While I feel like I have so much more to learn and discover about myself and the surrounding world, I have also reached a certain level of maturity and relative self-awareness.

Despite peaking as a track athlete in 8th grade, in almost all other areas, I notice that I get stronger every year. I have observed this most acutely in my abilities as a singer, but I think part of the reason is that since I have so many recordings of past performances, it is easier for me to directly track and observe my evolution as a performer. This is a very good feeling. It fuels a deeply held belief that even if I’m not exactly where I want to be, I am capable of becoming it. Although it might not be immediately apparent in the short term, as I practice a new technique and gain experience, growth can be measured gradually over time.

I thrive when I get to work on projects with hard-working teams that have the same goals and values. Seeing others giving their all inspires me to do the same. This is true with the colleagues I have pleasure of collaborating with in the library and with my musical pursuits. Because I feed off of the enthusiasm and encouragement of others, I run the risk of putting others’ wants ahead of my own needs. When you try to please everyone, at the end of the day you end up pleasing no one! There’s only so much energy I can give, and I would like to see myself prioritize diving deeper into a smaller range of activities rather than spread myself too thinly across as many activities as possible. This is advice I fought against when I tried participating in as many clubs as possible in college, but I am yearning to give myself more space to dedicate myself to my top projects. They consist of (what should be a subset) of the following: completing my computational linguistics masters, gaining additional fluency in Modern Greek, writing and producing music, getting regular exercise, and forming closer bonds with friends of new and old.

I am obsessed with multilingual songs! Besides concerts I organize that specifically focus on the way melodies form the template for songs in different languages, I have a chance to regularly search for and share multilingual songs on the Copyright Balkan Songs Facebook page. One day I’d like to build a more structured database of all the songs I come across. Also, I would like to write my own bilingual song, but I need to spend more time writing lyrics (or finding them somewhere!). It doesn’t look that hard. Artists find songs they like in other languages and translate or create a different story in their native tongue all the time. However, my strengths lie more as a composer, and I like the idea more of writing my own song and someone else liking the melody so much that they want to make a version in their language.

I’ll include a specific example that is actually a whole album that matches the title of this post. While I have known the Greek version of “Kemal” for about as long as I have been into Greek music, it was when I was planning a concert in the spring of 2019 that I got to into Manos Hadjidakis’ complete work “Reflections,” a collaboration with the New York Rock Ensemble, written while Hadjidakis lived in NYC in the late 1960s and originally featuring English lyrics! The Greek lyrics by Nikos Gatsos didn’t come until the 1980s. I’ve performed “Dedication” and a bilingual version of “Noble Dame/Περιμπανού” in concerts and the whole album has grown into one of my favorites.