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Have you ever looked out at the world and wondered if your life would make an interesting movie that people would actually want to see? Sometimes I find myself peering through the cracks of my eyelids as if each pupil were a unique camera lens, capturing images of my life – evidence of my existence and growth. I don't know...I just think about things like that sometimes. Is that so wrong? It's like that quote from that one Shakespeare play, “All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players.” Who am I? Well...I've always wanted to be a caterpillar. They get to eat all they want and get nice and plump (something that no respectable modern day woman would ever dream of doing), Then, I could form myself into a chrysalis and close myself off from the world. The most beautiful and awe-inspiring thing in the world, I think, is a caterpillar's ability to transform. For a few painful weeks, the caterpillar wriggles and writhes in excruciating pain until one day, it emerges free – and with wings to carry it away from its previously claustrophobic existence! Free. Sometimes I think only caterpillars know the real meaning of that word (or butterflies, I should say). People seem to throw around the word freedom as if it were a baseball. By people I mean conservative political pundits, but, it's not their fault. They aren't butterflies. I wish they were...then they could fly away.
This is what happens when I am alone with my thoughts.

I saw my therapist yesterday. I think we were supposed to focus on something like my self-esteem issues or my problems with dealing with stress. For some reason I started to blurt out this story about last Thursday where I got into this surreal fight with my dad which involved me pushing him and him throwing water and a metal glass at my face. It didn't end well...I think. So my therapist (her name is Theresa by the way) decided to spend the entire session working on anger management. Oh joy! She had always been pretty normal, you know...listening to me, sympathizing with me, and giving me words of encouragement. Here, she started to get a bit weird. She broke anger down into 4 stages, which was simple enough to understand. Stage one was being irritated. It's that feeling where you're writing a research paper you have already procrastinated on and everything is going just peachy and all of a sudden, BAM! White screen! And the screen just stops everything like a kid who got tagged in freeze tag. Yup...that is irritation. The next stage is frustration. That feels like when you're screen has frozen right in the middle of a research paper you have already procrastinated on and then, coincidentally, your printer has also broken. That's when your face starts contorting into some trippy dispositions. Stage three is anger. I think what my therapist meant by this is...like when you're writing that research paper that you have already procrastinated on, the screen freezes, your printer doesn't work, and then your computer just goes ahead and dies on you. Crashes! BOOM! Just like that, without even one word of goodbye! Then you're running around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to find some way to prevent your heart from exploding out of your butt and then comes stage four: being mad. Ok I didn't know what Theresa was going on about. What was the difference between anger and being mad? She kind of put it to me this way: say you're working on a research paper and you're already procrastinating on it when your screen freezes. Then all of a sudden you realize that your printer is broken, you haven't saved anything, your computer implodes, and then a bright light enters from the right corner of your eye and you start to feel stars. The next time you open your eyes, you're lying in a hospital bed with no health insurance, twelve broken bones, a failed grade, a dead computer, and no social life at least for the next few months – as you are confined to your uncomfortable hospital bed. Pretty bad, huh? No...none of these things ( thank the Lord) have happened to me...yet; but, I just wanted to illustrate to you that I was kind of getting up to the stage four level at the end of this fight my dad and I had.
The oddest thing about it all was that I had no clue why I was so angry, I mean...we were just yelling about the stupid laundry. It was kind of like an out of body experience where a part of myself was just watching me get angrier and angrier to the point of actually becoming violent. It was all bad. So after learning the four stages of anger, Theresa started to go into this unconventional, perhaps experimental therapy. She kept trying to get me to associate different images or colors with the different levels of anger. Mind you, I am really breaking this down for you. She was being really confusing. These images or colors are supposed to act as signals, so when you see them, you know which stage of anger you're in and that you need to start calming down. I figured out that when I start to get from stage two of irritation to stage three of anger I cannot, for the life of me, tolerate a mess. If I see a pile of dirty laundry on the bathroom floor, I will go off. It' me against the laundry, one on one and I tackle it, I wrestle it, I pin it to the floor until it's weeping for its mother! That laundry didn't stand a chance. Gosh what is it with me and laundry? Then there's the unmade bed. I will make the hell out of that bed until it is so perfect, Queen Elizabeth herself could have made babies in it! Do I feel better when I clean? Perhaps. I REALLY feel better when I play the drums though. There's something about beating the living daylights out of something with a stick that is so beautiful – I'm talking about the music here. I really don't want to seem like a violent person. I'm actually a pacifier. I haven't been giving you a good impression of myself have I?

So this is what has been on my mind lately. I've been reading this book called Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks. It's a collection of stories about people who have been affected by music in a unique way be it with amusia where a symphony sounds like banging pots and pans or heightened musical senses. I began reading the book for a research paper I was writing on how music neurologically affects you and I chanced upon this story about a strong, 42 year old orthopedic surgeon. He gets trapped in this epic storm and finds the need to make a call to his mother. Now I'm thinking, is this really necessary? Is calling your mother really that important? But, I guess my mother and I have a really terrible relationship so I'm not one to ask these questions. So he goes into the phone booth, and as he picks up the phone, a bolt of lightning hits him! BANG! He gets this strange out-of-body experience where he kind of sees himself as if he's another person looking in at his body. While this is going on, his life starts flashing before his eyes and he feels as if he's moving backwards and forwards at the same time. Pretty trippy, huh? The most interesting thing about this story is not the fact that he survived and was so healthy that he was able to do surgery a few weeks later – it's that he immediately started to become obsessed with the piano stylings of classical composer Frederic Chopin. He was consumed with music and started playing Chopin as if he had been doing it his entire life! This was a man who had hardly any knowledge of music prior to getting struck by lightning. What a remarkable story! So what's the moral here and why has this story consumed me so much? Well...it's not just because I'm a musician. It's because I am in love with the fact that this man had something so horrifying and disastrous strike him (literally) – yet, something spectacular and magnificent emerged from it. Then I realized – this is I want my life to be. Lightning has struck me and it's time for me to embrace the music of Chopin and rock the piano, never looking back.