10/04 - A lot of random things. I apologize.

First order of business, my mom makes marimba and other yarn mallets now, how freakin cool is that? So any of you UNT friends, I have 20 dollar mallets for sale. Well, she does.

Hm...

You don't have to figure out who you're going to be for your whole life when you're in college. Example A, my mom. She went to med school and totally rocked it, and now she's a pharmacist and works way too many weird hours and 12 hour days. I don't know if she thought it was going to be glamorous, probably not, cuz that's not who my mom is, but it certainly wouldn't be something I would get into for personal reasons... personal reasons including I wouldn't survive and I'm not really that interested.

But now, while holding a job and working crazy hours, she still teaches etiquette classes, designs costumes and stage sets, helps choreograph, sings with a church youth choir, plays more piano and mallet stuff than I've heard in a long time, and hey, now she's making mallets. Somehow this creative side that was hiding when she was in medical school just blossomed into a whole new part of who she is, or maybe it was just hiding or being put off the whole time. Either way, she's enjoying it, and I'm getting free mallets, and it's all good.

I just really hope she explores her creativity in cooking so I can get some cookies some time soon.

Today I had a pretty bad mallets lesson, mostly my fault. I don't practice nearly as much as I should, but I don't know that I could practice for three hours a day. I don't have the mental capacity to focus through classes and homework and ensemble rehearsals and practicing 2 hours of each instrument already. Three hours of marimba a day!? That's 6 hours of practice a day, not including homework, not including vocal stuff or piano stuff I need for my classes. That's a lot of time I'm not capable of enforcing myself to do something with yet. But does that mean I shouldn't be a performance major if I can't do that?

I still don't really know what I want to be. I don't think I could get a performance degree and perform for the rest of my life. I still have a side of me that likes to teach, and likes to travel, and likes to explore other cultures and styles of this huge freaking planet we live on.

And it's really comforting to know that whatever I end up doing, somehow in all the chaos of my future life, I can still pick things up that I've lost or explore new areas of myself I never really knew I had any potential with. As long as I've got strength like my mom :) but that's a lot of strength, so we'll see.

M