning and yesterday from my early morning class, and the same next week. The school is transitioning into in-person class…I’m not yet sure how that will affect us yet, but at some point we will be back in person. I guess that’s okay if we are all wearing masks and the classes aren’t too long—it looks like things are working out well for that sort of thing.

Sometimes I can’t believe we live the way we are, can you?

Random thoughts

First Full Week “Back”

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This is the real “back to school” week, as my new job started this morning. I have to get used to getting up at something like 6 am weekdays, which is early for me! (It’s early for anybody, I think.) I naturally woke up earlier than that because I was stressed. In any case, we had some technical glitches this morning, not due to anything I did, and only half my class showed up but it went well for what we had. Mondays are one of my busiest days with 7 hours of teaching! I have one new college student this week and several returning students, and it should be a fun week.

This past week was kind of crazy: I had three different playing jobs which was so weird! I was actually kind of stressed about it, because I have gotten used to only teaching and not having to worry about what to wear and when to be places other than, in front of my computer. But I did a recording for a church service, played at a retirement community (outside) and then played an orchestra concert, outside, in a park, with Leonard Slatkin! Which was awesome—it was with the Metropolitan Orchestra of St Louis, which is a group I play with quite often. The conductor of MOSL, Wendy Lea, set up a whole program and really went above and beyond. I don’t know if we were safe playing together, but we followed the best practices we could: everybody was on their own stage, spread out six feet or so, we were outdoors, and everybody who could play their instrument wearing a mask did so. The flute players had these weird caps on their flute heads that blocked their breath from going too far.

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The audience may or may have been safe, I can’t be concerned about everybody. It looked like maybe only about half were wearing masks, which is concerning, and makes me NOT want to go back to St Charles (that’s where we played, at Frontier Park in St Charles) but they were pretty well distanced from one another. I don’t know if I would agree to do another large event like this one during the pandemic, but getting to play Beethoven’s Symphony no. 7 with Leonard Slatkin was pretty much well worth it!IMG_6581

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The masked violinist!

It was really nice to see some colleagues…I hadn’t seen any of those people in six months or longer. It doesn’t feel like we’ve been doing this isolation thing for so long, yet it feels like forever, doesn’t it?

Other weekend happenings: baking zucchini muffins with the last of the garden zucchini! I made a recipe that made over three dozen muffins, but since I only have two muffin pans, rather than do in two batches I decided to make 24 muffins and a small loaf with the rest. I added some coconut and chocolate chips to the recipe because I had them on hand and wanted to use up the chips.

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I think the next time I’m baking quick bread it’ll be pumpkin time! I can’t believe it’s almost fall and we are still in this pandemic with no end in sight. I read an opinion article recently talking about how we are in the risk mitigation part of the pandemic: we can’t stay at home all the time and avoid risk completely, but we have to make decisions about what to do and how to live our lives in the least risky way possible. Louie is off to the classroom today, but he is hopeful that the safety protocols the University has implemented will work for him (I think if he and those in the classroom follow the rules they will work).

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Miles joined this little stuffed cat for a catnap in the kitten hammock. He barely fits but he makes it work.

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I was excited to see two of the reviews of sheet music that I had written in the past year were in this month’s American String Teacher Journal.

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We moved this green chair to make room for something else and Muriel immediately started sitting on it. She loves when furniture is in a different place.

I have done some serious meal planning this week, hoping to stay on top of things. We don’t have the option of running out for a quick meal out after a long day (whether or not we technically do, my risk assessment says no) so that means lots of cooking. I prefer to cook dinner after work and then have leftovers for lunches, so that means we often eat late, but it’s been working well. I have thought about cooking and doing dinner leftovers but it’s just not as fun. Louie and I tend to do our best chatting about the day while cooking so it is a good bonding experience as well.

I’m reading two books right now, switching back and forth between them. The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson, and The Broken Heart of America by Walter Johnson. Both are good reads but heavy.

How was your weekend? Reading any good books?