First, the celebrity death of this week is obviously Yasser Arafat. Normally, I wouldn't speak ill of the dead, but this is a case where I'm willing to make an exception. What is remarkable is that he died a natural death. Let's just hope that the loss of the father of modern terrorism opens doors, unlikely as it seems.
As for what I did this week, things were rather hectic at work. I continue to be amazed at the teamwork our group is capable of. We don't even stop and think about it a lot of times - we just get things done. As a result, two of our three big budget issues are gone. The person who was trying to kill our program has given up. And we have backing from two other organizations in trying to preserve another big item. The rest of the month is still going to be insane, but there's a lot less doom and gloom than there was earlier in the week.
On Wednesday night, I went to a free concert at the Kennedy Center. (In case I haven't mentioned this before, there's a free performance every evening on the Millennium Stage. The thing I find particularly astonishing is that they print a program every day.) The artist, Juliet Wyers, was billed in a way that had led me to expect somewhat humorous, somewhat science-related songs. Instead, there was rather dreary standard singer-songwriter fare. If you're going to sing a song about how the first warm sunny day in Portland, Oregon makes people happy, you should actually attempt to sound happy. She did have one rather interesting piece about beekeepers, but I suspect that the essay she adapted it from was the real strength, rather than her own limited chord range. Oh, well, you can take chances on unknowns when it's free.
Then I spent the weekend wrapped up in storytelling. I was at a workshop with Donald Davis all day both yesterday and today, as well as attending his concert at the City Museum last night. (He also did a Friday night concert, but I skipped that.) The concert was mostly new pieces and mostly lighter ones. The story I liked the most of the five he told was the final one, about doing laundry, though the ending could have been a bit tighter. It was particularly interesting listen to his stories after hearing things he'd said during the day about how stories work.
As for the workshop, I'm not sure I actually learned anything per se, but it did get me to do some work on a story that's been hanging around on the back burners of my mind for a while. The externals of the story have to do with taking music lessons as a kid. I have tons of little details, e.g. Mr. Manassian holding my notebook over my hands so I wouldn't look at my fingers while playing the piano. But I realized that there's a bigger context that I'm not telling. When I played duets with my brother, I always played the harmony part. Later on, I took viola, an instrument which is lucky to get three or four notes every ten measures. And I complained about never getting the melody. That's actually one of the things that's wrong with our culture, though. Everybody wants the melody, leading to cacophony as we avoid listening to one another and try to take center stage. We need those rich harmonic tones to make things pull together. I can do something interesting in the story with this, though I'm not sure how it will pull itself together. What's important is that now I know what the story is really about.
I suspect the real solution is finding ways to have both melody and harmony in your life. I'm very much a "figure out what you want and do it" person, which is the melody aspect. But I enjoy the teamwork I have at my job, where my role is definitely a harmonic one. For example, most of the point papers I write go up the chain with somebody else's name on the bottom of them. It's the balance which makes beautiful music.
Copyright 2004 Miriam H. Nadel