I’ll be honest, work has been a bit stressful for me this past week. So I decided that I would do another one of these “Happiness Reports”, to publicly share what I am appreciative for in my life, despite some minor hardships. Just a simple list, in no particular order, of some happy things in my life.

~ I have a job. A few jobs, actually. All music teaching jobs, and all jobs that I absolutely love. Although teaching hundreds of young children every week is very difficult at times, it is truly a blessing that I have a job that I am passionate about and look forward to going to, that also allows me to live in a beautiful place, own a car, and eat food every day.

~ After the heavy rains we’ve had in the last few weeks, the pretty cherry blossom tree outside my house has started blooming—it’s the first time I’ve seen this many flowers since I moved in about five months ago 🙂

~ My boyfriend and I went to see Cirque du Soleil: Luzia this past weekend. It was an amazing show. I had seen Cirque a few times as a kid, and they have always been some of my very favorite shows. But now that I’m an adult, I started appreciating more of the stuff I hadn’t realized or noticed before as a kid. It was very technically impressive (music, lighting, staging, choreography), and in addition to being a simply majestic display of human body capabilities, it shows the incredible feat of trust between performers. Seeing people calmly getting thrown around, and witnessing the split second intimate glances shared between performers was absolutely beautiful. There’s a wonderful video on YouTube about this very thing, actually:

~ This weekend, my homework assignment for my music theory students was a “Composer Mini Research Project”, where I had them search basic facts (birthday, place of birth, achievements) about living composers that I love. My largest music theory class is nine students, so I came up with nine composers to research, just so there’s no repeats in the same class. I printed out copies and handed them out according to who I think each student might enjoy researching. At my last class, I hadn’t realized that the composers I handed out were all male…

…But, one of my students did. And it was the boy who noticed. He asked, “Ms. Russell, why are they all boys?” I was shocked, first at the fact that I had done that (hadn’t printed enough female composers for that class), but also because it was a male student who asked. I was so proud though, that he even noticed. It made me very hopeful for the next generation. I admit that I sighed and told him, “Well, music is generally a male-dominated field.” My step-mom pointed out though, that maybe when he gets to be my age, it won’t be anymore 🙂

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