Author Archives: Autumn

Spirited Away

We saw Spirited Away with Ceri and Scott last night, and it was gratifying to see one of the large theatres at the AMC with that many people in it. Wonderful movie – I don’t know if I enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed Princess Mononoke, but it was excellent: well-paced, with every character memorable without over-developing the supporting cast or pulling focus from the main storyline. And a wonderful soundtrack by Hisaishi, of course.

I looked around the theatre at the crowd – mostly thirty-somethings like myself – and I thought that each and every one of them was there because this was a new Miyazaki movie, which was pretty impressive. With movie tickets on a Friday night costing thirteen dollars (*koff* *koff* – shows how long it’s been since I saw a movie on a weekend, and it will be a long, long time before I do it again; if I’d known the price I’d probably have rescheduled my viewing, regretfully missing that opening night show but very aware of the reality my finances operate within these days), I knew that from now on I’d really be paying attention to what kind of movies I choose to see, and where I choose to see them. I’ve already sworn off the Paramount (except for films like Lord of the Rings) for price and atmosphere; I’d hate to have to swear off the AMC as well.

It really made me think, though, about what kind of movies for which I wish to demonstrate support. I’ve never been the kind of person who goes to see a movie for the sake of seeing a movie; I’m already rather discriminating, which solves a lot of my problem right off the bat. Thirteen dollars for a film, though… last night’s movie was almost two and a half hours, which breaks down to $5.20 per hour, which is a pretty good deal for Miyazaki. I don’t see films in the theatre very often, and I don’t understand people who say, “Oh, it’s Tuesday/Friday night, let’s catch a film.” It’s a product and a service, as well as being entertainment, and frankly I don’t think most films are worth the money.

This one was, thank goodness. But then, it was a Miyazaki product. Sometimes you know it’s safe to spend the money.

Good Days

I had a fantastic day yesterday. That’s about it. Four hours of playing in the store, dinner with Ceri, a smash-bang-wow workshop, a request for a private workshop for a group on the South Shore, then drinks with friends.

On the way to the pub we stopped in at Renaud Bray and I picked up those inks, because I was paid for my full-time work last week and for last night’s workshop (private instruction is so much more lucrative than retail!) and I thought that I deserved a little treat for surviving the past two lean weeks. I now have those darling little oval pots of cuivre, marron, and spring green. Yay! We got home last night and the first thing I did was get out my dip pen, sit on the floor and make lines all over a sheet of blank parchment paper to see what it looked like. I’ll be paying Hydro off in full later today with a chunk of my earnings, but before that, the inks were a lovely little gift to myself. (Note to self: ink (both black and colour) for the printer would probably help too.)

Over dinner last night Ceri gave me her latest pages of creative effort, and for the first time since we began doing this exchange of writing in July, I had nothing to give her. I felt guilty when I left the flat yesterday morning, but then I told myself that I really didn’t have to feel that way since I had given her seventy-eight (!) pages of the Great Canadian Novel over the past three months. I did try to write earlier this week, honestly I did; but I opened the laptop, made a couple of corrections as I re-read the eleven pages of the latest section, and then stared at the screen for about twenty minutes. I’m stuck. Normally when I’m stuck, I jump to the next scene and then go back and fill in the necessary space with an event of some sort, but the next scene I had planned was Christmas shopping, and the characters were still only in mid-November with no way to get to early December. So when I shared that frustration with Ceri yesterday, she said, without missing a beat, “Make it snow,” which was absolutely brilliant and I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it. Another of Ceri’s super-powers, by the way, is being a Muse for people. She gives them great ideas. She occasionally laments that alas, she doesn’t inspire herself in the same fashion, so I can only hope that our writing arrangement covers at least the deadline sort of inspiration that writers need. I did give her a nifty idea for her husband’s Hallowe’en costume, but I doubt it even comes close to repaying the Muse-debt that society has incurred to her.

I’m terribly looking forward to driving up to see my parents next weekend; I haven’t seen them since July, and we haven’t made the drive to Oakville in this new car yet. After its spectacular performance through New York and Pennsylvania, this five-hour spin should be a dream! Seven days to go!

Upcoming

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: November 15

Treasure Planet: November 27

The Two Towers: December 18

Yes, finally, more movies that I want to see in the theatre!

The official Harry Potter web site has released images of the upcoming theatre banners, which has cheered me immensely, because I don’t like the Dobby teaser poster at all.

Treasure Planet is a movie I will see with my husband, who sat a-quiver with excitement when we saw the trailer in theatres a few months ago. It’s as if they reached into his head and pulled out all the things he loves: pirates, science fiction, animation. It also features the voice talents of Emma Thompson and David Hyde-Pierce, which intrigues me. Tamu just contacted me with the stunning news that her brother Emru was unexpectedly happy with the press screening, so my standards have just been raised.

And, well, The Two Towers… what can I say that I haven’t said already? Except, of course, for seventy-seven days, and counting. And forty-one days until the extended version of The Fellowship of the Ring is released on DVD. (Must… wait… till Christmas… argh!)

Life In The Bathtub

Ever have one of those days? One of those weeks? The kind where everything gets your back up, and you feel like you’re the only sane person in the world, and why can’t eveyone just understand what you’re getting at? You feel like every step you take is against a hurricane-force wind, uphill, through a crowd of people standing with their eyes closed and their fingers in their ears as you try, through gritted teeth and bright smile, to communicate?

Oh, yeah. Often.

Kate, babe, I’m with you. You have my sympathy.

If we could only direct our lives from the bathtub. With a stack of good books, a cup of tea or a glass of wine (depending on the hour of the day), good music nearby. As an extra treat, a nice box of chocolates close by, but not too close so the warmth of the stress-bleeding bath melts them, or so that you don’t eat them too fast. (Can you tell I’ve managed to get this down to a science?)

Baths, however, in my world, no longer give me the relaxation I need. It’s odd, but somewhere over the past ten years or so I’ve been on my own, a bath has lost its charm. It used to be that when I was upset, I’d go into the bathroom, run a bath, add bubbles, oils, the whole nine yards. Book. Candles. Music. Cat. (No, not in the bath, next to the bath, and I didn’t put her there. She just likes to curl up next to the warm bathtub. Okay, and swish her tail around in the warm water. And play with bubbles.)

I’d sink in, and sigh. And just like that, I’d melt, and everything would be bearable.

Now, though, I’m just as tense in the tub as I am out of the tub. It’s really frustrating. You start the routine, get in, close your eyes, expect the warmth and the gentle aromas to start working, and you end up staring at the ceiling after half an hour, wondering why you’re not all soft and floaty.

It’s a relatively recent development, within the last four or five years, I’d say. Eight baths out of ten, I get next to no soft floaty relaxation.

I don’t think the quality of bath has decreased, which means it must be me. Am I too stressed for a bath to relax me? Is it living with someone? Do I need new towels?

Baths shouldn’t be work. Baths should be mindless comfort. Baths should not stress me because they are not relaxing me.

I think I’ll go play my cello. (Yeah, right. Like that will relax me.)

Shock

I’m not sure where to begin.

I’m back at work this week — yes, retail; covering for another full-timer who’s on a well-deserved vacation. It was fun for about half a day. Then I started to get tired. I have thirty more hours of this, mostly with new part-timers I don’t know and have never worked with.

After work was my regular class that I teach on Monday nights. I was tired, but onwards I went. I wish things could have ended on a better note; I was trying to make them understand the individual steps in writing a research paper, and one student was seemingly being stubborn on purpose until we discovered that the term “research paper” meant something completely different to her than it meant to the twelve other students and the two professors. Misunderstanding cleared up. Frustrating at the time, though.

The I came home to two messages on my answering machine, one from my orchestra contact asking me to return his call, the other from a member of the LLO board asking me if I would help out backstage since I didn’t get the part. (Nice of you to ask; snowball’s chance in hell.)

I called my orchestra contact back, and sat down, stunned, as he told me that our conductor had been in a rather bad road accident on Friday, had severe head trauma, was in the Montreal General Hospital where unsuccessful surgery had taken place to staunch internal cranial bleeding, and was being kept alive by machines. So our weekly rehearsal has been cancelled.

This is the man who founded the orchestra thirty-odd years ago. Every member of the orchestra has been called and advised of the situation. Of course the rehearsal’s been cancelled!

The situation is even bleaker than it first appears. The family expects to make a decision within the next couple of days as to whether or not those life-support machines should be kept functional. Andres has just retired from teaching high school music to be there for his wife, who is battling terminal cancer. After a promising spring she has taken a turn for the worse, and now she has just been transferred to the Montreal General to be with her husband. Family is being summoned from his native country of Latvia and other places of residence. Evidently, things don’t look good all around.

I don’t know Andres other than as my conductor for a single year of orchestra. He has a sense of humour, a true love for music, the ability to communicate his ideas and visions, to corral forty adults of various levels of competence and with them create a thing of beauty. He taught years and years of string students at Lindsay Place High School. When I saw him last on Wednesday, he was in a wonderful mood.

The strangeness of knowing that he’s now lying somewhere hooked up to monitors and IV drips and pumps and tubes is unreal. It’s so difficult to maintain two opposing realities in the mind: that you expect upon extrapolating from the last time you encountered someone, and the reality that someone has told you which completely contradicts it. I suppose the necessity for closure is directly proportional to how well you know the individual in question. I’ve only known Andres for a year, despite the joy he’s brought me and the work I’ve done for him to meet the standards he’s set. My stunned feelings must pale next to those of the orchestra members how have worked with him longer than I, and to those of his already stressed family. I’m angry at the senseless tragedy; all I can do is pray, and I’ve been doing it since I heard the news. If he’s meant to live, let it be with peace and no pain, with health and positivity. May his doctors’ minds be clear, their hands steady, their acts inspired. If he is meant to die, then let him pass gently, with no further trauma, and may his family be spared further agony. He is an admirable man. Why did this have to happen?

This reminds me that if I walk away from someone in anger, or even indifference, there may not be another opportunity to erase that final image I’ll hold in my mind of them ever afterwards. Like my cats and our dog, he might not be there next time our orchestra gathers. My contact assures me that we’ll likely go on, although Andres was our heart. Perhaps we will; he wouldn’t want the orchestra to dissolve. Music is eternal, although people who create it are not. It will be strange, and it will be different; but for me, it will be a way to balance the senseless and tragic loss of life, if it is indeed confirmed that there must be loss of life. For every destruction, there must be creation, after all.

Auspicious Circle

I thought I’d blog something positive, seeing as how when I scan past entries I notice that I’ve been blogging bad news more often than not. I�ve been rather glum recently.

So! I had orchestra again last night, and there was new music waiting for us: Handel’s Toccata and Fugue in F (I think; I might be misremembering the key signature). There were only two copies of the cello part for this, and four cellists, so I shared with another cellist, the one of the infamous Canada Day concert shared stand. Now, when I share music, I end up squinting to my left, and I get dizzy. Sure enough, I couldn’t follow correctly, and rapidly became alarmingly nauseous. I stopped trying to play, and eventually laid my cello down quietly, stood up, left the stage, and sat outside in the cool fresh air, breathing deeply. I had a flash of “why am I bothering, I’ll never do this right” which surfaces every once in a while, ignored it, and eventually went back inside, figuring that if it got worse I’d just pack up and go home. I sat and followed the music until we switched to the Mendelssohn symphony, when I pulled my own stand forward and opened my own music. “Oh,” said my seatmate, “you don’t want to share mine?” “No, but thanks,” I said politely, “I’ll use mine, it has all my marks on it anyway.”

Now, the conductor has told us a few times now that this is a difficult symphony, and I’m still waiting for the proverbial piano to fall, because I’m having a ball with it. So we started, and every once in a while Sean or my old stand partner Walter (who now sits in the second chair, at the seemingly casual request of our principal cellist which everyone in the cello section knows is a veiled promotion and the mark of favour) would check on me: “Are you feeling okay? Do you need air? Water?” No, I was fine, I told them, my mind was somewhere else now, and so long as I didn’t think about my stomach I’d be all right. They were very kind.

From that point on I proceeded to have a fantastic night, first with the opening movement of the Mendelssohn symphony, then for the last ten minutes of rehearsal during the Rossini overture we’re doing. I truly adore these new strings; I do need a softer rosin, and I had to stand up and retune them (via the pegs, not the fine tuners) every twenty minutes or so as they stretch, but all in all, it went spectacularly well. So well, in fact, that time flew, and I wasn’t ready for the evening to come to an end. (I have never, ever understood why people are in such a hurry to leave something they do for fun.)

As I was packing up, Walter turned around with a smile and said, “You’ve been practicing; I can tell. Having the free time to do it is really showing. Soon you’ll be in my chair!”

Well, well, well. I think I must have glowed. “I do have the time, and the headspace,” I agreed, “but these new strings have something to do with it as well, I’m sure. Thank you.”

My intonation sounds more precise, my overall tone sounds more cohesive, and the sound in general is clearer, the bow moves more easily and articulation just seems to be more present than it did before. Having someone else notice really did wonders for my confidence. Maybe it’s the new bridge; maybe it’s the still-new bow; maybe it’s the new strings; maybe it’s all of them, plus me.

Hmm. Just looking at that list makes me add up how much I’ve spent on upgrading my instrument and accessories over the past nine months and wince a little bit — just a little bit. It’s cheaper than buying a new instrument, after all. And now that it’s all done, I don’t need to worry for a while.

I do sound better, and that I can even tell shows me how much I’ve improved over the past year. I love playing with these new strings, because I love the sound. Loving to play is a good thing, because I’ll play even more. And the more I play, the better I get. What a nice change from the vicious circles I usually get caught up in. What would I call this — an auspicious circle? Whatever the term, I’m thankful for it, and intend to keep on enjoying it, as well.

Feline Challenges

Oh dear. Cat trouble all around, it seems.

Pursuant to the loss of the elderly Sir Grey, my mother has decided to reserve another Maine Coon kitten. Her reasoning, which I fully agree with, is that no animal as social as a Maine Coon should be solitary, and they had reserved him months ago expecting the little guy to have a dog and a cat to romp with. An empty house is unfair. So, Mum has decided to go ahead and reserve a silver Maine Coon from the same breeder, despite my father’s waffling (and if he finds out via my blog, I do apologise, but you had at least two days to tell him, Mum). This one’s ETA is December, so Seamus will only have three months on his own. (Yes, three months; when did it get to be three months to the end of the year?)

On top of that, Scarlet has e-mailed to inform me that the feral cat who produced the litter of kittens we’ve been nursing tested positive for feline immunodeficiency virus, which means that it might have been passed to the kittens in utero or via the mother’s milk. There�s no way to tell until they’re tested after four months old, since they can still possess a sort of trace phantom FIV from contact with the mother until that age. The main problem is that an FIV positive cat can’t be in contact with an FIV negative cat, or the virus can be passed along.

This is a problem, of course, since Scarlet was hoping to have all these cats gone to good homes as soon as possible, so she could have her office back to normal. If we can’t mix these cats with her other non-FIV household cats — well, you see the problem. It also means that she has to keep the kittens till they’re four months old and tested to ascertain their FIV status, because it would be irresponsible to pass a potentially FIV-positive cat along to a household with non-FIV cats.

There are irresponsible people out there, of course. We are not members of that particular demographic. So these cats will stay at home for two extra months, and once we’ve found out whether they’re FIV positive or negative, we’ll be able to place them properly.

Oh dear, indeed.