"Love is the answer - but while you're waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty interesting questions" - Woody Allen

Oh Woody. Grow up.

OK, assholes. A lot of you think I'm full of shit, so I'll document it in writing.

I'm enlightened. Oh yes, laugh not, you immature retards - you, whose life is driven by the physically carnal and the spontaneous passion of hedonistic desire - this is no longer me! I'm all about something else.

I'm all about just holding a girl's hand that I truly care about (and not that clasping shit; I'm talking the real interlocking fingers kind), and maybe taking a walk down a moonlit river or through a tourist infested area before buying overpriced icecream after hours and retiring to over-indulgent cheese like "Love Actually."

You may be about middle period Liszt and the hedonistic harmonies of Rachmaninoff. Me? I'm all about the D900's, baby - I'm revamping my moral system to Opus. Posthumous's and 132's.

I'm enlightened; not driven by the necessity of desire and at the risk of sounding patronizing (ha), I am ABOVE you. Yes, read that again.

Grow up, bitches. Grow up.

A memorable Christmas Eve.

Richmond, Virginia: Looks like LA.

Oh Koreans. You know I love you guys. I kid, I kid.

I don't like to complain in real life - so I use this blog as a vehicle for bitching. Excuse me.

In the next two weeks, somehow I'll have to get an inhuman amount of notes ready. Mendelssohn d minor Trio, Rachmaninoff Cello Sonata, Debussy Cello Sonata, Brahms Quintet, Beethoven Magic Flute variations, Casado crap pieces for cello. How is this possible.

"A work of art is a stuffed crocodile." -Alfred Jarry, ridiculous writer of the Dada movement

This post will probably get me into a lot of trouble. Suffice it to say that despite the raucous content, I do truly believe that intimate association with an ethnic breed in no way justifies contempt. That being said....

I don't really like Koreans. Yes, I said it.

Sure, yes, all my closest friends are Korean and I love them all to death, but the stereotypes that stick to the ethnicity I'm sure even they would agree with - it's as if my friends are a bunch of numerous outliers on a disturbed-homogenized curve.

What don't I like? I don't like how the large majority of them at school are a waste of space; a disgusting influx of apathy where the social norm of acceptablity makes it cool to purposely misspell words, promote intellectual ignorance, and not give a shit about career, music, or life beyond the occassional noraebang, cheap immature romance over stale bottles of overpriced soju, and a blindly clueless Christian mentality that often has nothing to do with Christianity.

I don't like how the large majority of them overtly read K-Pop magazines in performance class in front of legendary professors and often I actually and sincerely wonder whether most of them ENJOY music. I mean, really. Do they? I don't like how most of them are here to get a degree for the marketability purpose of a better marriage, but you know what I really don't like?

I really don't like how I feel like I could take a humongous shit (I mean, really, the kind you get after a huge meal), scrape it out of the toilet, and drop it on a keyboard - and this would sound better than most of their music-making. Sitting in on my performance class on a tidal wave of an oceanic deluge of Koreans, I honestly feel like taking my own life by slitting my throat with a blunt spoon.

I don't like these things. I've always thought this. I just never say it, partly because some of the most amazing people in my life are Korean, and some of the most amazing musicians I know are Korean. That doesn't really eradicate my racisim.

At any rate, I'll probably delete this post sooner rather than later. But I just had to get it out of my system.

Is it really that cool to be dumb?

Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam:

There's a particularly Bohemian cafe in the Amsterdam Airport - I've never seen anything like it before in any other country.

It's a blueish epitome of the globally eclectic cultural mess, but it silently screams with a personable introspection of universal human emotion - it needs no spoken vernacular because every fool in the cafe sits by himself looking like he had just fought a war of attrition. Was I just another one of those pathetic souls, drinking another cup of coffee in a large European hub?

Germany disgruntles me. Why?

In a uniquely disgusting way, it always has. It´s the little things. I hate that I can´t find the @ sign on the computers, and that the keyboards are nearly identical with the slight exception of the reversed Y and Z. I hate the US Dollar which in turn, makes me pissed the hell off at the Euro, since I pay about 8 Euro in this country to get a meal that consists of a piece of shit with ketchup.

Am I too American? Perhaps. Does this country suck? Perhaps.

My third time in Germany. And this country sort of blows. Gute Nacht.

Viña del Mar, Chile: An emotionally safe haven infested by South American flair, stray dogs, an expensive casino, and the beautiful Pacific.

I think I´ve learned more in the last two weeks about myself than I ever really cared to know, be that a good thing or bad... I could come home, back to the chaos of reality-soaked Manhattan, now if I wanted to...but why do that?

Contemplation breeds introspection. Introspection begets depression. Depression encourages alcoholism. Alcoholism forces contemplation. Repeat.

I need time. Time will help. Won´t it?

I digress.

I'll be in Chile for the next two weeks so if anybody needs to reach me, I'll be staying at the Hotel O'Higgins in a town called Vina del Mar. Internet access unknown.

Writing functions as a compulsive rehabilitative stress relief; much in the same way a sauna would. Or maybe it's just a self-reflective useless method, akin to say, putting Neosporin on a twisted elbow.

Years ago, I wrote a "masculinist" post. I claimed the era of feminism was dead and I went on to threaten to get with a girl and then drop her like a fat shit after a big meal. Suffice it to say I never got around to this.

Maybe I should. Yes. As a matter of fact, I think I will.

I'm off to Santiago, Chile on Thursday. Won't be back for a few weeks.

I hurt so much, it hurts.

Alexandria, Louisiana:

The brutal intersection point of the stereotypicalized American [overweight, gun-wielding, deep-fried eating, uneducated] and the unforgiving world of classical music. Does it work.....no.

Though most of my time seems to have been spent either practicing or avoiding possible lynchings, suffice it to say that I had fun. Just another nameless town in a futile quest for success? Maybe.

The budding life of an upcoming Urologist:

car LOCO 69: waddup man
car LOCO 69: free day again huh
classyoog: wadup dawg
classyoog: yep thank god for sunday
classyoog: preparin my presentation for tomorrow
classyoog: it's about bent penis

As many of you know, I'm an avid collector of my friends' own recordings, often without their consent or knowledge. I'm shady like that. Though it would be illegal for me to self-distribute them, please see me if you would like to hear any of the following people play.

Darrett Zusko, Earl Lee, David Tong, Yura Lee, Amy Lee, Clara Lee, Katie Hyun, Ryo Yanagitani, Mihai Marica, Vassilis Varvaresos, Kristin Lee, Sean Lee, Jordan Han, Milena Pajaro-van-deStadt, Elizabeth Schumann, Eric Han, Andrea Lam, Wayne Lin, Sami Merdinian, Robert Woolfrey, Greg Anderson, Liz Roe, Jin Shan Dai, Hannah Shields, Jeff Worthey.

Listen and learn. Hear them today. They're the musicians of tomorrow.

Many of you who are on that list will see your own names and inevitably come up to me, begging for immediate deletion of whatever I might own of yours.

The answer, in advance, is NO.

I feel a strangely cathartic emptiness in my already-jaded emotional system. There are very few things with which I would consider myself to be "pro", but recovery is one of them.

I'm prepared. I can take anything.

This is a cryptic post. Nobody will get it. Don't even trip.

"Why am I writing? To revive a tottering conviction, long ago banished to a dim corner of my room, that if we could Only Connect the world would have meaning. But what's the meaning of connect? And isn't the sense of life just as full or empty when alone? Nothing can penetrate the sumptuous solitude of Everyman, yet I have a frantic urge (many people I know do not, including composers and writers) to leave something."

-Ned Rorem, 1976

It's almost 5 in the morning. What are my thoughts?

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. These words somehow materialize in an unorganized fashion somewhere consequentially deep in my now-psycho psyche, like a drifting caption of a Far Side cartoon that loses itself from the page, unable to smell itself back.

Why? I don't know.

Is everything going well? I don't know.

One of the most memorable weeks for me. Thank you to my boys, and to my girl.

Yes, I'm updating. Get over it.

Contrary to popular belief, my blogging draught isn't any implicative reflection on any drastically mortifying status-change in my life - some months I just get lazy. That being said; for the first time in quite awhile, I feel happy these days. Not to sound like a penis-less fairyqueen or some post-modern Manhattan psychologist that sings Kumbaya on an 87-dollar church-donated guitar; but really. Me happy.

So what's happened in the last few months? Hmmm....

Well, Rostropovich died. Normally, I'd be wrought with a burning trigger-happy-blog to compose some sort of fitting elegiaque post-mortem but the dude died so long ago it seems. And at that, how to verbalize or wordify anything non-trite regarding the greatest cellist to walk the planet? Suffice it to say just that.

I went to jail for a night. For a suspended drivers license I didn't know about. Sadly, there's not much more to the story than that - it's more of a ha-ha than an "omg", but in light of my criminal history, ha-ha's are a preferred alternative.

Juilliard is starting to look like the ambient collateral damage from a 1930's Hemingway novel.

The election approaches. Obama or Hillary. Obama or Hillary. Why is it that there is an 'antithetical' but no 'thetical?' Adjectivized words from root nouns confuse me. There's an antecedent, but no cedent - wouldn't the 'cedent' be the current? There's a progress, but no congress. ha!

Sarasota, Florida. Robert Levin: the point at which charisma violently intersects with intelligence to produce the epitomized dickweed. Why must the two consistently clash? Pamela Frank: the beginning, it seems, of an effort to homogenize impeccable musicianship into an all-powerful surname. Though I feel drastic in saying such a thing, if you don't like her - you're probably a bad musician.

In other news, some long deserved congratulations are overdue. Congratulations of course to Wei Yu, on his new appointment to the cello section of New York Philharmonic. Congratulations and good luck to David Kim, on his ability to pack his bags and leave us all in search of truth, greatness, and the holy grail of viola. And to Yura Lee, for the Avery Fisher grant - that's actually kind of gangster.

Back from the Hamptons today. Leaving for California on Monday. Holla.