Last year was the first time I couldn't use "California", or "Chicago", or "New York". Turns out Oregon - even Portland - is quite obscure to most people in England, which meant I had to explain the PNW. Next time I'll just fudge it with Chicago, where I was born.
I will never play as well as I sing, & from the perspective of someone who does much better with the one, learning the cello is sometimes humbling. But hearing your work rewarded with a beautiful phrase or a new tonal color is great compensation for being a medium-level musician.
(deletes long rant about women being gaslit by medical industry with the word "discomfort"). I have video from my last recital, but I am not posting it because I am still getting used to the few millimeters difference in the string length & my intonation is very much not great.
The difference in the cellos is night & day. I played that 4/4 - the best my parents could afford when I was 14 - for nearly 40 year. It was a workhorse. It was also the wrong size. The new cello has a beautiful voice, & more importantly, fits my small hand. Extensions aren't supposed to hurt?
On the floor is my bow case; I had upgraded my bow several years prior, to one I was told was secretly really good, but they had to replace the screw so it was no longer original, & I could therefore afford it. This shop confirmed it was worth way more than I paid.
A brunette white woman playing a cello in a room full of cellos.
And finally a pic I had taken at the shop when I knew I had found The One.
The 2 piece back of a brown cello with visible grain from the maple used to construct it.
Here’s a pic of the pretty back - the old cello was made of plywood, so having an instrument with honest to god actual flaming is a novelty for me.
Two cellos on a brightly colored carpet. The one on the left is larger and orange Than colored.the one on the tight is a bit smaller and more brown.
Want to see some cello porn? I took this pic of my new cello (right) which is a 7/8 size instrument next to my 4/4, now property of the David Douglas School District music program.
Feel like I got the rare PCP who doesn’t treat “perimenopause” as a thought terminating cliche. Told her about my insomnia she said “perimenopause… we can fix that”, gave me a cheap rx & 2 days later - problem solved.
I can eat ice cream for breakfast and never have to go to a math class or church again. I'll trade that for any amount of playground equipment.
Looking forward to this. I really enjoy sci-fi movies that aren't just pew-pew action flicks where they shoot lasers at a bunch of CGI monsters/ships. I wouldn't call it "hard" sci-fi, but maybe Human Scale Sci-fi.
the whole purpose of the post-menopausal woman is to prevent the rise of generative AI
... later that week Tiger the bookstore cat peed on it. So I never had to experience that catastrophic level of cognitive dissonance again.
I got an AWESOME dark green wool cloakish coat thrifting in NYC. I felt so bad-ass. It had a great drape. I got to work & a co-worker said, "Wow, great coat! You look just like one of those guys in Star Wars..." & I said "Jedi" at the same time he said "Jawas". Devastating.
I’ve sung on the stage of Wagner’s Festspielhaus and Wrigley Field.
Pay attention to the things fat people won’t do. We know the built environment is crumbling because it collapses for us first. We know air travel is getting shittier because it pinches us the hardest. We know medical care is getting more expensive and more evil because it make us the problem.
(Also, not to do a Hot Taek, but the Vienna Boy’s Choir are hooty and can’t sing a schwa.)
I love this so much, as a girl who sang, a young woman no one would train as a contralto, the church alto section leader replaced by a counter-tenor, & former A2 in the fantastic Vox Femina Los Angeles. There is something gross hearing a boy sing Mary’s moving words in the Magnificat.
… a “lap band in a box!” because the man who was treating me for multiple endocrine disorders refused to believe me when I told him I never overate. That med was later featured on one of those “have you or your loved ones died” lawyer commercials.
When I was pre-diabetic my endo told me that PCOS made me gain weight on my middle that made it hard to lose weight, & then said if I would just lose that weight I wouldn’t have that symptom. The next appt he offered to give me a fraudulent diabetes dx so insurance wld cover byetta… (1/2)
Over the last several years I have gone from medium fat to smaller fat, & nothing has radicalized me more to stand up for my former fatter self & current fatter friends. Esp as a woman. Got tits or ass? Drs will treat you as fat until you are visibly skeletal. You are fat until you disappear.
I appreciate all your efforts, as well as your transparency, regardless of outcome.
One of them was a band leader - "the" Jimmie Koa of Jimmie Koa & His Royal Samoans - from the 30's to the 60's. This other was a shitpiece who ran out on his family so I neither know no care what he did for a living.
Architect dad would often bring me to the office when I was wee & there was no child care. The back side of an old blueprint roll, a variety of mechanical pencils & erasers, & various templates that had landscaping or toilets & I was good for hours. Try that with AutoCad or Solidworks.
That has to be one of those AI glurge books. What author in their right mind would call their book "<subject's> Biography", and then leave the word "memoir", which implies that it is written by the subject, in the title. Yikes.
I have observed this as well! I have lived in several other states, and the willingness and promptness with which Oregonians (and adjacent) will pull over for emergency vehicles makes me proud. Thanks for being Not Embarrassing about one thing in particular, Oregonians!
People who vote for fascism because they want people who are not Fundamentalist White Men to suffer should get used to being disliked, disrespected, & despised. Them’s the breaks, bigots.
Ok, everything collapses in 20 years. I guess I’ll spend the next 1.5 hoping that blur was some guy trying to steal the one carrot I managed to grow that I shot & not just a neighbor bring me pie before my body collapses into a dysfunctional goo.
Since I can’t manufacture my own thyroid hormone, my body doesn’t know what to do with the insulin it does make, & I only have so long before everything looks like a green blur if I can’t get glasses, I fail to see what the point of depriving myself of culture & fellowship in the interim would be.
Bosun’s chair?
