every time i see a high-quality classical music performance i am increasingly relieved that i'm not going into it. my father got tickets to yuja wang and the shanghai symphony last month and i'll be damned if it wasn't a very accurate performance. she wore a pretty sweet dress. sometimes i get to go for hikes.

you know that joke that goes:

go, go and practice until your fingers bleed?

yeah, well, my teacher actually does that shit, and the moment her fingertips split open, she gets really excited. "it means hi hem practicing enough," she says.

on a conservative day i'll put in four hours; what does it take to break open your fingertips? i have no idea. people who do that have, in my book, officially crossed the line into nutso. its been three days of no practice and my tendons are still hurting off and on, as they do. how does the skin of your fingertips give out before your tendons?

maybe she doesn't have tendons.

she used to put superglue on her fingertips to stop the bleeding.

"superglue hiznt good enough, hi have to use za chrazy glue." she laughs.

it's not funny.

maybe she's some crazy bulgarian octopus robot who has to use crazy glue to maintain a human shape. maybe she moved to california because she had some west-coast octopus relatives on her father's side that she wanted to get to know. maybe at night she drives to the ocean and takes her true form (leaving large, human-shaped shells of crazy glue on the shore) and they all tour old shipwrecks together. (maybe the glue-shells fill with moonlight and are buffeted around by the sea-breeze so the hippies who sleep at the beach think they're ghosts. maybe some of the hippies have gotten wise and now use the glue-shells for shelter. or boats. maybe they hang small shell and hemp and bottle-cap amulets around the inside of the glue-shells so that when they leave, the shells are large clattering moon-filled idiophone ghost-hollows that go whoom clatter clatter whoom clatter clatter as the night wind bounces them down the length of the beach. maybe.)

her sister played the bach concerto i'm currently working on when she was seven. my teacher didnt say when she herself played it, but in one section "when hi was a little ghirl," she said, "and didnt have such good control, hi used dis fingering. now hi can do dis, but you see."

uh huh, lady, i'm getting wise to you. i've heard the shore-hippies whispering.

meanwhile, i'm turning into one of those crafty 65-year-old ladies who gifts shitty hand-made earrings for her female relatives. i can't wait to see my kid sister's face when she opens the box: you mean, i'm supposed to hang this crap off the side of my head? are you serious? is this a gift or an insult? her friends'll be asking her what's the name of that clever little five-year-old in her life. it's fuckin' cute.