Musicmaking




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Teaching moments

Teaching moments A while back, I was sitting in the San Jose airport in Costa Rica, waiting for the van that was supposed to take me to a yoga retreat a couple hours away. The van was very, very late, and a woman about my age introduced herself as a sister yogini (let’s call her 3G), and we started chatting. I was tempted to complain as the hours ticked by, but my companion stopped me cold by musing, “I wonder what it is that I need to learn from waiting?” So the other day when I walking in the park sweating inside my mask, I asked myself 3G’s question: What is it I can learn from this fucking mask? And there are a few things: First, I now know how enraging it must be to women wearing burqas to be asked, Isn’t that thing hot? And I know the answer too: It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity. Second, why am I still peering into magnifying mirrors to scissor off my chin whiskers? No one can see me behind the white curtain that covers my face and stifles my breath. Third, I am so ...
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I feel your pain--and everyone else's too

Empathy—everyone thinks it’s so wonderful! I’m often told I’m an empathetic person, as if it’s a compliment. But truthfully, no one realizes how deeply empathetic I am, and what a blight it is. I would trade in my empathy for a good salty vice—gluttony, selfishness, sloth, whatever. According to Merriam-Webster, empathy is “the ability to relate to another person’s pain vicariously, as if one has experienced that pain themselves.” (I’m going to ignore the noun/pronoun--“one”/”themselves”--number disagreement.) The thing is, I experience another’s pain exactly as if it were my own. And therein lies the problem. There is a lot of pain in this world, and some days I think I feel it all: I am stressed out by the predicament of my friend who has an instant to pack a lifetime and a loftful of accumulation into a modest-sized new apartment. I feel her anxiety about whether she can afford the new place. I feel the distraction of my friend whose beloved nonagenarian aunt died leaving her to dis...
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Maskerade

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I’ve barely noticed the lockdown, so busy have I been sublimating any anxiety into frenzied and probably pointless activity. In the past month, I’ve made 250-odd (and I do mean odd) fabric masks. Initially they were commissioned by medical personnel to protect and prolong the use of N95 masks, and later they were requested by everyone from Native American groups to food banks to homeless shelters. No one knows whether cloth masks shield the breather or the breathed-upon from COVID-19, but nearly everyone is required to wear one now. The utility of the masks I make, in particular, cannot be known since I work on donated fabrics—different ones on different days, none bearing any mystery as to why they were donated. The conundrum of the masks is that the more impervious they are, the more impervious they are. In other words, a mask that allows you to breathe is not preventing disease transmission. I know more than the average person now about masks, and that means I know nothing, sinc...
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