Last year around Thanksgiving we got a robot vacuum. It is a Shark brand, and since we also have a regular-sized Shark vacuum, we started calling it “Baby Shark” and of course sing the song as well. So I sit here, about to write down a few random thoughts while my baby shark vacuums around me. I usually run it once a week and then use the regular Shark vacuum on the high traffic areas on a shorter basis during the week.

I do find that the cat hair gets so embedded into the front rug, it’s obnoxious. What do you recommend for getting cat hair out more easily? Now that I have students coming back to my house again regularly I am trying more to keep it cleaner as we like to sit on the rug sometimes too.

One thing that I think I’ve mentioned here and that I’ve been thinking about a lot career-wise is how there is this dichotomy between what I want to be doing and what people think I want to be doing, and what I think people want me to be doing. The pandemic has really made me reevaluate what I want to be doing, but it’s so hard to shut off that switch of “oh, I should be doing {fill in the blank} because that’s what people will be impressed by.” The music world doesn’t happen in a vacuum (see what I did there, using an analogy poorly)…whenever I’m meeting new people and they ask me what I do for a living and I say “I teach violin” then they ask do I play also and I say, sure, around town, and then they ask do I play in the symphony. They ignore that I first said “I teach violin” and they only perk up when I say, no but I do play at the Fox sometimes for visiting shows…but nobody ever seems to be remotely interested in furthering a discussion about teaching.

Now, I’m fully aware that I shouldn’t care about this, but when it happens literally every time I meet somebody new, it makes me think about what our society thinks of teaching. I’ll tell you what, it’s actually an important and useful thing, to be a teacher, and I find that when I give myself space to really do it that it’s fun and I’m good at it. But when I treat it like something less than or something that I’m only doing because I’m not good enough for a symphony job, then it feels bad and I can get super annoyed at my students.

So my switch is to say, yes, I’m a teacher, and yes, I taught online during the pandemic, and out of the 40 plus students I had before the pandemic, I lost TWO and gained about 8. So that went pretty well.

It is nice to play concerts of course, and I even have some scheduled, and I hope to play some shows at the Fox this year as well. It’s entirely too easy to sit there and see who’s playing what and wondering why so and so didn’t ask me for this or that, and you can drive yourself crazy with that, or you can just say to yourself, whatever, it’s all good. I don’t want to be on that roller-coaster, and I’m okay with it.

And I think, that it gets easier to MEAN it, that it is okay. It’s a mantra, that it’s okay that other people are playing stuff you used to play, and for a variety of reasons, none of which are that you aren’t a good player, and mostly because you take trips sometimes and don’t drop everything for a gig…(and because you did notice, that during the pandemic once everything got settled, you actually made more money from just teaching and being regular with that than you did trying to scramble around, and while…it’s obviously not only about the money, making a living doing something is better than not doing so.)

I know I’ve pontificated on this concept a lot over the past year, longer, and it’s a tricky thing, isn’t it, trying to decide if what you are doing for a career is what you are meant to be doing? Is your life heading in the right direction, are you happy, what even IS happiness? How lucky am I to be able to ponder these questions! How lucky am I to be sitting here while a small robot vacuum cleans my house!

After lunch we are going to go for a bike ride, probably on the River Des Peres Trail. It doesn’t seem too hot today which is a nice change. I spent some time this morning trying to figure out how to set up my tripod in order to record some lessons for something I’m working towards. And my fridge is filled with zucchini, mushrooms, and a few other veggies from my CSA pickup on Thursday that still need to get eaten, so we’ll do some cooking this evening! Yesterday I canned 6 jars of dilly beans, which is my favorite pickled veggies I made last summer. Half were from my garden and half were green beans I bought at the grocery store.

So that is and was my weekend. Relaxing, cooking, “cleaning”, writing, thinking about the meaning of life and my career path, reading, and biking. How about you?