Happy 2013!

Goodbye, 2012.  You were a pretty good year.

New Year’s Eve has always been a bittersweet event for me.  I remain a creature of possibility.  A hard, fast ending that involves a countdown followed by a melancholy tune rhetorically questioning if we should forgot the days that have gone by can reduce me to tears as I realize all that could have been won’t be.  At least not this year. But then, poof, here comes 365 days of possibility, wonder, amazement.  You can’t turn down a fresh start.

I’ve become a little more fluid in my thinking these days and have recognized possibilities and fresh starts are available almost any time or place, but it still feels good to demarcate the beginning and ending of 52 weeks.  It makes it easier to look back and say things like, “That was the year my youngest son started school;” “That was the year my oldest son grew taller than me;” “That was the year I began to feel like if I put in the time and effort, I could really become a musician;” “That was that year I felt my life had come together and I became aware and  amazed by how much love and beauty surrounds me.”

Actually I  would never say that last sentence because it’s a little too New Age-y for me.  One cannot thrive on the power of failure and fully embrace the positive affirmation.  It seems to me positive affirmations are tossed around far too willy-nilly these days anyway, and often I sense there is a less than positive subtext beneath.  In my cynical little blackened heart I  feel that the much touted “I’m so blessed” Facebook status update translates into: “My life is soooo much better than yours.”  Seriously, if Mother Theresa were alive and on Facebook she wouldn’t be posting how freakin’ blessed she is every 15 minutes! Get over yourselves, people!  You’re trying too hard, and I’m pretty sure all those pictures of your family have been heavily retouched!

Ahem. I feel better now. But this does bring me to the obligatory list of New Year’s Resolution.  My first resolution is to limit my Facebook time to one session per day (and preferably a session that lasts no more than 5 hours) or at the very least,to figure out how to turn off the status updates of the Facebook friends who annoy me.  Beyond that, I should  work on my self confidence, but then I realize I would never be able to do that, I just don’t have that kind of strength of character.  So instead I have resolved to take up a bunch of  low level bad habits (like not flossing twice a day or biting my nails) and then next year I can resolve to stop doing those things, which should be fairly easy to accomplish,  thereby boosting my sense of self worth.  Sometimes you have to look at the big picture with these resolutions. My final resolution is to have the mess from my New Year’s Eve party cleaned up by next New Year’s Eve.

Seriously though, I’m looking forward to a lot in 2013, including working on my second CD, playing music with the Debora Iyall Group (DIG for short), perhaps continuing a side project with my friend Pauli Gray, and of course spending lots of time with my kids who are growing up way faster than I thought possible.

For those of you who have stopped in and read my entries in 2012, thanks so much for reading.  Hope you have a great 2013!

Some of my favorite gifts from this Holiday Season.

 

 

 

 

File Under : I Bet This Never Happens to DeadMau5

Deadhau5Wife

A couple of weeks ago I decided I needed some really heavy bass synth sounds for a song I’m working on.  I loves me some free VST Plugins, but thought I might broaden my horizons and check out free demos to see the range of what is out there.  I came across Native Instruments’ Massive, immediately downloaded it , fired up Cubase and was ready to give it a whirl when my son called me into his room.  He wanted to show me something he had created.  I tried putting him off for a few minutes while I messed  with a couple of the presets,  but it became apparent he really wanted my attention so off I went.

After checking out my son’s latest Lego creation, I headed back towards the kitchen only to spy a basket of laundry I had collected a little earlier that day.  I decided to be proactive and take the laundry down to the washing machine.  Once I had the wash started I realized there was more laundry in the dryer.  I’ve been working very hard to stay on top of things and not let it all pile up, so I took that laundry upstairs, folded it and put it away.  In the process I came across a shirt that needed a button sewn back on.  Well, there happened to be a few things in my “needs mending” pile, so I took all of that out to the living room, sat down and made necessary repairs. Now I felt really good about myself.  I was getting things done!

I started towards the bedroom by way of the kitchen when I saw my laptop sitting there with  an odd message on the screen.  I immediately checked it out in fear that is was my  virus protection software alerting me to some download doom.  Nope.  It was simply a message from Native Instruments telling me my thirty minute trial of Massive was up and thanking me for giving it a try. D’oh!

 

 

In praise of the power of Failure

Disappointment (who perhaps looks a little like Mr. Howell from Gilligan’s Island)

One of the hardest things to do is to sit with your own disappointment; sit quietly with it in a room, no running or reaching for the phone to call for help, no opening a bottle of something to drown it. Disappointment can be huge, and yet still drowns neatly in a small bottle of the right stuff. Funny how that works. The challenge is to just sit with it, look it in its colorless eyes and wait until it gets bored. Eventually it shrugs and says “what did you expect?” before it finally lopes off to some other non-event.

But I can’t do it. I can’t wait out disappointment like that. If it looks like disappointment is on the way, anyone’s disappointment, I will be the first to cast an anxious eye to the horizon and scream, “Distract, distract, distract!” And  it must have been that time when I could not distract myself from looming disappointment, that I discovered the power of failure.

Failure can be a beautiful thing. It builds no expectations, and with no expectations there can be no disappointment. The twisted twin of: “Do or do not. There is no try,” there is only “try” in my power of failure. And I try everything – film making, sword fighting, singing in front of an audience, creative writing groups, so many endeavors that make others pause and worry, “What if I’m no good?” I simply mutter my negative affirmation “I’m going to suck. Oh well,” and barrel onward.
Sometimes I do stop and ask, “Where has this gotten me?” Because obviously approaching everything with the understanding that you will fail doesn’t leave much room to strive towards improvement. I suppose the answer is nowhere, but it’s an interesting nowhere. And I’m rarely if ever defeated, which makes me something of an alpha loser.

Sadly though, any expectation, even an expectation of failure, will lead you back to disappointment. Witness the moment a peer in one of my activities turned to me and said, “You know, you’re not as bad as you think you are.” It was intended as encouragement, but it meant that I had failed at failing.  And what do I do with that?

Secret Studios

I went out to Secret Studios last night to meet up with my friend, Pauli, who hopefully will play a few songs with me at my next show (May 22 at El Rio, in case you’re wondering). I was late and he thought I had already cancelled,  so I waited while he made the trek from his place in The Mission to Cesar Chavez.  As I stood there in the hall with a pile of equipment at my feet, fumbling with my phone to pass the time, I realized that this was such a familiar situation in such a familiar place, that it felt timeless.

Before I knew it as Secret Studios, I knew the building as McCune Audio/Visual. I worked there for a few years, but not a contiguous few years. I think I may have quit twice before finally leaving for good. Secret Studios was already occupying the back of the building when it was McCune, but when McCune left, Secret Studios took over the rest of the warehouse area (the same area where I spent a lot of time wrapping cables, because the McCune warehouse manager didn’t know what to do with the secretary from upstairs who claimed she wanted to be a tech even though she couldn’t comfortably lift half of the equipment that needed to be hauled around for the job).

I’d been there a couple of times on auditions before I became a regular, traveling down the long halls of rehearsal space doors to meet with Karen, the singer/ guitarist with whom I formed The Little Things. When Karen needed to take a break from music to have a baby, I auditioned for Candy from Strangers, which lead me to the same door I waited by last night. Since then I’ve also rented out the hourly room for various projects.
I’ve watched bands load drum sets and amps into shabby vans in the parking lot, I’ve clumsily dragged my own equipment over the bumpy asphalt and dropped my keyboard on the loading ramp more than once (on one particular instance it was a choice between my keyboard or my mini skirt, and I chose the mini skirt. Either way, I was going to look stupid.) Sometimes it seems the musicians coming and going are ageless, sometimes they look like kids, and then sometimes, when I really look around everyone seems to be my age.

If there’s any secret left to Secret Studios, it certainly isn’t the security gate code, I think you could probably Google it if you had to. Maybe the real secret is that it is timeless. Some bands have practiced there forever; many bands have been born and died there, occasionally  all in the same night. It holds the same psychic energy as say a dorm room, or a prison, or any space that is inhabited for a very specific purpose. Musicians come and go, but things don’t change much. The musical styles cycle through.

But the one thing that hangs in my mind each and every time I go to Secret Studios is “Man, this would be a kick ass setting for a zombie flick.” And it really would be.  A poor unsuspecting singer on her way to the audition of lifetime doesn’t realize the zombie apocalypse is upon her.  Suddenly she finds herself trapped in a maze of punk rock zombies, metal head zombies, goth zombies, swing band zombies – and half of the zombies she encounters aren’t even zombies yet.  It practically writes itself!

 

7 AM, Monday Morning

My youngest wakes up crying for a certain kind of breakfast food I don’t have in the house. For reasons still unknown to me, I agree to run out to the store to appease his craving. I throw on some sweatpants and my winter jacket and head out to the local store that is not as safe as its name implies (you’d better check the dates on the organic yogurt, if you know what I’m saying).

As soon as I start-up my husband’s car, the mp3 player comes to life and “There is a Light That Never Goes Out” blasts forth from the stereo, throwing me back in time a good 25 years. And then, like a character from a Philip K. Dick novel, my timeline is scrambled. I am both a middle-aged woman driving down the pleasant, suburban street on which she lives on a crisp Monday morning, and I am also an awkward, discontent teenager, shut up in her room listening to records, dreaming of a future she knows will never materialize.

“It’s okay,” I want to tell my tell my teenage self. “Things turn out nothing like you planned, but it turns out fine. By the way, can I pick up anything for you at the grocery store while I’m out?” My teenage self gives me the silent treatment as usual.

There’s no one else out here except for a teenage boy walking to the bus stop; his dyed black hair provides no contrast to his black hoodie and his black t-shirt.

“And if a ten ton truck crashes into us, to die by your side, well the pleasure the privilege is mine,” croons Morrissey.

For just a moment I fight the urge to pull over to the Emo boy and say, “Hey, want a ride?”

Happy Holiday Malaise

It’s that time of year when I should be neglecting my blog because I’m so busy with the bustle of the holidays, but instead I’ve been fighting inertia.   I’m not sure if it’s the shorter days, or the anniversary of my mother’s passing four years ago, but  this holiday season has found me listless and unfocused.  Tasks I normally look forward too like decorating the house for Christmas, seemed overwhelming.  I managed to pull the boxes of decorations out one day, but then let them sit in the hallway for a week before I summoned the energy to actually open them and put things out.  My music practice space in the basement has become cold and unbearably dark as well, so I found myself avoiding it, even though I had an on-line show scheduled.  Mostly I’ve been wanting to curl up and sleep.  This is not really a viable plan when you have kids.

So I started doing some research on ways to combat winter depression.  Here are some of the tips I found:

-  Eat lots of fruits and vegetables:  The vitamins will give your immune system a boost and the carbs will give you energy. Bananas are particularly good because of the fiber content and they contain dopamine,  a hormone that improves your mood.

- Get some light: Sunlight helps our bodies produce vitamin D and serotonin, a neurotransmitter that helps regulate the  central nervous system and digestive tract and is thought to contribute to a feeling of general well being.  Because of the shorter days,   some people benefit from daylight lamps to get the light their bodies need.

- Exercise:  Any kind of exercise can lift your mood, but yoga in particular has some moves that target the pineal gland which helps regulate the production of melatonin, yet another hormone  that helps balance the mood by keeping the body’s sleep-wake cycle in check. A quick side note here,  I found a yoga program on Netflix’s streaming library that targets depression.  This was ideal since I did not have to leave the house for a class;  the idea of leaving the house seemed exhausting. However, yoga can be difficult to do properly from just an instructional video, so use your best judgment.

All of these tips are good, and other than the daylight lamp, are things everyone should do to stay happy and healthy.  I have a few more personal tips that may be helpful to others as well.

- Music: My safest drug of choice, music is the ultimate mood-altering substance for me.  Upbeat music made me feel angry, and Christmas music made me feel even more depressed, so I tried some ambient electronica/chillout music. I recommend Soma FM’s Groove Salad should you need some mood boosting grooves to pull you out of the doldrums.

-  Wallow in your depression creatively:  Make something.  Make something dark.  Use your depression as the ultimate shield against disappointment.  You expect nothing, so anything you create will be better than expected.  Oddly enough, this philosophy works well for me in times like this.   This is what I came up with.  Certainly not my best work (I hope) but it made me feel like I accomplished something and also conveys my feelings right about now.  For the record,  the music was recorded many years ago,  I only put video to it.

- Engage others in an activity, if only electronically:In the thick of my listlessness, I didn’t want to chat with anyone in person or even in real time online.  It all required too much effort.  My husband, never shy about commandeering my iPhone, downloaded Words with Friends without my consent and then challenged me to a game.  For the most part I hate games, but I’m a sucker for word games.  I reluctantly gave it a try.  The back and forth and the need to re-engage my brain actually drew me in and in doing so, pulled me out of my mood.  Plus, I couldn’t help but feel pretty good about myself when I scored 60 points for the word “hamlet”.

I will say I’m feeling much better these past few days and am now looking forward to Christmas.  More so, I’m looking forward to getting past the whole holiday hoopla, so I can move on to 2012.  In the meantime, have yourself a Merry Little Christmas!

The Past 72 Hours . . .

In the past 72 hours I have:

- Donated supplies to the Occupy San Franciso base camp.

- Eaten wasabi coated roasted seaweed. Yum!

- Been amazed at how well my 4 yr old can swing on his own.

- Completed 7 videos to accompany my live performance at El Rio on Tuesday October, 4th (7 pm sharp, in case you are wondering).

- Engaged in melee combat with 4 other fighters, all of us armed with bokkens.  I was defeated in every single round.

- Completed many loads of laundry and dishes.

- Practiced music for my El Rio show and also the show I will be playing in Second Life tomorrow afternoon.

- Promised my 11 yr old that this afternoon when he gets home from school I will play the level of VVVVVV he created.

- Hiked up Mori Point and marveled at the color of the ocean.

- Read about an Oklahoma woman, a mother to 11 children, who is now attending  Harvard and thought to myself, “I should be doing more.”

In an alternate universe . . .

In an alternate universe Amy Winehouse is still alive.  She is married with two children and works as a file clerk for an accounting firm.  She once got a bit tipsy at the company Christmas party and when it was time for the Christmas Carol sing-along, she began belting out carols in a big, sultry voice that both shocked and amazed her co-workers.  The next day she was politely complimented on her singing voice by her boss.  Embarrassed, she resolved to never get tipsy again, and only drinks once a year on New Years Eve, but never to excess.  She sings to her children, but is too self-conscious about her voice to sing in front of others.   Her children and her husband are the center of her universe and she is very happy.

I swear this was meant as a tribute. I draw like a promising 7th grader.

August (and everything after)

I spent yesterday trying to dig up all the weeds from a patch of ground in my backyard where I have unsuccessfully attempted to grow a garden.  Currently there are two zucchini plants there which have bloomed and bloomed all summer  but have yet to produce a single zucchini, and then a rather sprawling poppy plant.  I have promised myself that next year-next year – there will be a glorious bed of  flowers surrounding a small plot of vegetables, perhaps sweet peas, pumpkins and beets.  It will be beautiful and fragrant and buzzing with bees. (My kids hate bees.  Maybe I’ll rethink the flowers.)

This morning  I woke up a little sore from all that weeding. I grabbed a cup of coffee and sat down at my computer, just like every morning,  to check in with all the online things I have that need tending – e-mails, social network connections, etc.  I am so much more attentive to these things.  Sometimes I feel too attentive to my online life, too plugged in to my computer, and too attached to technology in general.

I have a small list of life skills that I wish I’d learned better when I was young – sewing, cooking, gardening.  I avoided those things back then because they seemed the height of domesticity, and I of course was going to be a rock star.  I now appreciate how those things add value to my family’s life, particularly cooking and gardening.  Good food is very important and I’m increasingly more cautious of the food available in restaurants and grocery stores.  

I also love how tactile those activities are.  So many different textures are involved with weeding, or cooking, or creating something with cloth or yarn.  Technology makes everything smooth – the keys on my laptop, the roller ball on my mouse, even the keys on my synthesizer and the buttons on my sampler are smooth, almost bland. I sometimes wonder if it’s not making my life similar – smooth, bland. 

 As we move into August, the final summer month, I want to spend less time at my computer and more time outside preparing my fledgling garden or just running around with my kids.  I want to make healthy, yummy food for my family and decorate my house to match the changing seasons. 

I’ll still be doing music of course.  I have shows coming up in October and November.  Those months seems far away right now, but after the upcoming family vacation we have planned, it will be  time for the kids to go back to school and then the days will do that crazy, runaway train thing that happens at the end of each year,  like a rush to the downhill finish of  Christmas.   

How about you?  Do you every feel too plugged in?  Do certain times of the year make you more aware of your time spent working online versus working in the real world?   I’d love to hear about it.

A Straight Mom’s Guide to San Francisco on Gay Pride Weekend 2011

Back when I lived in the city proper, Gay Pride weekend meant that most of my friends were having parties and celebrating.  I was often the token straight girl in the crowd and I loved going along for the ride.  I vowed that should I ever become  a mother I would bring my kids to the parade and be completely open with them about all kinds of love and relationships.  And should any of my children one day be part of the LGBT community, I would be totally cool with that. 

Then Z came along and my husband and I moved out of the city to the suburbs where the streets were safer and the schools were better.  Z turned out to be the kind of kid who doesn’t deal well with crowds, and so the Pride Parade has never felt like a good idea as a family outing.  In fact, I don’t think he’s ever been to a parade of any kind.  

Sometimes I will casually mention to Z that this person and that person are not just friends, but are in love, like his dad and I.  This boggles Z’s mind as the heterosexual couple is the norm in our society even in the bay area.  Z knows these people; these are our friends who come to our family gatherings,  and friends who have babysat Z and his brother.  I realize that there’s no need to force the issue or make him uncomfortable,  so I’ve been trying to figure out what I do want him to know at this point.  Kids at school calling other kids gay as a derogatory term – not  okay in my book.  Realizing that some of our close friends are not married because they can’t legally be married – that’s discrimination and it’s something to fight against.  I’m not sure if there’s more for him to understand at this point.  I am considering taking him to the Dyke March on Saturday in Dolores Park.  We would be going with another family and hopefully have a fun afternoon.

So what am I doing on Pride Weekend?  Glad you asked.

Starting tomorrow night, Friday, June 24th, I’m playing a half hour set at The Brainwash Cafe with The Passion Kings.  I go on around 9:00 pm and I’ll be debuting some new material, so stop by if you get a chance.

On Saturday I may be taking my kids to the Dyke March as I’ve already mentioned.   And then in the evening I’m taking part in a music salon organized by my fabulous vocal teacher, Karina Denike.  This event starts at 6:30 PM and is held at a private live/work space, but if you’re in the area and interested in attending e-mail me and I’ll give you details.  paula@phaseslikethemoon.com

Sunday is the Pride Parade.  It kicks off at 10:30 AM from Market and Beale St.  I don’t think I’ll be making it out to the parade, but I highly recommend it to anyone who has never experienced it before.  It’s a wonderful event and Chaz Bono and Olympia Dukakis are Grand Marshals this year, so you should check it out!