So here's my wonderfully insane grad school situation:

Stony Brook - Not a word
Juilliard - accepted, wait listed for my first teacher choice, no idea about money, no idea about who else is interested in taking me.
Mannes - accepted, half tuition (maybe I can bitch for more, but then there's:), wait listed for my first teacher choice, given a list of two whom I've never heard of who will accept me, and one whom I've also never heard of who might accept me.

So yeah, it's cool that I got into Juilliard, and if my second or third choice teacher accept me, I'd be quite happy with that, depending on money. But then there's Stony Brook, but maybe I'll get in off of Mr. Eddy's wait list at either school, but probably not, and maybe one of these Mannes teachers is a great fit for me and I just don't know it yet, but I'll have to travel to New York to find out, and, and, and . . .

You get the idea. I just have to be patient and wait for more info, but I can't wait too long to move on this, since I may need to hurry to find the best teacher for me before that person's studio fills up. But as my quartet coach said today, it may be a bind, but it's a good sort of bind, and I can't help but agree. I never really thought I had a shot at Juilliard.

Since I posted about medical marijuana recently . . . here's a positive development. The best thing is, this guy's going to be one of the Democrats competing for a presidential bid . . . and this story shows he's got integrity. Not because he signed the bill, but because he signed the bill even though it could well hurt his presidential campaign. That takes guts.

This country we live in . . .

Really riveting testimony on the very real uses for medical pot. I decided to post this in reaction today to the ruling by a federal appeals court that a California woman can be prosecuted for using medical marijuana under federal drug laws even though, according to her doctor, it's the only thing that's keeping her alive. What a country we live in . . . where the enforcement of a nonsensical law trumps a person's right to to keep herself alive. I don't blame the court, however, since it's their job to interpret law, not make it. It's up to all of us to push for sanity in this area, even if we indiviually look down on the use of marijuana, because, as the testimony above shows, there may well be so many real uses for this drug that people are afraid to research because of drug policy. It's not about getting high, it's about saving lives, or at the very least, dramatically improving the quality of lives.

MC Hawking - What We Need More Of Is Science

The best damn YouTube I've seen in forever.

So here I am, back in Madison after 8 days on the road. I came back feeling like I could sleep forever, but as usual I managed about 7 hours, which is about what I sleep while traveling. It always takes a day or two for my internal clock to readjust.

This trip confirmed to me that I lead a charmed life, with two clearly concrete examples and one that's a bit more subtle. For the first, apparently not twenty minutes after I passed the Pennsylvania border in my way to New York, a sudden white-out blew in, and a 20 car pileup ensued, closing 80 for hours, as trucks had pretty much scattered everywhere.

The second example is that I actually was boneheaded enough to miss my Mannes audition. I (for whatever crazy reason) thought it was at 4, when in reality it was at 11:30. So I was practicing in the early afternoon, getting ready, when suddenly this creeping aura of doom began to creep over me. I knew it had to be related to my audition, so I rushed over to the closest computer (the family I was staying with was a Mac family . . . I have a soft spot in my heart for Macs, although I hate the mice) and logged into my Mannes application. Sure enough: 11:30. First I panicked. Then, after calming down slightly, I started browsing the Mannes website, searching for the admissions office. Given 4 numbers to call, I tried them all, and on the fourth, someone finally picked up. Apparently cello auditions were going on all day, and also, quite a few people hadn't shown up for their auditions, so he figured it'd be easy to squeeze me in somewhere. SO i dash in to New York (I was staying about an hour out), manage to find the one open spot within two blocks in a matter of minutes; I get to the school at 2:35, and they tell me my audition's at 2:50. It probably would have been right away, but the pianist who was supposed to be accompanying auditions never showed (one of the student volunteers was quoted as saying "He eats crack for breakfast"), and they had some poor Russian grad in there hurriedly learning the entire cello concerto repertoire. So with such limited time, I didn't even bother to warm up, just literally warmed up my hands, regained some manner of equilibrium, and went in and definitely had my strongest audition yet. So all was well, and no one even mentioned my missing my first audition.

The final lucky thing that happened was getting placed on the alternate list for Tanglewood. I was pretty depressed after it happened, especially after also getting rejected from Indiana; so when I got the E-Mail, I called my teacher and told him I was feeling too out of it to have a lesson, and told him why. So we spent a good long time discussing it, and it may sound cheesy, but he told me that this could either just be another frustration or a real turning point. I then spent a long time analyzing what exactly had not gone so well in every I audition I had taken thusfar, and every single time it came down to rushing, mentally, emotionally, and physically. I spent pretty much all of my practice time between that conversation and my auditions working on this, slowing down my shifts, slowing down my tempi, and above all making sure I was in the correct frame of mind for what I was playing. That, and when I got to my Juilliard audition, I had an amazing pianist who had an excellent grasp of the music I was doing (except the 4th movement of Elgar. For some reason she wasn't aware I was doing that and so hadn't looked at it; but her schubert and other movements more than made up for it); she seemed to know every single nuance of the Arpeggione, so whenever I needed a bit of time for something, she was ready, and that made everything so much easier. So my Juilliard audition went quite well, although my Bach Suite Courante was HORRENDOUS, I had at least eight or nine memory slips, which virtually made the movement incoherrent. When I finished that movement, however, one of the faculty (there were about ten of them in there) just grinned at me and said "hey, don't worry about it" . . . which I think helped me just put it behind me, and the rest of the audition went really well, especially the Schubert, which sounded better than it had ever sounded before.

So then on Friday, after my Mannes tests, I looked at my phone, and saw that I had a message. Curious about who would call me before noon, I listened to my voice mail, and it was the Tanglewood admissions guy, telling me that I had actually been first on the alternate list and that I got in. So in hte end, everything worked out as well as it possibly could have, with me getting a necessary kick in the pants, and getting in nonetheless. So yeah, I lead a charmed life.

The one other thing I did on this trip was a lesson with Colin Carr out at Stony Brook (it's hard to say anything other than "out at", since it's "out there" on Long Island). I thought it was an amazing lesson, and he reminded me of quite a bit that I had not concentrated on since leaving Eastman, particularly refining my sound a good bit more, specifically being more cognizant of what sound I'm trying to produce at all times. He also gave me some intonation excersizes and some good ideas about Bach. You know, I've noticed that every teacher has a "correct way" to practice intonation. So I take a bit from everyone and add it to my repertoire of excersizes, and he was no exception. All in all, Stony Brook's looking to be a great place to go to school. If I get in to that and at least one of the NYC schools with enough money to go . . . it's going to be a tough decision.

So that's my trip in a nutshell. Man is it good to be home.