Since I last posted I've had quite an emotional rollercoaster. I'm starting to feel like my somewhat normal self again. The last week has included a funeral, visits to the nursing home to my aunt, going to class, teaching my piano students, somewhat losing it and somewhat getting ''it'' back.

My aunt is doing pretty well aside from being in a nursing home for rehabilitation. I have much admiration for those who work in a nursing home. They have to put up with a lot of garbage that I'm sure not many would like to deal with. I just don't particularly like nursing homes and sometimes, I don't feel particularly confident in the level of care they provide. In the last year, my aunt has been at three different ones, and each time, I couldn't wait until she got out. I'm sure she feels the same way.
Some of the people who I have encountered at this particular one are really sad, in really bad shape. There's a woman who is in a room across the hall who makes noises like she's a wild animal. Her roommate screams out, shut up! Every time I've been there, it's the same thing. There's another man who just sits in the hallway. When you pass by, he asks you to help him with something. Apparently he's not all there. And he looks relatively young. I walk into that place and I just am struck with the feeling that that is not exactly the type of place you go to, to get well. It looks like a place where people might go to live out their last days. It's horrible. It's too bad this place isn't better, it's so convenient to get there, one minute by car from my house. I have a feeling she won't be staying at this place. There have already been a couple of somewhat disturbing incidents and I commented to my father, if she doesn't just die on her own, the nursing home will kill her.
Last weekend after one of these incidents, I had a meltdown of my own. It's kind of embarrasing to admit that, but I was so angry/sad/upset that I just lost it in front of the nurses. Now they probably think that I'm just psycho. I guess after all the difficulties last weekend I couldn't maintain my composure. I guess you could say I feel very protective of this person and would like her to have the best possible care.

On a lighter note, I began an Italian class last night. To begin the Graduate program in voice, not only do I have to give a Junior and Senior recital next year, but I have to either have taken French, German and Italian or passed a proficiency test. Since the classes I have to take next semester all fall in the afternoon, and all the language classes seem to be in the morning and four days a week, I thought that I'd try to take Italian somewhere else and try to pass the proficiency test. Italian is so similar to Spanish that I don't think that I'm being too optimistic by trying to accomplish this. I wasn't real impressed with the class. The teacher seems like a nice woman but she just zipped through the material as if there were a race. There wasn't time enough to write things down, really digest the information. So much so that halfway through the class when she stopped to ask if there were any questions, people just stared at her and said, um, remember back at page 4 when you were talking about the articles? We had already progressed to page 24 and people were still confused about page 4. This is not a good sign, right? She went all the way back to the beginning and started explaining things all over. That was kinda boring but well, I guess everything was much more understandable the second time around. I didn't like that the vocabulary that they introduced weren't in word families. I appreciate that much more and it makes much more sense to learn.
I prefer my French class. I'm going to miss it. I only have it until the end of the month. I'm kinda sad about this. The semester started out in a strange way but later it sort of picked up and I felt better about it. I learned much useful stuff and I am really wondering about where to get my next fix of French. We'll see what I can do about that.

My voice teacher totally stunned me the other day when she stopped me in the midst of my warmup vocal exercises to inform me that I had missed her studio class yesterday, when one of her students showed up high to perform three songs for the class. I couldn't believe it. Two weeks earlier, someone brought a snake of all things to class. Someone in my diction class told me that in opera workshop, sometimes the students bring their pets. One guy will bring his birds, another will bring her cat. Why do animals need to be present at opera rehearsals? Does this make sense to anyone? And if you were high, don't you think it would be better to be high in the privacy of your own apartment rather than show up at school like that? I don't get it. The point of all this is that I am absolutely stunned by the lack of professionalism that there is at this school and I hope that it's not like this everywhere. I can't believe that this school is making me jump through hoops when clearly, the caliber of students they attract is so shockingly low. I honestly considered after my Master's to perhaps look into teaching at the college level. I thought it would be really great to teach voice at a college or something but after what my teacher has been telling me about, I have serious doubts if it's really all worth the trouble. I think it might just be better (and she agreed)_to have a private voice studio and work for myself. After all, I'm doing that now on a part time basis and I really enjoy it.

Okay I guess that's all.


Martha at 11:37 PM