Yeah, My Cousin Totally Won the Van Cliburn

Posted on by Elise

I started piano lessons at age five, and began competing in classical competitions by age seven. At eight, my playing partner Linh and I won the Missouri Music Teachers Association state title in duet, and even though I went on to perform and compete in classical piano until 9th grade, that early win was basically the highlight of my competitive piano career.

That's my cousin with Van Cliburn. (Photo by Van Cliburn Foundation)

Even then, I’d already heard the stories about my cousin Chris Shih, who lived in Maryland and was a piano prodigy. As I was growing up and fussing around with Chopin nocturnes, he was being backed by the National Symphony Orchestra and studying to be a doctor at the same time.

When I was 15, I met him for the first time in Fort Worth, where my mom took me to see him play in the preliminary round of the Van Cliburn International Piano competition. He was amazing. He represented the US in the prestigious professional contest even though he was really concentrating on wrapping up med school. Despite reviews calling his opening round performance “flawless,” he didn’t advance, possibly because the judges knew he wasn’t aiming to be a professional pianist.

Thank goodness the Van Cliburn Foundation created a similar quadrennial competition for amateurs above the age of 35, officially called the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition for Outstanding Amateurs. This year, Chris was finally old enough to enter, and lo and behold, HE WON the whole darn thiing. (For context, I recommend a compelling documentary about the 2007 contest, featuring some of the same finalists who Chris beat out last week.)

He totally MURDERED some Brahms for his final round performance. Thankfully my fantastic employer, NPR, posted Chris’ entire 30-minute performance of the Variations on a Theme from Handel (by Brahms, confusing, I know). NPR also interviewed Chris for Weekend All Things Considered, in which he talks about drug use and music all in one segment. Listen to both.

So it’s quite a treat to be part of the extended Shih family, with all the overachievers and all. I get a lot of questions about tiger moms ever since that became a meme, and I’m proud that all the success stories in the family were products of pretty progressive, hands-off parenting. Cheers to Chris and the anti-tiger parents out there.

Deadline? Some Reading to Help You Procrastinate

Posted on by Elise

Like any self-respecting journalist, I spend 90% of the run-up to a deadline either procrastinating or scouring the internet for ways to procrastinate. These are the aids in my deadline avoidance this weekend:

Esquire’s Guide to Marriage (complete with a quiz!)
Writers take on the beginning, middle and end stages of marriage with short essays. I love the “middle” essay, about fighting. As for the quiz, my husband-of-nearly-one-year Matty scored in the “she’s probably not going to leave you anytime soon” range, which is respectable. He did lose 100 points somewhere in the middle for saying “guy time” within the last six months.

Jimmy Lai Animates the News
My first exposure to Taiwan’s NextGen Animation was after the Tiger Woods scandal, when an avatar for Elin Nordegren chased the cartoon Woods with a golf club and bashed in the front window of his Suburban. By 2010, I was fully obsessed and went to NextGen’s YouTube page after any major news event, to see how the animators imagined things going down. The man behind the cross-cultural meme tells the NYT, “I could make a big business out of recreating the amazing images of the news, because what we get on TV is always the last bit of image. What happened before that image is always missing.” The interview gets really funny when he starts talking about the inspiration for his Asian clothing line, Giordano.

The Queen Pop Needs Her to Be
The Times runs a piece similar to a NY Mag cover feature of a year ago, about the workaholism and artistry and post-modern brilliance of Lady Gaga. Fun fact: Even with all the costuming and elaborate stagecraft and dancing, Gaga never lip syncs at her shows. I really gotta go see her live sometime.

What the Frack is Going On?
If you haven’t seen it yet, you gotta check out The Fracking Song, which is both an educational and entertaining explainer of hydraulic fracturing for natural gas. No, really.

All I Ever Really Needed to Know I Learned from Ace of Base

Posted on by Elise

“I don’t think I bought their CD.” -Matty, on Ace of Base

The other night, at the Hu-Stiles housewarming weenie roast of 2011, I took a lot of grief for the Ace of Base music on my iTunes. But if you pay closer attention, the music and lyrics performed by those clever Swedes offered all kinds of lessons for life. I picked out some of the most important takeaways from my favorite Ace of Base selections — “Don’t Turn Around,” “The Sign” and “Beautiful Life.” While I really enjoyed “All That She Wants” when I was in sixth grade, I found the message of the song to be a little too slutty.

Life is demanding without understanding
This seems like a simple lyric, but really, it’s a succinct expression of the human condition. The work of great artists, philosophers and theologians can justifiably trace back to this premise.

You can do what you want just seize the day
Perhaps Mark Twain said this better, but it’s riffing on the same principle: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you did not do than by the things you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the tradewinds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” (For me this means eating a lot of food and traveling a lot of places. But apply it however you’d like.)

Take a walk in the park when you feel down
I modify this to include any hike and bike trails, namely the one on Town Lady Bird Lake in Austin. But this is some solid, practical advice from my favorite early nineties Swedish pop band.

If you wanna leave, I won’t beg you to stay
Ladies, this is an important one. As Chuck Klosterman says, “Every relationship is fundamentally a power struggle, and the individual in power is whoever likes the other person less.” Look out for number one. Value yourself over a man who doesn’t care about you enough to stick around.

No one’s gonna drag you up to get into the light where you belong…(Where do you belong?)
This is my daily inspiration. Doesn’t need much explanation.

Team America

Posted on by Elise

Outside the White House with a fresh sign

Unless you’ve been in a cave, you know the news. Special forces killed public enemy number one, Osama/Usama bin Laden this morning and recovered his body. A spontaneous crowd flooded to the front gate of the White House and just after President Obama’s address to the nation, we started seeing some shots of the revelry on the T-V. So, being the news junkies that we are, Mr. Hu-Stiles and I drove the three miles to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., illegally parked and literally ran to check out the action. The air was thick with the smell of winning and weed. The crowd was dominated by drunk, fratty types and what appeared to be foreign journalists. We heard lots of “U-S-A, U-S-A” chants and an occasional rendition of the national anthem.

Revelry. I don’t know how they had a flag handy.

Proof I was there.

The Unbearable Lightness of Internet Stalking

Posted on by Elise

To briefly revisit a lesson from high school English, “dramatic irony” describes a situation in which the reader knows what’s going to happen to a character but the character doesn’t. It’s a tension that makes for great literature and art. And it’s the closest example I could think of to describe the situational discomfort of having to face someone who I’ve already internet stalked.

Just as a reader is one step ahead of a character because she possesses more information than say, Hamlet, so is the data-hoarding internet stalker. I usually do enough Googling to learn some stats that I’ll later have to pretend to not know in the course of face-to-face interaction. Unable to pack this problem into a single term, we will call this ‘”the unbearable lightness of internet stalking” until you come up with something better.

The context of this situation is part of the larger intersection of technology and human relationships that has long fascinated me.  The deep ocean of data available on the internet allow us to learn a lot about someone — and even communicate extensively with him — without ever talking to him in person. It’s the stuff of online startups, like my friends HO’s Umbel, which is designed to give people more control over internet searches of their identities. It’s also the stuff that can start relationships. A 2009 survey by Zagats found that more than 50% of respondents admitted to Googling their dates.

My problem is the human interaction that comes AFTER you learn or know information that you obtained in a slightly surreptitious but a let’s-face-it-we-all-do-it-kind-of-way. I am almost ALWAYS AWKWARD when I interact in person for the first time with someone I’ve searched or @ messaged on Twitter a lot. Two ways to think about this, both which make me act stupid.

1.) When I am the internet stalker: My fandom of a Google or Twitter @ subject leads to paranoia that the subject knows that I’ve been keeping up too closely with his feed because of my curiosity and interest. (This is why I was so strange everytime I saw Brian Stelter at SXSW, even though my friends say he is totally a normal, nice, dweeby dude.)

2.) When someone else has internet stalked me: This is usually revealed in a reference to something I tweet about a lot (like how someone saw a bacon-flavored something and thought of me). My response is always initial delight. “YOU LIKE BACON TOO? IT IS SO DELICIOUS, RIGHT?” But then, if I marinate on this too long, I start asking the vexing larger questions. Is it socially acceptable yet to reveal your stalkerdom? Maybe I feel weird on both ends of this situation because it’s not.

I quizzed my friend (over Gchat, natch). Let’s call her Megan:

Megan: I was very taken aback when I went on a date with someone who candidly told me that he had read my Twitter feed and then referenced things I had tweeted about like two months ago.

Me: What did it make you think?

Megan: I thought, “Why doesn’t he have the social skills to pretend he didn’t do that?” Because I had also stalked him too but I wasn’t going to admit it.

Me: So the reveal of it is somehow socially unacceptable.

Megan: Yeah… it’s almost as if you are exposing someone. Or forcing them to be intimate with you on this level you aren’t ready for. Because they have this info about you that you didn’t give them, but also, it’s all on a public forum, so why shouldn’t they know it?

And to use Hamlet once again, there’s the rub. Most of us admit to doing this sort of searching of near-strangers, and certain social media tools like Instagram allow us to go as far as seeing someone else’s day through their eyes. But I still can’t face some of my Twitter friends in person without feeling like a total dork/loser/insane person. When will this not be weird? When will internet stalkerdom be socially bearable?

Is There an ER for Mango Trees?

Posted on by Elise
Healthy mango tree, circa summer 2010.

Three years ago, when my parents were still living in St. Louis and not The Hague, my dad ate a grocery store mango and planted the seed in the ground to see what would happen. Being the excellent stewards of life he is, of course my Dad’s seed sprouted a tiny tree.

In 2009, after my dad retired and moved across the Atlantic with Mom, he forced this tree upon Matty and me. We drove it in the backseat of Matty’s car, from St. Louis to Austin. Dad kept telling us to plant it in the backyard, but I’d grown so attached to Mango Tree and his story that I didn’t want to plant him for fear we’d have to leave Austin someday.

Matty has cared for and talked to Mango Tree nearly every day for the past two years, as it’s sprouted more branches and inched taller and taller. If the temperature ever dropped below unbearably hot, Matty brought him inside. Then, when we made the difficult decision to move to Washington, Mango Tree rode in a backseat again, all the way from the 512 to the 202.

Dad came to visit last month. He was stunned and amused to see mango tree had grown to be a good three feet tall, especially since he actually remembers it as a seed.

Sick mango tree, tonight.

The mango tree that could — a sapling that came to symbolize a fruitful life for Matty and me and whose health gave us some confidence that we could successfully care for a living thing — is now quite ill.

His leaves have turned yellow and spotty, his branches are turning a powdery white. We think it’s a fungal disease. Dad said we needed to get him to a nursery to diagnose the issue. Matty, who’s out of town tonight, wants me to find some sort of spray to fight the illness yesterday. If you have suggestions for what else we oughta do, let me know.

I know it’s sort of ridiculous to feel so frantic about a plant. But as it is with pets, Mango Tree’s part of our family now. If there were an overpriced emergency nursery as there are emergency animal clinics, I’d be rushing the little guy there right now.

Internet Distractions Discovered by Reeve: The Inception Edition

Posted on by Elise

Let’s start with the distraction that’s also an effective meeting starter: The Inception Button. As Reeve says, you can “add a little drama to any mundane situation” by calling this up and pushing the button. You remember how intense that soundtrack was. Now you can use it to, say, announce you’re going to the loo. Or that you’re going to be late. Or that it’s time for lunch.

For our next selection, some Passover fun:

Reeve also recommends the distraction below because “the concept is great,” even though the execution is only okay. Check it out, especially those of you who are fans of the Academy Award-dominating film, The King’s Speech:

Every Dollar Counts

Posted on by Elise

I believe it is the great American sage called Oprah who preaches the mantra of living your best life. And if I recall correctly, to live your best life you should be grateful for all the love and kindness and free food that come your way. (Or something along those lines. I don’t watch Oprah but have read a few of her magazines while out by the pool.)

So today in my Oprah-brand “Gratitude Journal” I’d be grateful for my work cousin/guide/bestie Matt Thompson, who, after my $20 bill went flying into 5th Street NW, heroically jumped over a spiky four foot fence that enclosed us into a bar patio before running partially into the street, chasing the airborne Andrew Jackson until he was able to retrieve it in front of cheering bystanders. Thank you Matt, and thank you fellow fence jumper meandering dollar-chaser Patrick for bearing witness to this for the historical record (as I couldn’t scale a fence on a windy day in a loose skirt).

Armed with a $20, I’m now on my way to living my best life.

Introducing Crazy Distractions on the Internet Discovered by Reeve

Posted on by Elise

Back in my halcyon days of youth, I enjoyed starting a random blog series every now and again. Like “Snippet from Stiles,” in which I’d quote my then-boyfriend Matty out of context. Or “Impact Players,” a Q & A with a behind-the-scenes person in Texas politics who actually did a lot of heavy lifting. Since I haven’t really grown up, it’s time to start another random series. We’ll call it, “Crazy Distractions on the Internet Discovered by Reeve.”

He's keeping an eye on the internets for you, the people.

Reeve is my pal from Austin. Our connection dates to 2009, when I issued a call across the Texas Senate press table for someone to go eat with me at two in the afternoon. Reeve immediately said yes, and our friendship was born over bad tacos at an El Chilito that closed down and reopened briefly, only to close down again. I later discovered that Reeve enjoys a free meal even more than I do, which is pretty impressive.

Reeve is also about five years younger than me and therefore hip. So I count on Reeve to use his slacking off time at work to discover viral videos, music or any other assorted nonsense that he will then share with me. This has gone on for awhile now. I would not know about the three-year-old who wants to be governor of New Jersey without him. More importantly, I wouldn’t know about the internet sensation that is Rebecca Black’s “Friday” without Reeve, so our connection is both a blessing and a curse.

Since Reeve is pretty consistent in sharing his internet distractions with me, I will start sharing them with you, in the form of our new series. Says Reeve of this idea, “”I cannot fathom why Elise thinks this is worthwhile.”

This week’s distractions:

Stephen Colbert sings Rebecca Black’s Friday for charity, which Reeve calls “epic.”

An oldie but a goodie, featuring a wide array of artists singing “Perfect Day”

And since this is the inaugural post in our series, Reeve suggests you watch what he calls “the greatest YouTube video of all time,” in which this guy, Guy, is there for a job interview and they accidentally bring him on as an expert after some Apple lawsuit so he has no idea what’s going on but he soldiers through.