Dreamer: The Encounters Finale

This is it! Here is the Encounters finale! It has been an incredible journey to take with you all and I hope you have enjoyed this project. Thank you to all of the 9 to 5’er artists who participated in Encounters and thank you to the audience members of the Encounters community who have followed this story since it started four years ago.

(If you are interested in my new projects, I encourage you to check out the Engineering page of this website.)

And now, without further ado, I present to you the Encounters finale featuring my original song entitled, Dreamer. Enjoy!

(P.S. If you want to skip my intro, the official Encounter starts at 02:58)

With that, I will end this story of Encounters with these final words:

We All Matter, We All Inspire.

………The End.

Encounter #22: World of Things (A City of Extremes)

This month's Encounter is a Demi Encounter. For this Encounter, I am sharing my original song entitled,  World of Things (A City of Extremes). World of Things is a song from my first ever music album,#demisongs, which I will be releasing this April so stay tuned! A big thank you to my sister and my friends, Al and Matt, at The Loft Recording Studios for helping me bring this song to the next level. If you enjoy reading, I encourage you to check out the story behind my song below.  

And now, without further ado, I present to you, World of Things.  Enjoy!  (P.S. If you would like to skip my intro, the song begins at O5:07).

If you live in a city, chances are, that at some point in your day today, you passed by someone who was homeless.

Sitting at the corner, on the sidewalk, on a park bench. Sleeping in a subway car.

How did it make you feel? Wanting to help but feeling helpless? Scared? Sad? Angry? Guilty? Or did the scene not even register with you because it is a scene that, unfortunately, you have become too accustomed to?

This is what my song, World of Things, explores. It has been my way of diving into my emotions and thoughts on this issue of poverty in the United States; something that I witness everyday. World of Things is my message on an issue that is too prevalent, and an issue that we can solve if we sidestep greed and truly honor the fact that, We All Matter.

For this post, instead of a story, I want to share data. To raise awareness, which in turn is the first step towards actionable change.

Before we become obsessed with new virtual realities, let’s first fix the problems in our current one.

Excerpts from “Report of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights on his mission to the United States of America”, Human Rights Council, United Nations:

  • “[In the United States] About 40 million live in poverty, 18.5 million in extreme poverty, and 5.3 million live in Third World conditions of absolute poverty. It has the highest youth poverty rate in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)…”

  • “The United States has the highest rate of income inequality among Western countries…in 2018, the United States had over 25% of the world’s 2,208 billionaires…The share of the top 1 percent of the population in the United States has grown steadily in recent years. In 2016, they owned 38.6% of total wealth.”

  • “The United States now has one of the lowest rates of intergenerational social mobility of any of the rich countries. Zip codes, which are usually reliable proxies for race and wealth, are tragically reliable predictors of a child’s future employment and income prospects. High child and youth poverty rates perpetuate the intergenerational transmission of poverty very effectively, and ensure that the American dream is rapidly becoming the American illusion.”

  • “In 2016, 18% of children [in the United States] (13.3 million) were living in poverty, and children comprised 32.6% of all people in poverty…Contrary to stereotypical assumptions, 31% of poor children are White, 24% are Black, 36% are Hispanic, and 1% are indigenous.”

  • “On a given night in 2017 [in the United States], about 21% (or 114,829) of homeless individuals were children.”

  • “[In the United States] The official point-in-time estimates of homelessness in 2017 show a nationwide figure of 553,742, including 76,501 in New York, 55,188 in Los Angeles, and 6,858 in San Francisco. There is ample evidence that these figures underestimate the actual scale of the problem.”

  • “Sleeping rough, sitting in public places, panhandling, public urination, and myriad other offenses have been devised to attack the “blight” of homelessness. The criminalization of homeless individuals in cities that provide almost zero public toilets seems particularly callous. In June 2017, it was reported that the approximately 1,800 homeless individuals on Skid Row in Los Angeles had access to only nine public toilets. Los Angeles failed to meet even the minimum standards the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees sets for refugee camps in the Syrian Arab Republic and other emergency situations.”

  • “[In the United States] Poverty is frequently treated as a form of “child neglect” and thus as cause to remove a child from the home, a risk exacerbated by the fact that some states do not provide legal aid in child welfare proceedings.”

  • “In both Europe and the United States, the richest 1 percent earned 10% of national income in 1980. By 2017 that had risen slightly in Europe to 12%, but massively in the United States to 20%. Since 1980, annual income earnings for the top 1 percent in the United States have risen 205%, while for the top 0.001 percent the figure is 636%. By comparison, the average annual wage of the bottom 50 percent has stagnated since 1980.”

  • “High inequality undermines sustained economic growth. It manifests itself in poor education levels, inadequate health care, and the absence of social protection for the middle class and the poor, which in turn limits their economic opportunities and inhibits overall growth.”

  • “Health care is, in fact, a human right. The civil and political rights of the middle class and the poor are fundamentally undermined if they are unable to function effectively, which includes working, because of a lack of the access to health care that every human being needs.”

  • “…there are indispensable ingredients for a set of policies designed to eliminate poverty. They include: democratic decision-making, full employment policies, social protection for the vulnerable, a fair and effective justice system, gender and racial equality, respect for human dignity, responsible fiscal policies and environmental justice.”

No Matter the Politics. The Change Can Start With Us. We Have the Power.

Encounter #18: Waiting

This week's Encounter is a Demi Encounter.  For this Encounter, I am sharing my first original song with lyrics entitled Waiting.  Waiting is my first professionally recorded song so a big thank you to my friends at The Loft Recording Studios for helping me bring this song to the next level.  If you enjoy reading, I encourage you to check out the story behind my songwriting below.  

And now, without further ado, I present to you, Waiting.  Here's to the first of many more Demi songs to come on Encounters! :)  (If you would like to skip the intro, the song begins at O4:52).

Q: How can we elevate our words?

My Answer: By uncovering the music behind them.

Since high school, I have been composing on the piano for fun.  I love creating melodies on the piano (which often times end up sounding like the soundtrack to the life of a fairy)  but in the past, I would get frustrated that I could never sing with the piano.  First off, I never thought of myself as a singer and secondly, the notes that I determined I could sing, for some reason magically seemed to not exist on the piano.  It was a love-hate relationship that I had with my piano for the longest time because, while it spun out beautiful ethereal melodies, it refused to let me sing with it.  I am a loquacious person and for me, words are how I emote.  They are my strength and writing has always been  "easier" for me than other things.  I mean this in the sense that, when I do allow myself to let go, the words will flow out of the pen on their own and know exactly how to stand in a line to form that precise feeling that cuts through the air and into the soul.  This entry is not the best example of it but when it does happen, it is, ironically, indescribable but wonderful.

4 years ago, I was given a gift.  Interestingly, it came at a time of pain and loss and I was looking for a way to release and find some solace.  So I sat down at my piano and played 4 chords.  I kept playing these 4 chords because I wanted to sing.  I was desperate to put words to the emotions; to describe my internal world and make sense of what happened in the outside world; and to find connection again.  I wanted the music to speak.  And somehow, magically, that day it agreed to do just that and Waiting was written.  

Waiting was the tipping point for an overflow of songs that poured out of me in the following four years.  Songwriting was this gift that comforted me and allowed me to go on an adventure, exploring the relationship between melody and lyrics, how to develop beats, and, most fun for me, developing harmonies.  Although Waiting was written at a time of sorrow and sadness, it has ironically led me down a positive and enlightening path as I learned about music and myself.

This year, I decided on a gut feeling to professionally record some of the songs that I have been writing over the past few years.  As a chemical engineer, I had no idea where to start to record music.  The music world in general was an unknown to me but learning about it this year has turned out to be an exciting adventure that I am happy I get to experience together with my family (they are music aficionados as well).  I have learned so much about music and recording this past year and I give a big thank you to my new friends at The Loft Recording Studios who recorded Waiting.  Matt and Al at The Loft are such great and talented people to collaborate with; they understood my song and instinctively knew the vision I had, even if I couldn't put it into words.  They are the masters of their craft and the coolest and nicest guys I have met in the music world.  Collaborating with the team at The Loft has been one of the greatest gifts for me this year.

There is so much more I could write about music, songwriting, and this experience but I think I will stop here for now.  I have been recording over the past 6 months and I look forward to sharing with you these songs.  For me, music elevates words and I look forward to sharing my musical stories about loss, love, poverty, hope, and dreams in the coming months.

This creative endeavor has been a dream and I am so grateful to share it with my family.  My sister, who is affectionally now called "The Producer", has come to every single recording session (some lasting as long as 4 hours!) and always lets me know when we need to drop a beat, add a snare, or an "egg shakey thing".  My mom, "The Manager", as the most curious and adventurous one of the family, was the one who discovered The Loft and planted the seed of this idea.  My Baba, "The Fan and The Founder", places a dollar on the fireplace every time he listens to Waiting - his version of iTunes.  I recently discovered Baba's own musical recordings from his university years when he was a drummer and singer in a traditional Greek music ensemble; the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.  Without these 3 pillars in my life, I would not be living out this dream and so I thank them for raising me in a world of creativity, curiosity, passion, and magic.

Encounter #16: Fairies Dance (the music video)

As promised, this is the second half of the Demi Encounter entitled, Fairies Dance.  I present to you my first ever "music video", which  I have filmed for my composition Fairies Dance.  This video is a collaboration with my sister, who is a structural engineer, architect, and visual artist, and whose art forms are featured in the video.  The purpose of Encounters is to share our creative voices and our stories and so I have included my story behind the Fairies Dance music video below.   Enjoy! (P.S. If you would like to skip the intro, the official Encounter begins at 04:45)

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Home where my thought's escaping, Home where my music's playing, Home where my love lies waiting, Silently for me - Homeward Bound, Simon & Garfunkel.  

For the past 28 years, home has always been the same for me.  Literally.  I never moved from my childhood home.  The big move for me was down the hall from my childhood apartment and into my mom's art studio during those "liberating" years of college.  Then I moved to Italy this past year for 6 months and home became a concept for me to rediscover.  With a Greek father, Europe has been a constant in my life and I feel like I have a second home in Greece as well as Amsterdam (where my sister had lived).  The difference with Italy was that I knew no one, let alone have any family there.  This was truly a foreign place for me where I would have to figure out how to live, survive, and thrive on my own.

Fairies Dance, the video, turned out to by my personal exploration of finding home in Italy.  

I have an older sister who is a structural engineer and architect by profession and who has an incredible eye for the visual arts and aesthetic design.  She creates little forms when she has an idea (which is often) and so, throughout my apartment, you will find these forms sprinkled around, seeking refuge in the nooks and crannies of my bookshelves.  I wanted to share these forms with the Encounters community as just a glimpse into the creative visions of my sister therefore, I decided to make a film to my song, Fairies Dance, with her forms as the focal point.

It was through my journey with my sister's forms that I came to realize how I found home in Italy.  Walking around the small Italian town where I lived, Piacenza, I began to see my sister's forms in the architecture of the old Italian town.  This sparked a realization that there are constants in life no matter where we are.  Visually, these constants were my sister's forms as I uncovered them in the architecture of sleepy Piacenza and the cityscape of my hometown.  From my experience in Italy, these constants were love, a "family" meal, and camaraderie.  

And so, what began as a desire to artistically collaborate with my sister, became a deeper exploration for me of the journey to find home.  Although our path in life is unpredictable, we leave behind a thread of footsteps wherever we go that tells our story, and as we venture into the unknown, those constants await us, masked in a different form but ready to be rediscovered. 

Encounter #16: Fairies Dance (the song)

This week's Encounter is a Demi Encounter entitled, Fairies Dance.  Fairies Dance is an original composition of mine that I composed on piano back when I was in college.  I will be sharing this Encounter in two parts.  The first part is the song that I am sharing with you now and the second part is my version of a "music video" for the composition, which I will be sharing next week.  The purpose of Encounters is to share our creative voices and our stories and so I have included my story behind Fairies Dance below.  I hope you enjoy Part 1 of this Encounter and stay tuned next week for Part 2!  Enjoy! (P.S. If you would like to skip the intro, the official Encounter begins at 04:13)

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Music sustains me.  

It breathes out notes that give intention to words and meaning to emotions.  It transcends but it also connects.  Music has always been a form of magic for me and composing, it is a treasured gift.  I get excited to explore each time I sit at the piano, navigating the melodies and rhythms in the hopes of finding that exact tune that resonates with how I feel.   Fairies Dance came out of a place that was inspired by the romance of classic literature.  It was inspired by a story and was my attempt to capture the bittersweet relationship between love and the passage of time.  It's a composition that reminds me of trains and journeys therefore, I thought it would be a fitting composition to share as we begin our new journey this year on Encounters.

Welcome back to Encounters - Season 2!

Welcome back, Encounters community!  To kick off Season 2 of Encounters,  I thought I would share with you the inspiration for this project to help set the stage for the next chapter of our Encounters story.  Stay tuned to Encounters this season  as we have a great line-up of beautifully inspiring and deliciously unique 9 to 5'er artists including fearless ballerinas, an engineer/cake designer/entrepreneur, and a flight attendant whose passion for song and music is shared with all the exotic places that she visits.  I am also excited to share a few creative creations of my own that have been inspired by the amazing people and places I have Encountered this past year.

And now, without further ado, I present our first Encounter of the season.  Enjoy!

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Demi Encounter #2: Mia's Song

For this week's Encounter, I would like to share with you an original piano composition that I wrote 8 years ago entitled Mia's Song.  

If you like reading, I encourage you to check out the next chapter of my Encounters story below, but if not, I hope you enjoy this week's musical Encounter! :) 

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Where the story begins...

I grew up in a family of mostly engineers and am an engineer by training. 

I have the highest respect for engineering because I believe it is crucial to the preservation and advancement of society and yet, I think it is often overlooked and undervalued as a profession.

Despite my appreciation for engineering, I would be lying if I didn’t say that as a child, being a movie star appealed a lot more to me than being an engineer.  As a movie star, you have glitz and glamour while as an engineer, all the 18- year-old-freshman-engineering-student me could envision was a future of spreadsheets and beige khakis.

My appeal to become an actress did extend beyond the veneer of Hollywood.  My mother is an artist and my father publishes poetry in his free time therefore art has been a pillar in our family.  I have always been drawn to the performing arts because they give me a sense of exhilaration like nothing else I know.  In general, the magic of art, in whatever form it exists, has captivated me since I was young.  

It amazes me how art is born within the walls of an individual’s mind and yet it somehow is able to extend and transcend beyond all boundaries to touch the souls and imaginations of the masses, making them feel and inspiring them.  This ability to connect with humanity and impact it in a meaningful and beautiful way is what always drew me to the arts and what continuously tugged on my heart strings as I proceeded steadily down the road to become an Engineer.

The academic path for me to become an Engineer was paved by my older sister and there wasn’t much questioning of it because of rationale and money.  You attend a specialized science high school in order to get into a good engineering university because an engineering profession offers security and stability.  You trade in the exciting but expensive “college experience” advertised in pamphlets of colleges far away from your parents to attend a university in your parents’ backyard because tuition is free so college loans are a foreign concept.

It may seem at first that I reluctantly became an engineer and that my heart wasn't in it.  To be honest, there were times during my challenging chemical engineering undergraduate experience, that I wondered that myself.  Was I doing the engineering only because I was too scared to take on the unpredictable and challenging life of a professional artist?  (The term starving artist usually came to mind).  However, after 2 engineering degrees and a few years of work experience under my belt, I have come to realize that I ultimately made the decision to become an engineer, not out of robotic obligation to my parents’ desire for my security but instead, out of the obligation I feel I have to society.  The world desperately needs engineers and scientists therefore I strongly believe that if you have the capabilities to become one, it is one of the best ways to give back to society.

Fortunately, I have found a career in engineering that truly excites me.  From my job, I have come to realize that engineering is not so different from the arts that I love.  Despite what I used to think, engineering is not technically dry and stuffy.  There is a humanity to its purpose and a drama to its accomplishments.

Nonetheless, stoichiometry doesn’t quite soothe the soul like music or dance.  There has always been a part of me that needs to create and perform.  In my early 20s, I decided to stop telling myself that my identity was limited to one mold – that of the Engineer - and instead allowed myself to explore my identity in the arts.

With this decision to break my mold, the biggest question for me was how I could allow the dichotomy of the Artist and Engineer to harmoniously co-exist.

At first, I thought I had to choose so that is why after engineering graduate school, I decided to pursue acting full time.  I took classes, got headshots, took part in student films, and was in an off-Broadway play.  It was a fun experience and it exposed me to both the good and bad of being a working actor.  Although I loved the acting world and the Encounters that I had in it, I did not feel like all of who I was fit into that mold.  I missed the engineering world where I got to be the serious and nerdy problem solver so I returned to engineering and found my calling in the field of garbage (literally).

Although returning to engineering closed the curtain on the performer side of me for the past 2 years, I knew in the back of my mind that I would extend a hand to the performer once again, the only question was: How? 

Demi Encounter #1: The Prelude

Last February, I sat down at my piano and wrote a song. At the time, this song was meant only for me. Its sole purpose was to help me heal and overcome. Ironically, though, from this personal endeavor sprang an idea for a project that, I hope, will embrace and celebrate the Encounters that we have with the characters that exist beyond the walls of our personal lives.

My song is entitled Waiting and being that it feels like I have been waiting forever to launch this project, I think it is a fitting title for the first Encounter that I will share.  If you like reading, I invite you to read the narrative that follows, but if not, I hope you enjoy our first official Encounter!  Hopefully this will be the start of many more to come from myself and all of you! :)  

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Have you ever felt like you’ve been forced into a mold where not all of you fits? 

Regardless of whether you are a proud self-proclaimed outsider or someone who doesn’t like to go against the grain, I wonder to what extent we all become compartmentalized by Society; being bounded and defined primarily by our occupation, education, ethnicity, and appearance. 

In our day to day, we are often referred to by our job: we are the engineer, the teacher, the nurse, the construction worker, the actress, and in the eyes of Society, it seems that defines 90% of what we know about you and who we think you are.

This concept of Society’s mold never sat well with me and for the longest time I struggled with the decision of which mold I would choose to fall into and which character in Society I would choose to play: The Artist or The Engineer?

When I was 18 and starting down my path to a professional career, this question stared me down like a forked road – the arts and engineering were opposing directions and I could only choose one.  Little did I know at the time that my future Encounters with the different characters of life would reveal that this was never actually a choice to be made, that the dichotomy that exists within all of us can harmoniously co-exist as long as we are willing to redefine the mold that confines who we really are.

And so with this prelude, I now set the stage for Encounters.