Female Ambitions

  Every good student of western classical music has read Charles Rosen. He grew up with a Juilliard shaped spoon in his mouth, opted not to major in music because he "already knew more" as a freshman teenager than most of the postgraduates in the music department at Princeton. He was a brilliant guy and wrote textbooks that sit on my shelves still.

In fact I pulled one off the shelf this week as I am preparing a recital of piano sonatas. His book Sonata Forms beckoned to me as I am trying to define in my own mind how Scarlatti, Berg, Beethoven, Barber and Mozart sonatas are all the same species. Like Poodles and Doberman Pinschers are both dogs, along with Shar Peis and Dalmatians, somehow a sonata is a sonata is a sonata.Which is a vague term at best, meaning "sounded"from the Italian sonare, I suppose to point out that there were no words. Which was kind of an interesting concept, that music could be abstract and still have something to say, with that something being up to the listener.

I am taking this week off of my paid work in order to practice for longer chunks of time than I am normally allowed. Ass to piano bench, I traverse the centuries, 18th to 20th. My dog Zoe prefers Mozart and Beethoven to Berg and Barber. But she is very critical of the Beethoven, often just staring at me while I play the fugue of opus 110, her cataract eyes boring into my soul. If she could write, she would write like Charles Rosen, one hundred percent sure she was the smartest Golden Doodle in the room.

I have been running this week too. My streak is over. The two days I took off after 366 in a row were harder than the streak itself. But I feel pretty much back to normal now. I can start obsessing about some unreachable PR in the half or marathon again, without the excuse of just running for the sake of running. Meditative spirituality is again shelved, the purity of my self-righteous daily run replaced by faster times on my Strava feed.  I shall strive to drive my aging legs into submission without contrition.

Nah, I don't mean it. I am just a 49 year old woman trying to find my way in this world. I like running and playing piano an awful lot, and am fortunate enough to be able to take a week off to concentrate a bit more on my non-physician parts.

Charles Rosen notes that sonatas were really quite the thing for the female amateur musician. In fact I nearly choked on my coffee while reading this in Sonata Forms one early morning this week, while waiting for an appropriate time to start hammering the keys without completely destroying the lives of the teenagers in the house.

This is near the start of the book, and though I have read this book before as young music student, I somehow did not remember this  part. Of course music school is full of male music professors mansplaining Mozart, Haydn behind their thick spectacles, their representative white maleness just the tip of the ice Berg. I imagine the footnote in the passage above was the result of some female in his life choking on her own coffee and saying, "really, Charles?"

Living while being female is problematic.

Sonatas are abstract, which means to "draw away, divert, detach." Wordless sounds that pull one away from whatever tethers. Scarlatti unmoors as completely as Berg, across the divide of two hundred years and under the fingers of quite a few kick-ass female amateur and professional pianists. We use our womanly powers to distract, to interpret the secrets of long dead composers and cast our spell on unsuspecting men who think the world is exclusively about them. They think I am entertaining myself in my parlor, playing simple sonatas, she said with an evil laugh.

If sonatas were dogs, my recital would jump start with a Jack Russell Terrier (Scarlatti),  sashay to a Standard Poodle (Mozart), then proceed to a Pug (Berg). After a break, behold the Border Collie (Beethoven) and, at last, the All-American Mutt (Barber). Here is the program:

1. Busy and energetic
2. Prissy and intelligent
3. Weird and dramatic
*intermission-please take your sonata out for a walk*
4. Overly smart and obsessive
5. Will do anything to impress you and likes to kiss you square on the mouth

What I learned in music school is there is no way to perfection but ass on bench.
What I learned from medical school is to use all my senses to abstract disease.
What I learned from running for a year is to never leave the house without running gear.
What I learned from my dogs is we are less likely to get into trouble when we exercise every day.
What I learned from growing up as a woman in this miserable world is it would be better to be a man.

Nah, I don't mean it. I just hope Kavanaugh does not get confirmed.

Now excuse me while I go practice sonatas, an acceptable outlet for my female ambitions.

I Want It Now

I have a recurring dream where my son is home for a visit from prison but has morphed into a toddler. This happened last night (in my dream, not literally) and husband and I were taking turns tending to his toddler needs. In my mind the entire time was "Will he grow up again before he has to return to prison? Because I am concerned about his ability to survive there as a toddler." I awake from these dreams with a combination of malaise and contentment. Spending some time with my son before prison, before meth, before dropping out of school, before he gave up on life is nice. Even if it is just a weirdo movie in my brain.

Speaking of "Lost Boys", I have a hankering to watch this movie again. The best viewing of this movie for me was with my eldest daughter on the Santa Cruz Boardwalk on the beach on a big screen with the smell sea water and cotton candy and corn dogs and piss and the roar of approval the crowd gave (SPOILER ALERT) when grandpa staked the vampire.

Speaking of vampires, when we were 12 or 13, one of my best girlfriends and I would use "vampire" as code for someone who sucked the life blood out of us. In retrospect, I no longer believe people do this on purpose. Maybe, like vampires, they had their own life blood sucked, then that person forced them to do some reciprocal life-force draining and then they transformed into demons who make life miserable for everyone. For introverts, vampires can be exhausting as we are always trying to fix their broken souls, only to have to send them violently to a hell dimension when they cross a line by trying to hurt someone else that we love.

http://fandomania.com/joss-whedons-16-most-painful-character-deaths/

Speaking of love, nothing really equals the love of parent for child. And by parent I mean the one who chooses to stay with that kid, biological or otherwise. I recently re-read Middlesex and was stopped in my tracks by this quote. Stopped in my tracks because by re-read I mean I was listening to it on Audible while on a run. The quote: "The anguish of having children. A vulnerability as astonishing as the capacity for love that parenthood brings." Now if any of my children are reading this, don't worry, I love you despite the vulnerability. Also, I know that being a parent is not the only source of love vulnerability. So many ways to love and be loved and to anguish and be anguished.

Speaking of sources of anguish, September 17 is National Physician Suicide Awareness Day. The first one, actually. Because physicians, especially women physicians, kill them selves more often and more efficiently than the general population.

Speaking of physicians, I lost a patient this week despite best efforts and my heart is broken. Vulnerability in love of any kind, whether filial or someone else's filiation, is a mixed bag.

Speaking of hearts, I have mentioned my resting heart rate in the 40's in prior posts. Mostly because I like to brag and think it is cool to have a heart rate lower than my age. Which will be 49 a week from now. Which will be my 365th day in a row of running (feet willing). The thought of this streak ending has me feeling off kilter. My daily running has a spiritual milieu, a blue streak of meditative sinew stretching. It is pounding beach and trail and pavement with focus or while spacing out, with elation or with grumpy pout, though my run usually turns my frown upside down around mile 2.8.  I run in sun or rain or snow or wind or past dogs who threaten to eat me like on today's lunch run when I thought they were all fenced in but one was not and I used my best alpha voice to tell him to back the hell off.  The daily run is a connection to my son, the one in prison, not a toddler, but still a kid really. I am emotionally mixed up about the end of this streak and it is freaking me out.

Speaking of mixed emotions, turning 49 is OK. It puts me one step closer to the next age group for road racing. Gold prospecting might be in my plans for the year. I won't be 50 for a little while yet. Numerologically speaking, 49 represents compassionate realism, focus, tolerance, and humanitarianism. 49 gets shit done, is reliable, sincere and, I am beginning to think, potentially somewhat annoying. I will always be a Packers fan though. Sorry 49ers. Not that I watch football. My current favorite footballer is Colin Kaepernick. Though I still have mixed emotions about Nike, with the whole sweatshop thing and a long history of misogyny.

Speaking of gun violence, blatant racism and hatred of women, I sure hope this next chapter in my life has a few more paragraphs filled with common sense, justice and love. The messy love, the one that is vulnerable. The one that, biblically speaking, involves love for the Other not because of what they can do for you but because it is the right thing to do. Starting on my 49th birthday, I plan to wake up to a world that would never elect a rapist to be president or a supreme court judge. I will wake up to a society that does not make my child practice hiding under her desk in case someone tries to shoot her at school. If I do not get instant world peace and a modicum of respect and some ability to string two sentences together in the people running our country, and the ability to run sub 7 miles again and ten thousand tons of ice cream....I'm going to scream!

I want it now.