On addiction.

Some people drink. Others do drugs. I take pictures of the Beebla.

BB surrounded by the things she loves most: blankets and toys. Look at that rump! It is intoxicating.

Handsome gentleman.

Look at his perfectly crossed paws!

I really REALLY wanted to post these Bela pictures on Facebook, but I already posted like five Bela pictures in a row. I didn't want anyone thinking I'd gone insane.

Speaking of drinking - on the way home from work yesterday, Schmoobs and I purchased a small bottle of whipped cream flavored vodka just for kicks. I had a small taste. DANGER, WILL ROBINSON! DANGER! DANGER! 

Just a small, unfinished lowball on ice caused me to have a dream that Schmoobles was the father of American Idol superstar Kelly Clarkson. And that, even though she is a mega pop music millionaire, he had actually become even richer because of some brilliant business dealings. Oh, and he had a rust colored curly mullet. And then, with his riches, Schmoobles-as-Kelly-Clarkson's-billionaire-mulleted-father bought a miniature horse THAT LOOKED JUST LIKE HIM! It was rust colored and also had a luxurious curly mane. Oh, and the Schmoobs-lookalike-miniature-horse was evil to anybody except for Schmoobs and spent the entirety of my dream attacking me, which was particularly distressing because, instead of hooves, the blasted thing had claws!!!

WTF.

I am now glancing at the remainder of that whipped cream vodka with a wary side eye.

Someday...

...I will have reached the point of adulthood where I don't anxiously count down the last seven days of every month in great anticipation for the next payday.

Someday.

Anyway, this morning, after drinking about 1/3 of my first cup of coffee at work, I went to the Little Underpaid Adjunct Instructor's Room to tinkle and I totally did a stealth number twosies instead. In and out (as it were) in like under a minute, probably. I love when that happens!

In totally related news: I know I said that I was going to give you a final exciting conclusion to my Adventures in Daisy Shooting drama from earlier in the month, but I lied. That's old news now. It was either a surprise colon cleansing brought on courtesy of my (yes, still ongoing) vinegar-water regimen, or I accidentally ate some funky shrimp. Either way, my colon was cleansed (by the end of the whole adventure, I'm pretty sure there were dusty particles of meals I ate in high school coming out of me), I am thankfully back to normal and I now carry a travel-size bottle of Pepto Bismol in my purse. I'm not kidding.

So no final word yet on my situation in Lexington. I hope to have more news in about a week and a half.

ps. I also have to say that I think it's completely disingenuous that all of you claim to be totally unfamiliar with your legs going numb as you sit on the porcelain throne. I think it happens to me like once a week. So you are all clearly liars. Either that, or I have naturally poor blood circulation... Yes. That's it.

More words about my favorite subject. (Going to the bathroom, duh.)

Anyone else sit on the toilet for so long that when it's finally time to wipe up and get up, you get scared that your legs are too numb to support your body weight and you'll end up falling on your face on the bathroom floor (OR WORSE)?

But then you manage to safely clean up, flush and walk away on numb legs from the bathroom only to be attacked ten seconds later by the craziest ticklish pins and needles stretching all the way down to the tips of your toes and you end up falling against a wall and standing perfectly still while yelling at nobody in particular "Whoooa. WHOA! WHOOOAAA!" and giggling like an idiot at the same time because moving your legs just the slightest bit in any direction will cause you to collapse in a heap with no motor function in your lower half?

Anyone?

Don't lie.

Anyway. More stories about daisy shooting (The Exciting Conclusion.) and Lexington next time. Probably.

Adventures in Daisy Shooting.

Is there some kind of stomach bug going around? Because my intestinal system has been in super hyper overdrive for three days now. It was really cool the first day. But by the third day, I am finding myself actually frightened of eating for fear of being caught in an inconvenient location when *ahem* nature calls. I mean, like, I probably visited the Little Underpaid Adjunct Instructor's room three times in the span of one hour on Friday morning. For number twosies. AND I HADN'T EVEN EATEN ANYTHING YET. How is that possible? Are my bowels conjuring matter?

It's gotten so bad and become such a major part of my existence since Thursday that I have even gotten Schmoobs talking about it openly with me on a regular basis. However, since we all know that he doesn't believe that girls POOP, I have had to come up with the delightful euphemism of "shooting daisies" out of my nether regions. My exit chute has now officially been dubbed the "daisy shooter." And yesterday, we were invited out to dinner and drinks by a co-worker and his wife. When Schmoobs asked me if I was up for it, especially considering my daisy-shooting adventures and the fact that we were planning on meeting at a Mexican restaurant, I said, "Sure. But if I lean over to you with a panicked look and say 'I need to shoot some daisies,' then you know that we have to go home."

And then, this morning, a revelation of sorts:

Ys: "Hey, you know what I also realize probably didn't help things any?"
Schmoobs: "Hm? What's that?"
Ys: "On Thursday morning, instead of breakfast, I just had a cup of coffee and my glass of vinegar-water. And the night before I took an Acidophilus pill."
Schmoobs: *forehead smack*
Ys: "Oh. And I had a cream-filled donut later that day."

Anyway. I do wish this thing would hurry and clear itself up already. I miss eating with wild abandon with no care in the world. Especially on the weekend. Three days of colon cleansing daisy shooting is plenty enough for me. Time to go slug some Pepto.

***

UPDATE: Is this the delayed effect of inadvertent colon cleansing due to my ACV pee-water regimen?  I mean, I started this thing over a month ago, but maybe because the dosage is so small yet regular, the system flush occurs after a few weeks? Half of my internet sources from Oogly Googly tell me that ACV is supposed to help alleviate the D-word (diarrh...daisy shooting) while the other half of my internet sources tell me that taking ACV will cleanse your colon and may cause the D-word. THANKS A LOT, Googly. Very helpful as always.

Tornadopocalypse 2012!

So, twelve tornadoes blew through here yesterday. I'm not sure if it was a good or a bad thing that I was home since I didn't have to teach any classes. Our music building is new and large and when the storms blew through Rockwall, there was nobody else with me at home besides the Beebla, which kind of stunk. At least nobody was at home with me to witness me peeing in my pants. 

Thanks to Jeebus that the two that tore through our section of Northeast DFW just barely missed us! But what we did get was strong enough to have me curled up as far inside our curved sectional sofa, wrapped up with BB (Bela didn't give a flying crap about the tornado nonsense, as you will see.) and a large comforter to shield us should anything bad happen. The most common advice is to get to the lowest level possible and inside a bathtub with a mattress on top of you. But guess what we have? A top-story condo with two showers encased in sliding glass doors! Wheee! Also, an entire wall made of windows! Double wheeee!

At the end of it all, we just got about 20 minutes of intense storming, huge hail, things flying around and hitting against our walls and sunroofs, but no damage. Unfortunately, other nearby cities were not so lucky.

Pictures!

Right underneath where it says "Rockwall" is our condo. Notice the giant storm cell housing tornado #1 that is heading towards us. Bizarro-Steve Carrell looks concerned. Luckily, it just grazed us to the North.

 Hail. From our 3rd-story Window Wall of Doom, you can see they are quite large.

BB curled up on the couch at the beginning of the storm.

Bela looked like this the entire time. Did he even wake up from his afternoon slumber during the Tornadopocalypse? Probably not. Honey Badger don't give a sh**.

This is tornado #2 - the one that nearly made me crap my drawers. Again, we are in Rockwall and the tornado tore a path that passed just East. Phew. 

Oh, here's a fun story: So Schmooblebuns was at work yesterday afternoon. Our university is located about an hour directly NE of Rockwall, i.e. directly where the storms headed after it blew through our condo.  That red line going through Fate and Royse City is I-30, which is what we all take to get to work. It is also the exact path the second tornado took after it passed through. After the second tornado blew through Rockwall, I got a call from Schmoobs:

Schmoobs: "Hi, are you okay?"

Ys: "Yeah, that was scary, though. Where are you? Are you in the music building?"

Schmoobs: "No, they cancelled classes and the storm passed by here already so I'm heading home."

Ys: "Um...no. You better not do that."

Schmoobs: "Why? I heard there's another storm coming later."

Ys: "Yeah, it just finished here and has touched down on Royse City. It's literally headed right to there along I-30. You're going to drive right into it!"

Schmoobs: "Okay...I guess I better turn around then."

Ys: "Yes. DO THAT."

Only, guess what? Schmoobliebottoms realized that he was almost out of gas and he couldn't head back to the university. He ended up pulling over under a highway overpass where other drivers already were, trying to wait out the storm. By the time the tornado hit where he was, it was wrapped in rain, so you couldn't tell you were looking at a tornado. EGADS!! SCHMOOBLEBOTTOMS!  Anyway. He said it was completely terrifying, but he eventually got home safe. The best part was that, during this time, when I assumed he had turned around and gotten back to the safety of the music building but was in actuality in a highway underpass very near the path of a tornado, I got in the shower. Needless to say, I came out with 9 missed text messages and a billion phone calls from Schmoobliez convinced that I had somehow blown away with BB in a twister and was now singing to a bunch of colorful little people.

And then I cooked this for dinner and we all lived happily ever after:

The end.

Much Success!

So, whatever happened with that student that I talked about in my last post?

Well, even though I thought it wouldn't necessarily be the wisest thing to do, Schmooblebottoms let it be known to him after rehearsal last week that, not only was he, Professor Schmoobles, aware of the Facebook posts that he had written and stupidly made public, but that other faculty members (our department head, his tuba teacher, me, etc.) were aware as well. He also let the student know, in the way that only Schmoobles can, that perhaps he should consider the fact that his failings in school and in music are nobody's fault but his own and it is time for him to start owning up to his lack of work ethic.

That seemed to - FINALLY - put the fear of Jesus in him. The next day, Schmoobles received a very contrite and seemingly sincere apology email (again with the email) from the student. This was Schmooblies response:

"Please understand that your professors here are trying to help you, even when we are hard on you and criticize you. Honestly, those are the times when we are trying to help the most. The music business can be an ugly place out there. It is cut throat, competitive, and unforgiving. If you are not careful it will eat you up, or at least can be unfulfilling, which may be even worse. It can be an incredible line of work though, but you have to be a good musician (something that you have to earn in the practice room and actively seek out yourself) and you have to know your music theory, music history, and if you are an educator, your pedagogy as well. Most importantly, you have to have good study / organizational habits and a strong work ethic along with boatloads of tenacity and resolve.

To that end, I hope that you make it. It will take a lot of hard work and you may need to change some habits, but your teachers are behind you more than you may completely comprehend yet."

And that is that.

Oh, and I saw this follow up Facebook post right after:

So, only time will tell if this really is a turning point for this student. He seems genuine in his desire to change, but of course, talk is cheap. Like I said to Schmoobliez, what these students are often too young and inexperienced to know, is that teachers like us don't need explanations, apologies or promises. And we don't hold grudges over past behavior once change occurs. Truthfully, it doesn't even matter how bad and lazy of a student you had been or for how long. The minute you decide to change your behavior and become a good student and hard worker, that's what you are to us now. A formerly poor student who turned things around and is now awesome.  Anyway, I hope this kid realizes that and makes a change for the better.

What else...what else?

Oh. So we might be moving to Lexington. Yeah. There's that. I'll probably know more within the week.

And I gave a recital last night!

I knew it was going to be a good recital because 1) I came down with a sudden extreme sore throat while lecturing my classes in the morning and became extremely fatigued in the afternoon. In my experience, I perform best under pressure when I am feeling just a little under the weather. Probably something about it balancing out the nervous energy and adrenaline so that I am actually quite calm when it comes time to perform; and 2) I went backstage to the green room to get my instrument ready about an hour before the performance. I opened up my gig bag to find that my reed case had somehow come unlatched and open and ALL my reeds - the ones that I had spent the last 2 months obsessively choosing, working with, playing, preparing and ranking in order of quality for this recital - had become strewn all over the inside of my bag. Two of them were completely ruined and the rest were out of order. I had no idea which were the three that I had decided would be my performance reeds. So that was awesome. A good way to distract myself from any potential tummy butterflies.

Oh well.

Anyway. The recital was with our piano professor and his wife, a fantastic soprano. Our program was a pastoral themed (lots of stuff about lovesick shepherds and animal-strewn grassy hills) chamber music recital in order to celebrate the beginning of Spring. They are such great people, amazing musicians and I had so much fun working with them the last couple of months. The best thing was having my first official faculty recital be performed with two musicians that I have such confidence in, that, out of the 90 minute program, I really only felt about 3 seconds of nervous butterflies. Other than that, it was just a mixture of excitement and fun. I think I've found my secret to a successful performance: vague flu-like symptoms and great collaborators. There were, as always, a couple small technical flubs, maybe a missed cue once, but I thought my sound was good and our musicality was on point. I'm just glad I felt like I represented myself well in front of an audience that included other faculty members, our department head and a crowd of students that had, until that point, only heard me talk at them about music. Now they know I can play as well. Woot.

Here we are!

Now I think I'll take a day off from practicing.

Effing kids and their effing laziness and their effing entitlement.

I feel like I've been spewing a lot of anger and bitterness on my Facebook lately in regards to my disappointment and incredulousness at some students' attitudes, so I'm re-directing it here in an effort to not appear completely vile and cynical to my colleagues that see my Facebook posts. Obviously, it's not a new thing. There are always going to be entitled kids in every new class. - And I should interject this by stating that there are also always many students who I learn to admire and gain an affection for because they show true dedication and respect for their work. - Something's different this year, though. There are just SO many bad students. Bad writing. Bad studying. Bad attitudes. And, above anything else, such unbelievably low standards for themselves.

The reason I react to it so strongly is that these are students that are supposedly going to be future professionals in the music and music education world. At least that's what they think. That they are going to join the ranks of people who have worked extremely hard - extremely hard - to be able to join a profession and field that is competitive and very unforgiving. And they did it because they also knew that the rewards - not necessarily monetary, snort - of being in music and educating younger generations about music are indescribably grand. The problem is that what their attitudes towards their education show is that they want - no, expect - to get handed this degree in four years for being utterly mediocre. Sometimes, much worse than mediocre. Piss poor. They don't practice. They don't study. They don't show up for class.

They, in one instance this past week, have their eyes glued to their laptop watching some completely unrelated video when the rest of the class is watching the DVD that I bought - with my own money, for my students - of Leonard Bernstein conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in the finale of Beethoven's triumphant Symphony No. 9 in order to usher in our section on the Romantic Era of music and when I specifically walk slowly around the perimeter of the rather large classroom to call his attention and tell him to turn off his computer, he insists that he was merely "trying to bookmark Beethoven 9 on his computer so that he could listen to it over the weekend and a pop-up ad came up that was really flashy so it looked like he was watching something else."

Bullsh*t. Sorry.

Pop-up ads take roughly .7 seconds to click and close.

As I told his applied teacher later on in the week, after I received the student's email apology and explanation, that I accepted his apology but I don't believe a word of his excuse. Why would somebody have tickets to see the Chicago Symphony perform live, and spend the entire concert glued to their cellphone watching a separate Youtube video? Nonsense.

Thanks for the message. I don't believe you. Now, do better.

I don't yell at students. And I very rarely call them out in class. But I watch them. Like a hawk. Even while I'm lecturing. And I was watching you, student. I've been watching you all semester while you paid very little attention to the material I presented to you in class. I've been watching you as you consistently fail every single quiz and exam I give because you are so ill-prepared. I watched you make zero use of the chapter readings I assigned, the power point presentations I created for every single topic, the performance videos I show, the music clips we listen to and the 20-page study guide I created that literally that outlines everything we talk about in class and that you are quizzed on. And I watched you this day as your eyes were glued to the flashing video on your computer screen while your hands made zero effort towards clicking anything closed and readjusting your eyes up to the screen at the front of the classroom. I also watched you in the previous theory and ear training classes I taught you in as well, as you displayed the same exact lack of concern for your education and attendance.

So, when you proclaim yourself to be a misunderstood martyr who was just so captivated by this piece of music all of a sudden, that you felt deeply compelled to mark something for review and for study over the weekend - which is three days away, by the way - and was brought down by one singular pesky pop-up ad, I'm going to go beyond just looking at the myriad possible explanations that could be applied to the matter at hand and I am going to conjure up all of the information that you have given me over the past several months about you and your attitude towards music and education and call bullsh*t.

And when another professor then calls you out and informs you that your performance and attitude is simply not going to be sufficient for completing this major successfully - harsh, but very factual - you continue to play the martyr.

Who are these people that are telling him he is a "great musician"? Bernstein was a great musician. The members of the Vienna Philharmonic are great musicians. Beethoven was a great musician. A kid who is sitting in the lowest band and fails all his classes yet puts zero work into his training is not a great musician. And sorry, Gina, whoever you are, that your youth director told you you couldn't be a music minister because you were fat. That has nothing to do with this kid. He can't be a professional musician because he is bad and won't listen to any of the people that are trying to help him become less bad. You know, the teachers that are trying to teach him. If he'd show up to class. pay attention and quit making excuses he would understand that.

Here's another life lesson for you, student.  There are no martyrs in music. (At least not since the Renaissance Era, probably.) 

There are people who fail, certainly. I've done that myself plenty of times. As a college student, I skipped out on classes that I thought were beneath me. None of them were music classes - at least there's that. But I didn't follow the rules, even though the rules were simply to show up, do the work that you already knew how to do and you would get your A. But the classes were lame and a waste of my time, so I would skip class and laugh and laugh in my idiocy. I laughed until the end of the semester, when I turned in my very well-done final project and the teacher informed me that she would be giving me a C for the final project because I "did more work than I needed to which shows that I was not present to listen to the directions." 

Damn.

I passed the class, but I didn't get an A like I should have. I should have. And the teacher was right. I was an idiot and I blew my shot at a 4.0 for being a moron. Lesson learned.

And then there was the time that I went in to grad school as a new teaching assistant and a performance major. It was a fairly spontaneous decision to go to grad school and my playing was out of shape from lack of practice. So when the auditions were done and seatings were posted, I was sitting last chair in the Wind Ensemble. Last chair underneath a section of undergraduates who looked at me like a joke. I don't remember much about that first semester. We took a trip to New York to play in Carnegie Hall. Where I sat last chair. I should have been at the top of the section. I should have. Besides that, I remember practicing. A lot. A lot a lot. Kept my mouth shut, swallowed my pride and practiced. So I could get my chops back. So that I could take the auditions again the next semester and get the principal chair. 

And that happened.

So, no, student. There are no martyrs. There are only people who work, fail, work harder and succeed. But you, student, will probably never learn that lesson. Sad.

ps. If our job as a teacher is "not to discourage people from being a music major," then you must ask yourself the question: What is my job as a student? Answer that question and I think you'll at least gain a little bit of perspective.