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My very first class of college was Musicology 139: World Music. It was 9:30 am and I stumbled into class, found a seat in the lecture hall and waited for wisdom to be imparted. Professor Castro opened the class by telling us to look around at each and every one of the 115 other music performance majors in our grade, because around us were 115 of the finest musicians our age who all had the potential to be the next Pavarotti or Yo-Yo Ma. She then had us look again, as she reminded us that while we all were talented musicians, it is unlikely that even 3 of us will make a living on music alone.

As a rational person, those odds make me want to run as fast as possible away from a career in music. Run to engineering and white picket fences where things are comfortable, safe and all but guaranteed. 3 in 115? What if it is 2? What if it is 1? What if none of us make it?

Last semester, music almost defeated me. I auditioned for numerous shows and could not seem to get the roles which I desperately wanted, hurting my pride and causing me to wonder if I was one of the 112 who stood no chance at a career. Additionally, I excelled as an engineer finishing an internship with a return offer, joining the EECS Honor Society, and maintaining a strong GPA, making the choice between music and engineering seem all but obvious.

Yet, on December 18th as I sang in Hill Auditorium for the School of Music’s Concerto Competition I remembered why I sing in the first place. Even though my entire body was shaking from nerves and I felt as if I could barely remember how to breathe let alone 10 pages of French marred with coloratura, I was happy. Finding freedom in the intense focus, I survived and rekindled the passion which has driven me to music.

Only time will tell if I’m one of 3 or of 112. However, I am currently one a few thousand who have sung a solo at the acoustically perfect Hill Auditorium. And for the little girl who wrote a bucket list in crayon detailing all the places she wanted to sing one day, it is enough to be able to cross Hill Auditorium off the list.

Stop trying to make “epic” a thing, everyone. Epic came and went like “fetch” sadly never has. BUT. While I’m opposed to “epic,” “Epic” (capital E) is entirely different.

                             

It’s a genre. And with that,  all of you click away from this blog because: duh.

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Every January 1st, or around this time, facebook/news-outlets/twitter/tumblr/friends/real-life/etc. all start to either embrace, really or ironically, or denounce, the “new year resolution” way of being.

1) Goal: Fit hegemonic beauty standards for white, cis men. (Every year I’ve made this goal and oops! Always a fail. Sixpacks are like the elusivity of Mew, or so I’ve been told.)
2) Goal: Stop doing (x) “bad” habit: binge drinking, smoking, doing tons of drugs, having “meaningless” sex, procrastinating, hating myself, never leaving my bed . . . . (I’m stubborn, so my bad habits, some/most/none/whatever, usually do end when I tell them to. However, not all of them. Bad habits are like dark chocolate, “healthy” if you do them a little bit at a time.)

Don’t get me wrong. I love goals. I love planning. I love aims. My friends constantly remind me about how obsessed I am with the future and how I want to get things just right. With this in mind, however, most new year resolutions, on a global (everyone) and local (me), level tend to miserably fail on one if not ALL of these goals. But its not so tragic, rather it’s a comedy of errors. All of us fail every year, right when we want a fresh start.

{Busting your ass at the gym EVERY day all day long for a week so that by the time you quit working out you’ve done your body more harm than good, you’ve exhausted yourself and made yourself sick, and now you feel even worse.}

                              

                                        For the strong of heart: treadmill fails.  

{You tell yourself you want to be more (a)social so you’re either overwhelmed and crying in public or underwhelmed crying at home. And for us intro/extrovert mixes whose lives a constant balancing act of ways we get recharged, we’re left crying everywhere always.}

{Trying to fix your life by yourself  rather than seeking help from friends, family, your community, or from other “professional” people always ends badly. Not only do you fail yourself but then you lose any hope of doing anything alone. AND in this individualistic, capitalistic society,  personal failure isn’t bad it’s evil. So now you’re Satan, surprise!}

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Instead of making “goals” this new year, I’ve decided to make changes. I refuse to have a life that maps too well onto a comedy of errors and not, instead, onto an Epic. Changes lead to goals, but I don’t want to pretend to myself that I know where I want my life to go in a year from now. I don’t even know where I’ll be, let alone who I’ll be, in a year from now. 2015 is just as opaque as 2013, so I will stick to the present.

Some of my changes include:
1) “Evaluate life more often.”
2) “Love more freely and deeply.”

I’m just going to leave those here.

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My main plans for this new year is to embrace change. I will be turning in my thesis in 3 months. I will be graduating in 5. I will be travelling to Europe in 6. I will be taking the GRE in 8. I will be *hopefully* moving in 9. “3-6-9 you drink wine, monkey on your back you feel just fine.” I’m out of wine, I hate monkey massages, but Cat Power still gets me.

By making these changes–big and small alike–my life really can’t fail. This is the main thing I hate about New Years resolutions. All goals cannot be met or else the world would be a different place. Failure is imminent and I will either queerly embrace this art or thrive in redefining what success/failure/change/goals mean to me insofar as I can change my life one way. Change it back. Change it differently. So for me I resolve to make changes and that way I either change or stay the same. I cannot fail.

Thus, there’s really nothing that can go TOO wrong. Somedays I’ll be seduced by Calypso, others I’ll have to battle “the Citizen,” but I’ll learn something from each interaction, each movement, each path I take. And that, my friends, will be my Epic new year. Always learning, always growing, always reflecting. So when I get to 2015, I’ll have my adventures mapped out, the places I’ve seen remembered, the people I’ve loved etched into my heart, and my existence will transform into a 800 page novel with many more volumes to come.

                          

At the beginning of this semester, as I worried about distribution requirements in my political science advisor’s office, I assured her that the Beginning Drawing class I had in my registration backpack had been put there on a whim. To my surprise, the advisor was delighted by my whim and urged me to keep the class on my schedule, eventually mysteriously manipulating something on her computer to help me fill a requirement. I was reminded of the nonchalance of my nuclear family’s emphasis on art – an art class, she felt, would obviously do me good.

She was right. Drawing is a constant tic for me, an activity that I can engage in almost unconsciously – so being forced to devote three hours, twice a week, to developing my skills and ideas has felt enormously cathartic. Although I wasn’t a ‘true’ beginner in that I could already draw fairly accurately, I hadn’t tried to really make progress in developing my abilities in a long time.

My favorite part of the class was the month long segment on figure drawing.

I love figure drawing for so many reasons, but mostly because it forces you let go of so many anxieties about the human form. In order to draw the hand, face or torso in front of you, you have to get rid of previous conceptions about what how those pieces of the body look, or ‘should’ look. Each individual’s body is an accumulation of their history that exhibits itself most obviously in scars and tattoos, but also in certain postures, masses of muscle, accumulations of fat, and tones of skin. This is why books that teach figure drawing tend to only impart generalizations – abstract instructions can only guide you to draw a perfect hand, an ideal profile, a measured bicep, pieces that sum up to a perfectly proportionate but fictional body. But when you draw from life, these rules (i.e., figures should be nine ‘heads’ tall, with shoulders three ‘heads’ across) are often confounded by perspective, space and the oddity of physical variation.

My favorite model was large, with rounded belly and breasts that the class delighted in suggesting with a few animated strokes of the pencil. Her mass filled up our papers (or dwelt a little off to the side, depending on whether I remembered the lessons on composition), and the smooth round shapes of her body lent themselves to broad gesture. The woman’s poses were the product of heavy, stolid efforts, accompanied by coughs, but her weight was consistently grandiose and powerful on our newsprint pages. As she doggedly raised her hands in the air for a five-minute pose, our drawings reflected how gravity appeared to be pulling her body downwards; as she sat or lay down we scribbled to describe the bows and bends of her protruding curves.

As the class progressed, our teacher suggested that we use our non-dominant hand to suggest the pose, or that we use multiple utensils bunched together in our fists. To my surprise, I loved my left-handed drawing, finding that my crudest attempts sometimes expressed the figure the most accurately. The gestural exercises that looked more like lines and less like humans captured something important about impermanence in their very lack of development: the human figure can’t be divorced from its vast potential for action and movement, not even if it holds very very still. The dead flowers that we contoured, the paper bags, the bottles and boxes and chairs – they had the potential to move but we were too unskilled to see or incorporate it. You can draw an acceptably ‘accurate’ still life without thinking about the potential motion of your fruit basket, but figure drawing somehow necessitates deeper perceptions of motion and mass.

And it’s much harder to form a smooth, developed drawing without losing some of the immediacy that comes in identification between the quick mark on the page and the impermanence of human motion or stillness. Some of my longer figure drawings turned out labored and disjointed because I felt like I had the time to slowly develop pieces of the body separately instead of making quick marks that suggested the figure – but without those initial, abstract descriptions, the pieces of the body failed to unite. When I consequently built my developed drawings on a foundation of gesture drawings, the unmeasured, instinctive marks gave my figures presence.

Within (or maybe above) these struggles, there’s something so amazing, so fascinating about drawing a human body – as my teacher commented, “it’s so hard to draw them, because they’re us.”

It’s hard, but it’s also incredibly fulfilling. Embracing the human form’s oddities is strangely soothing to me, as I am no stranger to physical asymmetry. I was born with a cleft lip (I had my final repair four years ago), and I also have a permanently torn tendon in my right knee that has changed my posture and given me a much stronger, bigger left leg. Physically, these events have left only faded scars, a slight difference in the length of my legs, a minor irregularity in the shape of my nostrils. But to me, a lifetime of understanding self-worth as independent of beauty is intertwined with the scar tissue above my lip; my first encounter with age and permanence bound up in my uneven gait.

I used to consider it a kind of failure that I only wanted to draw people, that bodies engaged my artistic attention while I could only be bored by trees and buildings and tables and apples. But drawing people is essentially different. In class, our poorly drawn figures were sad little beings, slanted and un-souled and hilarious in their misery, but successful figures felt important beyond reason.

For our last self-portrait of the semester, we were only allowed to use our feet. Some people taped pencils to their socks or shoes, others held the pencil between their toes, some looked in the mirror, some didn’t bother. I held the pencil in my toes, and as my leg began to quiver from exhaustion I found that the shaking produced gentle, smooth shading. Slowly, I developed an oval. The drawing was meant to be a funny, loose exercise, and we spent most of the time laughing. But when a human face appeared, beneath my very foot – I can’t explain it, but I could have wept.

Once again comin’ atcha with some quick finals breaks and necessary distractions. Who better to bring some quality laughs and antics your way than the man himself, Jimmy Fallon. To be honest, I know nothing about him or his show, or any of those late night-one-man “news” (?) shows of which there are so many, but Jimmy Fallon certainly looks funny on youtube.

One of his best recurring segments is the “History of Rap” routine with Justin Timberlake. Together, the two provide the vocals for a mashup anthology of rap– approximately four minutes of song snippets beginning at rap’s origins and moving through at  hyper speed to the current state of pop-rap, all the while covering everything in between. Besides being unexpectedly good at rapping, Jimmy and Justin clearly treat this bit with nothing but a relaxed and carefree attitude. And true to all of the best Jimmy Fallon clips, The Roots are the driving force behind its brilliance. As integral parts of the History of Rap, themselves, the goal of reenacting a full timeline in under five minutes is only made possible with their help. There are four installments of this hilarious routine, but here are parts 2 & 3, in my opinion the best ones. Highlight: their back-to-back duet of “Killing Me Softly.” Take a few minutes away from your notes and clear your mind with these antics. If two white comedians are going to try to cover the history of rap, one of them for sure better be Justin Timberlake..

History Of Rap

For a more festive touch, here’s Jimmy Fallon singing the classic “All I Want For Christmas” with some help from Mariah Carey, The Roots playing children’s musical instruments (apparently straight from a FisherPrice toy collection) and some children themselves. Happy holidays, y’all.

All I Want For Christmas Is You