Catch up in Trichotomy

A lot of small things happened since I last wrote, but I haven’t been motivated to log onto prosebox. So the is almost 2 months’ worth of entries:

The Lead

With my promotion I’ve been assigned as one of the ‘Tech Leads’ in my team, which means I am now making decisions that affect everybody on my team now, and I get dragged into meetings with other teams all the time. I do not like those meetings - it’s more hard work than just running experiments and building things. When you are an engineer, you need to understand computers and code, but when you are liaising with other teams, you have to understand them. And I am now ‘mentoring’ three new people now… there is was new engineer who finished his post-doc in Columbia and wants to work as an engineer (he is easiest to manage - he’s smarter than me and often has better ideas), a new guy who transferred from the Ads team because he couldn’t get promoted due to the lack of opportunities there (he seems smart, but it’s too early to tell), and a 20%er from a neighboring team who’s working in fits and starts. There’s also a columbia grad that jumped ship from Goldman, and even though she is the Loud Talker co-worker’s mentee, I find myself coaching her often times. All these ‘people operations’ are exhausting. I’ll give it a year, and if I still don’t like it I’ll ask to be moved back to being an engineer.

The Erl King

The amateur musician group had our Carnegie Hall concert 1 1/2 weeks ago (the week before Christmas). It was at Zankel hall, and during the open rehearsal we learned that it was less than 2/3rd filled, so I was not optimistic about playing for a decently-filled hall going in. But I would say it was 5/6th filled on the day of the concert, and that does not include the empty seats due to us performers having to purchase tickets and leave it empty when we are on stage. I was tasked with turning pages for people in the first half, and I close the concert in the second half, so I spent all the time backstage, and my seat was empty the whole concert.

Because there was only one concert this year, the board could afford to be more selective in their picks, and most of the performers were great - as in entertaining. Two were only decent… I got the feeling we were watching a piano student recital (she played Debussy’s Arabesque) and a high-school student orchestra concert (the Organizer got a small group - drummer, him on the piano, and 5 strings to play “the Christmas song” with him on the piano) during those. But everybody else were terrific.

This is my 8th (I have to look it up now; starting to lose count) time playing at Carnegie Hall, and 4th time I close it, so it all had a very familiar feel to it. I always go do something relaxing by myself before a carnegie hall concert to clear the mind (which usually involves watching a mindless movie), so it was opportune that the new Star Wars movie was released the same weekend. I liked the movie, but it was not the greatest thing I’d seen.

I was most impressed by how big the Zankel hall back stage was, compared to Weill hall. We had 2 dressing rooms (one for men, one for women), and we get 3 warm-up rooms, which were as large as the dressing rooms, and usually empty. At Weil, we got one dinky warm-up room barely big enough to fit two people and there would be a line waiting to get in. But here, you see empty rooms all the time. I have to say that Erlkonig is a lot easier to play than the Godowsky Revolutionary Etude arrangement, and as a result, I was much more clam backstage during the concert, and had a much more pleasant time. The only complaint I have is that the stage hands decided that they would leave the piano at half-staff for the whole concert, so the piano soloists have to play with the lid half-closed. I struggled with getting enough power out of the piano. I’m pretty disappointed by their laziness.

We had a good time hanging out after the concert; one of my co-worker (the ex-Goldman) came with her boyfriend and La Professeure really liked them. The Ex-Chamber Music Group Organizer came too with her husband, and the six of us hung out at the reception. The Annoying Harpest Lady was talking to ECMGO the whole time and I tried to rescue her by suggesting that we go get coffee - but it backfired when AHL invited herself to come along. So I ended up talking to her, but it was for the most part pleasant because she was telling me a lot about the juicy politics of the Amateur Musicians group board.

La Professeure took the video of the performance. You don’t get a good look at me, but the sound was decent: https://goo.gl/photos/D67VgELPk5F8Qsr4A

I just realized I never shared the human orchestra… Try listening to it without laughing: https://goo.gl/photos/Ku3UUNtURVGcQ4yQ8

The Music Party

Marius from Les Miz held his annual music party the week before the Carnegie Hall concert. So it was a natural place for me to test out my repertoire. He had gone overboard this year, co-organising the event with the Treasurer and the Japanese pianist. It was very crowded. 50 people in one apartment which was maybe 1200 sq ft large. But it was also very well-organised. The Treasurer used tape to mark up the ‘stage area’, and organized folding chairs, buffet tables, a “green room”, a “coat room”, with signage and clear instructions. They even had a program, with estimated concert time and scheduled intermissions. I was very impressed by the thing.

There were many different music styles: some people sang from the American song book, someone did Madamina from Figaro, some Chopin, a group sang Meghan Trainor, some guitar/percussionist did folk, and a group did George Michael. I think only the Treasurer could have put a program like that.

The Piazzolla enthusiast was there but spent much of the party outside the apartment. La Professeure went with her most of the time; she’s going through a tough patch with her high-pressure job and just needed to vent and someone to talk to. And I was glad to be out of the over-stuffed apartment, so it made a good break for me. I think she is just in the wrong field - she is in finance doing portfolio analysis, but does not like the back-stabbing backroom-dealing nature of the place. So we (La Professeure and I) suggested that she look outside of her field, which she is reluctant to do. I think she just has to go through with it.

My performance in the party was not nice though. I was trying to play Erlkonig on an electronic keyboard, the pedal was flying away the whole time, and the keyboard made more sound with my finger colliding with it than it producing the sound electronically (I had to make the triplets quiet to bring out the melody, but the noise of finger-touching keyboard was louder), so it was very ‘interesting’. The bare-foot pianist was also there and had a tough time with her piece, so she talked to me about how difficult it was to play on the keyboard, loudly, saying that you can’t play anything on the keyboard, and that the next time she would rent a piano for this event. I wasn’t quite sure what to respond - it’s like saying your host’s food gives you food poisoning or something.

These people are geeks, and as such lacks certain… social skills.

The Work Party

Speaking of geek parties, my work’s office party was on the Thursday before Marius’s party. It was at the Waldorf=Astoria again, same as 3 years ago when I first joined.

It was very crowded. We arrived early enough, and my team had a designated time and place to meet, but we waited for a long time for people to show up. The Loud-Talker co-worker was there, and kept trying to corral people to stay together to explore the different rooms. It was a spectacle, but the crowdedness was difficult to tolerate. There were various rooms in the building that’s been decorated, each about 500 sq ft, with food, drinks, and some specific theme in each. This year’s theme was literature, so there was a room of the fantasy genre, with painting of Harry Potter (whose eyes move) on them. Or a room for romance genre, with large posters of top-less Fabians. The activities to do in each room are quite dumb… there was a room with craft table where you make ‘leaves’ on silver foils, there was black-jack tables, and there was a room with ping-pong table. In any case, everywhere we go it was crowded.

We didn’t move around much, because we spent time talking with my co-workers. La Professeure really likes the ex-Goldman co-worker and her boyfriend, and really likes my team-lead’s wife (who’s a photographer). So that part was nice. I also got to know the ex-Ads co-workers and the ex-columbia post-doc better. But La Professeure got pretty drunk by the time we left. On the LIRR, she asked me to give her her phone back, twice, in a 5 minutes interval, when it was on her lap.

The Christmas Break

I just came back from visiting Binghamton for Christmas break. It was a pleasant visit. It’s getting hard to shop for christmas gifts because they don’t need or want things anymore, so we ended up getting and giving gag gifts. The last few years La Professeure’s family exchanged a lot of gifts. They have this notion of “stocking stuffers” where you put smaller, less valuable gifts in each other’s stockings. For my family, our ‘regular’ gifts would be on the order of their stocking stuffers. But their ‘regular’ gifts exchange would be a whole-afternoon event.

We got a lot out of use for her brother’s gift, a Star Wars Catch Phrase. We played that a lot (I guess we’re a family of nerds), and also Star Wars and Doctor Who Madlibs. It was a lot of fun. However, after a few days, you start to get bored. I passed the time by trying to put together a photo album of our trip to France… There were so many pictures and so much details to look up that I spent most of the free time doing that during the break, but not even halfway done yet. I didn’t even practice the piano all that much. I stayed Thursday till Monday, coming back to the city by myself by bus. It was made a much easier bus-ride because I watched Match of The Day on my laptop. So that was great. I didn’t even get to practice the piano all that much.

La Professeure’s mom did not get to cook her traditional thanksgiving dinner this Thanksgiving (because we were invited to her sister-in-law’s family), so we did it on Christmas day. That was an activity in itself, and La Professeure did most of the work (her mom’s hand hadn’t healed yet, but she’s doing better), but after eating the same food for a day and a half, we were ready to eat something different. Christmas eve was very nice, though, we drove up in the morning (and I slept half of the way there), getting in just on time for the 4 o’clock mass intended for children, and La Professeure and I didn’t get seat in the main hall, so ended up sitting in the social hall (it has a projector and a live-stream of the happenings on the altar) which was a lot less formal and more comfortable, and not many people could see me cringing at the cantor’s horrible singing. I find it amusing that, as soon as the going forth is played, people in the social hall jumped up and dashed out the door - to beat the traffic. That night we went to Kampai Japanese Habachi - where we had our wedding rehearsal dinner - for dinner, and it was a lot of fun. The food was great too; on our rehearsal dinner I was not feeling well enough to eat, so it’s nice to finally get to taste the food there.

When I got back Monday, I worked half a day and then went to see Wise Young Friend and her family. WYF’s husband just had hip-replacement surgery 1 1/2 weeks ago, but he is already able to walk around, so that was remarkable. The kids were cute as always, and they, for once, actually liked the gift I gave them. This was a wood labyrinth game, and the kids spent most of the time playing with it, leaving WYF and I for some adult conversation time. So that is nice. I hope La Professeure will be able to come into the city during weekday some time before the semester starts - WYF haven’t seen her in a long while.

We are going to host a “spirits-tasting party” tomorrow night for New Years Eve. We weren’t planning on doing that - the idea came to La Professeure one time when we were hanging out with the amateur musician friends when they were drunk, so we weren’t sure whether anyone remembers the offer. But alas, at Marius’s party and after the Carnegie Hall concert, Dramatic Sop’s Vocal Coach and the ENT Doctor pianist both remembered, so we would do it. However, since the invitation came so late, the attendance won’t be high - there should be less than 20 people.

I’m looking forward to it - I am pretty sure I’ll be the only sober people in the party.

Last updated December 30, 2015