Health care reform NOW!!!

My daughter was very sick last week, and after a phone consultation with a pediatric nurse, we took her to an immediate care center, where it could be determined whether she needed IV fluids. We decided to try a newly opened place, because we thought there would be no wait.

Well, we were the only people there besides the staff--three women in the reception area and a doctor we saw through the window, just sitting around. The woman who came forward to help was very friendly. And stunningly incompetent.

She obviously had no idea how to use the computer system, and had to keep asking for help from the other women, one of whom seemed to be wincing with a headache. When I showed her my insurance card, she seemed mystified. She sat and looked at her screen for several minutes. Then she turned around and asked the others what she should do if there was no ID number on the card. It actually says on the card that the ID number is my SSN. So I volunteered this information, hoping to speed up the agonizing process of registering.

Meanwhile, my daughter is so sick that she doesn't even try to get out of her daddy's lap to explore. Her eyes are sunken, her face pale, her lips cracked, her body limp. We are both very anxious about her health, having seen her in a similar state two years ago when she was hospitalized.

After half an hour of trying to get registered, the woman ushered us back to a room, where we were horrified to discover that she was also our NURSE!!! We exchanged glances while she ineptly took Grace's temperature. She asked us a series of bizarre questions regarding my daughter's vomiting, again displaying total ignorance of the computer she was using to document the encounter. After what seemed an eternity, she finally left the room.

The doctor seemed nice, and gave us suggestions for rehydrating Grace and preventing more vomiting. He finished up by telling us he'd have her prescription ready in a few moments. Hubby took Grace out to the car while I waited. I sat and sat and sat, watching some terrible Lifetime movie in the waiting room. I offered to pay the copay. The nurse seemed surprised--"oh? There's a copay? I didn't see that on your card." Argh!!!!

Meanwhile the doctor is standing a ways back, obviously doing something with a computer. After a half hour of waiting, he finally came out with a handwritten Rx. Argh! Double Argh!!

I'm guessing "immediate care" is just a suggestion.

Hakuna matata

Over the summer I played in the wedding of an acquaintance. Her grandfather, a minister, gave the sermon, and spoke about the difficulty of moving beyond the initial stage of being in love to putting in the hard work required to make a marriage work. I sat, sagely nodding my head, knowing exactly what he meant, and looking at the young couple with stars in their eyes who thought they knew what he meant, but actually had no idea what they were in for.
It has given me food for thought recently--not just young persons' inherent disregard for older persons' words of wisdom, but also older persons' inherent desire to try to get their message across, despite having once been young themselves. It seems that most of the more difficult lessons in life are only really learned the hard way.

Another thought that struck me during that ceremony was how the culture of our times has moved away from the multi-generational society. Families used to be the center of life--people lived with extended family out of financial necessity. The roles of women were defined very narrowly as the center of the family at home. The various stages of life were marked by rituals that were meaningful. The young were shepherded through difficult times by the generations before them, who had been through those same difficult times.

No doubt this pastoral scene I've laid out is rather naive. People also used to be less educated. Women were not allowed to choose their lot. Dysfunctional behaviors continued from generation to generation because no one was exposed to the possibility of a different path.

However, I think maybe we've gone too far the other direction. Children learn to be disrespectful pretty early in their lives. Instead of staying connected to our elders, we move out on our own as soon as possible, choosing to spend all our time with people our own age. We avoid family gatherings and the rituals that they often surround. Because of the loss of rituals, we lose the perspective of ourselves within the larger cycle of life and death. We connect only over the ethernet--anonymous and reinventing ourselves. We watch TV shows that distort the world and we believe that distortion, and make it the real world. Once television got a firm hold on our collective imagination, the young and the pretty became revered, leaving the wise out in the cold. Katie Couric's recent triumph is an example of this trend. Men and women have disfiguring surgeries to perpetuate their own delusion of youth instead of embracing their steady path towards old age.

We should be more aware of the circle of life--our food, the seasons, each day, our own mortality.

Hope

I just wanted to post a little about my daughter, who's been taking great strides developmentally these last months.
She has become more interactive, turning when I speak to her, responding intentionally to instructions, taking turns, playing "games" with us. She has become more responsive to her environment, less dependent on the same repeated episodes of Sesame Street. She wants to be outside all day (even on days like today, stiflingly hot and humid). She is curious about what mommy is doing in the bathroom, and even showers with me daily. She has been babbling. She tries to grab food away from me and is actually eating again, after a year of turning her head at the offer of any kind of food but milk. She has tried new foods and voluntarily put them in her mouth. We had begun to believe that she would need her feeding tube the rest of her life, but other possibilities are peeking over the horizon.

All of these changes are occurring in a time when she has very little in the way of therapy, which has led us to look back over the last few years, when she was in therapies several days a week. How much of her progress was actually a result of her therapy? She seems to make progress when she decides she's ready to do something new or more difficult, not when an adult tries to force it on her. She decided she wants to eat, so she'll eat. My guess is that she will decide to talk when she's good and ready.
(I should say that we do believe that some of her therapies have helped us by showing us new ways to approach her, letting her initiate activities, and turning it around on her, to show her the possibilities.)

Anyway, we are encouraged! We don't know what the future holds for her, but we know that she will likely exceed our expectations.

At least I've got more discipline than some....

It has been a long time since I have written here. There have been two reasons for this: 1) I have had trouble staying healthy for the last few months because of sleep deprivation, and 2) I was practicing for an audition. I haven't taken an audition since my daughter was 9 months old, and before that it was several years.

For the fortunate who've never taken a symphony audition, let me try to describe the process.

When a position becomes open in an orchestra, an ad will appear in the national union paper. You send in your resume, and they send you a list of music to prepare. You show up at the audition a few months later, along with the 30-200 other hopeful musicians who have also been practicing insanely and probably had more time to practice than you. You all sit in a room together talking and/or practicing until a practice room becomes available for each person. Sometimes this means sitting in that room for eight hours, sometimes you get a private room for most of the day, depending on the facilities. When it's your turn to play, you are escorted on a carpeted path to the stage or other large room, where you play a list of excerpts and solo pieces for the audition committee, who are most often hidden behind a screen, to make sure the audition is fair. When they have heard enough (usually about 10-15 minutes) to decide whether you are good enough, they say "Thank you" and you are escorted back to the room where you wait what seems endless hours. The committee listens to a number of people, then takes a break to vote. They may select some people to move on to the next round, or they may send everyone from that group home. After they have heard everyone from the preliminary round, they hear those who passed on to the semi-finals, following the same process to select finalists. The final round is usually without a screen, and the music director is usually present. After the final round, they select the winner(s) or not.

In the case of my most recent audition, I received the most votes in the final round, but still did not get selected. They were apparently looking for a higher level of playing and experience than I have. This has been very difficult for me to deal with emotionally, but I feel that I grew as a musician through the process of preparing for this audition.

I am one of those lucky ones who can get by with very little actual work on the violin while still playing pretty well. I have always avoided practicing, even as an adult. When I was 10 my mother would feel whether the TV was warm to see if I had really practiced while she was gone! In my middle teen years circumstances made it difficult to avoid practicing--we lived with my grandparents who were always home and very strict about such things-- and for a few years I practiced 3 hours a day. When left to my own devices, I was most likely not going to practice. When I went to prestigious Meadowmount School of Music the summer I turned 14, I was supposed to practice 4-5 hours a day. We were monitored closely, but I still managed to play solitaire for many of those hours. Miraculously, my playing still got better that summer.

In college, I was more motivated, but panic practicing was my modus operandi. I also had not yet developed good practice techniques. I had always just repeated stuff when I played it wrong. During my junior year a pianist friend taught me a few exercises with rhythmic practice which worked like a magic trick on difficult fast passages. That made it possible to learn more in a shorter time, but didn't really teach me discipline.

At the end of my junior year, while preparing for a difficult jury, I developed some arm problems that made it painful to hold a book, much less play a Paganini caprice. That whole summer I didn't practice much, and when I returned in the fall my wrists were better and my technique was not so great. I foolishly signed up for my senior recital in October, which left me less than 2 months to learn the repertoire. My recital was mediocre, complete with memorization problems. That whole year I struggled with my identity of myself as a violinist. Who would I be if I couldn't make it in music? Having grown up in a musician-glutted family, I had always just assumed that being a musician was the thing to do. I was passionate about it, and had from an early age identified myself as a violinist. Now that my future felt insecure, I didn't really know who I was.

After graduating, I loafed around my grandparents' house for several months, taking long walks, trying to drum up some violin students. Meanwhile, all my friends were pursuing graduate degrees. I felt fairly useless and hopeless.

I took an audition for a regional orchestra, and won. I slowly started freelancing, gradually accumulating enough work to get my own apartment. I made very little money in those years, but I enjoyed myself, playing a variety of gigs--opera, symphony, weddings, teaching, chamber orchestra. I never practiced.

One year I decided to put on a recital. I practiced for that, and thought I made some improvements. On listening to the recording, I was horrified at how bad my intonation was. I decided to take some lessons with a local university teacher, and she was just what I needed to get back to some of the niceties of violin playing. I took an audition for a more substantial job and won a temporary position. I started taking auditions left and right, surprising myself by getting past the first round a few times. Eventually I won my current job.

After being here for a while I took some more auditions, but decided that the stress was putting my health at stake, so I finally settled down and bought a house. Again, I settled into minimal practice time. Why practice when I could be doing other fun things like reading, watching TV, being outside? After meeting my husband and having a baby, my practicing became a faint memory.

When this most recent audition was advertised, I decided to go for it. Concertmaster in my own orchestra sounded pretty good to me--if I won I'd make more money without having to move! I knew it would be a challenge when I got the repertoire list: it was mostly music I had never played before, and also mostly virtuosic. What I didn't expect once I started working on it was that this challenge would bring me to actually enjoy practicing. I was paying close attention to detail, but also to the larger shapes and phrases, trying to understand the forest of music instead of just looking at the individual trees of technique and perfection. I became more attuned to the reasoning behind musical choices. I was learning music without the aid of a teacher, and discovered that I can make good music without someone telling me exactly what to do. I was hearing and feeling results. I felt good about my playing for the first time in years. In addition, the precious time alone with the violin became a bit of a break from being a wife and mother. It was as though I was revisiting my childhood dream of being a soloist. I felt that I had never played better. What would have happened if I had practiced with this much passion and interest when I was still in college? Where would I be now? Had I missed the path of stardom, or at least distinction, because I didn't have the discipline?

It turns out that all of my practicing still didn't make me concertmaster. But I did learn a little about potential. How ironic that when I finally had the self-confidence and drive to pursue greatness, I was stymied by my lack of those very qualities in the past. I can only go forward now. I can't practice 3 hours a day and still maintain a relationship with my husband and daughter, but I can try to maintain some continuity in my practice, retaining those gems of wisdom that I wrested from the walls of my mind. If further opportunities arise, I can step forward and pursue them with confidence.

Rachmaninoff rights

This afternoon the orchestra played a "run-out" in a tiny burg north of Indy. It was one of those concerts they tack onto a week when some far-flung rich person gives the orchestra money. We had already played this heavy program three times, so it was disheartening to see the small venue with half an audience. Why drag us up here to play for nobody in a high school auditorium, when we really wanted to rest our arms and brains? (I shouldn't complain--I'm on vacation for a week now!)
Anyway, it became clear within minutes of starting the concert that an audience member seated close to the stage had some kind of oxygen apparatus that made a sharp hissing noise every few seconds. It almost sounded like a cymbal swipe. My initial reaction was annoyance: this person should be asked to leave, or at least sit further away from the stage. As musicians, we often discuss the rudeness of noisy audiences (and uninformed audiences who applaud enthusiastically and inappropriately between movements). How dare they disturb the mood with their tubercular coughs and cell phones and hearing aid whistles and conversation and rustling programs! After about 15 minutes of allowing myself to be distracted by the whoosh of this unfortunate individual's machinery, I realized that I was practicing discrimination of some kind. How would I feel if my daughter were told she couldn't remain at a concert because of her disability? Why do I think that we are so special that we can command complete silence at the discomfort of our audience? Isn't music for the audience? At the same time, isn't the audience entitled to enough quiet to be able to listen without distraction? With all this running through my mind, I'm glad I didn't make a wrong entrance. Fortunately I have enough experience to be able to play large swathes of music while daydreaming. However, the question remains--whose rights are most important? In this particular situation, I decided that this oxygen-toting invalid came to the concert to experience something outside xemself, and that I should be able to put that sound into the background of my mind, just as xe has to all day every day. After a while I stopped really noticing the sound, an concentrated on doing my job, which is making good music, not making bad judgments.

DiLululemma

My husband has an old friend, from high school days, who is passionate about comics to the point that his old apartment was stacked top to bottom, including in the oven, with comics. When I first met this fellow, he and my husband discussed "Little Lulu" at great length. Having only recently been introduced to the world of comics, I just stood by silently while all these unfamiliar names and inside jokes went flying. But I did gather from the conversation that there was one item missing from his collection for which he'd give his eyeteeth: Little Lulu volume one, a set of three hardbound books in a sheath. There were several volumes which had come out in reverse order, and the interest in them at the time was so poor that they printed fewer and fewer of each succeeding volume, so that by the time volume one was published, they only put out about 1000 of them. This means that now this volume is extremely rare. When it shows up on eBay, it usually sells for about $700.

Last month my husband found this volume in a local comics shop for $125. Obviously these people had not done their research! He came rushing home, asking me what I thought we should do. For both of us our first reaction was to buy the books and let the friend buy it from us at cost. The friend was called, and I went, armed with a credit card, to acquire this mysterious item.

Later, we both felt some remorse. We could really use the money if we sold it on eBay. My husband even said that he'd be happy to keep the volume himself, as he is also quite the collector. We agonized over ways that we could retract the offer to the friend while maintaining our morality. No solution revealed itself to us, and we grudgingly followed through. The friend was pretty happy.

It is sometimes hard to be good and painful to do the right thing.
Any thoughts from my readers on what you would have done?