Challenges

I have reached the point in my preparation where I have, for the most part, finished learning and studying my pieces, and now what remains to be done is getting the hang of playing them through cleanly from beginning to end (or from end to beginning, while standing on my head and drinking a glass of Perrier). I have to build up my concentration and endurance so that nothing may throw me off. But of course the game wouldn't be fun without some surprise challenges thrown in at the last minute, so fate has sent me a team of construction workers to set up camp in my courtyard, just outside my window, a mere meter away from my head while I'm practicing. Today they brought in all the pieces that will become their scaffolding and started the business of banging them together, loud metal on metal, while they shout back and forth to each other and smoke. No hurry; they'll be here for two to three months!

Their excuse is that they are going to clean and repaint the outer wall of our building, but honestly, this wall we're talking about is right up against the wall of the next building over. Nobody uses the courtyard or ever sees this wall, and unless there's some structural work they need to do, this sounds like a flagrant waste of noise to me.

Courtyard: pre-construction.

From the moment I found out that they were coming, I've been worried that they will be a major distraction. Israel is something I've been working toward for almost two years, and now when I have barely a month to go my practice environment is converted into a construction zone! Strangely, external factors don't always affect my mood in predictable ways. My mood seems to respond more readily to what I perceive as the underlying meaning beneath the externalities. This is turning out to provide some interesting insights.

I've had plenty of problems with noise in the apartment before this. At first I was the problem. When I moved in two years ago and practiced my harp every day, this crazy lady who lives across from and a floor above me would occasionally reach her threshold and blow down the stairs like a tornado to have a shrieking tantrum all over me and threaten to call the police if I kept playing. It was kind of scary, because I didn't feel so comfortable with French yet, and... oh lord, she is terrifyingly hideous. Fortunately, she is actually crazy enough to have had a 180-degree turn-around, and now she loves me and wishes I would never leave. It's because I'm so charming! No really, at the time I demonstrated my good faith by offering to confine my practice hours to before 1:00 pm. Coincidentally, this was all going on right before a different competition, in Hungary. As you can imagine, it took a good deal of inventiveness and lots of character-building to work around that challenge.

This year it's been more the other way around. Crazy is up there having occasional tantrums about other things, vocalising stream-of-consciousness to her little dog, or clunking around the stairwell at 2:00 am. The neighbors just across the hall from me, with whom I share the courtyard, have two small children that whine and cry an inordinate amount, often either right by their open window or in the courtyard itself. And there is some Asian or possibly Polynesian family a few floors above me, with a whole flock of little children who don't go to bed until well after midnight and a mother whose words always are whipped out in impassioned, rapid-fire spurts. She always sounds indignant and bitter, but I have to assume it's just the lilt of whatever language she's speaking, because you can't always be that grumpy can you? When it's nice outside and everybody has their windows open, the wall across from us echoes and amplifies all this noise right back into every body's windows. Thus I am witness to the daily sounds of human vulgarity at close range. (Just as I typed the last sentence, the guy across the courtyard noisily snorted out a wad of spit... aaand here comes another.) It is ugly and depressing.

When the workmen showed up, I shut my shutters, and I'm sure everyone else at least shut their windows, and as they took over with their clanking, I was amazed to discover that the first thought in my head was, “Yes! They are drowning out all the other noise!” It's only been one day, but I think I actually prefer their noise (deafening as it is) to the usual, because it is the noise of productivity. Those are the sounds of people with a goal, building something. It turns the building into a workplace. Spurred on by their aura of activity, I feel more justified working here than I ever have before, and I crank out my pieces as loud as I please! After I gave them a good talking-to about not smoking outside my window and clarified that I was playing a harp and not a piano, they mind their business and I mind my own. I think this is actually going to work.