Yes, yes and YES!

Are you...

A mom of one, two or ten?
Pregnant or just had a baby?
Sleep-deprived because of said baby or for any reason whatsoever?

Have you...

Had appliances just go all to heck within days, weeks or months of their purchase?
Had to wait for a repairman? For hours?
Written a nasty-gram to a company regarding their lack of customer-service?

Do you...

Need a good, belly-shaking, snorting carbonated beverages through your nose laugh?
Tweet or at least know what it is and that it has nothing to do with a little yellow bird?
Enjoy happy, break-out-the tissues and have a good cry endings?

If you answered "yes" to any or all of the above questions, go now and read (or re-read) Dooce.

Would you like a little cheese with that whine?

I'm not generally a whiner. If anything, I tend to be a bit too Pollyanna-ish for my own good. I figure, I don't really want to hear your whining, why would you want to hear mine?

One of my biggest pet peeves about some of the "younger generation" (boy, does that make me sound OLD) is their strange sense of entitlement. I don't remember where I first heard it, but a favorite quote says "The world doesn't owe you a living. The world owes you nothing. The world was here first."

So if you were a fly on the wall of my office this morning, you'd have heard a loud clatter as my jaw fell to the floor as I read this headline in an online journal I receive periodically:

"New grad can't find job--so sues college"

Are you KIDDING me?!

From Higher Ed Morning.com

"A recent graduate of a New York college is having trouble landing a job. But is it the college’s fault? She thinks so — and that’s why she’s suing.

Recent Monroe College grad Trina Thompson completed her course of studies in April and graduated with a bachelor of business administration degree in information technology. But Thompson is still searching for a job, and she says the school hasn’t done enough to help her.

Thompson claims the school’s office of career advancement dropped the ball by failing to give her enough career counseling assistance. She says it’s the school’s fault that her phone’s not ringing with calls from potential employers. “They have not tried hard enough to help,” she claims.

Thompson’s suit has asked that the college be forced to return the tuition she paid – all $70,000 of it. For good measure, she wants another $2,000 to compensate her “for the stress I have been going through looking for a full time job on my own.”

The school says on its Web site that its Office of Career Advancement offers a variety of services to all current students, including workshops and individual career counseling services. It insists the suit is meritless."

Now, I'm a champion letter writer. I could go off on this girl like there's no tomorrow. But my brain, my Master's degree educated brain, my "I've had three full-time jobs in my lifetime and found every one of them on my own" brain, my slightly-addled yet still thinking somewhat clearly Mommy brain?

Simply cannot wrap itself around this insanity.

Does she REALLY think that paying $70,000 in tuition should GUARANTEE her a job? And please don't even get me started on the tuition. Even if she didn't receive a single penny (which I seriously doubt, since Monroe is a private school), it's highly likely that she received loans to cover that tuition.

Hmm...so she likely had someone else covering her school tuition while she was IN school, and now she thinks the College has an obligation to find her a job to make money now that she's OUT of school.

Right.

Yeah, I know the economy's tough. Joshua Persky, an MIT grad, was laid-off from his job and was out of work for a YEAR. He didn't sue MIT or his former employers. Instead, he distributed his resume through the streets of Manhattan while wearing a sandwich board that said "Experienced MIT Grad for Hire" and listed his phone number.

He's now employed.

Maybe she should meet Liz Murray.

But a lawsuit? Seriously, sweetie? You'll be lucky if Monroe doesn't rescind your degree.

Where's Aesop when we need him?

It's no secret in our family that Sweet Son #1 could win an academy award for his performances is a bit dramatic at times. True to his boyishness, he likes to wrestle with Diva Husband and The Manimal. Unfortunately, he's usually the one screaming for mercy as The Manimal does his best John Cena impression.

He's never actually been HURT, as in blood, guts, broken bones or anything like that, but from some of his protestations, you'd assume that he'd just been body-slammed in the MMA fight of the century.

We've had multiple chats with him about "The Boy Who Cried Wolf". For those of you who aren't familiar with the little guy, he was a shepherd boy who, in his boredom of watching the sheep graze, kept crying "Wolf!", whereupon the villagers would come running to his aid, causing some excitement in his otherwise dull day. He did this multiple times, until the villagers, getting wise to his ploy, quit coming.

You can guess the ending, can't you?

Yeah, when he showed up, the wolf had a really tasty lunch.

Anyway, it must be sinking in, that wolf story. SS#1 has toughened up over the past few weeks. He still would rather his little brother not use him as a punching bag or jumping mattress, but the tears flow less often.

Maybe it's because the old fable's been on mind so much lately, but it seems to me that at some point, the NFL and media are going to tire of the pseudo-retirement claims of a certain quarterback for the Green Bay Packers New York Jets Minnesota Vikings.

"There's no believing a liar, even when he speaks the truth."

Back to School

I was a music major in college, specifically Music Education. I wanted to be a band director. I didn't have any high-fallutin' ideas about being a performer. I was neither a strong enough, nor a dedicated enough player to handle that. I do remember my parents being relieved, however, that "at least" I'd be able to teach.

I was lucky. Other than my folks being worried that if I majored in music, I would end up completely broke and living on the streets, trying to teach the rats to beat a drum wouldn't be able to make a living performing, they were very supportive of my college decision.

So many talented kids. So many parents worried that their otherwise intelligent children are wasting their intelligence by majoring in music. Rest easily parents. Your children are going to be just fine...

Welcome Address To Freshmen At Boston Conservatory by Karl Paulnack, Director of Music.

"One of my parents' deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn't be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still remember my mother's remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school she said, "you're WASTING your SAT scores." On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they LOVED music, they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren't really clear about its function.

So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the "arts and entertainment" section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it's the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.

The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable , permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the "Quartet for the End of Time" written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp. He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose.

There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire. Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture. Why would anyone bother with music? And yet, from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn't just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, "I am alive, and my life has meaning."

On September 12, 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. That morning I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter?

Isn't this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day.

At least in my neighborhood, we didn't shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn't play cards to pass the time, we didn't watch TV, we didn't shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall.

The first organized activity that I saw in New York, that same day, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang "We Shall Overcome." Lots of people sang "America the Beautiful". The first organized public event that I remember was the "Brahms Requiem", later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert.

That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night. From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of "arts and entertainment" as the newspaper section would have us believe. It's not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time.

Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can't with our minds.

Some of you may know Samuel Barber's heart-wrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio for Strings. If you don't know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie "Platoon", a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn't know you had.

Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what's really going on inside us the way a good therapist does. I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but I bet you there was some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings. People get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there's some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if th e quality isn't good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts.

Why? The Greeks.

Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can't talk about it. Can you imagine watching "Indiana Jones" or "Superman" or "Star Wars" with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in "ET" so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn't happen that way.

The Greeks: Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.

I'll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in Fargo, ND, about 4 years ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland's "Sonata", which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland's, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.

Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier. Even in his 70's, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn't the first time I've heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.

When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterward, tears and all, to explain himself. What he told us was this: "During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team's planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute cords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn't understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?"

Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. This concert in Fargo was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.

What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year's freshman class when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this:

"If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you'd take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you're going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.

You're not here to become an entertainer, and you don't have to sell yourself. The truth is you don't have anything to sell; being a musician isn't about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies. I'm not an entertainer; I'm a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You're here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don't expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that's what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives."

So play on, my fellow musicians. And if you're feeling called to study music in college, do it. Because you're doing more than just practicing a skill or honing a talent.

You're learning life.

Six Word Saturday

"No wrinkle" fabric is a scam.

More "Six Word Saturday" postings at Show My Face.

Insert Catchy Post Title Here

I was chastised this weekend by Diva Nana. Yes, 40 years old and Mom can still scold me!

Apparently, she enjoys reading my blog. Daily. Which means that this nearly two-week hiatus has been less than enjoyable.

To be fair, I'm the same way with my favorite blogs. I love it when I visit and there's a new post! So Diva Nana? This one's for you!

I need a new alarm clock.

I typically get out of bed between 6:30 and 7. My alarm clock had been generally reliable, not terribly annoying, and easy on batteries and electricity. The snooze button would usually work for about 10 minutes, but then it would force me out of bed, which was a good thing.

Last week my alarm clock failed me. I woke up in a panic at 7:40, jumped in the shower and ran out the door with my hair still half damp.

My alarm clock went off just as I was leaving the house.

I'm not opposed to buying a new alarm clock, but mine is only 3 years old. Several of my friends have had similar models. I myself had a similar one that quit working about 6 years ago. I keep it around for sentimental reasons, but it's completely unreliable for regular use.

I'm a bit bummed. I mean, would you rather have this alarm clock?
Or one of these?