I have four big projects right now -- being a researcher, being an ICANN director, making sure that OneWebDay has a life of its own, and being a violist.

The viola project is the easiest of the four, because it's the thing I've been doing the longest.  This hasn't always been true.  I remember when I first tried to play all four open strings on the violin (one at a time, up and down).  Very very hard -- right hand holding tight to the bow, right thumb locked underneath the bottom part of the bow stick (hard to explain without a picture), feeling of pain in my left shoulder and neck. I remember that when I first started the pads of the fingers on my left hand stung with pain; the topmost string was like a razor.  No wonder so many kids quit after a year or so.

I didn't know quitting was an option. So I kept going, and now when I don't play my hands don't feel as useful and the pads on the tips of my left fingers start to ache.  I switched to the viola when I was a junior in college because I thought I'd get a better job that way.  I've never looked back, and the few times I've played the violin since then I've sounded like a trombone player.

I did get a better job eventually, but as a lawyer and not a violist. About six years after I graduated from law school I started practicing every day again, not the three or four hours a day I'd done in college (not the smartest thing to do in college, by the way), but a solid hour.  I'm not sorry that I took the route I did.  Musicians don't get treated very well in America (except for a lucky few), and lawyers, amazingly, get paid just for thinking, writing, and talking.  What's so hard about that?  I remember the first day of my first job after I dropped out of music school. I couldn't believe that they would pay me for sitting in an air-conditioned office and keeping track of pieces of paper. It seemed like a game, a lark, a scam.

Now playing seems like a gift, a lucky thing I get to do that I've done all my life.