Thinking

[unbound_spirit]

-My younger cousin Jonny starts his Master's degree in Astro Physics this fall at Cambridge University!  Maybe he'll get to attend some Hawking lectures!  Maybe I'll have to go visit him.

-Last Saturday I was hanging out in Chelsea with a friend of mine from college and some of her friends from MIT.  They all work in the stock market or in these high-pressure finance jobs.  And after work and on weekends they spend their time getting drunk at places that resemble college bars.  One of them got on my case about not drinking.  He was like, "If you were one of my friends from work or something, and I knew you didn't drink, I would never invite you to come hang out with me," as if that would be such a horrible thing.  As if I should want to spend my free time hanging out with drunk guys in pseudo-college bars, which are environments I never cared for, even back in college.  Um, no, sorry, I actually have a life.

That also got me thinking about somthing someone on here posted from Donald Trump, and how he said one secret to success is doing a job that you never want to take a vacation from.  My career as a musician is a job I never want to take a vacation from.  I don't feel the need to get drunk and escape from life.  Well, okay, I do sometimes, but for other reasons, not work related.  I never want to retire.  I'm always thinking about work because I love it.  I'm an artist and I always have an inclination to do art. 

-I'm lining up a lot of auditions...

Comments

[kvschwartz.livejournal.com]

"If you were one of my friends from work or something, and I knew you didn't drink, I would never invite you to come hang out with me."

Wow, that was so sweet of him.


Congrats on the auditions. :D

[unbound-spirit.livejournal.com]

Yeah, seriously, I was like, "excuse me?" This guy totally had a chip on his shoulder.

Thanks, I hope the auditions actually lead to something. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

[kvschwartz.livejournal.com]

Hmmph! Jews don't cross their fingers; that's so Christian.

But I send good wishes your way. :)

[kvschwartz.livejournal.com]

And fishes.

"This guy totally had a chip on his shoulder."

[kvschwartz.livejournal.com]

There is a school of "thought" which says that, since pretty girls are used to guys being ever so NICE to them, that the way to get "noticed" is to be an ass toward them. So maybe his comment was, in some weird way, a compliment of sorts.

Which doesn't necessarily make him any less of a jerk -- it just means he was a deliberate jerk instead of an accidental jerk (which, imho, is actually much WORSE, in that everyone is an accidental jerk SOMETIMES).

Re: "This guy totally had a chip on his shoulder."

[unbound-spirit.livejournal.com]

I don't think this guy was doing it with that in mind. He was serious. He was a little weird in general. We shared a cab on the way to Korean food after the shady bars and my friend was talking about how she's moving to China soon and how she's scared about meeting new people there, and this guy was just like, "You should never trust anyone, ever." I was like, hey, way to be positive and give people the benefit of the doubt!

[mechanyx.livejournal.com]

What he meant was, "If I knew you didn't drink, I wouldn't ask you to come hang out because I know there's no chance you'd do me."

[unbound-spirit.livejournal.com]

Haha yeah you're probably right.

[kvschwartz.livejournal.com]

Congrats to your cousin, too! Astro physics is so cool. (See also: icon.)

[unbound-spirit.livejournal.com]

Yay Dick!

[jhsc22.livejournal.com]

Your "friend" sounds like an idiot. Actually, thank you for that story. It gives me a whole new insight into why the majority of my graduate department spends their nights getting drunk. And why now, as we are graduating, they have no prospects, and I am going into a fully-funded PhD program. There must be a correlation...

[unbound-spirit.livejournal.com]

Yep, just goes to show you.

[solar-diablo.livejournal.com]

Drinkers, especially power drinkers, often get defensive around people who don't imbibe. It seems to be an unwritten law somewhere. I've found that if I'm out with friends who are drinking and I don't feel like it, I'll order one glass of wine or beer, and sip at it the entire time we're there, with ice water as my main beverage. I might get razzed now and then for being a lightweight, but having the drink in front of me tends to ward off the defensive reactions.

[mechanyx.livejournal.com]

I probably drink more than any of Pam's other friends and we're best friends so...

Just remember that I'm the exception to all rules and you'll be OK.

[solar-diablo.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah, obviously I can only speak to my own experience here, and her comment that the guy was being a dork.

[unbound-spirit.livejournal.com]

Speaking of which, when the hell are we going to hang out?

[mechanyx.livejournal.com]

Tomorrow night at 10PM at the Spy Club.

You wanna send out a Facebook thing for me? I'm really supposed to be doing my physics final projects.

[kvschwartz.livejournal.com]

In the great movie _The Twilight Samurai_, set in late 19th-century Japan, the eponymous character, Seibei, is constantly teased by his coworkers (samurais who spend their days doing paperwork for the clan) because he refuses to go out drinking with them after work. He is called "Twilight" Seibei because, their jokes go, he always vanishes at twilight. The fact that he has good reason to rush home from work -- he has two young daughters and an ailing mother he has to take care of -- doesn't even factor in.

BUT THEN ONE DAY ...

[solar-diablo.livejournal.com]

Already added to the Netflix queue.

[kvschwartz.livejournal.com]

If you enjoy it even 1% as much as I have, you'll enjoy it a great deal. :D

(Just try NOT to read the Netflix "review" before you watch the movie; it was written poorly, and it will only spoil things. Better, for this movie, to read the real reviews at, say, rottentomatoes, and just avert your eyes from the Netflix "review."

[mechanyx.livejournal.com]

That's why Kokoschka is my hero. He made a living drinking!

[unbound-spirit.livejournal.com]

And painting Alma Mahler naked. Don't forget that one.

[mechanyx.livejournal.com]

How could I? I've seen the painting! It's in my favorite room in the Boston MFA.

[kvschwartz.livejournal.com]

Ah, so THAT's how you're like Alma Mahler. Hahah.

[george-marie.livejournal.com]

There has always been something unhealthy to me about drinking to get away from what one does for a living. It suggests that the person would rather be somewhere else doing something else and that their job is just seething their life with emotional havoc.

My belief is consistent with the writings of Schopenhauer. The world is suffering and art is humanity's way of creating a world the way we want it to be. We artists are priviliged because we get to live that perfect (nothing is perfect, but i think that imperfection sometimes implies a state of perfection)world every day.

We as artists also subscribe to an ideal advocated by Kierkegaard. He advocated that faith should be the one ideal that everyone lives for. While I disagree somwhat with that assertion, I very much like the idea of dedicating one's life to something that is so much bigger and better than themselves.

So yeah! Kudos to all that you are doing and what your cousin is doing. Yup:).

[mechanyx.livejournal.com]

Sometimes art is not the description of an ideal but an exaggerated expression of reality (like a caricature) or a conveyance of a distant or hidden but very real reality.

I always think of the title to Cynic's demo Reflections of a Dying World or works like Kojiba's Requiem or Wolfgang Schorn's lethal pieces for orchestra :) lol

Sometimes it just tells a story or is just sound for sound or, perhaps most importantly, is there to get us laid.

Ohh, there's the money thing too.

[george-marie.livejournal.com]

How right you are:). I have yet to see it get me either of the two yet.....

[pinkstiletto510.livejournal.com]

i'm glad to know that youre not into that whole drinking to get drunk thing either.... i am one of the only 4 kids in my Performance class of 25 that hasnt gone out and gotten drunk...many of them like to do this after shows even when they have matinees in the morning...drives me insane. I really dont care if they do it on their own time but when I have to act with them while they're all hung-over...yeah not fun

[unbound-spirit.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I hear you on that one. I found out a while ago that several people in my opera department did cocaine, and I didn't find it too comforting to know that I'm trusting those people to pull off difficult performances with me.

After I turned 21 I tried to get into drinking because everyone around me seemed to enjoy it so much, but I just never seemed to get what was so great about it. Then a few times it became a thing of like, "Wow, something really horrible happened today, I think I'm going to try to drink a lot because that seems to be what other people do when horrible things happen," but then I would feel very temporarily better and then ten times as horrible for days afterwards. (Yeah, I seem to have a pretty strong emotional reaction to alcohol.) So I just stopped. It wasn't worth it to me.

[george-marie.livejournal.com]

Why would an opera singer want to do cocaine? That just doesn't make any sense to me. Anyways I think it's pretty cool that you have the self-confidence to say no about that kind of stuff. Alcohol is a wierd thing I think. For me, I'd be depressed all day after a night out when I was younger. I think it actually impacts your brain chemistry and lowers certain levels of electrolytes.

So yeah, I am writing a piece for percussion and mezzo-soprano for a friend here at Iowa. Sometime next semester, look for a copy to come your way:). I'd appreciate the input.