Five Questions Meme
From wizefics, who always seems to have the best memes.

001. Leave me a comment saying you want to do the meme.
002. I'll respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better.
003. You should update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
004. You should include this explanation and offer to ask someone else in the post.
005. When others comment asking to be asked, you will ask them five questions.


1. I know you're in school, but I'm not totally sure what you're studying or what you plan to do with it afterward. Will you tell me?

Certainly. I study ethnomusicology. (Pause for everyone to make the "ethnomusicology face," a combination of expressions that means "what's that?" and "I don't want to seem stupid by asking." Don't worry; ethnomusicologists are used to this, since we get it all the time.) Ethnomusicology is many things. Alan Merriam described it as "the study of music in culture." I call it "the bastard lovechild of musicology and anthropology." Basically, it's a way of studying music as a part of human social behavior. It also tends to encompass the study of popular musics and world musics, which have not traditionally fallen under the purview of historical musicology, a discipline designed to study Western art music.

What do I plan to do with it? Well, most ethnomusicologists have some sort of professorship to support their research habits. A few get positions with ethnic music archives, the Smithsonian, or companies like National Geographic, but most of us end up in academia. Which is fine with me.

2. What is your favorite place that you've ever been and why?

Tough question, since I've been to a lot of places -- one of my favorite things to do is to go someplace where I've never been and explore it. I really liked going to Lithuania, for instance, because I got to spend a significant amount of time there doing something really neat. But I guess, to answer this question, I might say Germany. I've spent a couple of years there, not consecutively, with a few shorter visits, and it's just a fascinating country all around. I speak the language well, so there's no illiteracy issue like there was in Lithuania, and I have friends there. It was also the place where I had one of the two most frightening experiences of my life, and where I met some of the kindest people I ever knew.

3. What is the last music you listened to by choice? (ie - not the radio, be specific!)

Well, that depends . . . do we count music that I listened to passively, or music that I had an active hand in making? If the latter, I would say the singing party I had at my apartment last night. If the former, probably watching Rigoletto a few days ago.

4. What's the last thing you've done that you're really proud of doing?

Re-taking my music history comprehensive exam earlier this week, and realizing that all the studying I'd done over the summer had worked. I felt much more in control of the exam than I was last year, like I could make arguments and defend them instead of just bullshitting my way through three questions I knew nothing about.

5. What is your favorite memory (that you're willing to share, of course)?

Well, I don't know if this is my absolutely favorite memory, but it's one that always makes me smile. It's from the second year that I lived in Germany, when I was eighteen years old. My father was still a coffee drinker at the time (he's given it up since), so the smell of coffee had always been around our house. I loved the smell, though I could never stand the taste, which is why I am one of those weird Americans who drinks tea.

Anyway, I'd been living in Germany for several months with the Wicked Bitch of the West. There's a long backstory to this, and I won't go into it, but the upshot was that I'd been living with this awful woman under conditions that pretty much amounted to psychological abuse for months on end, an ocean away from home, in the days before e-mail, so all communication with my parents was by handwritten letter, so it was easy to keep things from them. I kept my head down, made friends at school, and tried to pretend that everything was okay.

The town where I lived had a U.S. Army base, and every year, the base had a little carnival to which they invited the townspeople, sort of as a friendly gesture -- come on in and see that we're real people! One of my friends from school, a wonderful, shy, gentle, musical boy, invited me to go to the fair with him and his mother. I asked the Wicked Bitch of the West if I could go, and she huffed and puffed at my forwardness, and finally said that I had permission to be out until 8:00 as long as I found my own dinner at the fair, a decree that carried a distinct undertone of "do not darken my door before 8:00."

We went to the fair in the mid-afternoon, perhaps 3:30 or 4:00. The Boy's mother proved to be a lovely woman, who loved going to this fair every year and seeing the army base, and generally had a good time. The problem was that the fair wasn't all that big -- a few rides, a few game booths, but nothing that you couldn't see in over an hour. We saw everything there was to see, but by 5:00 it was time to go. I was a little nervous, since I knew that I wouldn't be welcome at home for another three hours, and I tried to think of a way to kill that time. The Boy asked if I had any plans, and I mumbled something about going into town and maybe window-shopping or something because I wasn't expected home until 8:00. The Boy was perceptive, and he figured out more of the truth than I suspected he had (as I learned later on), and he gave his mother the "this will Not Do, please think of a way to help her" look. His mother, also no fool, immediately declared that I was going to have dinner at their house, and they would have me back home by 8:00.

So I went home with The Boy and his mother, met his father and his little brother, and it was a wonderful experience to spend an evening with a normal, loving, open family, as opposed to the haughty, cold, congenitally devious people I lived with. The Boy took advantage of being The Host to wheedle a cup of after-dinner coffee from his mother (not that he had to wheedle all that hard, but he did give her distinct puppy-dog eyes), and then we went to the piano to noodle around -- we'd met in music class, and bonded over the piano.

So. After all this backstory, here is the memory. I remember The Boy sitting next to me on the piano bench, clearly happy to have me there, and his breath smelled like coffee, like the breakfast table at my parents' house. It was so different from being treated as a lower life form by the Wicked Bitch of the West and her husband; I'd grown up in a family like The Boy's, and I knew the difference. And, for that one evening, sitting with The Boy at the piano, making music and smelling the coffee on his breath, I felt safe.

I know it's my favorite memory, because it's fourteen years later, and I still cry to think of it. And I can still smell The Boy's coffee breath when I think back to it, just as if it were yesterday.