LaLaLa

I have a new project! As of yesterday!

I am learning to play…the viola.

Yes. The viola.

There is this sterotype that viola is for losers. Please set it aside while you read this post, and BEAR IN MIND that I was a vioLINist first.

When I was 3 I fell in love with the violin and begged my parents for lessons. I’ve been playing for 12 years now and I can do pretty much anything on the violin. Plus, it uses the treble clef which is normal.

 

My current violin is very good student quality and has a one-piece back that has been described to me as “mesmerizing”. Really.

Then when I was 11 I somehow ended up playing the piano despite not asking for piano lessons…I took piano for a year and then quit. I like to listen to it but it drives me crazy to play it. I mean, how are you supposed to get your hands to move different directions?

Then when I was 13 I started French horn. French horn is really from Germany and should not be confused with English horn, which is French and not a horn. More on that later.

Then I made this bet at a party which involved me switching to the viola. The person with whom this bet was made later kind of backed out, so I am playing violin with the orchestra in our spring concert but learning and auditioning on the viola as well. I am determined to get one of the first 2 stands. (that would be one of the top four people. out of nine)

I started yesterday. It’s a a borrowed instrument, Scherl and Roth, and so far it has not posed many dififculties. The only thing I’m struggling with is reading the music, because unlike a normal instrument it does not use treble (violin, flute, trumpet, horn) clef, nor does it use bass clef (cello, trombone, bassoon) NOR does it use the Grand Staff (piano and organ), which is stupid.

Also, I accidentally kept tuning the wrong strings because I was so used to using my finetuners without looking. And it’s bigger, so I haven’t completely gotten used to holding it yet and my fingers have to strech farther. Or further. Whichever is more correct.

My completely objective observations on viola vs. violin so far:

Viola pros:

• It has a very nice deep sound
• It’s easier to get “gigs” or orchestra positions because there’s less competition
• There’s less competition
• It’s easier to listen to than a violin when you’re a student

 

Viola Cons:

• The orchestral parts are boring
• There’s not even a whole lot of solo repertoire written specifically for it
• Everyone will crack jokes and/or think you’re a loser
• It doesn’t resonate as well as a violin or a cello
• The clef is unusual and you have to learn treble as well
• You won’t know how to shift (ha! ha!) (okay, i remained unbiased for most of the post.)

So my general summary so far would be: viola is a fun project and a good thing to learn, but not so amazing that I would tune down (ha!) my violin or horn playing to concentrate on it.

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot like Hanukkah!

Just kidding!

Not that it doesn’t look like Hanukkah or anything.

But Christmas—CHRISTMAS!—is in two short weeks!

You always know it’s getting to be the holidays when stores start playing Christmas music all the time. What I don’t entirely understand is, why don’t they play GOOD Christmas music? They always seem to pick the most horrible carols, sung by the most awful singers of all time. I can sing better than some of these people.

So, to go along with last year’s favorite Christmas Carols post, this one is about least favorites.

Yesterday I was in Shoprite (I do not reccommend going to Shoprite on Tuesday because that is apparently Large Quantities of Elderly People Run Over Your Toes With Their Shopping Carts Day) and they were playing an average bad Christmas album, when “Deck The Halls” came on. Deck The Halls, as I have always understood it, is a fairly peppy tune, which is meant to be sung as follows: “Deck the halls with boughs of holly, falalalalaaalalala” etc. If you are like me and have speed issues, you may wish to sing it like this: “Deckthehallswithboughsofholly, falalalalalaaaalalalala”. Either of these renditions is perfectly acceptable.
The man on the intercom, however, was not singing it like that. He wasn’t even singing it slowly. He was singing at approximately 32bpm, which is as slow as my metronome will even GO. As far as I can tell, this is a man who was out late at a holiday party and had a LOT of eggnog before he decided to make this recording. See actual rendition:
Deck…the…halls…with…boughs…of….hollllyyyy….
fa…la…la…la…laaaaaaaaaaa…la…la….la….la…..

PLUS he sang it in a nasal voice.

So why won’t stores play decent Christmas music?

These are the main songs I heard while out shopping:

-All We Are Saying is Give Peace a Chance
-Jingle Bells
-Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer
-Baby It’s Cold Outside
-Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
-Frosty the Snowman
-Carol of the Bells
-We Wish You a Merry Christmas

I don’t really even like most of these songs. Especially not Give Peace a Chance.

So, do any of you have a Christmas song that you just can’t stand?

And, Happy Holidays!

That was a joke, but last Sunday at the band concert our director (Yes, this is the cosmos man) said, quote, “Our last tune is We Wish You a Merry Christmas, and we do hope that you have a happy holidays, no matter what you believe.” And he was dead serious.

Oyak

Every day after evening prayers, there is a party called Oyak.

Actually, Oyak is the name of a building outside Taize, where they sell useful items such as snacks and toothbrushes, and soda which is about 10 times better than ours plus it comes in more attractive bottles. No one knows why it’s called Oyak but it is, (actually OYAK is the abbreviation for the armed forces pension fund in Turkey but…) and it makes for great conversational material such as, “Will I see you at OYAK tonight?” or “Want to go to OYAK now?”. Around the building there are some tables and benches, and behind the building there’s a field where Europeans whip our tails at soccer. There’s also some tents back there, but open tents, not the kind you sleep in. And every night after worship was done everyone would gather and there was music and dancing and cheap food and every so often you would run into someone who was either drunk or stoned and giggling uncontrollably.

Then there were the people who got drunk and sang “La Marsillaise” until 4am, but we won’t go into that now. These European people like THE WORST of our music. (yeah, I know that the Marsilliaise is French, I’m just seguing…) As far as I could tell the guitar players knew about 16 songs and they just kept playing them over and over and over.

At any given moment during the evening if you went down to Oyak you would be sure to find:

• Clapping games. There were a ton of clapping games, and it’s a great way to bond, I suppose. The chants to them were in all different languages, but the basic clapping stuff was the same. I must have learned 6 different ones that week. And one of the things about Taize is, no one is a stranger. You can randomly introduce yourself to people and randomly join in games with people from Lithuania or Poland or wherever. The bishop is standing there watching you teach German people the Chicken Dance. It was great.
• Other games. By this I mean ZipZap (which I am really really pathetic at, by the way) or the game where you go, “Hyah!” and make a slicing motion with your arms, or the Italian version of Twister, which interestingly enough one girl had to play with a guy who was about to be ordained as a Jesuit priest. That got kind of awkward.
• People over in the corner smoking something that was not cigarettes.
• Four or five different groups of people doing various songs or chanting. Everyone centered around the musicians, clapping, and if you were close you got a bench to sit or stand on. Around the periphery of the crowd would be groups or people dancing.
• Crazy American people obsessing over the Fanta bottles. Their soda is better than ours.
• Some guys with guitars singing Country Roads Take Me Home, among other songs. They also LOVED Hit The Road Jack and Land of 1000 Dances, probably because they require no lyrical memorization at all, the Backstreet Boys, and Lemon Tree, but not the version you’re thinking of, the one by Fool’s Garden that starts, “I’m sitting here in the boring room…”. They all knew all the lyrics to everything, too. People from Siberia knew more popular American music than I did.

I think that to understand Oyak you really have to be there, plus I’m tired, so to close here’s a video of Oyak: centering on people who don’t know each other, or if they do they met two days ago singing and dancing together, which is a pretty awesome experience.

At least until you got a headache from hearing Zombie for the twelfth time and went back to the tent to take aspirin.

 

For MORE OF THE OYAK EXPERIENCE visit youtube and type “taize oyak” into the search box.

 

This was taken while I was there so I might even be in the background somewhere…but I didn’t look closely enough to tell.

Goodbye!

I leave for Taize tomorrow morning, so I just wanted to take this opportunity to let everyone know I won’t be posting (actually, I have a few things on the AutoPoster but I’m not sure I did it right) for the next 10 days or so, although I promise to post lots and lots of pictures when I come back! Seeing photos of other people’s trips can get rather boring though, can’t it? I have been thinking of different sorts of trips lately:

• Mission trips, where you go to help others and usually become very very dirty in the process
• Pilgrimages, such as to Taize, where you look for God in yourself
• Vacations, which are usually fun fun fun, but not always
• Trips. I think everyone knows what I mean when I say, “trips”.

We often go on trips to the Midwest, where there is a lot of empty land. We’ve seen the great sights of America, such as Mount Rushmore, which consists of the heads of dead people carved in stone; EVERY DARN ONE  of the Laura Ingalls Wilder historical monuments, including the dugout on the Banks of Plum Creek, which interestingly enough has quite a bit of marijuana growing near it; or the Geographical Center of the 48 Contiguous States, which is in the middle of nowhere Kansas and is extremely windy. It does have a cute chapel though. Also, the Land of Oz theme/adventure park, which if I remember correctly is in Garden City Kansas, and is made up of a) a yellow brick road, b) a swingset, c) an old train, for some reason, and d) a mysterious red barn with pictures of the flying monkeys that is never open.

Other people may go on trips to the Scottish highlands, where they can meet braepeople and watch men in skirts singing songs containing words like “brankie”, while eating haggis; or they may go to the Milford Highlands, where they can stay at the Scottish Inn, and, during select weekends such as Milford Music Festival weekend, experience the charming quaintness of Milford by getting stuck in traffic made up of 1400 people from New Jersey, shop, and listen to music, much of it provided by people not yet out of high school. (I just had to find a way to work the Milford Highlands in there cause I find it highly ironic.)

Anyway. Goodbye for now, I love you all, pray for me, see you in August!

Au Revoir!

I (heart) Cheap Books

Today was the Friends of the Library Book Sale, which is a semiannual event at which you can buy used books extremely cheaply. I went to the early sale (they charge you $10 to get in an hour before it opens to the public) and got a box and a bag full of books for $26. I now have a stack of mysteries, a stack of sort-of literature, and a stack of random chapter books to work my way through.

Sort-of literature is defined as The Prince, “Peanuts” in French, an English textbook from fifty years ago, a book on the teachings of Rami, etc. Last year Ben got a HUGE unabridged dictionary for $1. It’s great. We also got some assorted videos. When I say “assorted” I mean “assorted”; they are: The Santa Clause, Jurassic Park, the Muppet Movie,  and Lord of the Dance. From puppets to killer dinosaurs to Irish dancing. Please notice that I managed to work both a semicolon and a regular colon into that last sentence.

I find the name “Friends of the Library” funny, partly because there is a large group of people who are apparently on amicable terms with an inanimate object and partly because it has a branch called the “Friends of the Children’s Room”, which could lead to all sorts of spinoffs, until eventually we are befriending the dark closet in the back where they keep the oversized books. Can’t you just see the news releases they would send out? “The Friends of the Dark Closet in the Back that Contains the Martyn Freed Collection would like to announce that their annual Talent Show and Karaoke Contest will be held….”

There were also several books I was tempted to get but did not, such as “An Idiot’s Guide to Ferrets” and the “Official Cookbook of the Detroit Junior Women’s Symphony”. The latter one is intriguing: the official cookbook? Do they often get people publishing unofficial cookbooks? And why “Junior”? Does that refer to their age or their size? Who even knew that there was a Detroit Junior Women’s Symphony? I can’t find it on Google but I swear that’s what it said. Not to mention that it was bright fluorescent pink. I would have bought it but all the recipes were for things like hotdish. And there were an incredible amount of books about a) the Kennedys and b) the Royal Family.

Anyhow, that was my morning.

Music Musings

You know you’re a music geek when:

• Your stand partner tells you he plays the psaltery. You say, “plucked or bowed?”.

 

• You spend valuable time arguing essentially worthless points, such as where to shift, whether to use a fourth finger or an open in measure 135, and the merits of French bow versus German bow…

 

• …and you enjoy it.

 

• You know which composer was the bridge between the Classical and Romantic Eras

 

• And you know the distinct differences in style between those eras and the Baroque Era, as well as which came first.

 

• No matter how sensitive and mature of a musician you pretend to be, you know, deep in your heart, that faster is more fun.

 

• You own your own soprano sax.

 

• You can play the harp

 

• You regularly ask and answer questions such as “do you have perfect pitch?” and “do you have a guitar pick?”

 

• You know all the verses and the violin riff to “Braes of Killiecrankie“, despite not being Scottish and therefore not having any idea what the words actually mean.

 

• When you’re bored, you practice.

 

• You know that in beginner books, they call the William Tell Overture “Go Tell Bill”, and this bothers you deeply.

 

• You know La Folia by heart, even though it’s the most boring repetitive song that ever was, and you know who it was written by and which number sonata it is.

 

• Speaking of violin sonatas, you know the difference between Handel’s Third, Fourth, and Fifth, and you will never admit that yes, they all sound sort of alike.

 

• Your high school ambition is to learn “The Devil’s Trill”.

 

• You can transpose by sight and yet you are NOT a French Horn player

 

• Rachmaninoff and Rimsky-Korsakov? Similar names, yet totally different.

 

• REAL orchestras tune to an oboe.

 

• You find Fiocco Allegro “fun”.

 

• You LOVE the Bach Double.

 

• You can tell viola jokes.

 

• When you screw up, you become mildly obsessed and play the offending section 50 times a day until it’s perfect.

 

• You feel that the portrayal of Mozart in Amadeus was disappointing.

 

• You actually watched Amadeus?

 

• You can sing Psalm 133 in Hebrew at the age of 12

 

• Bedrich Smetana: good or bad?

 

• Pachabel’s Canon? Three violins, one cello, a piano if you’re feeling reckless. That’s it.

 

• You’re sitting with twenty other people just like you; all holding small wooden boxes in the same manner; all watching a middle-aged guy wave a stick; all looking at a page full of little black dots with tails; and you all know exactly what to do. Enough said.

 

I am actually guilty of an astonishing number of these.

 

 

 

 

Passports…

they’re expensive, problematic, and absolutely necessary for traveling out of the country.

So since I’m going to France this summer, I had to apply for one. This is how it went:

1. A month or two ago, Dad brought home two forms, one for each of us. Something somehow happens to them, so he gets two more. These two inexplicably went missing, so since they have a new design out he gets four more at the post office.

2. Mom attempts to fill out the forms. On the first one, she accidentally signs on the line, the line that is right below the bold printing that says, “DO NOT WRITE BELOW THIS LINE”. So that form gets trashed.

3. On the second one, she fills it all out perfectly, except that each time the form asks for a birthday, she puts in mine. “I wonder why they keep asking for your birthday?” is what she said, and then she realized that most of them were for writing other people’s birthdays. So that form gets the Wite-Out treatment.

4. We have a photo taken at Rite-Aid. The plain off-white background is on rollers and will not stay down. The clerk told me, “It usually takes a couple of tries to get it to stay down” but she had to pull it thirty-seven times before it stuck.You know how those annoying blinds always snap up at random moments? That was what it was like. They probably would have better luck using a window blind.  Then they had to reboot the machine. But eventually it works, and we get two reasonably unattractive photos. I think that is some sort of government regulation, that no matter how good you look in real life, in a passport photo you look horrible.

5. Because I am under sixteen, both Mom and Dad have to be present when I apply. So we meet Dad at the post office (an authorized Passport Acceptance Facility) on his lunch hour, where we are informed that they do passport applications every day except Wednesday, which of course is what day we picked.

6. But they tell us we can also go down to the courthouse, which is also an Authorized Passport Acceptance Facility. So we go to the courthouse

7. well, actually we go to the Administration Building, which is where Dad thought it was. But it turns out it was really in the courthouse, so we go there.

8. At the courthouse, we have to go through the metal detector, to determine that we are not carrying any weapons or (God forbid) loose change. Dad asks where they do passports. The security officer says, “in the Administration Building”. Thankfully the other security officer directs us to the Pronthonotary. Is that not the coolest word? PronThoNotary. That could be a sort of computer game, like simulated fishing. Simulated PassPortApplikation. Real fake legal documents!

9. I digress. Anyway, at the Pronthonotary they are busy, so they tell us to wait in the hall. Half an hour later they inform us that they cannot do my passport because I need a certified Birth Certificate, which we lost. Mom points out that we do have my Baptism Certificate, Certificate of Confirmation, Social Security Card, and a copy of the birth certificate, but apparently that won’t cut it.

10. So we leave, and the next day Mom drives to Middletown to obtain replacement birth certificates.

11. And today we came back to the courthouse. When we went through the metal detector the security guard was a weirdo with an accent. He said that when we came out of the Pronthonotary we would have to spell it, but I thought he said smell it and got confused. Anyway, we applied, only to discover that the picture was stapled to the form wrong. Once we got that straightened out, the Pronthonotary changed the date of my trip from July to May so the application would come through faster. THEN Mom saw Dad’s picture and said that he looked like a criminal. Also, swarthy.THEN we found out that Wite-Out is unacceptable.

12. So she gave Mom a new form, and we went to the hallway to fill it out. Then Dad came out, and said he was going to run down to the post office to get a money order, because evidently they don’t accept checks.

13. Then we had to unstaple the pictures and restaple them on the new form. Then Dad came back with a money order, and we had to say an oath.

14. And finally, after much ado, I have applied for a passport!

15. Hopefully actually using it won’t be this much trouble.

All-time Favorite Movies

 I was watching The Office, and in this one episode they were playing Desert Island, and arguing over which movies they would take. So, my top five desert island movies..(or my top seven….or ten…….or twenty-six……)..there are so many!

Let’s see….

• National Treasure-That was a great movie.”OK, who wants to go into the creepy rat-infested tunnel beneath the tomb first? “
• The Parent Trap- both of them were really cute movies. I especially like the butler in the remake.
•  The In-Laws- This is my ALL-TIME favorite movie. Serpentine!
• The Glass Bottom Boat- This is Sophie’s alltime favorite.
• The Pink Panther- The new one, with Steve Martin: Damburger!
• The Harry Potter movies- The books were better though! 
• I liked Cheaper By the Dozen, but only the second one.
•  ELF!!!- I love Elf.
• A Christmas Story- We watch this and Elf all year round.
• The Santa Clause
• Christmas With The Kranks- Ok, I have a thing for holiday movies.
• Night At The Museum- this is so not worth 11:50 an hour.
• The Out Of Towners- Moviewise the first one was better, but the second one is worth watching just for John Cleese.
• The Great Outdoors
• The Russians are Coming
• The Odd Couple
• The Sound Of Music- a great movie, but you can only watch it once a year. Otherwise it gets on your nerves and you go around singing about cream-colored ponies and crisp apple strudel, doorbells and sleighbells and schintzel with noodles, ect.
• By the way: In the How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria song, do you think it goes, “how do you catch a clown and pin it dowwwwnn?” or is it “how do you catch a cloud…”. This is a recurring family arguement. Please help.

 

 

I think that’s it. What are your five (or sixteen) favorite desert island movies?

The Church Chronicles, episode two

I am in charge of the acolytes, which means I hear whatever people say in the choir or as they’re walking in, and I have been a part of some great conversations.

The first one was when I was standing with the youth choir, talking to some second-graders:

girl: do you like my earrings?

girl #2: oooohhhh! Are they new?

boy: when I grow up i’m gonna have an earring!

girl: no you aren’t, silly, earrings are for girls!

boy: when I grow up I’m gonna have an earring for my TONGUE!!!!

Then last fall the youth went to see Godspell in Port Jervis. I say “the youth”, but I really mean Danielle, Jonathon, Jennifer, and I. No one else could come. The play was at a church……..but Mrs. Repenning pulled into the wrong parking lot. Actually, she pulled into a parking lot that was

a) deserted

b) dark and

c) on the wrong side of the street and several blocks down from where we needed to be.

It was a bit like an alley, really. Then, there was no place to turn around, so she had to back out. To do this she got Jonathon, who was in back with JJ, to turn around and direct her. JJ was making siren noises, which probably didn’t help her concentration either. (I used abbreviations here, because somehow everybody involved has really long names)

Mrs. R: (really worried tone of voice)Jonathonjonathontellmehowi’mdoingamigoingtohitanything?

J: You are three feet from a tree. Please. Stop. Now.

Thank you.

She continued backing and agonizing.

JJ: WEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeEEEEEEeeeee (siren noise)  

J: Good one! You must have missed that last car by at least six inches!  

JJ:WWeeeeeeeEEEEEEEeeeeeee….. 

Me: JJ, ferme la bouche. (that’s French for shut up. We had been discussing foreign languages on the drive.) 

J: (Spanish, but i can’t spell it right) Muertes cabayo y un pantalones.  

Me: What?

 J: The dead horse is wearing pants. 

Me: that’s what i thought you said………… *loud crunch* 

Mrs. R: Jonathon? What was that?  

J: You just ran over a little old lady in a walker.  

*loud crunch again* 

J: Whoops! There goes her husband!  

Danielle: I’ll get out and direct you. (she jumps out of the car, which is moving, albeit slowly) (sidenote: she thinks were geeky. we drive her to the point of jumping out of moving vehicles.) 

Mrs. R: What are you doing? 

D: I TOLD you I was getting out!

Eventually Danielle got back in the van and we found the right parking lot. Unfortunately, there were no more parking spots, so Mrs. Repenning, instead of turning around, backed out. That caused traffic problems, because there were six other cars trying to get in at the same time. Then Danielle started freaking out about how everybody in Port Jervis has guns and is out to get us. Mrs. R. was trying to reassure her when Jonathon noted that “if you see a man and a woman holding hands in Port Jervis you know they’re brother and sister”. His exact words- I did not make this up.  For some reason this really bothered Mrs. Repenning.

Eventually we got out of the parking lot and started looking for a spot on the street.

Jonathon: (Really incredibly rude word in German)

JJ: (repeats rude word several times)

Mrs. R: JJ!

I bet we’re the only church youth group who curses at each other in German.

Top Five Least-Favorite Books of All Time

I love books, ordinarily. And I love to read. But sometimes, there is a book that is so awful or hard to understand that I never go back to re-read it. Especially books for school. This is prompted by my parents getting me a “challenging” literature program for next year. We got it yesterday, complete with 26 books to read in 36 weeks, plus journaling and daily vocabulary stuff. Plus essays and poetry. They tell me I’ll enjoy it. It’s gonna be arduous. So here are my top five least favorite books of all time, and I would love to hear yours.

Also, please don’t throw rotten fruit. 

1. Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy- I loathed this book. It is the only book in the history of Olivia that I didn’t finish. Also, I think that the title is pronounced “Anna Karen-nina” but everybody else on the planet thinks it’s “Anna Karena”.

2. The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane- I think I’ve mentioned that I don’t like this one. Or anything else by Stephen Crane. Even his poetry is depressing. And the ending is such a disappointment.

3. The Pearl, by John Stinebeck- This was also violent, and I fell into a deep depression after reading it and ate nothing but avocados for two weeks.

I made that up. But it was sad. I liked the Grapes of Wrath, also by Stinebeck, but Tortilla Flat was just about a bunch of Mexican guys getting drunk and setting houses on fire. If you do read Tortilla Flat, grappa makes an excellent vocabulary word. It means Italian brandy.

Back to the subject.

4. The Snake Dreamer, by some author I don’t remember- Bleaaarrrrggghhhhh.

5. Anything by Earnest Hemingway- is it any wonder he committed suicide? I mean, at the end of A Farewell To Arms, the girl dies and the guy walks home in the rain. What kind of letdown is that? Ben saw the title of that one, went to my dad, and told him that the book was so depressing it made him want to cut off his arm. Get it?

Tell me yours! I love comments. Comments are wonnnnnnnderful. You are getting sleeeeeepy. Your eyelids are heavvvvvyyy. Leave a commmmmmment.

And Ethan Frome was not so delightful either.