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I have several battered sheets of notebook paper filled with a childish scrawl of musical shorthand. At ten years I was too impatient while writing music to bother putting it into standard notation, and because of this sloppiness I have only a vague interpretation of what it was supposed to sound like. Nonetheless it serves as proof that composing was an interest of mine much earlier than I usually credit.
As a child I was tortured rather mercilessly by my peers. This is an observation, not a complaint or an excuse, merely part of an explanation for how I’ve evolved. It’s not a particularly unique situation; kids are bastards and their greatest cruelties are turned on each other because they have so few other outlets for control. My reaction, however, was kind of interesting.
I became the model child, the good one, to whom parents would compare their own children and find them wanting. Ignoring my own age group I strived for the attention and admiration of adults, being particularly proud when it seemed that a high school girlfriend’s parents liked me more. It got me far in school and life, but then the model started to break down in college.
I majored in engineering for two reasons. One is high minded and arrogant; I felt that I could teach myself art, music, and history but needed discipline in math and science. The other, underlying, reason was that whenever I would tell people I was an engineering major I got the exact same phrase, “you must be so smart!” It was heady stuff.
All this got me deeply into my major before things began to fall apart. Most importantly, I wasn’t particularly interested in engineering. The first two years of the curriculum were fascinating to me but once I started delving into the minutiae I became bored. But there was another side as well.
Being an engineering student came with a kind of glamour, as I mentioned. Being an actual engineer, however, involves much less. As I went through my internships with IBM (“you must be so smart!”) I discovered the gallows humor that pervades the field. My manager was a devout fan of a newly popular comic, and these Dilbert strips became a constant presence at every office meeting. It wasn’t an outlook I was looking forward to.
I’ve told the story many times of how my second internship overlapped with my first weekends performing at the Ohio Renaissance Festival, and how the contrast between the two made my career choice an easy one. I had found a certain glamour, once again, as a performer.
I loved the reaction of the audience, and the ability to shape it. I loved the places I was going, the people I was meeting, and the experiences I was having. And I loved that when I quit my day job in 2002 to make a living in the arts I began to hear “you must be so talented!”
No longer a child, it wasn’t parent figures I was impressing but my peers. The envy I got for being self-employed, for extensive travel, and for a supposed freedom was incredibly fulfilling. But within a few years the luster began to fade. The chaos and strain of a life on the road make short work of any social currency, but in 2005 I rediscovered a sense of purpose when I started writing music. Or, I should stay, when I started writing music again.
Suddenly whole new worlds were open to me, and I was well primed to milk an album of original music from the trauma of divorce. But taking inspiration from pain is a lot like burning down your house to cook dinner. Travel, I found, is a surer and saner path to the muse. She thrives on the unsteadiness of unfamiliar surroundings, the mental workout of learning new customs, and the improvisational flexibility to cope with the unexpected.
I had found my new meaning, one contained within myself rather than dependent on the reactions of others. While I must admit to a lingering enjoyment of being envied, it’s no longer nearly as important to me as it once was, especially considering the sacrifices I’ve made. And when I hear “you must be so talented!” I always politely counter with the amount of work that I’ve done and mention that anybody similarly motivated could have come at least as far.
I am in a stunningly beautiful place, where the water meets the sky in a horizon denoted only by a subtle shift in shades of blue. Even as I give thanks for this lifestyle and these opportunities, however, my gratitude is still mainly focused on the fact that in five days here I’ve written two new pieces.
As a child I was tortured rather mercilessly by my peers. This is an observation, not a complaint or an excuse, merely part of an explanation for how I’ve evolved. It’s not a particularly unique situation; kids are bastards and their greatest cruelties are turned on each other because they have so few other outlets for control. My reaction, however, was kind of interesting.
I became the model child, the good one, to whom parents would compare their own children and find them wanting. Ignoring my own age group I strived for the attention and admiration of adults, being particularly proud when it seemed that a high school girlfriend’s parents liked me more. It got me far in school and life, but then the model started to break down in college.
I majored in engineering for two reasons. One is high minded and arrogant; I felt that I could teach myself art, music, and history but needed discipline in math and science. The other, underlying, reason was that whenever I would tell people I was an engineering major I got the exact same phrase, “you must be so smart!” It was heady stuff.
All this got me deeply into my major before things began to fall apart. Most importantly, I wasn’t particularly interested in engineering. The first two years of the curriculum were fascinating to me but once I started delving into the minutiae I became bored. But there was another side as well.
Being an engineering student came with a kind of glamour, as I mentioned. Being an actual engineer, however, involves much less. As I went through my internships with IBM (“you must be so smart!”) I discovered the gallows humor that pervades the field. My manager was a devout fan of a newly popular comic, and these Dilbert strips became a constant presence at every office meeting. It wasn’t an outlook I was looking forward to.
I’ve told the story many times of how my second internship overlapped with my first weekends performing at the Ohio Renaissance Festival, and how the contrast between the two made my career choice an easy one. I had found a certain glamour, once again, as a performer.
I loved the reaction of the audience, and the ability to shape it. I loved the places I was going, the people I was meeting, and the experiences I was having. And I loved that when I quit my day job in 2002 to make a living in the arts I began to hear “you must be so talented!”
No longer a child, it wasn’t parent figures I was impressing but my peers. The envy I got for being self-employed, for extensive travel, and for a supposed freedom was incredibly fulfilling. But within a few years the luster began to fade. The chaos and strain of a life on the road make short work of any social currency, but in 2005 I rediscovered a sense of purpose when I started writing music. Or, I should stay, when I started writing music again.
Suddenly whole new worlds were open to me, and I was well primed to milk an album of original music from the trauma of divorce. But taking inspiration from pain is a lot like burning down your house to cook dinner. Travel, I found, is a surer and saner path to the muse. She thrives on the unsteadiness of unfamiliar surroundings, the mental workout of learning new customs, and the improvisational flexibility to cope with the unexpected.
I had found my new meaning, one contained within myself rather than dependent on the reactions of others. While I must admit to a lingering enjoyment of being envied, it’s no longer nearly as important to me as it once was, especially considering the sacrifices I’ve made. And when I hear “you must be so talented!” I always politely counter with the amount of work that I’ve done and mention that anybody similarly motivated could have come at least as far.
I am in a stunningly beautiful place, where the water meets the sky in a horizon denoted only by a subtle shift in shades of blue. Even as I give thanks for this lifestyle and these opportunities, however, my gratitude is still mainly focused on the fact that in five days here I’ve written two new pieces.
