by david chancellor. here is his webpage.

he is a photographer from south africa but i am really drawn to the pieces that have a flavor of the american west.






something about these resonate on a level with me that has to do with being totally outside. vastness of air and dirt. the feeling of being lonely and safe, or unsafe, of solidarity. you do not stay too still for too long at the same time that your motion comparative to the landscape is so insignificant that this necessary motion is meaningless, is rendered into stillness.

it is difficult to find the same whirling stillness in the city where i currently live.



the photographs also resonate on a level concerning personal strength and integrity. maybe the feeling is just a product of the aforementioned outside-ness -- of how the sense of self becomes distilled. i am jealous of this girl's sure look.

i know that i am romanticizing but i need to do it right now.
i need dirt and sunburn and outside-aloneness!

there is a certain kind of everybody's grandfather who has survived the war (wherever the war was) who likes bear claws. "don't bother putting it in a bag."

i am profiling you.

men talk to me more when i wear makeup.

it is warm and i have money now but am still working on the part with "friends". two weeks ago i went out with a guy from work. i had spent all day in bed with a fever and probably should have stayed there, but i was determined to not cancel my first (and only) social event in the seven months since i have moved here. i felt as though i had forgotten how to have a face-to-face honest conversation; i'm not so good at it any more.

very much a sea of aloneness and my hair smells like bread. is this adulthood?

i used to frequently cry during shavasana, back when i did yoga. sometimes it was like i finally reached a well of sadness that i hadn't known was there; sometimes it was just crying. it was embarrassing, at least, as soon as the lights were turned on and i rolled up my mat. and then i started having parallel experiences in my piano lessons.

one of the first times it hit me, we were working on a mompou cancion y danza. my teacher stopped me partway through the first phrase.
"stop," she said, "you just need to stop caring what i think and play from yourself."

so i started again from the top, and starting crying almost immediately. i cried all the way through the piece, through the end of the lesson, and through my kickboxing class afterwards. but i played it really well. my teacher was very pleased.

about a year later, i was working with another teacher on the first movement of the bach concerto in d minor. she was playing the orchestra part and yelling at me at the same time. it wasnt until i gave in and started crying as i was playing that the sound changed in the right way. she immediately noticed the change and commended it. i cried to the end of the concerto and at the end she said, "that was very good, emily."

had another lesson, again, last night. a schumann song, without a singer. it is a technically very simple piece, we took it at a meditative 60% tempo and it was the same feeling again, this welling up. this time, though, i wasn't willing to give in and start spontaneously sobbing in front of my new teacher. (i'm pretty sure he already thinks i'm off my rocker.) (maybe i am.) so i missed the point.






i used to have frequent dreams about the end of the world or the death of everybody. they'd happen two or three times a week and invovle large bodies of water rising over a city, the climbing of mountains as refugees, the systematic slaughter of a community with poison, dogs, guns, what have you. in spite of them being really awful dreams, i was only ever watching them and would wake up feeling fine.

it was last spring that i think i stopped having them, and this week, they're back. i've had three of these in about as many days and this time i'm feeling them, too, the horrible nightmarish part.

the one from last night was populated mostly by children. those of us who had survived hiked to the top of a hill covered in black scree and sat in a circle. we posted sentries, who wore garbage bags over their heads. at this point, the enemy (whoever they were) set dogs against us and came and threw the bodies into a van. and then i woke up.




obviously there is something i need to be working through right now but i have no idea what it is.

whenever i don't have a primary goal in my piano work i have this constant feeling of needing to be in some sort of therapy. individual. group. maybe i should go to AA even though i don't really drink, just to find some deeper love of the human stage.

but when i'm working on a project -- in this case, an audition in colorado in thirty-two days -- that need suddenly disappears. i don't care if people return my calls. i don't notice how many dishes are in the sink. i forget to make lunch for my girlfriend. when she says, "lets do something fun this weekend," i say, "mm," and then she says, "jesus, never mind."

it takes me a full day of work to pay for a single hour-long lesson. i am more specific about how i practice for them now, now that i have a more immediate appreciation of their cost.

i am finding that there are two primary kinds of teachers. both teach you how to feel, how to understand a phrase, how to shape a gesture, and so forth, but one tells you in a way that you do not personally comprehend in your bones while the other shows you in a way that is like how a friend points out that those elusive car keys are right on the kitchen table, under your nose. they show you ideas you already understood but couldn't articulate. in short, the second kind makes a lot more sense, requires a lot less emotional charlatanism, and is often more fun to work with, regardless of their "ability." of course there are gradiations, shades of gray between the two, but so far this is what i've come to notice about the different people i've worked with.

lessons with the latter can feel like a really good yoga sesson, or a massage, where afterwards i walk out with an enirely new sense of my body, of my spacial-temporal relationship with music, and a new quietness from the reminder that while everything takes a lot of work it doesnt take a lot of effort. if you have twenty miles to walk today, you should walk slowly.

i find that it is very hard to explain a true musical experience without sounding either like a religious nut or totally obscene. i love men who listen to classical music with their dicks, like an antenna. we seem to understand each other. is it crazy to say that all of the flaws in my playing are parallel to the flaws in my daily living?

i need to remember that god is waiting in every part of the breath. i need to remember that the emptiness is a good thing where all music comes from.

there are all these walls that have been set up that need to come down. i'm trying to take them apart brick by brick, or trying to kick them down, or trying to dig a tunnel under them, or trying to figure out where they came from in the first place. all i really need to do is walk through them. they're not actually there.

"the heart is the hub of all sacred places. go there and roam." -bhagawan nityananda

this is how i know a woman loves me.

today i helped a lebanese woman study for her citizenship exam. i was tagging along with friends who thought that it would be good if i were to read through the exam questions, because she hadn't heard my voice before. the first question i opened to was, "are you or have you ever been a prostitute?" the next question was, "have you ever sold your body for money?"

it was very weird to walk into this proud woman's house where i was offered cardamom coffee and to ask immediately, "are you or have you ever been a prostitute?" it probably isn't a very good conversation starter in any other situation.

her english was a little rickety and she gave a couple of especially non-sequitur answers over the course of the mock interview. my friends and i laughed out loud at some of them, which probably wasn't the nicest thing to do, but sometimes it was just too funny. take, for example:

what is the name of the national anthem?
three hundred and seventy five.

what was the main concern of the united states during the cold war?
thomas jefferson.

who brought the slaves over to america?
my husband.

last night i had a dream that one of our neighbors in the apartment complex got a piano, and i thought, me, me, me! i want a piano in my apartment, too!

retail has pretty much run out of charm. it is okay for a couple of months, but as soon as i start thinking about the massive amounts of time and effort i spent getting my undergrad, i immediately feel like a collapsed house of dreams. smoke furling out of shattered windows, that sort of thing.

two days ago there was a dress hanging on one of the return racks that i had never seen before. it looked like a fish, and i had to share the experience with somebody, anybody. so i addressed the most nearby customer. "ma'am, doesn't this dress look like a fish?"

she gave me a look and said, "i actually bought a dress just like that about a year ago to wear to my son's wedding. and then two months ago i buried my husband. both times i received a lot of compliments on it."

great.

my girlfriend reminds me that every hour i spend organizing elastic-waisted velour pants and turning shirts right-side-out after they've been thrown on the dressing room floor is another hour closer to switzerland. but what kind of way is that to live, killing time?

"i believe that you are your work. don't trade the stuff of your life, time, for mere dollars. that's a rotten bargain." - rita mae brown.

so i put in my two weeks. i told them i was going home for christmas.

"going home for christmas," said one of my supervisors, eyes narrowed, like a snake about to strike.

i'm broke. i'm lonely. i'm cold. i'm making time for the work that i love every morning when the campus is covered in snow and everybody else is still in bed.

it will get better. it will get better. it will get better.