symbology of mine

I should probably start with an apology to my parents, to whom I just left the most irate answering machine message - yes, old fashioned, Seinfeld-era, landline answering machine. And now the explanation.

I was in Chicago for the weekend, arriving Saturday morning to feed a friend's cat, getting back to Michigan just minutes ago - around midnight Michigan time. Over the weekend, I went to a fun pot luck and the Symphony Saturday night, another symphony concert on Sunday, taught two piano lessons and had dinner that night with my good friend Laura. Leaving dinner on Sunday was difficult, but I couldn't figure out why. Once in the car, I realized that I wasn't quite ready to be alone for the week and started to feel lonely. But I also felt motivated and excited about the things that I could do this week. Last week really felt like work; this week is more open, so I can do more fun things that motivate me.

I'm planning on starting my orchestra piece - at least the research for it - this week. I got inspired by going to the Symphony twice, paying close attention to the string writing. Writing for winds is easy; brass, less so; strings even less. It's just harder to write "idiomatically" for them. Just like writing at the piano produces certain results, you don't want to just write piano music for strings. There's much more flexibility with dynamics, for instance, since you can have them sustain a note (forever) and then crescendo or decrescendo. There's also the issue of the bow and its direction: how many notes do you give them per bow? and so on.

And so when I got back to Michigan, feeling conflicted and confused but ultimately optimistic, I noticed that my parents had opened a bottle of my wine over the weekend. Ostensibly, no big deal. Ostensibly, it's just a thing, an object, practically immaterial. But in this case, it had become even larger as a symbol than as an object. This particular bottle, I had bought in Paris over a year ago and had been saving it for a special occasion. Somehow, there haven't been any - none that I've deemed worthy. Schade. So the bottle became an even larger symbol - one of the noticeable lack of special occasions. Which I find terribly depressing. And so now I'm finishing it off. And, you know what? It's not amazing. Pretty good, but I'd give it a B. The build up, the anticipation, the idea of the wine had gotten larger than its actual quality. Then again, for the 25 or so Euro I paid for it, I would have expected more. Either way, it's over, and in a way, I'm glad that I don't have this burden any more, this reminder of lack. It's become just the latest thing in a string of stuff - objects, facebook friends, whatever - that I've discarded (with or against my will) to lighten the load I carry.

So now the two original opposing emotions - that my optimism (naive idealism) had managed to subsume - have spawned a litter of half breeds running amok. I think there's a sailor's saying like: sad and lonely at night nothing to fright; sad and lonely in morning, friends and family take warning.