I have a confession to make: today was the first day I played my instrument in a month. Hard to believe? There were a variety of reasons for my not-really-forced hiatus from the saxophone, including the conclusion of a tiring concert season, the stress of a job search while still teaching full-time, and a much-needed, extremely wonderful vacation to South Korea.
I'm not upset about it. Nor do I feel guilty. In the summer I usually take some time off from the saxophone—and I mean completely away from it. I do this 1) so I can recharge my mind and 2) ease off from all the hectic music-learning I have to do during the year. However, it's nice to come back to it—after having time away—because I can just take it slow, at my own pace, with nothing pressing, and it also gives me time to really focus on what are the problems with my playing. I like that a lot. A chance to rebuild and make myself a better player. So often during the year I don't have the time to really "practice" because all the time is spent learning new music for the next concert or series of concerts. This is magnified because I am mostly a new music performer, meaning it's hard to just fall back on repertoire I already know—I am constantly learning new music that has no performance history or precedent. I have to make the performance history. And often I have to make it with just one week to learn the music! It's all fun and exciting (and sometimes very stressful, like SPARK festival preparations) but I always like the time to dig back in to the basics of my instrument.
I learned this lesson of balance rather early on in my musical career. It happened the summer after my junior year of college. That year—and the two years prior to that—I lived, breathed, ate, drank, slept, and dreamed about the saxophone and its music. I practiced compulsively, until I was kicked out of the music building at night, swallowing my meals whole because time eating meant time not in the practice room, fingering through my music while riding the bus, not walking around without a set of headphones on, avoiding any sort of extracurricular social activity that didn't involve listening to or making music, waking up in the morning feeling like I hadn't slept at all. I had also just spent a year on the competition circuit, which meant keeping nearly 90 minutes of music memorized and at my fingertips all year long. Needless to say, at the end of that year I felt like I was headed for burnout. I was just sick of it all.
I realized pretty quickly that what I had been doing was a little unhealthy and that I needed to have some balance in my life—another interest to stimulate my mind and to transport me away from music. For me, that came in the form of tacking Japanese language and literature—a subject I'd already been doing coursework in—onto my schedule as a full-fledged academic minor. That summer I read Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji and got my wish. I was transported away, completely absorbed and engaged in the book. to make a long story short, I went on to write my senior honors thesis in Japanese literature on The Tale of Genji, but more importantly, I learned that achieving a sense of balance in one's life is not only healthy, but necessary.
On the eve of the start of the 2006 Tour de France in Strasbourg—the first TdF in seven years sans one dominating American rider, the first TdF since Pantani in 1998 that could complete the "double," a tour that was simply oozing excitement before it even started—bombs were dropped in the wake of the now infamous Operación Puerto affair. Under immense pressure from the UCI, the tour organizers, sponsors, and non-affected teams, teams have suspended their riders implicated in the biggest doping scandal since Festina at the 1998 Tour. The initial list totaled 31 riders, with more being tacked on as we write. And we're talking big name boys on the list. Jan shall not be redeemed. Basso can kiss his double hopes goodbye. It's really incredibly disappointing that the first Tour in the post-Armstrong era has to be run under this cloud of scandal, whose outcome, no matter how special for one rider, will always contain asterisks and "what if's." 
