The Trivial Pursuit of Happiness

When I was in my Freshman year of college, I spent Christmas break preparing pieces of music for an audition to the Music School at the University of Miami. One of those pieces was a song I had grown to absolutely love,  I Dreamed a Dream from the musical Les Miserables. While in its explicit context of a lover lost, I could not relate at just the age of 18, but I could relate to the heartache and the desire to have had a different less abused life.  This experience is one of those that shaped my desire for justice and when I see injustice I feel absolutely distraught. I will never forget what that voice teacher said to me: "When Fantine sings this she has been through so much. I just feel like you are too young to convey this in the piece." I am certain she saw my face turn dark red, but I didn't say anything because I didn't owe her an explanation or my trauma.  By the time I was 18, I had lost a sibling, been physically and emotionally abused, and considered takin...

Rarely, does someone who is lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, etc. come out of the proverbial closet more than once. I guess I enjoyed the revelation so much the first time, I took a second crack at it to make sure I got it right. All joking aside, I’m not proud that I shoved my entire being back into hiding. More about that later.  I write this with the hope that anyone who reads this and feels self loathing from having had moments in your life with one of your deeply held values clashed with another value. In my case, those values were authenticity and independence and caused me about ten years of deep  cognitive dissonance .  By the time I was a sophomore in college, I had at least one close gay guy friend who was trying to gently nudge me to come out as a lesbian. I don’t know if it was my stereotypical tomboyishness, or that I never shared his fawning over a guy. Maybe it was that I had played football or chosen the University of Miami because they had the best co...

I am sure the lady in the minivan behind me earlier today was annoyed that I was barely going the speed limit. I didn't really care either, I had nowhere to be. And even if I did, I always leave with extra time to spare. Besides, I was having a deep conversation with myself inside my head. For a brief moment of time, I was without worry and stress, because I was determined to figure this hypothesis of mine out with the proof to explain it to you.  What if? What if, it is possible to fall in love with a piece of music? The conditions would have to be absolutely perfect, I suspect. The melody, the timbre, tempo, and the connection to the piece the performer conveys. To demonstrate this point, I think back to a voice lesson I had to prepare for my audition at the University of Miami. I has chosen two musical theater pieces: Wishing you Were Somehow Here Again from the Phantom of the Opera and I Dreamed a Dream from Les Miserables (Les Miz as the cool kids called it back then). I wa...

It's true. We never forget our first love. Although, sometimes we should. The first time I saw her I was working at the circulation desk at the Music Library at the University of Miami. I'm not certain what score she checked out, but I made sure to make a note of her name. She was cute in an androgynous sort of way. Later that day, I emailed her at what I guessed was her University email address. I tried to be very non-descript just in case it wasn't her email. Her response was only "Are you the girl who works at the Music Library?" Busted. Next began a brief, whirlwind relationship. We spent all of our free time together. She was a classical piano major, but every time I had walked by the practice room she was playing in, she would stop to open the door so in two months, I never really heard her play an entire piece. A friend of mine, Dave, who was a Journalist in the Coast Guard stationed in Miami, took our photos in the Art quad on campus. Alana threatened to...

A phrase I have started using frequently but a more appropriate term would be serendipity. The feeling you get when one of your sense responses sends chills up your spine. When you can’t explain something or a connection to someone you wouldn’t otherwise have logically. We typically meet people who we become romantically involved with at our workplace or through our work. This makes sense from shared common experience, but not if you work with very few people, or work remotely. The next best way would be to meet someone at an event or place you might have in common. But how often do we travel alone and if we are with friends or family, how likely is it that we will engage in a lengthy conversation with a stranger we’ve just met and while ignoring who we are with. Then there are dating sites. No offense. But why does everyone on a dating site either look like they used a picture taken at Glamour Shots in the late 80’s or lie? I suspect because we all understand and suspect we will be ju...

Where would I be....if I had finished my Ph.D at Indiana University? For some reason this is what I woke up thinking about this morning. I rarely dwell on anything in my past, especially things I could not control, but, with the changes that have happened with how we communicate with others, being mostly through social media, what used to be covert in person behavior, has become more overt and easier to connect with motive. We believe that people do not pay attention to our digital behavior, but the truth is for the attentive, those behaviors are so much more obvious than they would be based on in person conversations and second hand conversations-which are gossip to most of us and untrustworthy of any type of judgement. For example, I once had a boss who for the first two years I worked for her, hid her raging narcissism from me. She never yelled while I was around and did everything she could to make me feel valued-I should have noticed she was overcompensating, but alas, I wanted ...