Panic and my favorite playlist
Sharon's Weekly Head Dump
I woke up last night in a cold panic because my brain thought the middle of a REM cycle was a good time to remind me that:
I have two weeks to go before the first performance of several works I still can’t play all the way through.
I have three weeks to go before I go into the recording studio to record two works I still can’t play all the way through.
I have under two months to go before I hop on stage with an orchestra and play a concerto that I’ve only learned about 40% of.
Why did I choose this life again??? Sixteen-year-old me thought it would be super great to just play music all the time and justify collecting evening gowns as “work attire,” and I continue to pay the price for her naïve career choices. Ah well, too late to turn back now.
In the middle of all of this, my always helpful brain piped up this week with the flash of an idea for a new satirical essay in the vein of the “Key Playerson” article. NOT NOW, BRAIN.
(Things are going great!)
(I will probably pitch the new satirical piece once I am not in a state of panic.)
(But please don’t hold me to that promise.)
We don’t deserve animals
Have a dumb outdated meme to commemorate the fact that I read a bunch of articles about animals this week.
First off, I’m very proud of Murphy:
Murphy the bald eagle waited day after day in his modest, yet carefully built nest for his one egg to hatch, but his keepers did not have the heart to break the news to him: The 31-year-old flightless bachelor was sitting on a rock.
[…]
A sign on the eagles’ enclosure attempted to abate visitors’ concern, noting that Murphy was “not hurt, sick, or otherwise in distress.” The sanctuary, acknowledging the bird’s behaviors, wished him the best of luck.
Second of all, why did this homage to Doorkins Magnificat (!) make me so emotional:
Doorkins came to Southwark Cathedral in 2008 and made her home with us. She had been living wild until she saw a place of sanctuary at Southwark Cathedral, and she gradually began to trust those who fed and looked after her.
She remained an active and fearless cat, wandering around the Cathedral and outside during her time with us, until the London Bridge terrorist attack in 2017. At that time she was shut out of the Cathedral for a number of days and once inside again she did not leave the warmth of the place which she had come to think of as home and where she knew she was safe.
Thirdly, I am Team Goats, But Not Team Lady Who Owns the Goats:
“We are trapped in a pathetic caricature of French administration,” Ms. Rolland said. “I want to scream all the time. There are laws! What are they waiting for?”
[…]
This is a story about French liberty and bureaucracy. It is about different visions of the countryside and nature. It’s about fire management, fights between neighbors and Brigitte Bardot. But mostly, it is about goats.
Help, I have Succession brain
I do not care for Rupert Murdoch and would not ordinarily go out of my way to read an article about his conundrum of deciding which of his adult children is the least terrible, but I am currently obsessed with HBO’s Succession and, well, as a result I really enjoyed (!) this Vanity Fair piece:
The central fault line remains the rift between James and Lachlan. According to sources, the brothers no longer speak. James is horrified by Fox News and tells people the network’s embrace of climate denialism, white nationalism, and stolen election conspiracies is a menace to American democracy. But to overthrow Lachlan and get control of Fox, James needs Elisabeth and Prudence to back him—and that is hardly assured. “James is a lone wolf,” the former News Corp executive said. Politically, Elisabeth is liberal, but she has remained close with Rupert and Lachlan; she sat in a box with the pair at the Super Bowl. A person close to Elisabeth says she wants to enjoy the time she has left with her father. “She’s terrified of Rupert dying mad at her,” the source said.
[…]
According to another source, Lachlan told Rupert that James was leaking stories to the writers of Succession, HBO’s acclaimed drama about a Murdoch-like media dynasty.
Tending to my little playlist 🌱
I am terrible at gardening (I have lovingly killed so many plants it’s just sad) so I take the energy that other normal non-floracidal put into raising little leafy babies and apply it to feeding and pruning all my little playlists.
One of my flagship playlists—and by “flagship,” I mean “I put it on all the time and maybe about two other people know it exists”—is “L’anglais est ennuyeux,” a playlist full of not-in-English bangers that I have previously shared on here. (It is on Apple Music only—sorry, Spotify users.)
If you’ve previously checked out the playlist, there are a lot of new tracks added (and a couple removed) since the last time you likely heard it. When I first assembled the playlist it was mostly French pop and hip-hop (hence the playlist’s title being in French), but I’ve gone down a recent rabbit hole of Italian artists, so there is just…a lot of Italian in it now. I’m still futzing with the order, but it’s the go-to playlist keeping me sane right now.
Twitter may be a shadow of its former self, but I’m still very proud of this joke
Have a great weekend, everyone! 🎹