What are my 12 Steps?

It has been confirmed by more than one source (okay okay, just Greatest Print Assistant Ever and myself) that I am officially a caffeine addict. As in, if I do not have, at the minimum, a cup of coffee in the morning -- but, ideally, at least a double Americano or, dare I say it, a Star*ucks double soy Pumpkin Spice Latte* -- then I am truly the moodiest, most unpleasant raving botch this world has ever seen**. This makes me wonder if all my years spent being a sulky teenager was just my body's way of telling me that it needed coffee. Hm. See, Mom? Dad? Greg? Nothing personal. I just hadn't found the light yet at that point.

Anyway, Scott is judging some sort of band nerdly goodness today and I have spent all day*** lying on the couch watching bad (And by "bad," I mean, soooo good) reality television on MTV and wondering why I'm really sleepy and have a throbbing headache. And then it dawned on me. I need to go fix myself a hot cup of crack coffee. DOY. And so I did. And now I feel much better! Better enough to say this: you guys have all heard this song from the Old Navy commercial, right? Is it not the cutest little song ever? Is it not the musical equivalent of a widdle strawberry cupcake with white fwosting and rainbow shprinkles? Ugh, I love it. Maybe I'll see if I can make it my ringtone...although to get rid of Brubeck's Blue Rondo a la Turk as my ringtone would be hard. Or Kelis' Milkshake, as is the case for my personalized ringtone for Scott :) Don't ask.


* 'Tis the season for Pumpkin Spice Lattes again! Squeee!

** Outside of the world of old cranky-ass piano teachers, of course.

*** Except for early this morning when I finally redeemed the gift certificate I got from my wonderful sister to Dream Dinners and assembled three pretty spectacular meals. I chose to prepare a 1. Garlic and balsamic marinated sirloin roast, 2. Stuffed flounder with white wine sauce, and 3. Chicken paella. I am excited to eat them all. Perhaps I will leave some for Scott. If he's lucky.

Gut Gott in Himmel.

I just stuffed my face with a handful of peanut butter oreos. I had not had them before. Which is painful for me in hindsight, because I cannot now understand how I got through these last 27 years of life without them. They are like the beautiful love child of a sweet night of passion between an oreo and a nutter butter. Go get some right now.

I wanted to paste a giant image of a delicious peanut butter oreo here just to emphasize my point, but I couldn't find a decent, large-sized one. So I guess I'll have to make do with this blurry injustice. Hmph.

The Audition.

1. Warm up in wonderfully cozy heated room. Choose reed that is both easy to blow against and articulate with while still sounding resonant and clear.

2. Walk into audition room that is inevitably 20 degrees colder than warm-up room. Blow a few notes into your horn to confirm that, yes, your reed has proceeded to freak out about the temperature change and no longer has any resonance.

3. Play the first audition piece, an etude in the key of Db, at least 10 clicks faster on the metronome than you had prepared. Proceed to curse your brains out (mentally) as both your pinkies refuse to allign themselves with the rest of your fingers, as well as your tongue, thereby causing every other note in this etude to be out of time.

4. Move on to the orchestral excerpt, Mendelssohn's Scottish Symphony. Redeem yourself by playing the brisk solo with great gusto and playfulness. Finish the excerpt with an increased sense of confidence.

5. Proceed to take the allotted minute given to silently look over the ridiculously atonal and nonsensical sight-reading piece.

6. While looking over the sight-reading, have the silence broken by one of the judging members behind the screen saying, "Uh...can you finish the Mendelssohn?"

7. Proceed to pee in your pants slightly. Realize in a split-second that you, indeed, did not finish the excerpt and, instead, had the second most gigantic* performance-related brain fart in your entire life and left the last two lines out for no apparent reason.

8. Play the remaining two lines of the orchestral excerpt perfectly as your brain instinctively blacked out and could not think of any ways to sabotage your playing, as per the norm.

9. Play the sight-reading piece, complete with the final note replace by the most gloriously resonant squeak ever in the history of mankind.

10. 30 minutes later, learn that you have won the principal chair.

The End.


* The absolute most gigantic performance-related brain fart I ever made was realizing halfway through the first page of a twenty-minute long concerto during a solo recital in my first year of graduate school that I had walked out onstage without my neckstrap, thereby guaranteeing that my wrists would lock up within the next two minutes and I would have to suffer through the remaining 17 minutes of the concerto with about 50% functionality of my entire lower arm region. Whoops.

In which Ysabel threatens to slap a grown man in the face.

So the story goes that I walked in to work this morning to find a wall of boxes greeting me, over twenty boxes of band books that had been sent back to me from one of our stores because the manager of that particular store had grossly over-estimated how many books she would sell through during this rental season, plus 8 boxes of music from various publishers that I had ordered to fill specific customer special orders. So I whipped out the trusty hand dolly from the supply room and did some good old-fashioned heavy lifting and carting. And then the phone rang about ten times in two minutes, which I had to run and answer every time because, to add on to the countless things that I love (*cough*) about my job is the fact that, oh, have I mentioned that it's just me and Greatest Print Assistant Ever running the entire damn department? Meaning, ordering, shelving, unpacking, loading, unloading, warehousing, and, yes, having to cover the damn sales floor 90% of the time. Anyway, after rearranging the wall of boxes from the back of the building to a small mountain of boxes in front of my desk because there was nowhere else to put them, goddamnit, I finally plopped myself down at my desk to enjoy a delicious double Americano (at last!) and start working through the frighteningly large number of email orders in my inbox that had accumulated over the weekend. In the midst of this, one of our store managers, Casey, came up to my desk followed by a tall, gangly, middle-aged man who, apparently, was looking for some obscure Japanese guitar tablature book that this guy saw online:


Casey: Hey Ysabel, can you order music from Japan? This guy is looking for a guitar boo--

Idiot customer: HEY! Are you from Japan?!

Me: (under my breath) Uuuhboy... (out loud) No. I'm from the Philippines.

Idiot customer: Oh. Uh, Vinnie Moore! Vinnie Moore!

Me: "Vinnie Moore"? What is that, the name of the artist?

Idiot customer: The book I'm looking for is 'Mind's Eye.'

Me: Okay, let me see what comes up in this publisher's database... (proceeds to type into my computer)

Idiot customer: Whoa, is this what you do all day? I actually work. Harharhar!

Me: (Slowly craning my head around to look him in the face) Do you want to get slapped upside your head?

* Casey starts walking away *

Idiot customer: Hey, you're cuter than he is. I'd rather get help from you anyday!

Me: (eyes rolling so far to the back of my head I can see the bookshelf behind me) Ohmygod...

Idiot customer: Oh wow, you type really fast! That's pretty impressive. Look at that!

Me: Errrrrrg...


Anyway, I was stuck helping this numbskull out for the next half hour during which he threw out a couple more unbearably charming attempts to flirt (bleargh) with me and show off in front of his buddy who was very kindly just sitting on a piano bench noodling on a guitar. What an idiot. All I could do to get rid of him was to tell him that I would call some distributors and see if they had an old copy of this book in their inventory (even though this thing is clearly out of print, and only available from this Japanese seller on eBay) and that we (i.e. anybody but me) would call him if I could get a copy (won't happen). And then I immediately went down to the dungeon of doom where Greatest Print Assistant Ever was working on sorting through all our Christmas sheet music (Yes, you heard me right. Christmas music. Because piano teachers have already been on my case for the past month about buying f*ing Christmas music. It's September, you old hags!!!) so that I could share with somebody the sheer grossness of this moron. Yurgh. End of story

In other news: Tomorrow is audition day for the Wind Ensemble. I feel meh about it. At least the excerpt this time is not the Mendelssohn Scherzo like last year. I think I'll do a decent job. The difficult thing is gauging how you are going to react to any sort of audition process when you haven't really been in any sort of regular high (or any) -pressure performance environment. I can play the audition music just fine. But getting into that room and playing for a hidden panel and remembering how to control those voices in your head (all you music nerdly friends know what I'm talking about) when you haven't had to really deal with that kind of thing in a while -- that's something I'll have to wait and figure out tomorrow I guess. The good news? Now that Wind Ensemble is starting again, I'll get to leave work early two days a week again! Huzzah! ...even though it means paying a ridiculous amount of money to park in Seattle two days a week again. That's not so cool.

In OTHER news: Heroes* season premiere tonight! To celebrate, Scott and I will grab some burgers from Burger Hut (They have this 'Burger Hut Special' which is basically a really simple, delicious, fresh-grilled burger with a blanket of scrambled eggs inside. Wow. So good.) and come back to watch it on TiVo, baby! Woo!


* Um, apparently Peter Petrelli and Claire are dating in real life now? Blech. I do not approve of this.

Schmonday.

Today, I asked a customer if he wanted to be slapped upside the head. By me. And I wasn't joking. More later.

Why do weekends have to be so shoooort?!

Waaaaaah.

A letter from my stomach...

Dear Ysabel,

What the deuce? This morning you made a deliciously cholesterol-laden breakfast of eggs sunny side up, butter-sauteed onions and sausages and toast. That was beautiful. But then you went to Peet's Coffee and ordered a double-shot Americano in which you mixed a healthy dollop of half and half as well as 3 packets of sugar. And then you chose to enjoy said Americano over a a "Pikilia" plate for lunch at this fantastic Greek restaurant in Fremont, which consisted of Mousaka, Spanikopikataokipeiokipita (you know, that phyllo dough and spinach creation of glory), Dolmades, gyro meat, sauteed zucchini and Greek potatoes. And then you went to Oktoberfest. And to round off the day, you locked yourself in the hot, disgusting, smelly side room in Scott's office and practiced the Mendelssohn Scottish Symphony excerpt for an hour. Now. Not for any one singular item from this list, but, rather, this exact series of events combined, I have decided to make you suffer in such a way that we both know the pain will be resolved by - and only by - a traumatic trip to the Little Stupid Girl's Room. Please don't take this personally, but I must do this to remind you to Never. Do. This. To. Me. Again.

Sincerely,

Your belly.

One. More. Day.

This has been the longest week everrr. I feel as though my entire life is now made up of nothing but cardboard boxes. Cardboard boxes of varying sizes, inside of which are trillions of music books that serve no purpose but to fall on my toes or leap out and give me paper cuts on every possible piece of exposed skin. Yargh. So, in light of my both physically and emotionally exhausted state, I offer you a lame survey in lieu of an actual post. Sorry.


***

On second thought, I got through about 12 of the 40 questions and realized just how lame the survey was so I deleted it. You're welcome.

Anyway, speaking of toes (I mentioned it up there, see?), I spent the majority of yesterday walking up and down a flight of steps and back and forth on the sales floor carrying boxes of music books to and from the basement dungeon of doom (i.e. the print warehouse) wearing my awesome brown boots. What is not awesome, however, is that I feel as though I am now experiencing what is the birth of a potential ingrown nail on my right biggie toe. Poo. This makes me not so happy. I don't think I've ever had an ingrown toenail, but Scott had one a few months ago and it was DISGUSTING. So today I wrapped a band-aid around my toe (makes no sense whatsoever) and wore a pair of sandals to work. Hopefully I can stave this thing off before it gets bad.

Ugh, I'm so tired that I can't even blog right. So I give up. I think I'll just watch the season premiere of Survivor: China and hope my blazing wit and humor return by the weekend. Byeee!

UPDATE: I just Wikipedia-ed "ingrown toenail" to do some research (And, boy, do i know how to chooose my dependable scientific sources!) and nearly vomited in my mouth from looking at the pictures. I'd add the link here, but I am not that cruel. Blech.

Sweet Holy Moses!

PBS' Live from Lincoln Center is showing the New York Philharmonic doing an all-Dvorak concert (by which they mean, of course, an all-AWESOME concert!!!)...featuring Yo-yo Ma and the Dvorak Cello Concerto. Oh God. I think I just creamed my pants. If you missed this one I think they're re-televising it on the 25th. This will never be deleted from my TiVo. Gotta go drool over the television ... Ciao.

ps. Stanley Drucker has been with the freaking New York Phil for goddamned almost sixty years?! Are you kidding me?! He doesn't even look sixty years old. What is he, Satan's spawn?! Good lord, that's ridiculous...

Notes from a Monday

1. Today, I nearly strangled a fifty-year old (I'm guessing?) piano teacher with my own bare hands. Her name is Doris (of course) and she is a heinous betsch everytime she comes in. The grand epitome of everything you do NOT want your child exposed to when taking music lessons. Also, I have determined that she smells like whatever she had for lunch three days ago mixed with wet cat food.

2. I just downloaded an obscene amount of music from iTunes. I couldn't help it. It all started with Mendelssohn's "Scottish" Symphony (It's one of the audition pieces next week for the UW Wind Ensemble -- hey, better to prepare one week before an audition than never at all, correct?), then Smetana's "Die Moldau" (I was listening to it on the radio, which made me realize what a travesty it is that I don't have a recording of it in my own personal collection), which was on an album which contained Dvorak's "New World" Symphony (One can never have enough recordings of this piece -- or any Dvorak piece for that matter...plus, c'mon, Vienna Philharmonic? Um, yes please.) which naturally led to the Dvorak "American" String Quartet (Oh God, yes more Dvorak! Don't stop!) and ended with, yup, you guessed it, yet another recording of Ysabel's Top Rated Most Orgasmic Piece In The Entire Universe Ever: the Dvorak Cello Concerto* (Ooooh, how did I live this long without a recording of Jaqueline DuPre's performance? Jaqueline DuPre with the Berlin Phil, no less. I mean, I've got Yo-yo Ma with Berlin, Rostropovich with London and Jan Vogler with New York, but this one was a blatant hole in my obsession collection. I nearly soiled myself - in a good way - upon listening to the first minute of the second movement...).

3. This Friday is payday. Thank the lord because, well, see above. Also, the next time Doris comes in, I may not have the strength of will to not strangle her and then I will have to post bail.


* As previously mentioned by me here, here and here.

Humans... * hurl *

1. Busy morning. I walked in to work and, literally, within the first 3 minutes already had 3 different people tell me that there were 3 different people on the phone wanting to talk to me. And then it didn't stop for the next hour after that. The best part was when some horrible ugly Mistress of Satan started berating me because she had been standing there for "the last half hour waiting for somebody to help her." Oh? I'm sorry. But if you had been standing there for the last half hour -which you were not, skank - you would have seen that the phone has been ringing non-stop all morning and that I and the two other people working have been running around like chickens with our heads cut off helping everyone else and their mother. Also, if you are standing 6 inches in front of an entire display of music books, holding a music book, leafing through said music book, looking at the pages inside said music book, and not attempting to stop me as I walk by you numerous times as you are obviously looking through said opened music book, I am going to go ahead and assume that you are content to continue leafing through said opened music book and not standing around tragically waiting for somebody to help you for the last 'half hour.' In any case, what is it that you need help with? Oh, you want to know where our clearance titles are that were advertised on the front door? Please to let me kindly direct your ugly fat head 90 degrees to your right at the corner of the store currently 10 feet away from you with the numerous big multi-colored laminated signs that say "CLEARANCE CORNER." And I will save you some dignity (oops, no I won't) by not mentioning the brightly colored arrows on the floor and walls with the accompanying signage that says "This way to savings! Visit our Clearance Corner!" that every three-year old that comes into this store is able to follow. How unfortunate for you that you were not able to locate this magical brightly marked giant invisible display of books during your tragic 30 minute wait. That must mean you are incredibly stupid. Also, your hair is greasy. Go wash it.

2. To top it off, I went upstairs to the accountaing office to get some coffee and it was disgusting. It tasted like hot water mixed with dirt from the bottom of my shoe with a hint of hazelnut.

3. 1.5 more days until the weekend. Praise Jeebus Hallelujah. If I had any money in my bank account to spare, I'd go to Target on my lunch break and give myself some retail therapy. But I went to Target two days ago*, as well as yesterday**, and am running out of expendable income. Also, it is almost 3 in the afternoon and it seems kind of late to take a lunch break now anyway. Might as well just hammer through the rest of the day and save myself some gas money, right? Blagh.


* two nice sweater tops on sale (good for autumn!), a ginormous pack of toilet paper (we are down to our last 2 rolls...no good when you live with a poop-making dynamo), roughly 5 trillion packs of gum, a big glass mixing bowl, and 2 cookie sheets

** a metal baking pan set (two round cake pans, two rectangle cake pans and a cookie sheet for $12!), white cake mix, and lemon & pepper kettle chips (verdict: delicious!)


UPDATE: You know what I hate? Being yelled at by overly-aggressive Russian piano teachers. Ugh, I don't even know if she was angry or not, but it's getting late in this very longest of days, and everything with a heavy Russian accent sounds very accusatory to me right now. Also, I'm thinking about making some sort of improvised baked pasta dish for dinner. You hear that, Kristina? I'm cooking! I would use this as an excuse to go to Target for my third Target run in as many days to buy a decent glass bakeware set, but I just checked my bank balance online and my computer actually just sprouted arms and reached out and bitch-slapped me in the face for thinking about spending any more money. And I suppose I can make do with my metal baking dishes purchased just yesterday even though baked pasta dishes with all the crispy brown delicious melty cheesy goodness sounds so much better when envisioned in a pretty glass casserole dish. *sigh* Next Friday, though, my pretty little Visa debit card. You and I have a little date...

Go Niners!!!

Me: *smiling as the 49ers win over Arizona on the Monday Night Football opener* "I smell a Superboooowl..."

Scott: *rolls eyes to the back of his head*

***

Also, this is driving me batty and I'm calling on all my music-nerdly friends to give me their opinions:



Because we are music nerds, Scott and I spent a hearty chunk of the evening debating the rhythmic breakdown of the Monday Night Football theme. I think that, assuming this starts with a 4-note pick-up (tied over the bar line) on beat 3 in 4/4, there are 3 measures of 4/4, then a measure of 6/4 and then back to 4/4? How do you hear it?

Meanwhile...first, I take online grammar quizzes and now I'm analyzing the metric outline of the Monday Night Football theme? Oy. By the way, did you know that the theme song's official title is Heavy Action, written roughly 4 decades ago by British composer and pianist Johnny Pearson for the BBC television show Superstars? Didn't think so. Now you do. Thank you, Wikipedia.

***

UPDATE 1: Dan thinks it is a 3-note pick-up and written completely in 4/4. Scott also thought this last night. That is, until I set him straight because I, of course, am always right.

UPDATE 2: Ben thinks...a lot of things. Oof, just read his comment, it's pretty funny brilliant. Except for that fact that he is wrong and I am still right. Bottom line: I seem to be the only one smart enough to know that THIS STARTS WITH A PICK UP RIGHT ON BEAT 3 PEOPLE! ENOUGH WITH THIS "AND" OF 3 BULLPOOP. I CAN'T BELIEVE NOBODY ELSE HEARS THIS BUT ME! AGH.

UPDATE 3: Oh dear God, I can't stop watching that kitty video I posted on Sunday. Everytime he stretches his puddy tat arms and then smacks his face with his widdle furry paws my insides get all melty and I try to jump through my monitor so I can swallow him whole. I must be ovulating.

This is how I unwind after work.

I would just like to say that I got a perfect score on this grammar quiz. I am awesome (as if you need me to tell you that...). I guess the loser from Craigslist who never emailed me back about that proof-reader job will be sorry now.

This is going to be me tomorrow morning...

***

Also, this was one of the entries from my blog's stat counter:

http://www.google.com/search?q=huge wieners&hl=en&start=10&sa=N

Meaning that at 5:09pm on September 4th, somebody in Baltimore found my blog after Googling "huge wieners." Hehehe. Sorry, anonymous reader. I don't think this is what you were looking for.

Alllll better.

One long-awaited night of sleep undisturbed by an alarm clock followed by a therapeutic Star*ucks soy caramel macchiatto can work some magic, no?

My frustration-filled previous post was work-related, as you might have guessed. You know, being in charge of your own department for a company is all well and good when you, for the most part, can pretty much set your own schedule and go about your business undisturbed and, most importantly, unsupervised by your boss. However, every once in a while, you do find yourself in a situation in which you are left to clean up after the mess created by well-meaning but astoundingly incompetent people who show a tremendous amount of skill only in finding the singularly most convoluted, inefficient and nonsensical way to do, oh, anything. And then when things, for some reason, don't turn out well, an angry phone call gets placed to yours truly. And because I am so awesome, I spend the following two days waving my magic wand and sprinkling my fairy dust around (oh wait, I mean just using my brain...) until everything is aaaall better, and the incompetent people realize what they did wrong, the angry people realize that they had nothing to be angry about in the first place, and I realize that I deserve a bigger paycheck.

Anyway, in case you didn't know, I am hella glad it's the weekend. That's right. Hell-ah. We had an early (blurgh) meeting yesterday morning that involved everybody else talking and me sitting in the farthest possible chair nursing a double Americano and sending text messages to Scott that said such things as "This meeting is sooooo booooooring." and "I want to SLEEP." But I never got any text messages back because he was still sleeping. Lucky bastard. I vaguely remember at one point the Bossman said, "Ysabel, did you want to say anything regarding print? How are things going?" to which I responded with a half-conscious smile, a slight nod and the a-ok sign on my right hand. Yeah, I think that's what happened.

In other news: I'm now in the very early stages of beginning to think about going back to school for a post-graduate degree in music history. More on that in the coming months, I suppose.

People are idiots!!!

AAAAAAUGH.

More later. Blurgh.

It was Tchaikovsky's Marche Slave.

You know what I love? Classical radio stations who have a complete listing down to the minute of their programming on their website. Seriously. If not for this, I would have been left to wonder for all the rest of my days what the hell that piece was that I was listening to on my drive home from work today that I could not identify, even though I've surely heard it at least ten times before and can whistle the melody in my sleep. Way to go, Seattle's 98.1!

And for your listening (dis)pleasure, here is the piece in varying interpretations:

GOOD

BAAAD

What is this "labor" you speak of?

Happy "Labor" Day everyone. To celebrate, I am filling my day with as much non-laboriousness as possible. So far, I have taken a shower, put on my pair of yellow-moons-with-happy-faces pajama pants and requisite clashing orange t-shirt, plopped down on the couch, wrapped myself in my second-favorite comfy blanket, and have been flipping through marathon showings of "Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations" on the Travel Channel and "America's Next Top Model" on MTV. Sweetness. Also, I should note that I first began typing this post 4 hours ago. At that point, I had about 3 paragraphs of witty, humorous and clever anecdotes ready to share. And then this infernal hunk of metal and wires decided to randomly shut down before I had a chance to save anything beyond the first two sentences...consarnit!!! Anyway, now that I've had a few hours to cool down, I'm going to try again.

1. Note to self: Make Scott clean out Bela's litter box before he heads home to California for the weekend in order to see his family and to watch the Cal vs. Tennessee football game (go Vols!), so you do not find yourself hovering over the long-neglected box of filth, breathing through your mouth while scooping out the massive collection of cat turdies and piss-soaked litter whose fumes have been left to ferment for so long that it is burning through your esophagus and causing your eyes to water. Yes. Duly noted.

2. I have eaten way too much in fiber-deficient foods during this extended weekend and now I feel as though things are, so they say, a little backed up on the expressway (See? Methaphors!). To remedy this, I have brewed up a fresh pot of extra-strong coffee to help speed things up. Keep your fingers crossed.

3. This morning in the shower, I shampooed and conditioned my hair with this fabulous Shiseido Tsubaki hair care set that my wonderful mommy got for me on her trip to the motherland this summer. It is fabulous. Oh wait, I already said that. Anyway, it made my long locks so beautimous and luxurious that I no longer want to chop my hair off. There. The choice has been made. I will almost certainly, though, probably change my mind again the next time I see some girl with a cute bobbed haircut on tv and instantly convince myself that I must have her hair. *sigh* Such is the life of a female.

4. I think the coffee may be starting to work. Joy!

5. I had a very scintillating phone conversation with my friend Ben (also known as "Daddy #1) earlier this afternoon during which he pointed out that girls do not necessarily pee while they poo (Yes, this is what we talk about on the phone, and, yes, this is why we are such good friends), whereas, according to him, boys always have to pee at least just a little bit everytime they poo. Is this true? And if this is, why did I not know about this before? I tried to Google this subject to see if I could find any documentation to further support this statement, but after Googling such subjects as "boys pee while poo" and "male urinate during poo," I felt the need to give up the study before coming across any substantial support. Perhaps this is a project I can continue further while at work tomorrow.

6. And finally, in between Tony Bourdain and Tyra Banks today, I also watched a little bit of Oprah (Ah, the trifecta!) and noticed this:




Yes, indeed. How often do you clean? Hopefully, often enough that you never find hidden filth in your ho. Hahaha. And you are reading that correctly. The woman on this show had kept the same underwear for THIRTY YEARS. Get thee to a Target, woman!

And on that note: I hope everyone has had a wonderful 3-day weekend. Back to the grind tomorrow...


UPDATE: Oh, coffee. So predictable. So efficient. :)