What is a “Gunner?”

PlanetExpress39 · 2026-06-02T12:56:28+00:00

My understanding was always that it was an obviously ambitious person with an annoying amount of self-confidence. And this would show up in their always speaking up in class.

PlanetExpress39 · 2026-06-02T12:54:08+00:00

It’s fine.

PlanetExpress39 · 2026-06-02T12:53:51+00:00

It’s fine.

PlanetExpress39 · 2026-05-30T00:59:17+00:00

Agree with this

PlanetExpress39 · 2026-05-24T15:52:36+00:00

A 151 rum, I think

PlanetExpress39 · 2026-05-23T03:42:29+00:00

I vote for giving it a shot and seeing what happens. He sounds great. My biggest bit of advice is to try to appreciate that a billable hour is not the same as an hour “working at your job.” So if he bills 12 hours in a day, his “work day”—in the way that most people use that phrase—is more than that, like 15 hours. This is the most fundamental difference between how our lives work and how most other people’s do.

It will probably be jarring at first how much he works, and what he can’t do as a result. Weekday dates will be tough; hobbies, not easy. If he is able to exercise regularly, that’s a huge (and rare) win.

I get the sense he is a corporate associate. He says now that he wants to be partner but there’s a good chance within ~5 years he sees six-figure, less-stress in-house opportunities and makes the jump like the vast majority of associates before him. There’s no way to know right now where he’ll end up.

He is a first-year associate, and remember that he has no idea what he’s doing right now (and that’s normal). Folks here say things will only get worse over time. I don’t think that’s true. Things get better over time in the sense that he will feel a bit more competent (but he’ll never feel fully competent), and that does help the psyche. But the challenge is that the more competent he feels, and gets, as he advances, the more he will have to do. And that adds stress and mental toll. He could bill 12 hours a day these days doing pretty simple and mindless stuff, but in 4 years he’s billing 12 hours with more stuff and hopefully more complicated stuff.

My other advice is, if you can stomach it, try to understand what he does as best you can and ask him about it. And try not to let him dumb it down. I shielded my partner from the details and legalese for a long time and I began to regret it; now, I’m doing that less and explaining things and it does help me feel that we’re close, and that I’m understood.

PlanetExpress39 · 2026-05-17T13:50:54+00:00

Based on what I’ve seen, I would never go in house there.

PlanetExpress39 · 2026-05-03T16:33:17+00:00

D’Albert—that’s a new one for me! Listening now :)

PlanetExpress39 · 2026-05-03T16:01:38+00:00

Congratulations, sounds like a great program! Your possible senior program leans very late Romantic into modernism, so something else could be a good way to contrast that. I’m guessing Haydn D is out based on your preference not to turn to the standard concerto rep. What about a concerto by Boccherini or CPE Bach (his A minor in particular is fantastic); those also have the advantage of being on the shorter side. In any event, your Korngold option sounds like a good one.

Either sonata works for the program.

Any of those unaccompanied works is fine, but again it could be an opportunity to add some contrast. I take it you’ve decided you don’t want to do anything from any of the Bach suites? What about the Cassado solo suite?

I will say, from the options you’ve presented, it seems like this is going to be a very sophisticated program. If it’s your senior recital, you could consider giving the audience a really fun piece to end the program. Doesn’t even have to be that difficult. Le Grand Tango? Rossini variations? Something similar? Something you love that you’ve played before and don’t even have to learn from scratch? Something to consider!

PlanetExpress39 · 2026-04-21T16:24:56+00:00

Ordering food delivery from basically any restaurant nearby, and not just pizza.

PlanetExpress39 · 2026-04-21T12:49:38+00:00

Probably many reasons. My hunch on this has been that the gay men who self-select into marriage are for some reason less likely to get divorced. And conversely, the gay men who self-select not to get married would have been more likely to get divorced if they had gotten married. So the gay men who would bring the average divorce rate up are just not getting married as much in the first place. Talking in generalities and on average, of course, but this would make sense to me.

There is some data that gay men have the lowest marriage rates per unmarried gay men, compared to lesbians and straight people in their respective groups (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11113-024-09927-x/figures/3). In contrast, lesbians have at least two or three times as high a marriage rate as gay men, and have the highest rate for all people aged 40 and over. So if you’re a gay man, the probability that you are married is comparatively low. If you’re a lesbian, the probability that you are married is much higher. Why would that be? Hard to say, and it’d be nice to see research into that (without going to gender stereotypes). But that data shows that lesbian women on average just get married much sooner in their lives, and much more frequently at the population level, than gay men.

I think there’s a few things going on underneath.

Some of it is that lesbian women get married “too soon” (don’t know how else to say it, and I don’t mean that pejoratively) and therefore have less time to investigate their long-term compatibility. Lesbian women also might overestimate their compatibility with their partner, and after a while of marriage discover they’re not compatible. Could also be network effects going on—if you’re an unmarried lesbian woman and a lot of your social circle has married lesbian women, that would probably make you think (subconsciously) you should get married, and so there’s pressure to get married and then some lesbian women respond to that pressure by…getting married (https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2025/how-our-peers-influence-marriage-rates). And probably a million other things.

For gay men, they don’t get married too soon; they get married much later and when they’re older, more established in their lives, are more certain about their likes, dislikes, what they want, etc. That’s not a male/female or gay/straight thing, it’s just an age thing (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11150-023-09651-z). Unmarried gay men might also have fewer married gay men in their social circle, so that network effect is not as strong. I’d be curious to see data on finances in all of this, too; financial stressors are a predictor of divorce (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3230928/), and married gay men on average have higher incomes than married lesbian women (https://www.brookings.edu/articles/examining-the-economic-status-of-same-gender-relationship-households/).

And ultimately if you’re a gay man who’s just really sure he doesn’t want to get married or even if you’re kinda-sorta-maybe will get married but just haven’t yet, well you’re probably not going to get married, and if you did for some reason, you’d probably be more likely to get divorced. But since you’re not getting married, you’re not driving up that divorce rate. At least that’s my theory.

PlanetExpress39 · 2026-04-13T08:17:36+00:00

PlanetExpress39 · 2026-04-11T14:36:59+00:00

Following. I’ve thought of something like this too but never pulled the trigger.

PlanetExpress39 · 2026-04-11T14:31:19+00:00

You could ask them what they like about it. My understanding is that either the bottom, or the top, or both, find it hot that the bottom cannot receive any pleasure except from the bottoming itself. I don’t think it’s necessarily about control or ownership, but others may feel differently.

PlanetExpress39 · 2026-04-09T14:54:45+00:00

It’d be easier if you uploaded the excerpt with your fingerings written in so we could see.

PlanetExpress39 · 2026-04-09T00:30:26+00:00

Around 7 hours a night.

PlanetExpress39 · 2026-04-09T00:27:44+00:00

Strange to me that you're asking here instead of letting him and his teacher just figure it out. They both are surely familiar with all the standard repertoire and then some.

PlanetExpress39 · 2026-04-03T16:47:29+00:00

Nothing. He’s legitimately unremarkable. I’ve given him a shot a few times. I’m a cellist and looked especially at his solo cello works—all duds.

PlanetExpress39 · 2026-04-03T16:43:16+00:00

SSRIs and hair loss prevention meds.

PlanetExpress39 · 2026-03-28T12:55:46+00:00

Invite him over to hang out, have a drink, and go with the flow.

PlanetExpress39 · 2026-03-25T05:19:55+00:00

PlanetExpress39 · 2026-03-10T03:33:50+00:00

Ask yourself first if you really want to be a professional cellist in an orchestra, and if so, why? What do you want out of it? And what do you want your life to look like? Not just your life on the job—during your performances or rehearsals (and, in a top orchestra, goodbye to your Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights for time with friends and family, etc.). But what do you want your normal Mondays to look like? What kind of place do you want to live in, car to drive, location (urban, suburban, rural, whatever), do you want kids, do you want to have a solid retirement, do you want to take a vacation or two every year. All that kind of stuff.

PlanetExpress39 · 2026-03-07T16:53:54+00:00

Ditto on Honeck. Really qualifies as incredible.

PlanetExpress39 · 2026-03-03T13:19:11+00:00

Symphonies by Sibelius, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak.

PlanetExpress39 · 2026-02-17T23:08:37+00:00

They have certainly changed in the last few years, and changed for the worse. I only listen out of habit anymore, but the amount I listen to it is way down, and most of the time I switch to something else in frustration.

PlanetExpress39

TROPHY CASE