Motivation

I still love the pages, but I'm otherwise finding inertia in my way as I watch week one quickly expire. I may just copy an idea I've seen on other blogs this week and go to a thrift shop if I don't find the motivation to innovate for myself an artist date with a little more personal juice. At least I won't skip it. This reminds me, though, of the first time I attempted the AW. I didn't get the dates. I think I ended up just taking myself to the movies most of the time, to see nothing in particular - whatever was playing nearby. I remember a film I saw on an artist date in those days as perhaps one of the worst I've ever seen, actually. I was the only person in the theatre, too, for this memorable matinee, and I thought I caught a whiff of what is her damage from the staff. Maybe it was just annoyance because if I hadn't shown up they wouldn't have had to run the horrid thing at all. In any case, I didn't do that part of the program very well, and it's quite possible that that contributed to the apathy which resulted in me dropping the program after three or four weeks (though I did keep the pages up for quite awhile).

I don't want to slip into Artist Date Apathy again. I know on some level that I deserve to think up something of interest to me and do that, but so far I just have a sort of whining I don't wan-na, I don't feeeel like it attitude about it. Blea.

I'm also dragging some ass on the tasks. So I figure I might as well do one right now, while I'm thinking of it. The semi-public nature of this online group is certainly a motivating factor. I said I would do this. So. Here goes.

Task number 3. Time-Travel: List three old enemies of your creative self-worth. The number one old enemy of my creative self-worth was my mother. She still is on some level, though that has more to do with what I internalized than how she is now. There are many specifics I could cite regarding her anti-nurturing of my developing creative self, but what comes to mind most prominently at the moment is that she always seemed jealous rather than pleased or supportive when I did anything interesting musically. (She's a singer from a musical family but never played any instruments or read music.) I remember once playing her something on the piano that I had copied by ear when I was about fourteen - I have a good ear, and it gave me great pleasure to figure things out exactly. (I must have been pretty excited about this to play it for her. I guess I just wanted to share it with someone, anyone.) But after I had played a little bit she wrinkled her nose and said, "How do you do that?" with great distaste, like I was a circus geek who had just performed an impressive but revolting contortion. The message was clear: what you just did was unpleasant for me.

Copying something by ear may not be creative in the pure sense, but this was not the message my budding musician self needed to hear as she developed her skills. For more about monster numero uno, please refer to my previous post. Or don't - it's depressing.

(Guess I'm combining Task 3 with Task 4 - write out a horror story. Works for me.) So... let's see. Number two would have to be the first voice teacher I worked with as a freshman at Berklee College of Music. Her name was Nancy. She was tall, too, though not as tall as me. She asked me to sing something for her at the beginning of my first lesson. I played and sang an original song I was pleased with. When I finished, the first thing she said was, "Do you always sing in your head voice?" Oozing disdain. At the time I didn't even know what that meant. Now I know that I have a large range (over three octaves) and a high break (C-C sharp), for those of you who might speak that language. (It's not too shabby, and she may have been incorrect in her rhetorical observation.) In that same lesson she also insulted my haircut. This woman later stole my boyfriend, which in a way seems a natural trajectory. Nasty bee-atch. Music school, I found, was lousy with bitter and lupine shadow-artist teachers who should under no circumstances have been in the position of shepherding young creatives.

Number three: my neighbor and classmate Victor, with whom I had incidentally been best friends in early elementary school. His family's house was set close to ours, and their back porch was next to the room my piano was in. At around age seventeen, I noticed him out there one day summer day when I had been playing and singing for awhile with the windows open. I went to the window to say hi. I think I also said something like, hope you don't mind the music. I was just making small talk, though I suppose that sort of comment might be construed as trolling for a compliment. What he said was, "All your songs sound the same." Nice.