From the GRE to Hawaiian history, all in one post!

Tomorrow I have to take the GRE again.  I'm a little nervous.  Don't get me wrong, I'm good at standardized tests and all that, I just feel a little old and I'm worried that my mind won't be as sharp as it used to be.  I just took a little mini-online practice preview - went okay, although I am TOAST on the math part.  But hopefully the writing program won't be too interested in that.

Otherwise, things continue.  The big girls are back in school now and Mari is adjusting pretty well so far to being at school all day.  She's been a little grumpy I suppose but nothing too intolerable.  Steph is gearing up for the start of her school year, and for the first time in a long time, I am not.  Friday would have been my first day at the part-time job I left.  I thought about it a couple times, but there are no regrets.

That's the one thing I think you can say about me.  I don't look back in regret.  Once a decision is made I commit to it and don't wonder about what could have been.  Doesn't mean I can't change my mind later if I think I made a mistake, but it's always about moving forward for me.  And while I consider it a strength of character, I suppose I can be a little bit extreme in my abandonment of the past.  And maybe that's a defense mechanism - I know that getting too close will hurt so I stay the hell away.  I've taken lately to, whenever I witness a poor musical performance, saying "It's not my problem anymore."  Which is a loaded statement.  On one hand, it's just my way of being flip and reminding myself that I'm something new now.  But there's some more depth to that statement.

It turns out that I had a lot more pride than I thought in being somehow 'officially' affiliated with the music world.   I have the same knowledge now that I did when I was still a music teacher, and I perform in more groups now than I did then, but somehow I now feel less qualified to speak on anything musical.  (I never really did feel qualified to speak too much about the education world, which again is telling.)  And I've never looked down on amateur musicianship or somehow felt like I was superior to anyone because of my title...and yet I feel like I have no business saying a damn thing any more when it comes to music.  I know that what happened was out of my control, but it's impossible to shake the notion that somehow I failed.  And I feel like if I go offering any opinion or advice, someone would have every right to question its worth.

Don't get me wrong, I know it's ridiculous and snobbish.  But I can't deny that it's there.

And there is also the temptation to sell the trumpet, trade the iPod for a Kindle and walk away from it for good.  But I know that's goofy and I'm taking steps to prevent that kind of attitude from taking hold.  Fact is, even though there are now times when I just prefer silence in the car, there are  an equal number of times I drive home from work, singing awfully along with a beautiful song and end up wiping tears from my eyes at the beauty and power of music.  Music is, and always will be, an addiction for me, and at the very least, a bad habit.  I can't stop.  If things ever did get to the point where I gave it up completely, I really would be killing more of me than I could ever hope to recover.  I'm not to that point yet.  There may be an awful lot of me that could do with a soul makeover...but I think there's still enough time to salvage what's there.  I'm going to keep trying.

And I'm going to keep trying my hand at creation.  A long time ago, there was a story.  As part of that story, King Kamehameha told me (don't ask, it's way too complicated) that I was not a creator.  I was a compiler, an arranger, an appreciator of what others create.  I was not an artist, I was an art critic.  I was not a composer, I was a listener.  That was my role in the universe, that was my essence, and that true happiness would be found by following that role - and that there was no shame in that role.  Of course, there was also the fact that my attempts at creation were so flawed that they endangered the very fabric of space and time.  But there are things I want to say and I'm going to keep working on ways to say them.  So far the results have been underwhelming.  But...no rips in reality yet, no temporal or spatial anomolies, so I think I'm going to keep on trying.  Maybe, just maybe, I can create something beautiful, instead of relying on others to do it for me.

We'll see.