Ladies, please, conduct yourselves

Hello my dearest friends. I hope you are all having wonderful weeks and getting very excited to register for online classes in a mere two days. Once course registration is over, let's all post our schedules like we're high schoolers trying to figure out who has B lunch on Thursdays and who's in Ms. Gilmore's homeroom.

Anyway, the theme for this week is: something you've always wanted to learn/try to do.

Okay, I was struggling to come up with an answer, but I've been listening to a lot of musical soundtracks this week (drop your picks for best musical soundtrack in the comments below) and honestly, I think one of my biggest dreams has been to conduct an orchestra pit.

I've been missing high school band a lot the past week. I don't know if I've talked about it on the blog before but I've probably mentioned it to you guys in the (increasingly nebulous term) real world. Basically, ever since my senior year of high school, playing saxophone has been kind of a challenge for me. It used to feel like second nature. Spending so much time playing a piece that it became muscle memory. Playing scale patterns without even realizing it when I set up my horn. But ever since I had some mechanical problems senior year, I have bad performance anxiety about playing sax that has sapped a lot of the fun out of it for me.

I've played in college of course, but even then, it's a lot harder than it used to be. And performing solo (or in a small ensemble) gives me really bad anxiety that makes me squeak on stage. It's like this negative feedback loop. I think I'm going to squeak or my horn is going to break, so it "does" because I basically make it happen. It was really weird to have this thing that, to be honest, was my entire identity growing up suddenly become so hard for me. It's like, what do you do when the one thing you've based your personality around being good at suddenly becomes almost impossible for you to do?

Maybe that's exaggerating, but some weeks it does feel pretty impossible. But I still was able to do wind ensemble and play in the pit of a couple musicals at Smith. I would get new reeds to try to convince myself that if I had brand new reeds, nothing could go wrong. And I found that I really enjoyed playing in pit for musicals, something I've always wanted to do. It's just something else to get to sit in the middle of an ensemble playing music and you can literally feel the vibrations of the music around you, and then the music that you yourself are producing, all while looking onstage and seeing the actors who are able to put on their show because of the music, and you're also able to watch the audience react to everything in real time. It's really special and kind of unique in that way. Plus I just like musicals.

Anyway, but I've always wanted to conduct. When I was a senior in high school, I was drum major for marching band, but that's so different. There, you have to be so rigid and you can't really do anything with your hands except the basic patterns because you're so high up and you have to be visible to everyone on the field at once. My favorite piece to conduct was the ballad because you get to be a lot more lyrical and flowy with it. I also just really want to conduct a show with music that I love.

When I was a first year, I tried to take the conducting class through the music department but not enough people signed up so they cancelled it. But I hope that someday I can still get to conduct an orchestra. :'(

In other news, I cut my hair:

idk why they're different sizes they were taken with the same exact phone at the same angle but oh well.