Symphony at Sea

Last night I scrubbed, poked, and popped three medium sweet potatos into the oven. If you've never had a sweet potato as an entree before, you should really try it. I drizzled a bit of natural peanut butter, chopped apples and walnuts on mine, and it was sweet and dessert-like but also full of fiber and made me feel energized for the whole evening.

Which was good, because I needed every bit of it for last night's rehearsal. We're doing Vaughn Williams A Sea Symphony, which is an obviously programmatic piece about being, well, at sea. I'm feeling about it as I feel about much of the Wagner I have played before.

1. It's probably much more fun to listen to than it is to play. For example, Wagner's Tristan and Isolde is one of the most difficult operas I have ever played and it was sheer mental (and physical) agony to have to perform it in Febr. 2004 when the MSO did it with the Florentine Opera; but seeing it performed at the Met (the very night my sweet David proposed to me before the 3rd Act!) in October of 2003 was a life-altering experience.
2. It's all build-up [i.e., LOUD] and never really seems to go or arrive anywhere. In the case of the Sea Symphony, it's like being on a boat that's supposedly going somewhere but there's never any land in sight. Loud, loud, loud.
3. It's painful. It's all loud, and we're playing pretty much all the time, but very little of what we're playing is all that important.

But, the chorus sounds fabulous, and thankfully, they're singing pretty much the entire time. I think the piece should be called "A Sea Mass" or "Songs of the Sea"; the title "Symphony" is misleading because very little of it is unsung/purely symphonic.

What else is new? Well, it's still cold, but I'd feel as pointless as a bra on a supermodel if I complained about it. It's February. I'm in Milwaukee. It's gonna be cold.

But I do have good news...the scale has finally jumped back in the right direction, and I've lost 24.5 pounds now since Sept. 05. I am continually humbled by this journey toward wellness and a less encumbered self. At times, I am amazed at how simple it really is: don't eat more calories than you need to function. I think the word simple is often misinterpreted as easy. Losing weight may be simple, and at our most motivated, it may even seem easy. But it is ultimately really, really difficult for zillions of reasons: emotional associations with certain foods, the social aspect of eating, the ever-increasing pace of life and devalue of taking time for sit-down "slow food" meals, avoiding processed and additive-laden foods, the difficulty of staying active in an increasingly sedentary media/computer/TV dependent society, eating to self-medicate and comfort with sugary/carby foods, etc. etc. etc. The list is infinite and unending.

I am in this for the long haul. It's very different from those other times when I looked to a program, an unsustainable exercsie routine, or expertise of other people to achieve my wellness goals. This is much more internal, personal, and I think ultimately much more of a lifetime awareness. I thought about it and realized how easy, how imperceptible it would be to gain just .5 or 1 pound a week. Well, if you do that over the course of a year, you've gained over 50 pounds. Consequently, if you lose only that much per week, you could lose over 50 pounds in a year. Taking it easy, making small, non-drastic manageable changes, seems to be the way to go for me.

The hardest thing is going to be to remain humble about it. I'm not saying I shouldn't feel good about this, but I have to remember that just as seemingly easily as this weight has come off, it could just as easily come back on. I have also noticed the tendency within myself to loathe the fat person I was and had become and to want to just shut that person out of my mind forever, to abandon her and gloat that she's no longer a part of my life now. Our culture has become so obsessed with burning fat and demonizing weight that anyone who's been the least bit heavy can't help but internalize some of that. Of course it's good to be healthy, but I can guarantee you that there are some heavier people out there that are fit who eat healthfully that will greatly outlive some skinny, inactive person who drives around in his car smoking and eating Taco Bell all day.

Anyway, I have rehearsal in a bit so I'd better get showered and dressed. More on this subject later!!

XO Darcy