Blog Entry: Life shifts, music and chocolate chip cookies
Today I am thinking about two things: music and chocolate-chip cookies. And how I can get more of both! ;)
I had a big musical crisis (no, really) three years ago, when I resigned from my job at an opera company, officially dropped out of my music history PhD program, and lost all professional musical ties. Add in the fact that I'd started out as a performing musician (I went to the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music for undergrad and got a B.M. in French horn Performance as well as Music History), originally planning to play professionally as my dayjob...and you can maybe guess what a big life shift this was for me.
I wish I could say that I always react to big life shifts with grace. Unfortunately...no. No, no, no. Take this as one example: the week I got my degree in music performance, having accepted a Fulbright scholarship based on music history and having officially decided that I would not be a performing musician after all...I stopped playing the French horn. Period.
I'd been playing it for 12 years, devoting most of my waking hours to becoming a better and better musician, loving playing even after I realized it wasn't what I wanted as a career...but when I finished my degree and realized that I was now officially off the professional track, I just couldn't play anymore.
I wanted to play. I still miss - really, physically, painfully miss - playing the horn. I LOVED it. But every single time I've tried to pick it up again since 1999, all I can hear is the difference in how I sound now from how I sounded back when I was practicing 5 hours a day.
Not good. And I haven't found a way around that yet.
So. I resigned from my job at the opera company in 2007 because of the CFS, and I dropped out of the PhD program because, with my CFS-limited energy, I could either try to finish the PhD or I could write my fiction...and I'd already decided that I didn't want to be a professor (even if the CFS had allowed it). I've never regretted giving up the PhD except in the feeling that I was disappointing my supervisors. It was definitely the right decision to focus on the career I loved and wanted - writing - instead of the career I thought I should follow - academia - but, but, but...
For about a year afterward, I couldn't listen to classical music. And when you consider I'd been listening to it and loving it since I was tiny (my parents are both fans), playing it on one instrument or another since I was six, going to classical concerts or opera performances regularly ever since, and I was thirty when I made that second big life/career shift...
Big loss. Big, big loss. Luckily, unlike the French horn issue, I managed to mostly get over it within a year or so. I listen to it regularly again now, although I still find it painful to listen to the operas I was writing about for my PhD thesis, or to go to live orchestra concerts. (Back to the French horn again...) But for some reason I still have a hard time persuading myself to buy CDs - persuading myself that it's "worth it" - even though listening to music I love is one of the best feelings I know.
Well. This weekend, I bought a new CD. It's not classical, for once, but I adore it: Eva Cassidy's Wonderful World. (I used to own, and absolutely loved her album Songbird.) I bought it yesterday and have had it on nearly constant repeat ever since.
What about you guys? What's the most recent CD that you've bought? Have you had any major life-shifts that changed your identity? And do you have any good chocolate-chip cookie recipes to share? :)