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Violin: Well, as the lack of recent posts might suggest, I haven't been practicing very much lately. Mostly though, it has been due to worthy causes - a 5-day trip back to my alma mater, and a big paper due a few days after that. Only today did I manage to get in a reasonable amount. It felt good. I had a lesson with my old teacher during my trip, and talked to a lot of violinists, and got inspired about playing. My old teacher seemed to think that all the work I've been doing with my right hand is coming along just fine, and had me focus my attention on other matters that I haven't been listening for. Mostly this meant paying attention to the beginnings, middles, and ends of my notes. The beginnings especially I have recently found often completely escape my aural radar. In fact, a lot of things do. Today I felt like my ears were very lazy. They only listen to part of what comes out of my violin, and they distort it with what they might want to hear, and somehow stop listening whenever I get uncomfortable. Thus, at every bow change, I would stop listening. So today I worked a lot on trying to find good articulations. I was happy with my progress. Trying to open up my ears suddenly gives me all this new stuff to listen to and try to fix, while before I didn't have much to do other than just play things and hope they got better. I spent 4 hours on 2 pages. It was great. I look forward to tomorrow.

Life: All this time I wasn't practicing was spent doing something at least. I decided to try to deal with the fact that I am often abusive to women in my life. Never physically, (unless they ask for it) but emotionally or whatever. I have come to realize that I do not want to be this way anymore, and that the way I initially react to things can be ignored, if not changed. There is no excuse for the amount of suffering I have made some people endure. Especially those people who I really cared about. So I'm tryin to be a better person. It kind of makes me sick, but oh well.

Practice Time: 4 hours