She's Back...

I have not been here in a long time. I felt the need to delete my other blog that was taking up my time. Until about mid-July, that is, when I stopped blogging completely. No reason, really, I just didn't feel the need like I did in the past. I almost deleted this blog, too. But I didn't.

What you missed while I was gone:

• I was diagnosed with chronic clinical depression, general anxiety disorder and mild OCD
• I had my first trip to the dentist
• I went to Puerto Rico to visit family... for the first time in 14 years
• I lopped off about 14 inches of my hair
  
• I went to the midwest with my family for a week
• My relationship with my family has become a million times better
• My mom got a Facebook [squee!]
• I went to the dentist for the first time in my life
• I decided not to go to Boston or the Philippines as I reasoned getting closer with my family was way more important right now
• I had tons of family and friends help me for hours and hours and hours on fixing up the apartment
• I wrote a couple of songs
• I drove by myself to another state without getting lost

I'm sure there's tons more, but all in all, it's been a pretty awesome summer.

Over and out
~me

It's not easy being a snowflake. Yeah, it seems all wonderful to be unique and beautiful, but you're always falling. It's always cold. And, ultimately, you're going to get crushed and buried- then melt away forever as if you never existed. You get lost in the mass of trillions of other snowflakes, just as unique as yourself, but people never see you.

Yet, the reason you exist, is to join with every other snow flake to create a giant blanket of white that makes the world stop, look and listen to the muffled silence. You make the world look up, and though they are looking at you, they don't ever see you. They watch you dance and drift along, but what they see is beauty, the sky, heaven and God. That is why you exist. But it's not easy being a snowflake.

Counting Sheep

Last night I was having serious issues sleeping and generally being sane. One of my former students recommend I try counting sheep. This was my response:

reasons counting sheep doesn't work for me: by the time i get to sheep number 15, sheep number 12 has run off with sheep number 4. Then I have to go chase them until a giant ogre gets in my way. This poses a problem. I run away from the ogre, but then I realize I'm daydreaming and really still awake. I start thinking about what I've got to do the next day. Then sheep number 5 starts trying to eat my students' homework. This poses another problem. I hire a wolf to get rid of the sheep. Then the wolf wants to eat me, but I give him a starburst, instead, and he goes away. The sheep come back. By then, I've lost count and am more awake than ever.

Reasons my Twitter Page is Awesome:

• either Frank Sinatra is haunting me, or the voices in my head hit their teens in the 40s...
• do not listen to the giant flamingos. Their ideas are always bad. Very bad.
• so the 'cello said to the violin, 'You're mean,' and the violin said, 'Pluck you!'
• take a look at your leg and say, "Something's afoot here, but I can't quite pun it down..."
• depression makes you medicate on the deeper things in life...

...and that's just from today.

Hmmm...

I haven't posted in a while. I've pretty much moved my obsession elsewhere, but I keep this up, too, for a few good friends. =) My instant reaction, otherwise, would be to impulsively delete it, complete with all of the poems that I have yet to transfer into my new journal.

I have "Popular" from Wicked stuck in my head. Not so great.

Random melodies

Melodies have been popping into my head lately. I've actually been recording them. You should be proud.

Piano Thoughts

I feel the piano and the piano feels me. Playing it is like trying to catch lots of fluffy, multicolored lights. I can hear it in my dreams.When I think in piano, I get frustrated because I want to sing it but there are too many notes and they move too fast, and in too many different directions. I try to speak about it, but it is a wordless thought, a wordless thing. I speak and my voice sounds like an awful croak, a disgusting and horrid thing compared to the innate beauty of piano thoughts. Worst of all, I try to play it, but my inner ear is not directly connected to my kinesthetic map of the keys. One day, I will fully attach the sound to my hands, and when I make a hand shape without even touching the keys, I will hear it. That is my deepest and most sincere hope. Then, I will be a satisfied human being and most comfortable and secure in calling myself a musician. Until then, my heart does battle while my fingers, they awkwardly dance, waiting to land on something that is a struggle to keep.

I made it.
Be jealous.
Or pity me immensely.

http://tinyurl.com/dalyoz

Doing the maths

3 days until my self-proclaimed three day weekend...
20 days until i get to see a doctor.
50 days until my summer break.
63 days until i go to puerto rico for the first time in fourteen years.
91 days until i go to berklee.
15 months until i go to england.
27 years until i retire.


Days of my life that are gone forever: 8,948

Days of my life that are left: unknown


I will be single for the rest of my life.

I don't think I can watch sad movies by myself anymore. I watched 'The Fountain' which was an excellent film, in my opinion, and had a wonderful twisted, imaginative, heart-wrenching plot. After watching it, I promptly had a nervous breakdown, but somehow managed to peel myself off the floor and get to the piano, working through a Chopin Ballade I've been picking at. By the time I was through, I had stopped crying and the nerves in my face had stopped tingling.

Something about having to comfort myself through all of these times makes me innately angry. At one point I was so upset I considered moving back in with my parents, which of course, is crazy talk. They are the least comforting people on the face of the planet. It would make way more sense to have my brother move in with me. But they would never allow it.

Dear Diary,
I've been fighting kidney stone attacks all afternoon on and off. I don't know if and when it's going to stop, or even if it has already. I do not like this game. I do not like it a lot.

On a more positive note, I got accepted to participate in the Summer Institute for Piano Teachers at Berklee College of Music in Boston. I needed that piece of sunshine!!

Hahahahahahahahaha....

My throat is sore. And I took this quiz:

Your romantic attachment style: Intense and Preoccupied

You have described yourself as preoccupied in your attachments. This suggests that you have more intense interpersonal relations than many people do, that in your romantic relations you sometimes feel really quite close, and at other times you feel almost estranged and cut-off. You probably have a hard time asserting yourself in a way that makes you feel you are really in control of your emotions. You may find that you often feel let down and as if you are giving much more than you get in your romances.

It's possible that your partners feel as if you don't really know who they are, even though you feel you are very intimate with them. You probably have a higher level of emotional arousal than most other people, both positive and negative, and this gets expressed in your romantic relationships. You may find it hard to be without a lover, and yet find that when you have a lover, the intensity puts a strain on the relationship.

Being preoccupied in romance is a matter of degree. A good lover thinks of the beloved often and holds the beloved in her or his thoughts. Mindfulness is a virtue and being mindful of one's lover is highly regarded and a tremendous asset in close relationships. But there's a difference between mindfulness and preoccupation. If you feel that perhaps you have been too preoccupied in love, it may be time for you to consider professional help. Being overly preoccupied in love is a condition that can often be successfully addressed in psychotherapy.

Remember that attachment styles exist in degrees, and in this test, the degree to which a style is true for you will make a difference in your interpretation. Everyone has to have some style or another, and the features of any one style only become maladaptive when they exist in the extreme.

do you ever feel that crushing, nagging sense of defeat?



...yeah, me too.


my mom has an esophageal hernia and she's throwing a party. those are two separate thoughts...

Insomnia

I took some pills so I could sleep. But I can't sleep. So I decided to look up mental disorders. Some more. And I took some quizzes and found out I don't have Asperger's or Autism, which I already knew, but I took the quiz to make sure they were legit. Ish.

Anywho, big surprise, I have a seriously likelihood of depression [which I already know I have because I've actually been diagnosed on that one], bipolar tendencies, and something I keep denying I have- Adult ADHD. But at least they gave me this pretty badge:

Woo

A thousand profile views. Do I get some kind of award?

Meh.


So I finished this painting yesterday. It began as a deposit for a blue color I had concocted. Then I began experimenting with different brush sizes, shapes, and textures in greens, yellows, and whites. I wasn’t really thinking much of anything other than getting the strokes mostly vertical. I literally tapped the brush on the surface of the canvas while I held it up, playing it like a drum. At one point, I heard one of my neighbors blasting ‘Clocks’ by Coldpay and I started playing in that 8/8 rhythm [1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2]. Once I felt like I had enough marks, I put it down for a bit. Then I found the word “dinner” from a newspaper cut-out I had found on the steps at work one day. I attached it to a splotch of wet paint, then decided to turn it into a fish, and create a hook, because at this point the more that I looked at the piece the less it looked like random strokes and the more it looked like the marshland near where I live. Funny how that can happen sometimes.

Oh My Goodness

I absolutely adore this artist's photography. It's so dramatic, imaginative, colorful, and seductive. It juxtaposes ideas, jars, and tells a story. Great awesomeness.

So today was the most wonderful April Fool's Day by far. I stuffed two jackets on the hammers of the upright piano in my classroom, making it impossible to play and causing resistance when anyone should try to press down the keys. Then I took my handy dandy dismembered baby doll head, arms, and legs and placed them neatly on top of the jackets along with a note, bidding the musician who finds it, 'April Fools!'. Then I closed the upright lid and placed the books on top of it the way it normally always is in my classroom. I also set the date on the board to 'March 32', unplugged the 88 key electronic keyboard and hid the headphones that belong to it. I also unplugged the smaller electronic keyboard, but only on the keyboard part so the adapter was still on the wall and everything 'appeared' plugged in. Then I went to the computer station where my compositions use compositional software and unplugged the mouse and the keyboard, but kept them close to the slots so it seemed they were plugged in. I also put away the electric pencil sharpener and replaced it with an uber tiny manual sharpener.

This is definitely my favorite holiday. =)

And per request, here is an example of artwork that I was looking at recently. I was moved by compassion when I saw them because they are quite beautiful. In fact, they are far better than anything I think I ever could produce. It makes me sad to think that the artistic world, by constantly rejecting this talented and very troubled man, was responsible for the deaths of so many. The butterfly effect, indeed.

Sea Sick

So this poor old sea turtle was sick. What did it decide to do? It decided to swim to the only hospital that is certified to treat sea turtles. That's right. There's only one sea turtle hospital, and this little guy [or big...girl?] swam right up to it. Don't believe me? Read about it.

Oh, how I am not looking forward to April Fool's day this year. I am much too gullible and naive, and I don't even have any good pranks planned for my kids this year to make up for it...

I just stuck my application to the Summer Piano Teacher Institute at Berklee in the mail. I'm so excited. I'd do cartwheels if I could. Berklee sounds so wonderful. I wish I could be there right now...

Dear Diary,

Last night there was a wicked thunderstorm. I stayed up for four hours straight composing a choral piece. I don't have a recording of it because I don't have a choir in my apartment. I gave it to the choir director at my church this morning. He seemed pretty excited about it.

So after I went to bed, it had stopped raining and thundering finally. I had just started to fall asleep where out of friggin nowhere, this humungous thunderclap hits somewhere really close by, and it was so strong that it shook my whole building. All I could think was, that was the wrath of God, man.

Dude.