actual jewish mother

As I post this, my parents are both busily waltzing away at the Vienna Opera Ball. They head to Austria every few years to do so, with elaborate ball gowns and natty tails tuxedos in tow. Later this week, they’ll be at the Royal Ball in the Hofsburg Palace as well. Which, frankly, is pretty damn cool.

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prototypical jewish mother

A young Jewish man excitedly tells his mother he’s fallen in love and going to get married. He says, “Just for fun, Ma, I’m going to bring over three women and you try and guess which one I’m going to marry.” The mother agrees.

The next day, he brings three beautiful women into the house and sits them down on the couch and they chat for a while. He then says, “Okay, Ma. Guess which one I’m going to marry.” She immediately replies, “The brunette in the middle.”

“That’s amazing, Ma. You’re right. How did you know?”

“I don’t like her.”

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a less than smooth return

Earlier this evening, had my first orchestral rehearsal since returning to New York, and I’m afraid it wasn’t pretty. Sibelius and Tchaikovsky were likely rolling in their graves at the travesty I committed upon their symphonies.

Allow me to explain: Playing most musical instruments is a bit like riding a bicycle – a few months off might leave you slighty rusty, but after a relatively short amount of practice you’d likely once again return to a reasonably high level of proficiency. Playing the trumpet, however, is a bit more like pole vaulting. Sure, there’s a skill component, but it’s also a rather physical undertaking. Tooting the horn requires strength and endurance in the small muscles of the lips, tongue and cheeks, muscles rarely called on for heavy lifting in everyday life. As a result, with too much time away, even the most technically skilled trumpeter is back to square one.

Which is, essentially, where I was upon my return from LA. Though I had brought a trumpet out with me, a number of mechanical problems with it (and, frankly, my severe lack of free time) kept me from playing nearly at all. As a result, I picked up the horn last Friday to find dodgy intonation, cracked notes, poor endurance, no upper register, and a deflated, ‘badly injured cow’ sort of tone quality. In short, I was your basic middle school trumpeter. After a week of heavy practice, I’m now somewhere near high school level, which, while representing strong progress, is still rather short of the professional proficiency my fellow musicians were expecting.

I spent most of rehearsal trying to convince myself that I was likely overdramatizing the problem; that I might not, in fact, be anywhere near as bad as I was imagining. But with my section-mates shooting me dirty looks, several violinists coming over during break to ask if I was feeling alright, and the director occasionally making comments to me such as “that’s okay, we can tune the passage up at the next rehearsal,” I wasn’t particularly reassured.

As a result, I’ll be redoubling my practice efforts between now and next week; with luck, I could even progress to sounding like a pro having a really bad day. Baby steps, baby steps.

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circularity

“We must not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.”
– T. S. Elliot

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paging doctor phil

Any hints on how to make a long-distance relationship work between two people too busy to think, much less regularly see (and, often, even talk to) each other?

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like a tourist

This afternoon, on the way back from the bank to my office, I was stopped by a gentleman in Times Square handing out tickets to the taping of Letterman. With nothing better to do (aside from, say, actual work), and having never before attended such a thing, I decided to skip out the rest of the afternoon to attend.

In summary: the guests were good (Steve Martin, Amy Sedaris, The Foo Fighters), the sketches and Dave’s jokes were rather bland, and the incontrovertible highlight of the show was the poor makeup woman whose sole responsibility seemed to be sneaking on and off stage to quickly powder Paul Shaffer’s bald head between shots.

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roommate blues

Over my last few months absence, paying bills has apparently been a rather low priority item for my roommates. As a result, I returned to New York to find our apartment with no telephone service, no internet access, no cable, and no electricity. Well, actually, yes electricity, but only because I was able to catch the people from Con Edison on Friday morning just as they were turning it off.

Further, it seems part of the flushing mechanism in our toilet broke several weeks back, and instead of calling the landlord to have it fixed, they’ve simply been reaching in to the tank to manually lift that little rubber stopper at the bottom.

It’s been a few years since I’ve had roommates, and I’m beginning to remember why.

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back in ny

Went down to the Meatpacking district today to eat lunch at Pastis. On the way back, I passed a man holding an elaborate phone conversation on a banana placed to his ear. Ah, New York City, it’s good to be home.

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helpful note

If, because the documents, clothing, and other items you’ve accumulated during two months in Los Angeles don’t all fit into your suitcase, you cleverly decide to UPS some things back home, be sure to check the pockets of any pants you ship, so that you don’t realize the following morning that you’ve actually sent your wallet out by mistake as well.

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