Life after college?

I feel...lost. I have no idea what I want to do after I graduate, and it scares me. I really think I could grow into choral conducting, but I'm also really starting to enjoy directing. I feel like I have to pick one, and I don't know which one to choose. I don't want to choose either of them, really. I want to be really great at both of them, and study both of them after I graduate. But...that's the way college is. In undergrad, you're pretty good at a lot of things, and then in grad school, you become excellent in just one thing. That's the way the process works. But you know me. The way things have always been normally isn't good enough for me. And another thing is, I'm just too preoccupied just getting through the week to think about what I'm going to do in a year...a year...I graduate in a year from this coming December. That's really scary. I'm more scared than excited. I'm scared to be thrust into the real world with no real clue about what I'm doing. At least education majors have a goal: get a job, be a teacher. The only thing left to decide is where. But for me, I'm still trying to figure out the what. And I hate that. I've never really been certain about what I want to do with my life, my ultimate career goal. It's changed so much over the years, and I've never been like, "oh my gosh, I HAVE to do this!" It's always been just a neat idea that I might be able to do. I don't think that means I have no goals, or no ambition. I'm just really torn. I'm good at more than one thing, and so obviously that makes it harder to choose. My parents have always assured me of that, all the way from when I was in high school, agonizing over what to study in college, which of course affected where I wanted to go to school. They told me that it's okay to not know. It just means you like and are good at more than one thing, which is good.

But none of this helps me figure out my life. And that's the depressing part.

Decompressing

I haven't really had sufficient time to decompress after Fall Tour. It was a real growing experience for me. I feel like my voice grew and changed just over the course of the weekend. Of course, 8 performances in three days will do that to you. I wish that I hadn't been so tired the whole time. I would have like to have gotten to know the new Kapelle members better. But I was just so exhausted the whole time, and putting all my effort into just making it through the next concert or church service to really care that much about socializing. I think I'll be able to get to know everyone better on Spring Tour in March. That's really far away, I know, but spring tour is a lot more relaxed than fall tour is.

I think that this tour I was so exhausted that I had a really hard time connecting emotionally to the music. I felt like I was pretending to understand the character of the pieces.

The dominating feeling of the weekend was exhaustion. The whole weekend was kind of a blurr. I feel like it went by really quickly, but also that last Friday feels like two weeks ago. I really dislike fall tour because your whole sense of time is thrown off. You sing so much and the days are so long that you lose track of exactly how many days have passed. I'm kind of glad that I only have one fall tour left.

sigh

Okay, so I may have been overreacting a LITTLE. (I bet you didn't see THAT one coming. ;) ) Everything worked out okay, and I should have known that it would, because it always does. I really need to stop worrying. It's bad for my health.

People will always let you down, but God will never disappoint you.

I just wish people would do the things they said they would do, keep the commitments they said they would, come to the places they said they would be when they said they would be there. Some circumstances are unavoidable, I understand that. There are just somethings that you just have to cancel other things for. But this... can't you go and buy a car tomorrow? "I'm supposed to do this thing tonight, but I'll just tell her we have to do it later, because I don't feel like it, and I'd much rather buy a car." NEWS FLASH: sometimes we have to do things we don't feel like doing. Today, I didn't feel like singing in chapel with Resonanz, or going to work, but I did both of those because I said I would. This thing is really important to me. But I guess you're just too caught up in whatever the hell it is YOU want to give a damn about things that are important to other people.

I know that I'm a control freak, and that sometimes I wish I could control what other people do, make them do the things they said they would, keep their commitments. And I know that I can't make people keep their promises. Only God really keeps his promises. He's the only one that can truly do EVERYTHING he says he will. And I have to learn to be okay with just God keeping his promises. I have to learn to let that be a comfort to me. But it's not really a comfort at this point. It's still a disappointment that the people who say they'll do something won't really do it.

Little kids are amazing

Yesterday a girl in one of the preschool classrooms I work in asked me, "Why is your hair orange?"
"Why is my hair orange?" I repeated. "Because God made it that way."
"No!" she exclaimed.
"No? Then why is my hair red?"
"Because Jesus died on the cross. See?" And she pointed to the sculpture of Jesus on the cross on the outside of the Chapel.

At first I brushed this off as a cute little kid-ism, and it could certainly be said that she saw the sculpture and saw my hair and then drew a completely unrelated comparison. But I'm starting to see more in this explanation of why my hair is "orange." My hair is certainly this color due to my family heritage (red hair is a recessive trait, both of your parents have to have it, etc.) and also because God made it that way. I could have just as easily have had brown hair, like my mother. But I didn't. He decided to make me look different than a lot of people. This is one of the ways he made me unique. We all have different traits and gifts that God gives us, and this is one of the ways he sets us apart from each other. But we are also set apart in a different way.

He has set us apart through Jesus' death on the cross. We are his own. We are separate and different from everyone else. Holy-"set apart."

I could have taken this way too far, in a direction that doesn't even make sense. But her statement just seemed too profound to be just a little kid's nonsense statement.

Fear

I feel like shit. What else is new? I know I said I wasn't really looking forward to Kapelle Tour this weekend, but I've changed my mind. I'm kind of looking forward to doing nothing but sitting on a bus and singing all weekend. It'll be a nice escape from everything. Things haven't been so good. I won't go into detail, though. I just wish things were better. I feel really overwhelmed right now. And afraid.

Messiaen

Tonight I went to this concert at school with music all by Olivier Messiaen. It was amazing. The first half the the song cycle, Poemes pour Mi sung by Julia Bentley, who is an absolutely fantastic mezzo-soprano. Messiaen wrote the piece for his wife. "Mi" was his nickname for her. Sometimes on music he'd written he'd write a small staff at the top of the first page and write an "E" in it (the note, E) because essentially the third scale degree is "mi" in solfege. Sorry, I'm a music nerd. I'll try and put it more simply. In The Sound of Music when Maria is explaining music to the kids. "Do, a deer, a female deer. Re, a drop of golden sun. Mi, a name I call myself..." Okay, so "Do, Re, Mi." Mi was Messiaen's wife's nickname. Goodness! That took WAY too long.

Anyway, the first half was that song set, and the second half was Quartet for the End of Time. It's so amazing. It's based on the book of Revelation. What Messiaen tries to achieve is the sense of timelessness of heaven. I'm not going to even try to describe how amazing it is. You'll just have to listen to it yourself. It made my soul happy. I left with my soul filled to the brim with Messiaen's visions in color of the book of Revelation.

He had this disease where his senses got all mixed up. So he would hear a chord and see a color. Most of his pieces have color discriptions written in them, like "deep violet with gold flakes crossed with orange streaks," or something to that effect.

I could go on and on and on about all the things I learned at a Lectures in Church Music session this afternoon about Messiaen. But I won't bore you.

Long story short, Messiaen is wonderful. I feel peaceful tonight.