A Day Longer Than Its Hours

 

I have doodled*, I have SHADOWSed,** I have sung.***  I have hurtled.†  I am tired.  I tried to ring a few handbells with Pooka but the brain said ARE YOU TRYING TO DESTROY WHAT LITTLE OF ME IS LEFT?  GO LIE ON THE SOFA OR SOMETHING.  So hellhounds and I lay on the sofa.††

            Isn't it bedtime yet?  Maybe I'll go sleep in the bath††† till it's time to go to bed. 

* * *

* I made an alarming discovery this morning, as I was swearing at the latest FRELLING INSANE FRELLING REQUEST for a doodle^.  I know I keep telling you I enjoy doodling, and I do, and some of the insane ones are extra fun^^ after I stop swearing and settle down.  But I'm so conscious of still having 1,000,000,000,000 left to do IN SPITE OF THE FACT that you can hardly get into my office at the moment for the pile of stuff Fiona has to haul away on Friday, that the number of those remaining tends to be the main thought in my mind as I pick up my doodling pen.  But the alarming discovery is:  I am going to miss them when I finish the last one.  All very well that there's nothing stopping me from doodling for my own amusement . . . but there hasn't been anything stopping me for the last twenty years either, except not doing it.  Maybe I'll learn to think up captions and call them cartoons.  Maybe we can have caption contests.  And Blogmom has found a gizmo to create an order-a-doodle box for the blog, in case anyone is sorry they missed the sale/auction, or has thought of something particularly fiendish for their second cousin's brother-in-law's birthday next year.  But when she gave me this gratifying news she added, in her best headmistress voice, that she wasn't going to put it up till I was done with current orders, and I laughed a lot and said that that was fine, I'd have a nervous breakdown if she put it up any sooner. 

^ Maybe I'll have a whack at Gotterdammerung after all 

^^ I bet Gotterdammerung would be a blast 

**  b_twin_1 wrote:

Another day passes as a seventeen-year-old named Maggie.

mmmmm spoilers  

It gets worse.  And she has a border-collie-cross dog.    

. . . Mongo was totally thrilled by all the people (in Mongo's opinion we didn't entertain nearly enough) and since these were nearly all friends of his too no one said anything about getting long black and white hairs on their good clothes.  But after I stopped the third person giving him a piece of cake—sugar is so not a good idea with a dog that's mental to begin with—I hooked my hand through his collar and dragged him out.  He was all stiff-legged and resisting on the way to the kitchen door but as soon as I got him over the sill into the back yard he collapsed and turned into a sad hairy forlorn dog-blob.  I looked at him and laughed. . . .   He raised his head and thumped his tail hopefully. 

*** I got out the Christmas carol book(s) today.  Peter thinks I should learn In the Bleak Midwinter.  It's not totally unknown to me—and I'm a pushover for Holst—but it's not big in the bits of America I have sung carols in so I have to keep an eye on the music.  This perhaps in contradiction to part of the little chat Nadia and I had yesterday about concentrating more on fewer pieces.  Ahem.  Everyone gets to sing Christmas carols.  They don't count.  And . . . as I said to Nadia, I don't actually know how to concentrate more on a piece.  Once I get to the 'can more or less hit the right notes in the right order in the (relatively) right rhythm' place I am rapidly at a loss.  We will work on this, said Nadia.  Meanwhile I can just about sing all of Cold Haily Windy Night without getting tangled up in my own feet/voice and falling over.  This finding your own way through a folk song template is a bit of a freller.  But I suppose it might count as useful practise toward being able to Make Your Own Decisions about fancy art songs and sh . . . I mean, pieces your teacher suggests to you?

            Also, on the subject of confidence:  email from a music teacher friend today who says flatly that she's never had an adult student who didn't have confidence problems to a greater or lesser degree.  Trawling through my memory—which is, of course, mostly full of incidents in which I screwed up—I seem to remember that Oisin has said the same thing.  Still makes me wonder how we all got this way. 

blondviolinist

The only student I ever wanted to smack was a high school student who hadn't practiced for weeks, so I read her the riot act. (I read a pretty decent riot act, if I do say so myself.) 

Oooh!  Details! 

She looked at me and said "Why do you care? I'm paying you." 

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

She's lucky she got out of that lesson alive. 

I WANT THE END OF THIS STORY.  Like, how alive did she get out of that lesson?  Was she missing any limbs?  And did you fire her?

(I informed her in no uncertain terms that if it was money I wanted, I'd go work as a checker in the grocery store.) 

Sigh.  Yes.  In a good year I probably earn commensurate with the customer service drone in the booth playing Montezuma on her iPhone, but I still have grocery checker years.  New laptop^ or the kid gets another semester at college?  What a good thing I didn't manage to have kids.  

Horsehair Braider

These are, I guess, the same people who come up to a professional writer at a party and say with a smirk, Oh yes, I've always wanted to write a novel, I just don't have time. Urge. To. Kill.

::Bangs head on wall::  So like, what the FREAK is stopping you?! 

Erm.  The strong suspicion that I would not do my best work from a jail cell?

I hate that. I absolutely hate that. I used to show at this one really relatively prestigious show, and people would tell me, "We've got horsehair – we can do that." So finally at the next show, I sold little packets of horsehair, and people would ask me why, and I told them it was so they could braid their own horsehair. So I sold a bunch. THE NEXT YEAR, everyone came back to my booth and said, "This is really hard!!" and I said, "No s**t, Sherlock" and made a lot of sales. 

Yes.  There's also that slight brain disconnect about being able to do something at all, being able to do something well, and, even if you are capable of doing something well, how much time it may take to produce it to that level.  Most people probably can produce a book-shaped object, with 100,000 words arranged in groups loosely recognisable as sentences, but it's not what most of us would call a novel, and most people probably can braid horsehair into a fuzzy ring they could fit over a hand to hang round a wrist, but it would not be a thing of beauty.^^  And beyond that, even if you're good at it—novel writing, horsehair braiding, music teaching—you're still doing it for love, because you sure aren't doing it for the money.^^^  Most of the time this is okay—the idea of working this hard on a job I didn't love doesn't bear thinking about—but those moments when morons are getting in your face, it can be less great. 

^ Which may arrive tomorrow.  And not a moment too soon, because my email HAS GONE HORRIBLY WRONG.  Even if I don't take possession of a new laptop tomorrow, I'm going to have to have some archangel input. 

^^ I am one of those with experience of braiding horsehair that is still attached to the horse and . . . I never came close to rating in one of those 'best turn out' classes. 

^^^ There are good writers who make shedloads of money . . . but not very many.  

† Darkness has managed to hurt his back again—that is, Chaos has managed to hurt Darkness' back by body-slamming him when they were going 90 mph across a large field two days ago.  Frelling frelling frelling frelling.  DOGS.  WHOSE IDEA WAS DOGS.  So I am also tired because at the moment I am lifting Darkness in and out of the car.^ 

^ I only carried him upstairs once.  Fortunately he seems to have decided this is not worth it. 

††  Funny thing:  Darkness managed to jump on the sofa without any particular difficulty.^ 

^ Okay, the sofa is a lot lower.  

††† It's also WINTER out there.  The best time for scalding hot baths.