Last weekend I road my 150 mi. from New York to Philadelphia with eight other people. It was amazing. I feel nine feet high. And it's beautiful autumn! No such thing in California!

At dinner when we arrived I met this amazing guy R who may be another spiritually and musically minded person like so many I met at greenman. I always thought to be religious i had to gulp down traditional services. no!

Later he told me I was like a character or a bunch of different attributes and he wondered if I mesh together. At first I thought, of course, for you I will tell the story so that I appear to be one person, pleasing to you. But then I thought, no, we really are all made up of different attributes, and to be perfectly honest we would have to present ourselves that way.

And then I thought about my obsession with redrawing my history so that I seem to have been a singer, a Singer, A Singer from childhood. I also have a desire to mesh together all of the parts into one coherent identity. preferably one that can apply for grants. "what do you do?" "I do the karnatic/opera singing with improvisors, have been singing all my life" "I make puppets out of paper mache and moss and silk, my mother is an artist"

And then I thought, in a relationship with a person, you try to mesh together two independent and changing human beings, and it takes continuous effort. true love over a long period of time takes intention and effort. so wouldn't it be the same for a single human being trying to mesh together disparate parts of the self?

So maybe no one is just a singer, unless they're a Famous Singer, but that's just it, we're commodifying the singer part, but there's a lot more there. in real life, singing has meaning only in what it introduces into other spheres: discipline, connection to the body, awareness of time, communication with other beings... somehow it doesn't seem like the converse is true though. I don't only read marx in order to be a better singer. well, but i do it to understand why i don't get paid to sing... i work in order to sing. i have a boyfriend because i need someone to love me so that i can sing. it's just hard to believe i'm really a singer, even combined with other things. do you ever feel that way?

oh yeah and for what i learned singing today: played through rachmaninov while singing at the keyboard (thanks mom!) today. sang one note at a time with chords. realized some notes are louder than others because of the harmonic stacking and the overtones. and Rach knows! He knows, he'll put a decrescendo over a note that is a quieter pitch harmonically. Try it!