What is it about my hair that makes people want to cut it all the time??? This morning I was scurrying back to Mannes after grabbing a few cereal bars for breakfast inbetween classes when this woman stopped me on the street and told me that Salon West on the corner of the same block as Mannes was giving free hair cuts. "Do you have time right now?" - "Nope, I actually have to hurry to a test right now (which I really did)." - "When are you free later today?" - "Not until after six." - "How about next Wednesday between 9 and 11?" - "Wednesday...I have class from 9 to 11." - "Well, here's what we'll do: just call us on this number (handing me a business card), my name is Tina, and we'll see where we can fit you in." I suppose the smart thing would be to do that and take advantage of the free haircut. But really, this would be the third haircut I'm getting within like two months!

Finally a little chance for a breather...met up with Frank, the film studies apartment mate, for lunch near Mannes at a place called Saigon Grill - good food, extremely fast (they brought out my dish within like 3 minutes of ordering it!), and cheap too. Afterwards, we both walked around Central Park to see [The Gates]. Frank brought his video camera and shot videos while I took pictures with my trusty old canon s300 and short video clips with my new Audiovox SMT5600 phone. Some of the pictures I thought were rather nice - you can judge yourself [here]. We hung around there for at least a half hour despite the freezing cold and both our lack of gloves and headwear, then headed back home.

All in all, a nice change of pace from the hectic past two weeks, during which my lunch sometimes consisted of a chocolate candybar from the 5th floor vending machine, inhaled hastily inbetween classes and rehearsals. The orchestra concert this past Thursday went pretty well, the Bartok after hours and hours of rehearsal actually came together nicely and sounded pretty good. The Beethoven also was pretty good, except that at the very end of the last movement when the oboe has a solo, she must have misread the conductor's beat, because all the sudden she had a completely different tempo from everybody else around her. And since she had the melody at that point, it was rather obvious. There was actually a reporter from the NY Times in the audience who a couple months ago reviewed a concert by the Juilliard Orchestra and had (so I heard) rather unfavorable things to say about them. The last I heard, she has ten days to write up the article about our performance and submit it to the newspaper so for now everybody's just staying tuned.

Chamber music and such are going nicely...after hours and hours of struggling through the music, my piano trio finally managed to make sense out of the new piece we've decided to add - Charles Ives' Scherzo movement from his piano trio, titled "TSIAJ" for "This Scherzo is a joke." The idea was that we've been given the opportunity to perform at a new concert series in downtown Manhattan but are supposed to limit our music to about 15 minutes. But since the Arensky trio is too long for this purpose, and playing a subset of the movements of a piece doesn't quite have as good an effect, we decided to play Ives' TSIAJ (which is often performed on its own) along with the Elegie movement of the Arensky. A perfect pairing: the last chord of the Arensky elegie - a G minor chord - is also the opening chord of the Ives.

While we're talking about opportunities: I just recently talked to a fellow cellist Master's student from Taiwan who recently went back there to give a recital. It turns out that it's actually not that complicated to set up something like that - she just got in touch with a management company in Taiwan and paid them a fee and they took care of all the advertising, venue renting etc. Which gave me the idea to do the same thing too and thereby give my cancer-stricken aunt on paternal side (who years and years ago studied piano in Vienna at the same time as my mom!) a chance to see me play!

Alright, time to stop. I'm off to record the last bit of music for the [Apt. 4F short film project] with Frank. Due to time constraints, I had to ditch my grand plan of composing the music, and opted instead to use some movements of the Bach Suites for the movie which actually have turned out to fit very nicely. It's so exciting to see the movie complete with the music and to realize how much of an effect the music has! Anyways, after that it's laundry/practice time, then off to a concert at Mannes tonight by the Orion String quartet and two Mannes students chosen by audition earlier this year, then hopping on the 10:15 Amtrak to Philly with a surprise for my brother :P (it's his birthday tomorrow).

So inspired by a movie I recently saw, I've been thinking about the idea of a "defining moment," a moment in one's past that has had defining effect in life since. And I realized that much of who I am today really traces back to one critical night back about 8 years ago (actually, almost exactly 8 years ago. freaky.) during a ski trip that a few friends of mine and I organized...I was a tender 15 years of age at that time, and had just developed my first big crush (well aside from my grade school crush :P) on a classmate of mine who had by that time made pretty obvious that the feeling was mutual, and who was also going on this ski trip. Yes, teenage age drama...to make a long story short, she ended up hooking up with one of my close friends (who didn't know how I felt about her so I could hardly blame him even though he made the first move on her). But the point is that that night I was forced to choose between respect and royalty for my friend and my own feelings for the girl, and the choice I made that night to uphold respect for the fellow person over my own personal gain has defined me ever since.

Along with another principle that I value highly - truth, and sticking to it. Because, in that case, couldn't all that drama have been avoided if she had just from the beginning stayed with her true beliefs and wishes (and I do know that hooking up with my friend was not what she was after)? I suppose truth is a little bit more iffy because there rarely is one single universal truth for anything, but we ought to follow whatever it is that is our own truth in order to have any chance of being completely on the same page.

Unfortunately, as with any kind of rule, sometimes they end up feeling very much like some kind of leash. And sometimes they become so suffocating that one begins to ponder what the point of it all is if at the end of the day, nobody understands or appreciates what it is that you're trying to do. And you wonder, "Can a man, by trying to be the best human he can, deprive himself of the very things that make us human?" Are happiness, love - well, satisfaction of any kind, really - worth giving up in the hope that others may notice and take inspiration?

Well, enough philosophical blabbering. In other news, my scale at home said this weekend that my body fat percentage has dropped to less than 18%. That's down a hefty 5% since I came back from Austria, thanks to the many hours of persisting in the gym downstairs. I even fit into my old W32 pants again which I wore out Saturday night to the Philadelphia Orchestra concert, tickets courtesy of my aunt's friends who couldn't make it. Sawallisch's rendition of the Schubert Great C major symphony was awesome, the "chord of desperation" in the second movement brought unexpected tears to my eyes.

On yet other news, the director of the Bryn Mawr Conservatory told me this past Saturday that one of my students' high school has called her to ask permission to publish my name on a list of teachers of students whose progress they are particularly impressed with. Yay!

And the best news: the next two weeks are off for me! this week is audition week, and next week is spring break. This ain't no time to sit on my butt and smoke a cigar though, gotta prepare for all sorts of stuff that's coming up right after break. Oral presentation in class on my findings in comparing different editions of a piece the first week after break, chamber music concerts on the 29th and 30th of March, then another on the 4th of April, orchestra concert (yes, they put me in the next rotation too, which means more agonizingly long Thursdays) on the 7th, and then the week of the 11th, juries in front of the entire cello faculty. Aaaaah!