Daily Archives: August 1, 2002

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I have discovered a way to beat the heat. And no, it has nothing to do with spending time in a grocery store, hugging bags of frozen peas. I actually dislike grocery stores in heatwaves; they’re too cold, so that when you walk outside again the humidity hits you like a huge wet pillow and your knees buckle for a second or two.

No, my solution is a stay-at-home, do-it-yourself kind of answer. It presupposes you were in a supermarket in the recent past, however, and that you have chicken or some such thing in your fridge or freezer.

Go into your kitchen; turn on an element on top of the stove. (I know I’ve lost some of you already, because most people go into the kitchen to open the fridge for ice water in weather like this. Stove? What stove?) Melt some butter in a pan. Slice your chicken up and stir-fry it. If you want to get fancy you can add some onion, but really, don’t worry about it.

Stand there in front of the stove, and fry that meat.

When it’s done, slide it onto a plate, cover it loosely, and put it in the fridge. Don’t forget to turn off the stove.

Walk out of the kitchen. You will immediately notice a huge drop in temperature. Why, it’s almost as if the rest of your place of habitation is cool!

In addition, you have the handy cooked chicken to chop up and toss into a salad for dinner later, because that’s about as warm a meal as you want to have. Nice, cool salad, with chicken. Mmm.

You’re welcome.

Thoughts On Successful Children

So, Wil Wheaton is thirty.

So is Midori.

When people you knew as child prodigies hit their third decade, you get an odd sort of ripply time warp feeling. As if they have been children forever, and suddenly, bang, they’re adults.

Midori’s been performing for twenty years. Twenty. Made her debut at eleven. At fifteen, she calmly went through three violins while playing with Leonard Bernstein and the Boston Symphony. A string broke; she was handed another instrument and kept playing. A string broke on the replacement violin; she was handed a third instrument and finished the piece. Didn’t lose her cool. Didn’t make a mistake.

There are people who think that for a fifteen-year-old to display such sang-froide is proof of something unnatural. From what I can tell, however, Midori has always been polite and level-headed. I have nothing against child prodigies; I do, however, have something against the people who force children into being child prodigies if the child doesn’t want to be there. I also have something against people who convince a child prodigy that they’re something special and encourage them to be arrogant, or who don’t have the sense to keep the child rooted in the real world. This behaviour is hardly limited to child prodigies, of course; there are plenty of adult performers who are nowhere near prodigal who develop arrogance and run wild.

I’ve been trying to figure out why people get so hostile about successful young people. Is it guilt? Is it a sense of failure on their own part? Is it sour grapes? And on the other hand, why do people flock to see an eleven-year-old play the violin? Is an example of the human desire to gawk at something freakish? Or is it a genuine appreciation of the talent that shines?

There are generally two camps that end up emerging: those who disparage child prodigies as being unnatural, saying that while they may display technical brilliance they do not have the life experience necessary to interpret most pieces of music emotionally. My respnse to this particular belief is that there are plenty of adults who have the technical brilliance and the life experience who still can’t play a piece of music that sounds like it has any emotion whatsoever, and so what’s their excuse? The other camp views child prodigies as gifts, inspired by whatever deity you care to assign it to.

Unfortunately for any talented child, if a marketing department gets hold of them, woe betide their reputation. No matter what, people will get sick and tired of “child prodigy this” and “child prodigy that”. Inevitably, we strike out against anything we are overexposed to, and a touchy thing like a talented child, who is not only more skilled than we are but famous and making money at it as well, is all too easy a target.

Yo-Yo Ma began memorising two bars of the Bach Solo Suites for Cello daily when he was four years old. He knew them all by heart in a few years. I take that as an inspiration, not a criticism.

So long as a talented child pursues what s/he is skilled at becauses/he enjoys it, I think they’re on the right track. If someone else is forcing them to do it simply because they’re good at it, that’s where things start to break down.

Speaking of breaking down, I’m dizzy and my stomach appears to be upset, so I think I’m going to go lie down. I slept horribly last night and woke up much too early.

Did you remember to say “white rabbits, white rabbits, white rabbits”?