Greasy and smelly

Ewarat bash (good evening) from Sulemani!

I first must say how moving some of the comments on the last post were to me. I am reminded again how lucky I feel to have such passionate and feeling friends and family. And I must say, I was playing a bit of the devil's advocate in the last post. As many of you know, I asked myself the question of whether I could put a life together without playing the french horn years ago and discovered the answer was an emphatic no-- I couldn't help but play. And in the past few years, I've found that, to a somewhat lesser degree, I cannot help but teach as well.

So I do what I do, and the students do what they do. From the moment I heard of the opportunity to be here, I think it was invevitable that I would come. And I have no regrets that I have.

That said, inspiring and fulfilling as it is to work with students who have so little opportunity, it is amusing to what degree we approach the same mix of attitudes and degrees of talent, seriousness, inflated self-perspective, and attitude that I would expect from any mix of high school and young college students. Of course, in this setting, the very normality of it is comforting and somewhat encouraging. We truly are so much more the same than we are different. Music is a wonderful high-level common denominator, but a lower-level one is the constitutional inability of a seventeen-year-old guy to read a dynamic or practice slowly! And I love it all.

Today was an interesting day for entirely different reasons. I may be wandering into the dangerous blog terrain of TMI, but it's an amusing story.

I have been alluding a little to a medical problem that I have been having. The short version, for those who haven't seen me recently, is this: I have been itching. All over. Intensely. All the time. This started about five weeks ago, and I haven't really had a decent night of sleep since then. I had been to three doctors in the US and they all had diagnosed it as some sort of allergy. They ruled out some of the scarier possibilities, like skin cancer and other umentionables, but none of them could come up with a diagnosis that made the slight different. No treatment seemed even to alleviate the itching, let alone cure it.

Well, sometimes it pays to hang out with a bunch of teachers who are used to third-world countries. It turns out I have a rather intense case of scabies. Definitely somewhat embarassing (although not so much that I don't write about it here), but such a relief to know that I have something treatable and that this will all be coming to an end.

Of course, being in Iraq, my treatment is a little old school. I went by the hospital this morning for the diagnosis and prescription. And so it is that I am now coated in an ointment made from 10% sulfur. The pharmacist mixed it up on the spot in a ramshackle old shop in the central bazaar in town. The doctor has told me that I may not shower or change clothes for the next three days, only add layers of this sulfurous stuff. Since our concert is Tuesday, that means that I have already donned my concert clothes and I they should be thoroughly imbued with sulfur by the time of the concert. This may put some conductor odor stories to shame! However, any kind of suffering will be worth it if it brings this miserable sleepless itching to a close.

Running around town to take care of the prescriptions and dealing with my clothing took up almost the whole morning, so wind class was cancelled. Band continues well. At tonight's teachers' meeting to plan the concert on Tuesday, I was proud to be able to say I could provide a fifteen-minute program and a big finish if they needed one. Except for the trombone solos in the Helmesberger. My homework is to write those into the baritone sax part since that's the only way they'll get played.

I had a sectional with my hard-working trumpet players tonight. They've come much further than I had imagined possible a few days ago. I think even they are kind of surprised. Understand, of course, that this is all relative, and the potential for disaster is high. But even so, I think they finally have a taste of what it means to play properly in an ensemble. They adjust to each other and sometimes even to the rest of the group and I can rely on them for eye contact in rehearsal which just warms my little heart. The army guys have vowed to practice reading this year so that they can keep up better.

I just turned down an invitation to spend the night at the guys dorm. I have a feeling it would turn into one long string of private lessons, and I have got to get some rest. And being coated in sulfur hardly makes me feel socially comfortable!