I think it would be odd to type this entire blog post without acknowledging that it's been an entire year and a half since I've posted on this blog. Call me laden with excuses, excuses, but I am seriously bad at keeping blogs updated. And, well, a lot has changed since I last posted on here.
As we all know, our good ol' friend Miss Rona has been seriously impacting our lives for the last 6.5-ish months or so. It's literally turned this year into 366 (yes, 366) days of Absolute Trainwreck. And as a result, we've all been stuck in quarantine for literal months. For a musician like yours truly, that means performances for the time being have suddenly gone to zilch. For an orchestral musician like yours truly, that means orchestra rehearsals have also gone down to... zilch. The last time I was in orchestra rehearsal was on 3/12/20. At this point, that was probably my last orchestra rehearsal of the entire year, and I didn't even know it at the time.
Anyhow, I digress. Because of not being in orchestra and therefore not playing sitting down nearly as much as I used to, over quarantine I developed a less-than-ideal habit of slanting my bow while I played. It got so bad that sometimes my bow would literally slant over the fingerboard. And I blame Rona for that. I have this theory that being in orchestra for so many years and playing sitting down has been the reason this problem has been avoided, since playing sitting down has forced me to keep my bow straight because otherwise I'd hit my leg with it, and I think I sort of unknowingly relied on that all these years to avoid this problem. Until orchestra stopped, and this problem developed. And as a newly minted violin performance major (before you ask, no, I didn't end up going or even auditioning for Juilliard, contrary to the aspirations listed in my profile on here. I'm actually attending TXST, a way more reasonable choice.) who has been playing violin for 8 years and has far exceeded the beginner stage, I need to fix this frankly awkward habit, and STAT.
I have been trying to work on it for the past month and a half now and it's gotten better sometimes, but other times it will go back to the awkward slant. One of the dealbreakers that made me want to fix this is how uncomfortable I look when I look at pictures or videos of myself playing. In the moment, I'm completely comfortable and it feels natural, but when watch myself it looks completely unnatural and uncomfortable.
So, as you can imagine, this bad habit of mine has been a major focus in my practicing lately. And speaking of practicing, that brings me to my next point, which is the latter part of the title of this post. So last night I tried a little something different with my practice. And by last night, I literally mean, last night. Here's what I mean by that.
So I would classify myself as a total night person. By that I mean, if I am asleep anytime before midnight it means something's up with Daniela. For me to fall asleep even as early as 11:30pm means that I am probably not feeling well or something. This whole year there has been maybe 1 or 2 times I was passed out pre-midnight. So as you can imagine I really value my late-night waking hours. I'm literally saying this as I'm typing this lengthy blog post at 12:42am on a school night.
That's not to say I'm normally ever productive late at night. Usually I spend these cherished hours binge watching YouTube videos or noshing on late night snacks. Or both. But last night I decided to try something different. Since I usually feel most awake at night, why not practice at midnight?
So that's exactly what I did. Practicing late at night is something I've never really had the chance to do since in my home there's no place to do it without waking up the entire house (or neighborhood, for that matter). But since I live in a dorm now, and thanks to Rona causing the practice rooms in the music building to become extremely restricted I have found that my prime practice place is in the basement of the dorm (also killer acoustics in there too. Seriously.), I can do that kind of thing now without fear of waking up the whole building.
It ended up working out so well. First of all, it was the first time I had the entire basement all to myself. Our laundry room is in the basement, so when I'm practicing during my usual daytime hours there's people walking back and forth to check on their laundry, and while I do enjoy having a captive audience, I also enjoy having the whole space to myself to practice in peace. And no one is doing their laundry that late at night so that was definitely a plus.
Since I finished my to-do list in the wee hours of the day, as in even before I even went to bed, once I woke up I had an entire free day ahead of me. And I loved it. I could lounge around on my phone for as long as I wanted after waking up without fear of getting up too late and starting my schedule really late in the day. Because of that, the whole day felt way more leisurely. And that was an amazing feeling. It felt like having a day off without actually having a day off.
The only downside to this late-night productivity is the fact that it caused me to not get to sleep until really late, since being productive (especially doing something that engages the body more, like practicing, as opposed to doing homework or sitting in a lecture) gave me energy and made it harder to fall asleep. Sure, I was already up late, but it took me more hours on top of that to finally drift off into dreamworld. I didn't even fall asleep until 5am. Which was not as big of a deal since it was the weekend, so I didn't have to be up for anything, but doing this late-night productivity thing might not work so well during the week since I have classes I need to be up for. Which is why for now, I'm only planning to do this during the weekend, and maybe in the future I'll start doing it during the week if it works out.
I know that everyone thrives at different times of the day. Some people have their peak productivity in the morning and will happily hop out of bed at 6am and start simping on that to-do list (my dad is that person). If that's you, hey, more power to ya. Me personally, I feel most awake in the hours of 12-2am and I noticed last night that I felt way more productive at 2am than I ever have during the day.
Well, that's all I got tonight. I'll try to post more here, but don't hold me to it. Sometimes I go a year and a half or more without posting, and that's the procrastinator in me coming out. Well anyway, thanks for coming to my Ted Talk and I'll see you hopefully in less than a year and a half.
