Pecan Pie!

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It doesn't take a whole lot to make me happy.  I really enjoy the simple things: a puffy quilt to wrap up in, striped socks, the smell of mountains in the morning, and food!  Pretty much any downer moment is made better by good food, and any good moment must have its comestible component.  It is now the season of Thanksgiving, and so I am craving my favorite pie.  I don't think there's anything that has butter, sugar, and eggs in it that I don't like, but when it's just butter, sugar, and eggs....oh. 



Make the pies. mmmm.


My sister and her husband got a turkey from their work for Thanksgiving and they invited us over for a pre-Thanksgiving dinner so I had a good excuse to indulge in butter/sugar/egg bliss.  It was just a normal, easy, eat-food-and-hang-with-the-fam kind of afternoon, but those are the days you want to remember.  My 3mo-old nephew is learning how to squawk (he sounds like a little alligator) and we spent most of the time trying to get him to laugh.  We talked, we laughed...did the dishes, played a board game...Mal played the piano for me so I could practice my singing...
 

Eat the pies.  Mmmm!



Headed to Texas tomorrow to visit my nieces and nephews down there for actual Thanksgiving.  Yay for more food, more family time, and warmer weather! 

I think I'm actually looking forward to listening to Christmas songs on Friday, but maybe that's because I've been able to avoid them for the most part until the appropriate day-after-Thanksgiving barrier.  (People who listen to carols before then are like people who wear white pants after Labor day.  Sheesh.)  I kinda wish I had a Nutcracker to take up my time this season, but I'll be able to spend a lot of time with family and friends this Christmas.  That is something I haven't had in a while.

Life is good. :)



Take a nap.  Mmmmmm!







Speed Post: Gratitude

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Normally it takes me about 2 hours to get a blog fully posted (I'm a perfectionist, what can I tell you?)  I have 23 min....GO!

My family (awesome-ness) has brunch every saturday and sunday morning (frieking awesome-ness).  I don't always get to go and savor the delectible breakfast treats I remember from my grade school years at home, but this last week I did and for some reason had a Total Meltdown.  Really.  Yelling and throwing things tantrum-like meltdown.

I can't really explain it, it was like this huge wave of emotion crashed over me for about an hour and then went away pretty much as quickly as it came.  I'd like to blame my ginormous over-reaction on the stress in my life, and hormones (of course), and hope that my family will just let that one slide under the rug.  Still, that wasn't entirely it. 

I think I've been bottling up a lot of little hurts--little times when my family did or said something slightly insensitive--and they all came out in a gush saturday.  I had ignored the slight hurts at the time because if you make something big out of a little thing you often do a great deal more hurt to the person who only minimally hurt you.  No one is perfect, and we're all trying.  I know my family loves me, so I put my hurt feelings away.

What I did wrong was not let them go.  Sure, it is appropriate to swallow things sometimes, but if you let them stay there they only fester.  I didn't realize it until saturday, but I was remembering all of those little things every time there was a new little thing.  I would take them all out and look at them, decide it wasn't worth the hurt talking about it would cause and put them all back.  I guess on saturday the jagged, festering, pile was just too putrid to put back.  I had let it become a "thing".

My mom, my sister, and I had a long talk about it.  They were so patient with me, as they always are.  They helped resolve a lot of my issues and balance my perspective on what reality really looks like.  Since then, I've really been noticing and remembering all the little (and big) good things that my family does for me.  I have been amazed.  I really and truly love each person in my family (yes! that's you too step-family!) because they are great people.  And they love me too.  They laugh with me, and come to my shows, and brag about my silly accomplishments to their co-workers.  They invite me to girly-parties and game-nights and movies and dinners.  They help me move and help me get over ex-boyfriends, help me find a new style or a pair of jeans that actually fit.  They set me up on dates (as painful as blind dates are, I still appreciate the sentiment, family :) and tell me that I'm too uniquely wonderful for most of they guys out there (and actually mean it).  They talk to me about my problems, and tell me when I'm being an idiot, and put up with my odd way of saying the exact wrong thing all the time.

Today I woke up with an enormous sense of gratitude.  Before I had kind of been looking for bad things to match up with the ones I already had stored away.  The past few days, I've been remembering all the good things, and it's amazing how many of them I've found.  It's too bad that the little nice things people do for you don't get stored away in your memory as easily as the bad things, but they do have a way of growing on you if you take the time to notice them. 

It's scary to believe someone loves you.  It's a lot easier to believe that you are disliked.  It feels safer, but in the long run, is it really?  If you trust that someone loves you, a lot of mis-communication is avoided, and a lot of worry and time are saved.  It's easier to forgive people and salvage relationships that might be in jeopardy when you operate under the assumption that you are loved.  I've been worrying so much in my life whether or not my friend/family relationships are strong enough that I haven't been taking the time to be happy in them.  Letting myself be happy in them. 

I think I know now why they say that to truly love someone, you can't expect anything back.  I think that maybe we get back much more than we ever realize, because it's harder to see (and remember) all the things the other person does for you.  We keep the love alive by always giving (back).

Thanks family.  I love you.

 

 

I only wish I had pictures of everyone! sorry!

"It makes your cheeks all rosey, and your eyes bright as stars..."

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OK.  Anyone who can name the movie quoted in the title gets a free....something...from me.  You pick.  :D

It is now Autuminter.  That strange hybrid of summer and February that Utah seems to favor during november.  It is only here at the crossroads of the west that you get 70 degrees in the same weekend as 3" of snow.  Though my old battle wounds may be complaining about it, I think it's just beautiful.  I love the surprise every morning.  It might be a gothically foggy day building up for a storm, or a bright, breezy autumn morning so crisp the sky looks like someone just washed it in tide with color guard.  Then there is the serenity of a wintery morning just brushed with a bit of snow.  I love it all.  It's all beautiful to me.

Today was a good day.  I started out a little grumpy as things just didn't seem to be working right.  Then I got to go to my weekly singing lesson with the amazing, gorgeous, and incredibly talented Michelle Alexander, and something sort of... well... magical... happened.

We've been working on my voice for a few weeks now, covering this and that in classical singing technique.  Michelle gave me "Ombra Mai Fu" to work on.  It's a beautiful little Handel aria, but it's been so hard for me to connect to it.  Throghout our lessons, I could tell that Michelle just wasn't quite pleased with the work I was doing, and neither was I, frankly.  She kept trying to get me to do this, or that..."vomit out your eyeballs" she'd say, or "smell the cookies before you sing" or "try to make the sound more boyant".

I had no idea what she was talking about.

I tried to do all these things, and had sort of built for myself a voice that sounded OK, that I could get through the piece with when I was properly warmed up, but it just wasn't comfortable.  It wasn't me.

Today when we sat down, Michelle explained that we were going to really work on the shape of my vowels, that the tone I was using was just a little too dark.  (too heavy, I thought)  Then she said "I think that your true voice might be just a little more brilliant than the one you're using". 

We sang through an excercise, and all of a sudden it was there.  My voice.  I was singing.  It sounded like me.  It was so much more comfortable to use, and more expressive.  We sang through the Handel and I really felt the beauty of the music.  It was so much fun to sing.  I didn't want to stop.  "This is the voice I want to work on" I thought.  Michelle seemed to be as excited as I was.  Before I left for the day she said

"The best part about studying music is that you are really learning about yourself."

So true.  I feel like I've found a part of myself today that I always wanted to be there, but didn't think I'd be lucky enough to have.  Now I just have to learn to trust it.

Le Cour Jeune #3

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I am a graduate student. 

I feel like there is enough said in this one statement to excuse (almost) all the craziness, offensiveness, spaciness, rudeness, hyperness, absent-ness, and any other ness-ss-es you may have observed in me lately.  I'm so stressed it's oozing out of my pores; yet strangely I'm pretty happy.  Even though I have 8X more things to do that time to do them in, I really enjoy doing all of them.  And as everyone knows...busy keeps the blues away :)

So I think I should finally get around to talking about this project that I hope will be the culminating point of my career to date.

I've endeavored to create a piece which speaks to those of us who haven't fully grown up yet; who are still trying to discover who we are, what we want to do with our lives, and what is the thing called Love.  I imagine that most of us who might be "grown-ups" on paper might still feel like we belong to this group, so I've titled it "The Young Heart" as much to describe the subject of the piece as to include the "young-at-heart".  The title of the ballet (if we can call it that) and it's four movements are in french because the words spoken were originally written in french; but I'm getting ahead of myself.  Right now I'm only going to be able to talk about the one of the movements (*grad student*).  Concept and explanation to follow in subsequent posts...(stay with us!)

Le Fardeau de L'Amour

(in english: The Burden of Love).  Tonight we had our first rehearsal for the quintet in the 3rd movement. This is the longest movement in the piece (6:37min) and pretty heavy stuff.  It's basically an abbreviated version of the 7th letter set to music that took me forever to find. (It has a pretty specific emotional journey.)  The soloist (when we add her in) begins the piece dancing diagonally across the stage, onto the apron, and up to the edge of the proscenium.  As she dances her thoughts and feelings about love, the stage right pillar becomes her imaginary partner.  It is supportive and fills her imaginative need in these musings, but ultimately it is (as all inanimate prosceniums are) unresponsive, and again she finds herself alone.  She then turns away from it to find the quintet scattered across the stage.

The girls in the quintet (at least for the 3 min that we went over today) embody different kinds of "love", or more acurately, the different situations which feelings we often call "love" lead us to fall into. 
There is the girl comfortably married in a rather "business-like" relationship with her husband;
the girl who has yet to be married who is still joyously captivated by the object of her love;
the girl imprisoned in a marriage with someone she thought she knew;
the girl who gave everything in the name of love, only to be left abandoned;
the girl working to learn how to be yourself in a relationship with another person...

As the movement progresses, we realize the danger of making a poor choice in your partner in life, how much can be lost...

I have an amazing cast.  As I was watching them develop the movements that try to explain all this and explore what could actually be expressed through the choreography, I started getting chills.    The gravity of the subject matter sat hollowly in the pit of my stomach, and I could see similar reactions in the dancers.  It's a little odd to describe such a rehearsal as "successful" when the emotions the girls were trying to express were so dark, but they were so good at expressing them.  We had to quit an hour and 1/2 into rehearsal because we were all too emotionally drained to keep working.

The movement does pick up a little and end on an enlightened, hopeful note.  When we finish the choreography for the movement the rehearsals shouldn't be as down, but if they can continue to be this powerful, I will be very pleased with the final product.

Today, I feel like an artist.