I was in the store today looking to buy a card and I was taken aback by the amount of cheese on the shelves. One of the worst was a card going for $4.50. It said "10 Things I'm Thankful For", with such creative things like "Your smile", "Your eyes", "Your nose", "Your lips", "Your sense of humour", etc. -- ending the list with, predictably, "You".
Now, I may be mistaken, but if your whole list is an inventory of "Things On My Significant Other's Face", not only does it get a little redundant, it makes you wonder exactly where the $4.50 is going. You end up concluding that the card must be printed on extremely, extremely good paper, and that the gold lettering must contain actual gold.
I assume, of course, that people who write these cards have to write within the constraints of the general public. They can't get too specific because they'll immediately lose your business if it doesn't fit the bill. So here they are being very careful not to stray too far away from the general, card-buying consumers.
As a side note, Happy Belated cards are great sales because buying a "Happy Belated" card almost justifies your being average, attests that you're not a promontory spike in a demographic of people who are never stupid or inconsiderate enough to forget. If Hallmark will print thousands of "Happy Belated" cards, one would think that enough people are forgetting.
I did notice, however, that the "10 Things I'm Thankful For" card was missing praise for your lover's teeth. Decidedly, buying the card would side you with the notion that, though you are ready to laud every part of your lover's face, as far as his or her teeth are concerned, you'd rather not get into it.
There are those inspirational cards too that have lists of things that make life worth living. Like tea on a sunny afternoon, flying kites in the park by the ocean, taking a hot bubble bath. These things are actually on the card. For once, to counter-act all the emotional Hallmark sap, I want to see a card dedicated to all the things in life we're not thankful for. Like bunions, halitosis, body odour, warts, genocide, athlete's foot, the problem presented in realizing you have only one square of toilet paper left in your apartment after having already committed to the call.
I think cards should just be ultra specific and the company prints only one. So it becomes a collector's item. It would be like finding the perfect pair of pants. Let's say you found a "Sorry About That Freak Accident With The Exploding Airplane, Which Jettisoned A Barrage Of Renegade Suitcases On Your Poor Family While You Were Picnicking In The Park" and it actually happened.
Well, then that's something to be thankful for.
I recently flew back in from Oregon, and everything they say about Portland being a nice city -- with its gorgeous downtown, bridges, restaurants, and the breath-taking Columbia River -- is most likely true. What I mean is, though I thought the concert was in Portland, we were actually in a town far, far away, called Newberg. So I wouldn't know if Portland is a nice city.
But I figure people wouldn't lie.
After the concert, the Afiaras settled down to teach chamber music. People ask me if I'm good at it. For some reason, people find it perfectly acceptable to, upon asking me what I do, immediately ask me whether I can actually do it. Once, on the plane, I sat next to a man who asked me why I had brought my guitar on board with me. I told him it was a cello and that I was a musician. Smiling broadly, he said, "Oh, that's neat. Are you any good?" One wonders why that doesn't happen to other careers. When you tell someone you're a doctor or a lawyer, they don't ask you if you're good. They just say "wow". And what are you supposed to say to that, anyway?
"Are you any good?"
"Yes, as a matter of fact, I'm amazing."
Since this question comes up so often, I usually reply, "Funny you should ask, I was just wondering the same thing," make a dry comment about the pretzels, and, reclining my airplane chair, feign sleep. After all, when it comes to teaching, I have things to hide.
Well, maybe not hide. But I'd say pretty much everything in my life that turned out well came to be without any of my influence. For me, some might say the recipe for success is in not touching anything. It's great for the ego, I assure you.
I've heard two things about good teaching: That it shows through the students and that it starts with connecting with them. For an example of this, I asked one of my quartets, all of them around ten years old, if they knew "Animal Farm" and they nodded. But of course animals being on farms are pretty familiar fodder for pre-teens, having had Old McDonald and his peculiar fascination with ululating certain vowels burned into their minds only so recently. Oblivious were we all that while they were "oink-oinking" their way through my analogy, I was referring to Orwell's allegory on Stalin's Soviet totalitarianism. Which makes anyone wonder what I was saying about Orwell in the first place. I was trying to get the cellist in one of my quartets to lead certain sections as if she were the first violinist, so I think my point was in turning the phrase "Everyone's equal, but some are more equal than others" into "Everyone leads, but some lead more than others".
Which, in reality, I think I could have said without referencing anything whatsoever. Realizing I wasn't capable of saying anything without dredging up some old relic they wouldn't read for six years, and I haven't read for about as long, I don't think any of us listened to what I had to say from that point on.
It didn't help that my hearing is somehow atrociously bad. I never hear people correctly and I think it's getting worse. Which is cause for alarm because I'm like Beethoven but without the genius. Anyway, during a coaching, I had a different score than the quartet, so I asked them which rehearsal letter they were starting from. "Six bars before N," said the plucky first violinist.
"Before the end?" I asked, craning my neck to hear.
The first violinist shakes his head, "No, N. En-NUH."
"M."
"N as in Nancy!"
"Mancy?"
He turns to his group, "Okay, M, then. Let's start at M."
I suppose my tactic was in making them realize how dire the situation was. Figuring they were on their own anyway, they bore down and rehearsed until they were amazing and played a fabulous concert.
So am I good at teaching? Since it's debatable whether I ever connected with them in the first place and their performance had nothing to do with the teaching, technically, I did not teach them. Which means, technically, I'm still trying to figure it out.
And, as a life motto, that's what I'm going to go with.
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