Failure and success

Sometimes I am just amazed at how close the distance between failure and success is. As a pianist, a C chord is millimeters away from a B chord. Drop your hand a quarter inch to the left and there's dissonance and a cringing panic in the chest as you try to adjust.

You've played this piece a hundred times, probably more, at various tempos, in so many different ways, taking apart the voicing and the nuances, studying in such detail the way your piano part fits with the voice parts, and still, when you put it all together, there is a surprise. "How fascinating!" one of my mentors advises me to think when the unthinkable occurs in performances. "OMG!" or "what the F#ck" is what really goes through my head when the unexpected happens.

Yes, those of us who know the piece in such great detail know exactly where we have fallen short, while those listening may only hear a momentary pause, a slight hesitation, or a moment of awkwardness. Sometimes the failure is barely noticeable, sometimes not.

But we who perform know.

And we care outrageously.

It's a good thing, in that the knowing and the caring spurs us on to greater practice, greater precision, greater efforts that eventually produce greater results.

But at the moment of failure, and the remembrance of it, even with many many many successes on its heels, it still feels like *shit*. We go home, we cry, we kick ourselves, we replay the failure many times more than we replay the success.

And we ask ourselves [again, and again, and again], am I going to give up or am I going to go on?

And we take a nap, and then we go on.

Coming home

I've been enjoying a weekend home from school, and man it feels good. The reason I came down after only a month away is because the music director at my church needed an accordion player. Of all things. Naturally I jumped at the chance, and had a fun time playing with a polka band in church as part of an Oktoberfest worship celebration. Yes, my life is awesome.
It was really fun today seeing all my friends at church. I love it at school, and I'm weathering the challenges well, but there's no place like home. Actually, I spent so much of my time in high school at church, that a lot of people were not surprised at all to see me around this morning. Aside from jamming out on the accordion, I've spent my time finishing a research paper, which I'm glad to be done with, and practicing piano with my snazzy new metronome (which looks like a miniature beige coffin, which is why I associate metronomes with DEATH).

Today I've just been hanging out, knitting, and watching football. I miss this idea of free time!

My home-schooled background has helped me in a lot of ways; I get stuff done promptly, and I'm not burned out from years of being in school already, so I'm curious as to how things all work. Doesn't mean I like all the deadlines and creating annotated bibliographies, the late nights, and general fast pace of everything, but I roll with the punches. Even though I'm in college, I still identify myself as a home-schooler-–four years of college won't change that.