Visited the ‘rents this evening. Washed my car over there again. Two weekends in a row in which I did laundry and washed my car. I’m too embarrassed to put in writing how often I normally did laundry and washed the car, but if you know me, you should be wiping a tear in pride now. My mom offered to make me a fruit smoothie. She’s been really into the organic healthy stuff, and she makes her own yogurt which she blends into smoothies. I munched on sliced oranges and Fuji apples (smoothie ingredients) as my mom blended, and ended up too full when I got my mug o’ smoothie, so I played with the foam on top while my dad took a sip of his smoothie. He complained it was too sour. My mom said, “Oh, I must’ve used too much tomato.” HUH?

As I worked up the courage to take a sip of…tomato smoothie, I took the mug with me to the living room and decided to practice piano. It’d been a long time. I rummaged in the box of sheet music and music books, and pulled out Claude Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque. I discovered a whole submelody in “Clair de Lune.” I frowned to concentrate through my parents’ Chinese talk show CD, which they had cranked way up so they can hear it over my piano (the radio was in the kitchen and they were sitting in the family room trying to listen to it). Then I started pulling out Chopin and various composers’ Sonatas. It’s interesting to sight-read music I know I’ve played before but have no memory of it, or of the markings made by my former piano teacher. Coming at this music from a “fresh” perspective, then, I was impressed by the composition and light-heartedness of one Sonata which didn’t have a composer’s name under the title. I thought it sounded a lot like Mozart’s style, and it reminded me of the arias in Mozart’s opera “Le Nozze de Figaro,” which I had seen with my ex last year. I flipped to the table of contents which did list the composers, and I was right! Now that I’m older and have more exposure to classical music (as opposed to simply memorizing a given order of notes with no opinion as to the quality of the music, which was how I approached music as a child/teen), I find that I have more appreciation for and understanding of these works. It takes playing music to a whole different level. For example, I examined a chord and wondered why Debussy chose to use an F instead the smoother sounding chord he’d make with E-flat, and then I looked at the measure before and saw his pattern of note ascension. Brilliant. This appreciation bubble burst as my mom interrupted my playing to tell me to hurry up and drink the tomato smoothie before the enzymes die.

I went upstairs to blog about my excitement over my piano playing, and could not get their internet up because their dial-up kept hanging up after the “verifying user name and password” stage. So I played 3-D Pinball for 2 hours until I decided that the computer’s cheating, then I came home.