Role Reversal

I tell my students the strangest things sometimes.

Like when I was setting up stuff in my bandroom this summer, I had been looking at old myspace pictures of my friend Jackson, and parties he used to attend at the apartment where I used to live. We had us some good times. One had a caption that said, "Destroy all humans." I thought it was funny.

So I wrote it on a magnetic white board in my office.

This was like July.

Several of my students have seen it since - I haven't erased it. I tell them a robot wrote it. And that I can't erase it or the robot will break all of my remaining clarinet reeds. A disaster of epic proportions to be sure.

Anyway. Suffice to say I tell them some crazy things.

The craziest and most apt being that my profession is music, and my hobby is writing. For most people, I think, that is a reversal of reality. Most people's jobs have much more to do with writing things than playing music. Being a working musician, or for some even a respected music teacher is a pipe dream. Writing something somewhere isn't uncommon. Let's face it - universities give out a LOT more English degrees than they do music degrees. Not to belittle it - some of the smartest people I've ever met have English degrees. So do some of the less smart people I've ever met.

Point being - me and my hobbies. Music is a hobby to most people. And I know writers. I know really great writers. If you were to gather the circle of people closest to me, at least half of them would be writers, like serious writers. I dated a journalist for four years. People who write have other hobbies, sure, but they are obsessive. They are consumed by their craft. They write and write and write and re-write. A creative writing teacher (and published/well-received author) I had at UCF told us, "Writing is re-writing. Those who make it are those who stick with it." She quoted it from someone else but it stuck with me.

I love to write. I have always loved to write. Ever since I was a little girl. Whatever school I was a part of, there was always some writing award waiting there for me. Not to say that I'm the greatest writer who ever lived - um, no - but I had a knack for it. Being around other great writers has been great because it's challenged me, given me something to live up to.

Music was always work. I loved music more than anything else, but it was always work. It was always FUN work though, and something I could prove to myself. It was always about having definitive goals and reaching them. About performing in the moment, and letting that moment live on. Writers do that less often. Something about a manuscript can always be edited, always be improved. Maybe the Beats didn't believe that, but maybe Kerouac could have used a few more commas.

The thing is that now I teach and talk about music for a living. I've always worked toward it, since age 17 when I definitively decided on music over writing as my path. The writing has always found a way to sneak into my life, with jobs and people and opportunities. And the internet, of course - gotta love to blog! But now I find myself coming home from 13 hour days of work on less than six hours of sleep, and there's just no time for anything else. This is not much of a change from how things were in college. There was just less sleep in college, for a variety of reasons.

I want to keep up with it. I want to have my voice out there, which is primarily why I've piggy-backed on others' projects as a guest writer or contributor. But it seems my profession and having any sort of meaningfuly, satisfying social life do not allow time for a slight fixation that burns in me, but only partially consumes me. I've always known this was a battle within me, the writer and the musician, but now I see it making its presence known more clearly.

And while I've not proven myself to be the most reliable contributor in the past, I know that if I want to be known as a writer, I have to do it for myself. Like I said, though. Not all that different from college. Like in the fall of 2006, taking 15 hours including a graduate class, writing an undergrad thesis, working up to 40 hours a week at a box office, Winter Park HS rehearsals every week and football games, orchestra two nights a week, and desperately trying to finish my piano exam. I'm surprised I made it through all that sorts of crap.

Point being: where do passions overlap? Where can they co-exist? When in the world will I ever have time to do all the things I love, and not live in a really dirty house and pay all my bills on time?