le sigh

I'm not sure which bothers me more: 

the fact that I live in a house full of people who have no interest in being friends OR
the fact that I've no idea how to deal with it OR
the fact that I let it bother me so much.

I'm afraid living in the city is going to turn me into a grinch.

how shakespeare was a prophet

I can always find my way back to myself by spending time with one of two things (both for best results):  Jesus and the piano.  I know that sounds goofy, but it's true.  Add a little writing in there and perhaps some coffee and I begin to feel like a whole person again.  And if I get to watch a Cards game with a couple of girlfriends, it's like icing on the cake :)

I've recently realized this yet again.

No wonder I felt so lost last spring.  I was dating Jonathan and had abandoned both of these important things wholeheartedly in an attempt to keep up with him.  Granted, not the piano completely.  I had to make a living.  But I never worked on my own stuff.  And I was headed down a path that would eventually lead to abandoning my career if we'd have stayed together.

Katie...

Amazing what a lost puppy you can be when you try to make someone else's story your own.

"... in the movies we have leading ladies and we have the best friend.  You, I can tell, are a leading lady, but for some reason you're behaving like the best friend." 

And of course this has been brought to my attention yet again by a lack of time given to these two items of importance recently.  Life is such a hard balance sometimes.

Awareness is half the battle though.

A dear friend of mine informed me the other day that the word "passion" comes, not from a word meaning "fire" as so many of us like to think, but from the Greek word "paskho," which means "to suffer."

This was revolutionary for me.  Turns out passion may be a gift, but it's also a responsibility.  How did I know this for so long and yet struggle to understand it within myself?

"The battle is not with the instrument, it is with ourselves."  - Vincent Chicowicz

Chicowicz wasn't lying.  Not one single bit.

And of course I get to the point where I haven't been in the Word for... well, too long for my own good.  My counselor tells me I perpetually run on fumes.  Awesome, right?

"Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.  Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day... whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them."

Tonight I went back to my Bible study... the one that I'd abandoned for the past two weeks in favor of making it through the Christmas season without major injury.  I would have been better to keep at it.  Our small group at Central is going through the book of John this year and I've been behind... 

But I think about the chapters we've studied already... about the wedding at Cana and how Jesus turned a bunch of Jewish purification water into wine.  And about the woman at the well whose life had put her in a position with no choice but to be desperate and how Jesus knew her, mistakes and all, and revealed himself as God to her anyway.  And about how he fed 5,000 people bread and fish from a sack lunch.  And then how he turns around and offers himself to us as those things in the following verses and chapters.  And I think about Don Miller and how he compares Romeo and Juliet to what it's like to find life in Christ... about how Romeo takes Juliet up on her offer to doff his name and take all of her instead... about how both die so that they might have life together.

Suffer indeed.

Maybe this is how I'm supposed to be a leading lady.

... how is it that I keep forgetting this?  Maybe I get in the way of myself?  Maybe I keep expecting life out of other things?  Maybe that it's just too simple?

O true apothecary!  Thy drugs are quick.

o holy night

Hahahaha!  My brother is amazing!

le petit prince

"To tame... is to create ties... if you tame me, we'll need each other..."

"... the only things you learn are the things you tame," said the fox.

"Here is my secret. It's quite simple: One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes... It's the time you spent on your rose that makes your rose so important... You become responsible forever for what you've tamed. You're responsible for your rose."

- from the conversation with the fox, from Le Petit Prince

Christmastime in the Lou

God bless the US Postal Service. Dr. B's present is in the mail and scheduled to get there Friday. And it only cost $5.10 to send it priority mail. No packaging fee, no 2nd day air, no Saturday delivery option. And they got me through the line in a reasonable amount of time for 4:30 pm the Wednesday before Christmas. 

I will grant that I clearly did not think this one through very carefully when I left my house today.  Sometimes you've just gotta take one for the team and go forward without thinking too much, lest you get lost in the process of how and not make any headway in the actual task.  It took me all afternoon to find his present (and the card), not get completely distracted along the way, figure out how I wanted to mail it and how much it was going to cost, and then get everything I needed and get to the post office before 5 pm.  And let me just say that the guy at the Brentwood FedEx must really think he is something else.  He had a whole speech prepared about all of my shipping and packaging options.  The man was a walking paragraph of small-print disclaimers and huge words in a quiet monotone.  How a person can have so much to say about getting an object from one place to another is beyond me.  I smiled politely, muttered "Holy cow" (and perhaps a little something else) on my way out, and went to Target across the street to buy my own packaging, which I then took to the Post Office down the road where the people were totally down to earth and got me situated in no time.  For a third of the cost.  Granted, I did have to wrap his present in the car (in the parking lot of the Brentwood Post Office where people kept walking by giving me the crazy look -- did I mention the Asian guy who pulled up next to me, saw me turning my car into a wrapping center, smirked, and opened his trunk to pull out a perfectly wrapped present ready to go?  It's always interesting watching other people judge you... while you're sitting right there) but you know what, I'll take it.  You do what you have to do.

It was a victory.  Eat your hearts out FedEx/UPS.

But then I came home tonight to find that my roommates had hung the elf from the ceiling fan...

I admit that this totally struck the dark side of me as hilarious, albeit a little morbid.  

I had planned on moving him tonight anyway because he'd been completely stationery since the last prank (a hot air balloon with real balloons that had since lost all their helium, having been left up for 2 weeks while I finished my semester at Lutheran and got my kids through their studio recital).  But STILL... I mean, c'mon.  Hang an elf??  Really?

So I promptly took the poor thing down and put him in a nice relaxing bath of mini marshmallows.  The toothbrush is supposed to be his scrub brush, since apparently there's very little market for elf-sized scrub brushes.

It's ridiculous, I know, but it's one of the few ways that I'm connecting with my roommates right now, who are all extremely absorbed in their own lives.  Admittedly I can be too at times, but who wants to live with people who only talk to you if you speak first?

I mean... at least they responded, right?

shit my dad says

Sometimes my dad really cracks me up.  He can be so inappropriate, but it is downright hilarious listening to him when he gets going.  Not to mention that I absolutely love it when he gets into one of these moods. 

Today's topic:  his difficulty in finding normal Christmas lights and normal Christmas ornaments.  According to him, it seems that it's ridiculously hard to find white lights on a green string anymore and ornaments in traditional colors rather than pastel blue, pink, or purple.  He had to go to 5 or 6 different stores to get what he wanted.  "Why would you ever put a white string of lights on a green tree??  And I don't want blue, pink, and purple ornaments.  I want red, green, and gold!  You know, the Chinese don't know that Americans don't want all off this off-the-wall shit.  Because in China, they don't have Christmas.  They have like, the Year of the Dog or whatever..."

Shit my dad says.  My friend Megan and I had a good laugh over that one.  Apparently there's also a book with the same title. 

brains

Fascinating article published by Vanderbilt University that was posted on facebook by my mentor here in St. Louis, as well as an old friend from the music school.

Click HERE to read it.

Confirms what we always knew to be true:  musicians' brains really are different! :)

(smacks forehead, jaw drops)

Just realized I've left the coffee pot on for the last 48 hours or so.

Thank God there are geniuses out there who think to idiot-proof their products for people like me.  Amazing that the poor thing didn't blow up.

I've never been more convinced that my love for coffee will one day be the death of me.

I'm. ridiculous.

recital

Although I don't entirely believe it to be true, if students are a true reflection of their teachers, then I am an amazing teacher.

Tonight is one of those nights where I could stay up forever and bask in the glory of a job well done... like those nights in college after finals where you stay up watching movies you know and love because you don't want the good to end.  That's how I feel.

My studio recital went AMAZINGLY well.  Several of my kids totally came through at the last minute, despite being really iffy on their pieces only days before.  What a wonderful thing to watch child after child surpass my expectations with flying colors.  They totally nailed it -- all of them -- and it was incredible.

I only hope the Vivaldi goes as well.  One down, one to go.  I would write more but I need to sleep.  This week is going to be crazy!

the night I had half a cup of coffee at 3 pm...

If a cute girl offers to make hot chocolate in an attempt to cure both your insomnia and hers, why on earth would you ever say no?

Regardless of her intentions, you don't refuse a kind and innocent offer from a lady.

It's enough to make me think chivalry is dead.  At least in the house I now live in.  My new roommates mystify me like none other.  And I have a hard time not taking things personally.

I thought that this is why people live together... so that when you're crawling the walls at 1 am, there's someone to live through it with... that it's at least semi-fun rather than a mess of loneliness and frustration.  Right??  I don't get it.

... and I can assure you, the intention was merely platonic.  I would have offered the same to my brother if we were both clearly and obviously wide awake at the same time.

People are idiots.

wrestling

It's December.  Which means that I have no life right now.  And what little life I do have is spent trying to calculate my next Elf on the Shelf move in an attempt to spark some sort of relationship-building endeavor amongst my new roommates.

I've been eating/breathing/sleeping/singing the Vivaldi Gloria in my head for the past 2-3 weeks now and will continue to do so for another as we head into the final week before Lutheran's Christmas concert.  I'm falling in love with this work... desperately so.  It's a gorgeous piece of music.  I only hope I can do it justice.  But the kids are less than enthralled with it.  It's a hard piece.  And some weird spirit of mediocrity seems to have settled over everyone between the ages of 14 and 18 in my life right now:  my brother, several of my students, and many of the kids in the choir I'm playing for.  They just do not want to be bothered with the hard work of wrestling with something so demanding and coming out victorious.  It's hard to watch.  I so badly want to save the day...  my inner self wants to push, push, push, inspire, inspire, inspire.  But in reality I have no control.  And I exhaust myself trying to get them where I want them to be.  As their teacher and accompanist (and in the case of my brother, as his sister), I can only take them so far.  You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.  That is what's hard for me to wrestle with.

And I often wonder if God feels that way about us, doing everything he can to get our attention -- to help us realize that he's the one we ultimately need, that nothing else will satisfy... that we shoot ourselves in the foot every single time we attempt to do things our way.

I've been thinking about a lot of things lately.  This whole past year and a half has been one big fat growing pain in the you-know-what.  The entire year has been like (seriously)...  same song, fifteenth verse.  And what I've been painfully struggling with all this time in each of the different situations and scenarios I've found myself in are the answers to two huge questions:  a. who loves me truly? and b. of those that love me truly, who do I have the freedom to love back with the same truth?  And just when I think I get it figured out, something changes.  And chances are, it's something huge.  Like declining my candidacy at Wash U.  Or starting a business in a new city.  Or being in a relationship.  Or being dumped unceremoniously out of that relationship.  Or my parents getting divorced.  Or Halley getting married.  Or having to move... for the fourth time.

But you know, even after I figure out the answers to these questions, those answers only take me so far on the emotional journey.  Those people -- the ones who love me truly that I can love back with the same truth -- they can only go with me so far.  There comes a point where it's just me and Jesus.  And, like my students and my brother and the kids at Lutheran High, sometimes I just do not have what it takes to face the hard work of wrestling.

All I can say is... thank God he did it for me.

Maybe more than anything, that's what Emmanuel means for me this Christmas.  God with us... he did my wrestling for me.

crazies

Something's gotta give.  I need someone to give me some attention.  I can only handle so much of roommates thinking I'm crazy and then ignoring me, which makes me think I'm even crazier...

You know, people love crazies.  They think they're great... until they have to live with them.  But I am here to tell you that it's the crazies who win Nobel prizes and become professors and solve world problems and make a difference in the lives of children.

So what if I like to put the elf in the fridge and sing Vivaldi at 8:30 in the morning and hang gel clings all over the windows and read my music teacher magazines in the tub??

Being ignored is worse than living alone.   

peacocks

(me, to my 11-yr-old student): "I don't care if a peacock explodes in your front yard or a major asteroid makes its way toward the face of the earth, you have to practice your recital pieces every day until the recital..."

(student, timidly): "... there's a kid in my class whose last name is Peacock.  But no one makes fun of him because his dad makes a lot of money.  His dad is the president of Anheuser-Busch."

(me, laughing): "Oh man, allow me to re-phrase... I don't care if a DINOSAUR explodes in your front yard... you have to practice!"

This is what I get for teaching students in Clayton lol.

Also:  I am now living with two guys who never pay attention to me.  It's probably a good thing, but nonetheless, it blows.  I'm never getting married unless my would-be husband is desperately in love with me.