Performance

I've always heard that the performance you give is the performance you deserve, which roughly means that if you practice, you won't suck.
Well, today I sucked.
I don't get it. I've been practicing every day, for at least three hours a day, and then I got to church this morning, and I bombed. Like, if you mess up you're supposed to just keep going, but sometimes you mess up so bad that you can't, and then you stop, and everyone looks at you, and you want to evaporate.
E is currently:

• serving as the minister of music at FBC, which requires her to learn a new set of music every week...
  
• a professor and staff accompanist at C College...
• teaching private lessons to kids at every level from "this is a quarter note" to "you need to work on using your arms more with the octaves in this passage of your college audition selection," and...
  
• preparing a concert program for her doctoral degree, which includes a Chopin scherzo. She also...
• can improvise...
• and sightread amazingly.
  

I am currently:

• having difficulty preparing five hymns a week...
• ignoring the Chopin nocturne I had hoped to learn this summer because I'm trying to learn the aforementioned hymns...
• abandoning all hope of being to improvise worth anything...
• and questioning my worth as a musician.

Like, I know I'm overreacting. I know that E is both my teacher and pursuing her doctoral degree, therefore she's a better pianist than me, and that we all have our strengths and weaknesses and that somehow I make up for my inability to improvise and my mediocre sightreading skills, and that as I gain more experience I will improve in these and other areas and that it's only logical for me to not be the best right now because otherwise what's the point in going to college, but that doesn't make me feel any better.
At any rate... this week's hymns are behind me. I don't have to play in a week because I have the Sunday off, so I get two weeks to prepare. Hooray.
At least there weren't very many people there today.


M wanted to take one of my Calvin and Hobbes books to LR with him today. I said yes, after making sure it wasn't one of the hardcover ones. But I was flipping through one that he left, and I found that it had been inscribed when it was given to me.
L has damn impeccable handwriting. I hate it.
I used to think that you could tell a little about a person from their handwriting, but then as I was looking at the immaculately formed letters, I thought, "If I didn't know better, I would think that I might actually want to know this person."

I don't think you can tell a lot about a person from their handwriting anymore.


There are certain dishes that I will never understand the appeal of, and one of these is Baked Beans. I used to be supremely picky, and while I have gotten better, there are still certain foods that disgust me. Baked Beans are on that list. They smell sickening, they certainly aren't visually appealing... Kind of like scrambled eggs.


I found out that my roommate is a tap-dancing musical-theatre major from Seattle. I find this to be very cool.


I'm currently reading Skinny Dip by Carl Hiaasen. It's fantastic. E introduced me to his books, and I finished one yesterday to start this one today... I'm already like halfway done with it.