On Belated Updates and Weirdness

Every blog or journal or story I write has a common problem: I stop writing them. Life happens. In fact, it happens so much and so fast that I can't deal with everything all at once. Writing is one of the first activities that suffers.

Life has happened a lot lately. Work-related stress has spilled everywhere. I am grateful to have a job, but it is not an easy living. Some evenings I feel a little like Westley in The Princess Bride when he's strapped, writhing, into The Machine and the Six-Fingered Man tells him, "I've just sucked one year of your life away."

It's a weird year for me. A momentous year, to be sure, but the weirdness has skyrocketed in equal measure to the gravitas.

Friday evening at work I broke into hysterical tears. It was just that kind of day. My boss valiantly tried to cheer me up, but I couldn't stop crying until I drove 40 minutes home and Hillary cooed and put Victor / Victoria in the DVD player. It's impossible to cry in the presence of Julie Andrews.

Then yesterday morning I was splayed on an exam table for five hours as a technician electrified my hair follicles. An acoustic cover of Bittersweet Symphony played over the PA when the doctor came to anesthetize me. I disintegrated into a stammering blushing mess.

In the afternoon I watched NASCAR for 20 minutes as I waited to use the women's room in New Hope. After the first 10 minutes I noticed the men's room was vacant. I spent the next 9 minutes wondering if I should use it, or if that would cause the weirdness to compound upon itself over and over until New Hope suddenly became a weirdness black hole. In the last minute, I wondered if that had already happened. After all, New Hope is already a strange and fabulous place.

In the evening I left a meeting before I wanted because Hillary was undead-tired. She needed a real bed and not a car seat. So I took one for the team, grumbled a little about it, apologized for grumbling, and that was that.

Today I sang Happy Birthday to a dear friend and left shortly thereafter to see my voice teacher. We had a great lesson and made significant progress. She was wonderful, generous with her time, and didn't bat an eye when I explained weekly visits were beyond my budget so could we do bi or triweekly?

Tonight I sit before a glowing square, typing a sketchy blog post when I should be writing homework or printing Cole Porter or Hoagy Carmichael or Noel Coward or Scott Joplin sheet music because that is my music of obsession for the moment and I wish to learn it. Again.

You see, I played the piano a lot as a child and greatly annoyed everyone with rhythmically incorrect versions of The Entertainer and The Maple Leaf Rag and Fur Elise and other fabulous music which I hated then but love now. And now all I can do with the piano is plink and plonk and hammer out triads like there's no tomorrow and play the occasional descending chord progressions I stole from Bach.

Alas I must away to bed. Tomorrow I will put my Target gift cards to good use and feed one of the following obsessions: Gene Kelly, Julie Andrews, Alfred Hitchcock, or Bob Fosse.

For good measure: