The Shanghai Department of Culture gave my grandparents on my mom's side a nice apartment in the longtong alley on Fuxing Lu, and the apartments here also house the students from the Shanghai Conservatory of music, so from 7:30 in the morning until 8 at night, I hear someone practicing a sonata, and someone singing soprano, and then violin piano duet, and low bass, and the cello, and another sonata, then a sonatina or fugue, or whatever it is, my vocabulary way too limited to properly describe it, and sometimes I hear someone making a mistake on the piano and it gets me thinking that maybe I wasn't so terrible in middle school when I performed at the annual recital and made three mistakes and why did my mom have to dress me in a big fat pink bow on the top of my ponytail and then seven years later when it was my brother's turn to play he got to wear a sweet little bowtie and suspenders and when we took a picture of him from the side, boy oh boy, did his head look like big round apple or what!

The apple effect seems to have diminished, I think:





Maybe I should have kept practicing?