Just Chill Out

no wait that- no that's not- no.

Unles you've like, poured out ALL OF YOUR BLOOD, used it for a spell, and then somehow SIPHONED THE WHOLE THING BACK IN, that doesn't mean the blood on the inside of you is also used. And even then, if you'd had your sacrifical blood IV'd back into your body-

actually nevermind, I need to draw a graph to illustrate:

okay so here’s the Snakebite First Aid 101 that every Australian child is taught like ten billion times. If you get bitten by a snake:

- Try to get a look at the snake. Remember what it looks like. This will help emergency services get you the correct antidote as quickly as possible.

- Remain as calm as you possibly can. The faster your heart is beating, the less time you have.

- If the bite is on an arm/hand or leg/foot, bandage the area. This should be done IMMEDIATELY. Bandage it firmly, the same way that you would for a sprain. You are attempting to minimise bloodflow out of the bitten tissue. If you are not alone, it’s best to have somebody else do the bandaging. (A tourniquet is unnecessary in anything but the most dire circumstances. All this will do is lose you a limb for no reason.)

- If it is safe to do so, sit down immediately and keep the snakebite below your heart (opposite as for a sprain; you want the bite lower, not higher.) You can rest your back on a tree or something but it’s best not to lie down. This is to keep your heart rate and blood pressure as low as possible and make it as unlikely as possible that the venom will be pumped around your body.

- Call emergency services.

- If you don’t have a signal, send somebody else to find one and call emergency services. DO NOT go walking off to do this yourself if somebody else is available to do it. You want to do as little moving around as possible.

- If you are completely alone and have no access to emergency services, you are going to have to make the best decision you can and take a risk. If you can alert others without moving, this is ideal, but you may have to get up and move. If you’re in a snakeridden area, it’s best to never go alone or make sure you have a radio or phone (and signal), in addition to wearing snakeproof clothing. That way you can avoid this scenario. Being alone and unable to call for help with a snakebite is the worst case scenario, but it’s NOT a death sentence – bandage the bite, exert as little physical effort as possible, and if you have access to a vehicle, get to it as directly as you can to minimise walking.

Yes, I was tearing through books constantly, and talking to this teacher at least weekly. Because even though I always loved reading as a kid, literature was always a very weak subject for me in terms of a teaching-to-standardized-test school setting (I just do awful on "what color were the curtains" type multiple choice questions. Those details don't stick in my memory THEY JUST DON'T). But that didn't matter for this class. I could just read my way out of any bad test score. I have always had fond memories of how I "fudged" my way through that class and "abused' the extra credit policy.

The way I explain it to my patients is that our neurons don’t regenerate. They make connections with each other and that’s it. If you don’t use your brain, they make fewer connections and, if one of them dies, you’re gonna miss it, because that was the only one that knew how to do X. Now, if each one of them has many, many connections, you won’t notice the difference when one of them dies. The others pick up the slack.

As of 2024, 45% of dementia risk factors are modifiable. Relevant to this conversation, 5% for less education and 5% for social isolation.

We absolutely are going to see the reflection of this, but it’s gonna take decades and it’ll be too late. So, for the love of your brain, pretend that it’s a muscle and make it work. People complain about “when am I ever gonna use this maths formula in my life?” You’re not. You’re teaching your brain to think logically. Those sinapses will be there for when you need to figure out your week’s schedule. English classes taught me how to interpret data and how to convey it in this text so it’s clear and you understand what I’m saying, not because I needed to justify why the curtain is blue.

Make your brain know how to do different things. Logic games, puzzles, taking care of a garden even if small, planning a church’s event or birthday, learn a new instrument, learn a few words in another language, look at a calendar every day, do some manual labor if possible. Do not, I repeat, do not let your brain get rid of sinapses by letting AI do everything. Your brain uses 20% of your body’s energy — do you really think it’s going to maintain connexions that aren’t in use?

Most cases of Alzheimer’s are sporadic, meaning no family history. Family history of a first-degree relative with Alzheimer’s starting before they were 80yo increases your risk in 2-3x on average.

…Then they put down a carpet, so that high heels didn’t clack on the floor,  and BOOM women were suddenly getting hired.

While blind auditions dramatically increased the number of women, it specifically increased the number of white women. The number of musicians of colour has not been significantly impacted by the implementation of blind auditions.

There are lots of interesting conversations going on about orchestra hiring and the audition process in general. Several things to know about orchestral auditions:

Auditions are conducted by an Audition Committee, usually the maestro and several others. The selection process for this committee is frequently vague, poorly thought out, and sometimes little more than a section popularity contest.

Audition candidates generally must pay for their own flight tickets and accommodations to audition. And since well-paying symphony jobs are few and far between, you will be traveling significant distances for many of your auditions.

Audition committees often make their decisions on candidates in under twenty seconds of playing. (This happened to a friend of mine - he was eliminated in fifteen seconds by the New York Philharmonic. He kept doggedly playing through his whole excerpt as a stubborn ‘fuck you’ because he wanted to get his money’s worth on the flight.)

The final rounds of auditions are not blind. Usually only the first and second round are.

As you can see, that process is selecting for a very specific type of person who has access to very specific resources: beta blockers (yes these are wildly common in orchestral auditions), flights, accommodations, and often specialized audition training. There are programs that literally use sports psychology principles to help you audition better, and they do not come cheap.

So obviously there’s that problem, and then there’s the problem of a Good Auditioner versus a Good Ensemble Player. A Good Auditioner often has excellent solo musicianship and is good at playing under pressure. A Good Ensemble Player is a musician who understands how to blend with their section, support the musicianship of their colleagues, and generally be a good coworker. A Good Auditioner does not a Good Ensemble Player make. Ideally you’d have both, but…that’s a big ask, and also very difficult to select for with the current audition system. Add in audition committees that are often composed of older white people, and you can see how it’s a less-than-ideal hiring practice.

Young musicians of colour frequently realize shortly after they graduate from music school that orchestras are hostile places for them. Higher levels of musicianship and professionalism are expected from you than from a white colleague of the same gender, age and socioeconomic background. You are frequently tokenized by orchestra marketing departments and are asked to do more than your fair share of (usually unpaid) promo/PR so that the orchestra can show off how ‘diverse’ they are. Microaggressions from your mostly white colleagues abound. You are often passed over for committees, extra paid playing opportunities like chamber recitals, and promotions within your section.

So the question going around in the orchestral community is this: Is auditioning as it stands still serving us well? Or should we be looking at an entirely different way to build orchestras?

Many are saying now that we should be building orchestras with inclusivity, community and equity in mind, sacrificing that minuscule edge in playing quality afforded by the audition process. Orchestras that pave the way to welcome new generations of young musicians into a space that’s not openly hostile. (For the record, the differences in musicianship between final-round audition candidates really is minuscule. Often candidates are so closely tied that there will be multiple tiebreaker audition rounds, sometimes over a period of days as the committee deliberates.)

I personally fall more in line with this thinking. I also believe that by changing the composition of orchestras, we’ll be changing the landscape of classical music - programming featuring more diverse composers from music history, as well as the living composers today whose work is extremely underrepresented.

Some further reads on this subject:  

To Make Orchestras More Diverse, End Blind Auditions http://archive.today/iH2uh (NYT article, sans paywall)

He did a wonderful job, but as he was returning my plant to my custody, he explained "I watered her every other day, I gave her new dirt, moved her into the sunshine, prayed the rosary-"

"What?"

He looked at me, confused. "Isn't she a plant you pray with?"

"No," I said slowly. "She's a prayer plant. That's the... colloquial name of the plant."

Upon seeing his stricken face, I realized something went wrong. Turns out, this entire time, he's been including my plant in on his prayers and leaving her near icons.

Behold, Dorothea

He turned to me, sighed, and said in a very deadpan tone-- "Plants don't have covenants, Joy,"