Tag Archives: emotions

Places

An evening at home

Ligia and I relaxed at home tonight, and we watched “The Awful Truth” again. I think this was the third or fourth time I saw it, and I love it more and more each time. I can’t help it, the acting’s so good, the screenplay’s amazing, the filming is fantastic, and the direction is just what the story needs! If ever this movie gets remade properly, I’d love to be in it. Seriously.

Here are a few photos that remind me of the love between Jerry and Lucy in this movie, the sort of love that can’t be broken even by intrigue or jealousy — a love that survives in spite of themselves.

Peaceful

Fresh

Petals

Brought my love a flower

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Events

BSO's Annual Donor Thank You Concert

Tuning up

Ligia and I attended the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra‘s 2007 Annual Donor Thank You Concert last night. It was held at Strathmore Concert Hall. Pete & Nicole, thank you for the tickets! It was simply amazing.

I realized two things during the concert:

  1. The older I get, the more I appreciate classical music.
  2. The BSO is very good.

Ligia and I both grew up listening to classical music. Ligia studied at music schools since the age of 6, and she finished the conservatory in 2004, after having studied voice and piano. Her appreciation runs much deeper than mine. She actually gets goose bumps while she listens to good music. It’s kind of funny. I can always tell when a piece of music is great by looking at her skin. If she’s got goose bumps, it’s gotta be good. Well, last night she practically broke out in goose bumps…

There was always a huge (and growing) stack of classical music records by our pickup player during my childhood. If I wanted music, I got Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Liszt, Paganini, Tchaikovsky, Haydn, Handel, Strauss, Brahm, Vivaldi, Verdi, Rossini, Pacabel, Enescu, Porumbescu, Bizet — well, you get the point. I’ve always liked good classical music. But the older I get, the more I relate to it. It speaks to me. It resonates within my body, my soul, and my mind. I appreciate it on more levels. Never did I realize this more poignantly than last night.

We spent the first half on one of the upper levels, and we snuck down to the orchestra seats during the intermission. We felt a little guilty, but after all, it was general seating, and those seats weren’t being used. No point in letting great seats go to waste, right?

Orchestra seats

The BSO played Tchaikovsky. They started with the Polonaise from Eugene Onegin, then continued with Variations on a Rococo Theme, opus 33, and after the intermission, finished with Symphony No. 5 in E Minor, opus 64.

At Strathmore, photography isn’t allowed during performances. I was good and obeyed the rules. But before the show and during the intermission, I took out my 5D and 24mm prime lens, and took photos of the hall and of the public. Strathmore is quite beautiful. It’s got a modern design, quite different from traditional concert halls, and they’ve had to add floating, adjustable acoustic panels to the ceiling to make sure sound travels properly. They’ve done a good job with that, and the sound quality is pretty consistent between the upper and lower levels. I love the warm colors of the wood floor and panels. That, coupled with the open feel of the place, gives it a really nice atmosphere.

Polite conversation

A highly unusual thing happened during the performance. Because of the severe rainstorm outside, the power went out for a few seconds right in the middle of the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s 5th Symphony. The entire concert hall was pitch black, save for the red, glowing Exit signs. Do you know what the BSO did? They kept on playing right through the power outage as if everything was alright! They did not miss a beat! Now that’s professionalism! This also underscores one of the advantages of using acoustic instruments. No power outage can put them out!

You know what they say, right? Start strong, finish strong. Well, the BSO most certainly did that. We were on our feet by the end, giving the orchestra a standing ovation, along with everyone else. During the performance, Ligia and I kept looking at each other and smiling. Normally, my obsessive-compulsive mind keeps its manic wheels turning all the time. Even when I dream, I have parallel dreams, and I find myself half awake in the early hours of the morning, trying to force my brain to skip back to the more interesting dream… When I’m supposedly relaxed, tons of thoughts run through and I can’t keep still. Even when I want to think about nothing, I can’t. I’m telling you all of this because I managed to find clarity during the concert. There were long moments when the music passed right through me, clearing my mind. I could focus on just one thing at a time — on enjoying the music — and that was really something. I tell you, those moments are rare for me! What a concert! What a fantastic performance, especially during the symphony!

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Thoughts

Keeping up with the news

It’s so easy to spread yourself thin these modern times… You’ve got news up the wazoo, 24×7, from a gazillion sources. On top of that, you’ve got blogs, with experts expounding on the virtues of this and that, and why it should matter to you, and you’ve got feeds of all sorts you can subscribe to, and podcasts you can listen to, and videos you can watch on these humongous video sites like YouTube and Google Video and Revver and plenty more. If that’s not enough, you can watch tens, if not hundreds, of TV channels, and the programming variety just boggles the mind.

Trouble is, most of this is garbage, and you can’t keep up with all of it. As addictive as it is to read a ridiculous amount of news, and be at the top of the game on many subjects, it’s wearisome, stressful and exhausting. It’s not seldom that I found myself bleary-eyed and listless after catching up on the news these past several years. And yet, I still didn’t learn my lesson, and wanted more, more, more. Well, you can’t have it all. It’s humanly impossible to stay plugged into many sources at once, and expect to get anything else done. You end up becoming part of the pipe, unable to contribute, overwhelmed by the information, receptive but useless, a consumer, not a producer.

I suppose if that’s all you want to be, that’s fine, but I’d rather make content, not consume it. I want to leave a mark, not go through life eating, sleeping and watching TV or reading the news. More than that, and I suppose on a more basic level as well, I want to get some work done, not waste my day away. So, for the umpteenth time, I’ve come to the realization that I need to cut down on my news addiction. It’s good to stay informed, but it’s better to stay alert. And it’s even better to get my plans accomplished. Which for me includes work, consulting, photography and blogging on weekdays. On weekends, more consulting, photography and blogging, reviews and sometimes, podcasts. And somewhere in there, I’ve got to squeeze in downtime with my lovely wife and a movie then and now. Not to mention that I’ve got other projects waiting on the back burner.

The thing is, reading the news in itself doesn’t take that much time. At most, it takes one to one and half hours per day. I don’t think that’s a lot of time. But, it IS a lot of information. And information processing wears you down, particularly when it comes from many sources. If you don’t believe me, try picking up a few tens of books, and rapid-read a few pages from each. See how you feel at the end of that little power session! When we read the news, it’s the same thing. We don’t notice it these days because it’s so easy to subscribe to a ridiculous number of various sources in news or feed readers. They aggregate all of that content for us in one place, and we just browse through and read. But it’s all written by different people, on different subjects, in different styles, with differing levels of emotion. Our brain has to adapt to each style of writing and process all of that information in a short amount of time.

Add to that the emotion we spend if we get worked up about an article. I’m guilty of that a lot. If I read someone’s getting abused somewhere, I’ll get mad at that injustice. Some days that anger will affect me for more than half a days, and truth be told, there isn’t a darned thing I can do to help that person or people other than share that article with my friends or on my blog. The amount of help that provides is questionable and depends on the situations. Some are helped by more media attention, and some aren’t. So what’s the good of getting worked up over them? I don’t know. I do know I can’t help it, so the only way for me to stay focused on what I need to do is to avoid those articles. Otherwise, I end up shooting myself in the foot and I can’t meet my goals.

So while it’s not about the time, although it’s nice to gain an extra hour here and there, it’s about the effect of the news on you or me. That’s why I’ve already started to pare down on the amount of news sources I read. I’ve cut a few out today, and will continue to cut them down till I arrive at a good balance between quality of information and time spent reading it. And I encourage you to do the same. Don’t think I hold myself immune from this. If you find that I don’t add value to your day, then unsubscribe. Far be it from me to waste your time and keep you from doing something useful.

Here’s to a productive use of our time here on earth, brief as it is!

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