Category: Creativity

Creating something every day for 365 days

Land of the PDM (Day 311/365)

Posted on by Dale

All is well here in the Land of Pan-Dimensional Mice. Incredibly well, actually. I have a good staff, the copier is installed and working, everyone has a key to his/her classroom, and I even have my own parking space this year.

And today the pan-dimensional mouselings arrived. That also went smoothly: 700 students arrived on campus (complete with complete families), unloaded all their stuff, and got their cars out of the way, in about four hours.

And then, most miraculously of all, after the student orientation meeting, at which they were polite and attentive, all 700 of them went to the dining hall and were seated and eating supper in about twenty minutes! By the time I got there 45 minutes later, the crowd was actually thinning out.

After the horrors of last summer, with a copier that wouldn’t work even after being installed a week late (and in the men’s laundry room), and a dining hall under renovation so that we were fed in the Old Gym (poorly), and a host of other administrative nightmares, this is fairly Elysian.

Tonight, after the faculty met with their students for the first time, they came back to the dorm all rosy and optimistic, and I’d had about all the perfection I could stand. I reminded them of what Jeff Goldblum’s character says in Lost World: “Oh, yeah. ‘Ooooh, ahhh’, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s the running and screaming.”

And so it begins.

Thought and news (Day 310/365)

Posted on by Dale

Two interesting things today, one for Moonlight and one for William Blake.

Having started some actual work on songs for Moonlight, I made a sincere effort to keep the lyrics for “Love Song of Thurgood…” in my head so that maybe others would come. But what I found myself doing was playing with melodies for the words I had.

This is probably a good idea. Hammering out words that fit some metrical scheme (which may not be apparent from the words on the page, actually) to fill out the first verse is a good place to start, and then I think if I can begin setting those words to music, that gives me a rather complete framework to start writing the second verse, the ‘B’ section, and the third verse.

Question: having seen the gist of the first verse, do you think I need to strive for any kind of character development in the song, i.e., we know more about Thurgood at the end than at the beginning, or we see some change in him from beginning to end, or is it going to be acceptable for this to be yet another comedy song? I have a feeling we can fill this show with comedy songs. Is that going to be OK?

In other news, I handed off the score to “Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way” to Stephen Czarkowski, our orchestra maestro extraordinaire, to peruse. Never mind that I sent this to him in April. Never mind that I’ve been on pins and needles since he replied that there were a “few problems” and that he never told me what they were.

You understand my anxiety: I am a total fraud, without a real clue as to what I’m doing when I create an orchestral score of some proportions like “Milky Way.” For all I know, none of it can be played. Well, that’s not exactly true. I have some real knowledge of the woodwinds and sort of for the brass and percussion. Strings, though, I am quite in the dark.

I can look at a score by one of the masters and see that my music is not as “hard to play” as theirs, but I have no idea if there are certain intervals or fingerings that just can’t be done.

So I reacted apparently noticeably when, in a meeting with the GHP music department, Stephen says, “Oh, your ‘Milky Way’ score? There are some parts… Unplayable.”

Geez.

I’m thinking all kinds of horrible things: what if all those arpeggiations in the celli are just not doable? What if whole chunks of the thing cannot be played? That lovely music, everyone’s favorite, just gone because it’s… unplayable.

Geez.

He finally crosses my path again later this afternoon, bringing the score with him. Here, he says, measure 57, these two notes in the viola, out of their range.

And that was it? A part I copied and pasted from the second violins and transposed down, and never checked the range on? And I never heard the note was missing because it’s a complex section and the violas are doubling the violin IIs anyway? And I clearly never ran the plug-in that checks for range issues?

Before I could get too upset at the whole thing, Stephen says they plan to give it a readthrough during the sixth week of the program, i.e., basically after everything is accomplished and things are winding down. That’s as it should be, actually. I have no claim on the students’ time here at this program in this way, although I would like to think that might change after the readthrough.

But “Milky Way” will get at least an orchestral readthrough in late July. I’ll keep you posted.

Love song (Day 309/365)

Posted on by Dale

Aha! I did something today.

I could not bear posting yet again what a sluggard I was, so I forced myself to go for a walk around the Magic Square (that’s where we PDM live) and work on the lyrics for at least one song for A Day in the Moonlight.

I had had an idea for “The Love Song of Thurgood J. Proudbottom” recently that I thought I’d use to get me started: Thurgood and Alexandra are in the garden, hiding from their children, and it’s the occasion for Thurgood to sing to her. I am seeing a steamy tango, which the two dance.

After a very steamy walk around the Magic Square, I’ve made a start:

You’ll never know how much I love you
(if I can help it).
Every day and every night you’re on my mind
(I wish you’d move it.)
And… something something something
(like a pig in velvet)
‘Cause people say that love is blind
(And this should prove it.)

There: the start of a first verse. I’ve done something creative. Now I’m going to do something relaxing.

Temps perdu (Day 308/365)

Posted on by Dale

I may as well confess it, since Marc will blow my cover if I don’t: this post was written tomorrow.

The problem with the Land of the Pan-Dimensional Mice is that time is a mouse:

The Mouse Whose
Name Is Time

The Mouse whose name is Time
Is out of sound and sight.
He nibbles at the day
And nibbles at the night.

He nibbles at the summer
Till all of it is gone.
He nibbles at the seashore.
He nibbles at the moon.

Yet no man not a seer,
No woman not a sibyl
Can ever ever hear
Or see him nibble, nibble.

And whence or how he comes
And how or where he goes
Nobody dead remembers,
Nobody living knows.
–Robert Francis

And so today/yesterday passed with nothing creative from me. The Time Mouse ate it all up.

My great fear, and I knew this when I started this project last August 1, is that the rest of my days will be nibbled by the Time Mouse here at GHP. It’s entirely possible. I know for a fact that I will not, cannot, get anything done before next Thursday. It will be the first day of minors here, which outside the Land of Pan-Dimensional Mice means “I will have 1:30-4:00 free.” It is realistically the only time I have to work on anything of my own: dawn to 1:30 is spent supervising the instruction here, plus lunch; 4:00-5:30, I usually am meeting with staff about the morning; 5:30-9:30, supper plus whatever evening activity is on; and 9:30-11:00, mopping up the day’s damage.

So I freely admit that today was a total miss. Or yesterday, depending on when you believe I wrote this.

Could have been worse, of course. I considered channeling Francis Urquhart and writing, “I was creative today in ways I cannot possibly talk about.”

Friends (Day 307/365)

Posted on by Dale

Today is always a wonderful day, although I feel as if I have been rolled down a hill. Today is the day the faculty arrives at GHP.

In so many ways GHP is like Brigadoon: we only exist once a year, and for a very brief time. (Weird thought popped into my head here: what happens if the village’s land has been developed into a strip mall or “lifestyle center” in the intervening 100 years?) The difference is that we don’t go to sleep and wake up a hundred years later. We actually live the time in between.

So we don’t just wake up and go about our business with our friends and relations. We haven’t seen them in 10 months, and today is the day we get to pick up our “other life” and continue with those who live it with us.

And it is an “other life.” Sometimes I feel like the mice in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, members of a race of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings who poke only a tiny bit of their being into our universe (a bit that looks just like a mouse to us). I don’t think I am different at school or around town, but that most of who I am and what I do is never seen, or sensed, by people outside my immediate circle.

Here at GHP, however, we’re all pan-dimensional mice. We get to stretch our legs a bit without worrying about scaring the earth people. And it’s wonderful as people start showing up and checking in with me. It’s like a fabulous family reunion with a family that you actually look forward to spending six weeks with, if you can imagine such a thing.

Another difference between us and Brigadoon is that the villagers simply lived their everyday life. Our whole purpose, as pan-dimensional mice, is to set up an environment where extraordinary things happen. That makes for a certain anticipatory excitement in our gathering: what kind of students will we get this year? What kinds of wonderful things will they accomplish? What kind of spectacular crashings and burnings will we witness? How high will we fly, and how low will we go?

And so it begins.

A different kind of nothing (Day 306/365)

Posted on by Dale

I’m claiming much of what I did today as creative, simply because much of what I did today has been based on years of creative problem solving in the role of assistant program director of GHP. No one gets as efficient as I am without figuring out how to make the whole thing flow.

Which is one reason I get very annoyed when others haven’t figured it out. That’s also my overwhelming greenness, of course. However, why should I have to remind myself to send specific emails a week before I arrive so that it will be remembered that I’m coming and that I will need a) keys, b) parking pass of a specific kind, c) a parking place, d) an ID, etc., etc.? Why don’t they have a production manual of their own, so that when that fateful day pops up on their calendar, they have something in writing that tells them: Get parking pass ready. Remind staff that GHP is coming and how they differ from our regular clients. Chill the champagne. I am amazed every year at the breakdowns.

I have one document entitled “What to Print and When,” and it does exactly what it says: it tells me day by day for an entire week which of the 30+ documents I need to print in order to have them ready for the next day or two. If I have it open on my computer, I can actually just click on the names of the documents, which I have linked to the documents.

I have another document, some fifteen pages long, which is literally my production manual. It’s a huge timeline, starting the week before I get here and going week by week through the program, and day by day at rugged points like opening and closing. It tells me things like Unalarm end doors and Prepare a sticky note for each returning staff member with name and preferred room number and Be in the Palms lobby to collect the preference forms.

So what is all this for? It’s so that as my instructional staff arrives, the amount of hassle they encounter is reduced. It’s so they will have the information they need to do their jobs, and within four days, the students will have the information they need to negotiate the opening of the program.

It’s also to protect my sanity, so I’m not caught flat-footed by my staff’s needs. This has taken years of notating and adjusting and readjusting. The Lyles Theorem of Process Development states that “It takes three years to get any process right, if you don’t change the process.”

I reminded myself of the Theorem today as I was trying to make sure all the instructional room keys worked, and trying to figure out which keys we are missing so I can request them, a task I thought I had done a couple of weeks ago when I was asked to submit a complete list of keys we needed, and I did. I reminded myself that part of the process of process development is building in recursion to cushion your process from external loose ends. I reminded myself how to figure out how to do that for this process in FileMaker Pro.

But that’s creativity for another day.

59 days to go.

A couple more goals (Day 305/365)

Posted on by Dale

It was not until this evening, trying to clear off the sofa in my apartment here in Brown Hall on the campus of Valdosta State University, that I remembered that I actually have two more creative goals for the summer:

I am now taking suggestions for texts for either or both.

60 days to go!

Setting goals (Day 304/365)

Posted on by Dale

Enough whining. Having packed up my life for the next seven weeks, it’s time to move through this gateway and get back to creating.

Herewith are my goals for the summer:

  • Write at least three songs for Day in the Moonlight. I know I’ve got 15 or more to write, but given the realities of time at GHP, I’ll be lucky to get three done.
  • Learn how to use Logic Express. I’ve had this program since January and have yet to discover how it works. I bought a book, but haven’t had time to read it. I’ll do that this summer.
  • Contribute at least twenty-five items to the 100 Things to Do Before You’re 60 blog.

This doesn’t sound like a lot, but I’ll be lucky to do this much. Time is our enemy at GHP, and I’m usually lucky to get two hours a day to call my own. Evenings are devoted to activities or working with faculty, and that’s my usual time for working. Sunday mornings are free, and I have been productive in the past during this time. Mostly, I have to get my brain trained to work during the afternoons, between 1:30 and 4:00, minors time, when everyone is in class and I’m not usually out observing.

61 days to go.

Beginning the shift (Day 303/365

Posted on by Dale

Other than waiting around for Brett Smith to come and discuss how we were going to solve the stove problem, I had time this morning to start making the shift to GHP.

In years past, I would be making this shift weeks in advance, but this year, I haven’t been able to give a lot of thought to the fact that on Monday I descend into the maelstrom that is the Georgia Governor’s Honors Program and won’t emerge until July 23. How I’m going to hold to my vow of creating every day remains to be seen.

But I have to prepare, to begin unlocking those parts of my brain that I keep stored away all year because they’d be an impediment in everyday life. Part of the process is welcoming all the new staff members, which I have done, although not all of them have acknowledged being welcomed.

Another part is going through my document files and changing the year in the headers of memos, handouts, etc. I haven’t done that yet.

And yet another part is cleaning out the van and packing. Years ago I began a database of all the stuff I needed to be sure to take. I have opened that up a couple of times in the last few weeks to double-check it, to add items to it, to delete some items. When it’s time to pack, I print it out, sorted by location. This makes it very easy to pull what I need from the kitchen, the closet, the study, etc., without worrying about backtracking or forgetting something.

So this morning I began that process as much as I could. The whole kitchen dining room are in disarray because of the appliance move-in, which of course won’t be finished until I’m gone. That means I don’t have as much staging room as I usually do, and I may be apt to forget something in the clutter. I must be especially vigilant.

Still, I managed to pull together all my kitchen and, more importantly, all my bar stuff.

The rest of the day was spent going to a graduation party down past Moreland that didn’t exist, then an engagement party in Marietta that did. In between we passed through Fayetteville to return the elliptical, which was still making grinding noises, and got a new one. So yet another source of stress: I have to spend part of tomorrow, my packing day, putting together another &%$*#! machine.

Is it any wonder that my brain is not ready for GHP?

Stress (Day 302/365)

Posted on by Dale

It’s beginning to get to me that I haven’t committed a creative act in a week. I know, I’ve been shutting down school, and today was given over to trying to get the new appliances installed and the cats to the vet, but still. My goal was to create something every day.

I don’t like failing in my commitments, so this is an underlying stress that is exacerbated by the very things that are keeping me from creating.

For example, the installation of the appliances. The guys from Sears showed up at about 11:30, and that was fine. It was no problem at all emptying the refrigerator quickly, I had already emptied the freezer and culled the contents of the refrigerator itself, and moving the old appliances out was a snap.

Moving the new ones in was a snap as well. Hooking them up was not a problem. But then the stove wouldn’t fit correctly in the cutout in the island. We looked it over and decided that however the old stove (with the same dimensions) had fit in there, the new one had to slide further back and was being stopped from doing that by the gas pipe. We decided that the gas pipe had to be dropped back down into the basement and the stove hooked up down there, thus allowing the whole thing to fit firmly into the island.

Only the Sears guys couldn’t do that. Were they telling me that all they did was bring the appliance into the house and plug them in, I asked incredulously? That was exactly what they were telling me. A call to Sears confirmed that when I paid for installation, what they actually meant was plugging in, something which I was quite capable of doing for myself, a fact I pointed out to the manager. Abashed, he volunteered to take the installation charge off the bill.

That did not solve my problem, which was that I wanted to have these appliances completely installed by the end of the day so that Ginny wouldn’t have to deal with it on Monday after I was gone. (The water line to the icemaker in the refrigerator was also nonfunctional.)

I did track down a contractor who could do the job, but he couldn’t come until tomorrow morning. I had to be satisfied with that.

On a more positive note, both appliances functioned beautifully. The refrigerator is quiet and the stove works like a charm.

On a still more positive note, we watched a lovely movie called Malèna which we highly recommend you add to your Netflix list. It had lain around the house for months, and we were never “in the mood” to watch it. Foolish, indeed. I can’t remember now why I had added it to the list, but it’s a wonderful movie. And Monica Belucci is stunningly gorgeous.