It's Only A Paper Rose

(Gotta say, on the balance of evidence I kinda prefer Aerosmith's version.)

Ups:

My reading was a smashing success, or at least, that's how it felt. We had a good crowd—it appeared to be roughly 1/3 open-mic readers, 1/3 salon regulars, and 1/3 friends of mine (some from Tumblr, some from meatspace). I was honestly humbled by how many people showed up; I'm not sure if it was the novelty of having a fandom writer featured, or the fact that everyone was super into hearing something smutty that night, or my promotional efforts, or just good luck. (Probably some combination of the above.) Regardless, somebody commented later that it was the most people we've had yet at one of the virtual salons (I think we hit 25 participants at one point?), so that's encouraging.

One of the difficulties of doing a Zoom-based reading is the relative inability to get audience feedback in real-time—even if you have your work on a separate device so you can leave the Zoom window open, your eyes are focused on the page, and everyone's muted/in tiny video-chat format anyway so you can't easily read changes in body language. However, when I finished, I came back to a surprisingly lively chatlog—a couple of my Tumblr friends had shown up and been the absolute best hype-men in the comments, even getting some of the salon regulars to participate. (I was somewhat darkly amused to see that, at one point, the conversation had devolved into a not-quite-argument over whether each character was a top or a bottom, respectively. I've seen these arguments turn into outright fandom wars and cause major schisms, but apparently it's less of a fandom thing and more of a human thing? I dunno, I seem to have unchecked the "a character's preferred sex position is clearly an immutable aspect of their personality rather than a function of personal preference and context" box during my Human installation. Luckily the conversation moved on.) One of my meatspace friends who showed up told me later she'd been watching the video feeds and the scene clearly landed; perhaps most encouragingly, the host texted me afterwards (and reiterated in front of our writing group the next day) "You should know you're writing at a professional level, and if you file the serial numbers off there's a good chance you could sell this." Which...I sorta suspected as much, at least in the better sequences, but given my spotty history with longer projects I think I'm best keeping the pressure low until I've at least figured out whether I can actually finish it. Still, it was a lovely vote of confidence.

Condo board stuff is ongoing. I did get a contractor out here whose back-of-the-envelope calculations for the masonry work were significantly lower than the first contractor's. (The scope of work was also smaller, but he considered it sufficient to stop the leaking; his opinion was that the rest of the work the first guy recommended was a good idea, but not urgent.) I liked him a lot, he clearly knew his stuff and was happy to explain his reasoning; I never thought I'd meet someone who got that excited about different styles of brickwork, but I do love people who're passionate about their work. Additionally, it was his opinion that the issue wasn't a leak per se, but bricks absorbing moisture that was causing the water intrusion; that fits with what Aaron (the unit owner) told me about it only being a problem during major/extended rainstorms, and lowers the likelihood of significant damage by a lot. So all of that was a big relief. He's promised to have his formal estimate to me by today, so fingers crossed he comes through and it's in line with his initial assessment. Sunday we have a meeting to discuss all of this and figure out the path forward.

Through a piece of good luck (and a lot of wrangling), I also have managed to achieve one of my low-key goals for the building, and have obtained and set up an extremely high-quality elliptical in the workout room. KC had sent me the Craigslist post (a unit that went for $3K new, selling for $400), I had emailed the board offering to pay for half of it (since I was the one who wanted it) as well as take care of the truck rental and hauling; after some back and forth about insurance and cleaning and maintenance questions, and some low-key grumbling on our treasurer's part, I got everything sorted, got a truck rented, and got out to Northbrook. I was half-convinced it was too good to be true, but nope, the seller was a 70-year-old dude whose wife had purchased it a few years before she died, and he and his son were trying to clear out the garage. Moving it was no joke—the specs say it weighs about 250 pounds, and rarely have I been so grateful for my stocky-but-solid-muscle husband or all the Sculpt classes I've been doing. (It was worth it all just to see the look on the seller's face when we hoisted it up into the bed of the truck with relative ease.) I now have an impressive bruise on one thigh where I rested my end of it at one point during moving, but I also now have a high-quality cardio machine that I suspect will be invaluable during the upcoming (and frankly rather bleak-looking) winter months.

In other positive news, Dexter is hanging in there, far better than I'd expected. When I wrote about him a couple of weeks ago, I'd really thought it was time to call the vet. But it turns out the continence issues were more related to the litterboxes all being downstairs; I set one up in the second bedroom (easy enough to do, since I'm not hosting clients right now) and he hasn't had any difficulty using it. He still has active days and less-active days, but he doesn't appear to be in distress, and he still comes and snuggles on the regular. So we're not quite to the end yet.

Downs:

Well, I mean, there's the obvious.

My personal reaction to the news has been weird. Like, when Brian told me, it was a blow, but in the way that the eighteenth blow in a fistfight is—there's no shock or horror left, just a certain numbness and the grim reality of "well, gotta deal with this too." Which isn't to say I didn't react—I spent much of the evening in a low-key dissociative state, which is unusual (and disconcerting) for me. I've since been experiencing moments of profound grief, for the death of our country's self-image and democratic norms as much as for the woman herself, but in between I'm just...carrying on living. Because really, what else is there to do?

I spent the whole weekend in the Zoom version of a massage seminar I signed up for back in January. And while I learned some potentially useful techniques, it was hard not to feel like the time was pretty well wasted. I'm not going to be practicing probably for another six months to a year at least, and by then the knowledge will be more or less gone. To be honest, I'm not even certain I'm going back to massage as a primary career; right now my primary energy sink is writing, and if I can keep up this kind of consistent productivity even after quarantine is over I may well make this my primary focus and just keep massage as a sideline. I enjoy it, and I genuinely miss that feeling of making people feel better, but I don't miss the constant hustle for clients or the uncertainty of the income or the "???" of a future career path. (I realize, with some irony, that writing as a career is even worse on all three metrics, but it feels like there's so little expectation that you'll ever be able to make a livable income that there's less pressure? Psychology is weird, man.)

So, yeah. Lots of change happening. Some good, some bad, some just...different. I'm trying to stay focused on the things I can do, and not worry about the stuff I can't. It's tough. I'm not always in a great place. But life is movement, and so...onward.

Now that I'm working for pay again, my tax situation has gotten a little more complicated. After Brian's income our marginal tax rate is XX%, but frustratingly, there's no option on the W-4 for "just withhold XX% of my income, please". (There's the "withhold this additional amount from each paycheck" option, but since my paychecks vary wildly from month to month and job to job, that's not terribly accurate.) Since each job calculates my taxes from 0 rather than from my husband's salary, they never withhold anywhere near enough; consequently we've had pretty good-sized tax bills the past couple of years.

This year, I actually worked out the percentage and did my own withholding; I started a separate savings account, calculated the XX% figure out of each paycheck, subtracted whatever was already withheld, and tossed it in there. I'm ridiculously pleased that I came out almost exactly right - I get to give myself a $100 refund. Not bad for a former liberal arts major! Of course, this upcoming year everything's getting rejiggered I'm going to have to re-calculate everything...and if we buy a house, that'll make everything even more complex. I saw an ad for a local service that trains volunteers in tax prep so you can help low-income and ESL folks do their taxes; I don't have anywhere near the time this year, but I might look into that for next year. It seems like it'd be a good body of knowledge to have.

Ironically enough, even though I'm all set to file through Turbotax, the IRS isn't ready for me yet - they aren't yet accepting my state returns. It's kind of weird to realize you're more on top of things than the IRS...but in fairness, my tax situation is somewhat less complicated, heh.

I've been debating whether to write anything about this here, both because it's intensely personal and because I feel like I've mostly processed it at this point. But I'd like to have it down in something resembling a narrative; I'm slowly accepting that musicianhood is a fundamental chunk of my identity. (Which is something that anyone who's known me a while - especially while I'm in the throes of learning a new instrument - could have told me, but that I'm only really processing in chunks. Ah, self-discovery.) It feels like the real question, though, is where to start. As with most thorny questions of identity, past and present are all knotted together, and untangling them is difficult.

I think I'll start with a bit of common narrative advice, and begin as close to the end as possible.

So, last week I bought an electric piano. Nothing fancy, just a Casio Privia, a line known for being a solid choice for beginners. (The other strong contender was a Yamaha - it had a slightly warmer and fuller sound - but the Privia line has scaled weighted hammers attached to the keys to make it feel far more like an acoustic piano; the mechanical resistance on the Yamaha just felt mushy by comparison. Plus the Yamaha was finished in a high-gloss coat that attracted fingerprints and dust like whoa.) Slight brag: I was originally going to buy the entry-level keyboard for $500, but Guitar Center had the electric piano version (same footprint as the keyboard, but with a built-in stand with pedals and a fancy cover to slide down over the keys) for $600 because the new model had just come out. I inquired about it, and the only one they had left was the floor model...so they gave it to me for $560. Sold!

I got it home and set it up in the spare bedroom, and made arrangements with my pianist friend for lessons. I even did a little refreshing on the basics via YouTube, no problem. And then I went to write about it here in my blog, and all my paralyzing ambivalence about music began to kick in - to use the metaphor from Come As You Are, I could feel my flock of birds start to wheel about in different directions. Rather than try to push through or ignore the feeling like I usually do, I took the book's advice and began listening to each bird (i.e. my assumptions and experiences and values) and writing out what it had to say. Some particularly relevant ones:

--I love music. I love making music. I love learning music. It's right up there with bodywork and storytelling as things I'd say are fundamental to my identity. "Musician" is one of the few role descriptors that's felt right to me for my entire life.

--To become a real musician, I have to go through years of rigorous training, with teachers who berate and humiliate me until everything I play/sing is perfect.

--Becoming a real musician requires hours of disciplined practice every single day. Scales, drills, repetitions. Each new song needs to be completely perfect before it's ever performed.

--Performing in front of a live audience is one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences in my life.

--Real musicians are always hustling. Gigs are few, good-paying gigs even fewer. The only way to make a living at music is to be poor and constantly working, traveling to work, or practicing.

--Following from the above assumptions, being a real musician is both amazing and absolutely miserable.

--The only worthwhile way to be a musician is to be a "real" musician; otherwise you're just a hobbyist and a dabbler and you'll never actually be any good.

--Fun is completely incidental to music. If you're having a good time jamming with friends or trading techniques, this is nice but not real musicianship.

Yeah, can any of you tell that my mother was classically trained? :P

As with most such sets of assumptions, these are of course ridiculous and contradictory when written out. But I'm not sure I can convey exactly how much emotion I had invested in them. To borrow another metaphor from Come As You Are (for a book about sexuality I'm seeing an awful lot of personal value from the non-sexy bits), these plants were pretty deeply rooted in my mental garden - some from my own experiences, a lot from the messages I got growing up with my mother and her own ambivalence towards musicianship. Pulling them up was fraught, to say the least; I spent about twenty minutes simultaneously crying and laughing with fear and rage and relief and anger and amusement at the sheer ridiculousness of all of it. It was more than a little terrifying - at one point I wanted to put my fist through the wall. I never get that angry!

I think, on some level, part of the fear was/is that pulling up those plants (i.e. facing these assumptions and letting myself feel the associated emotions) would mean that I'd no longer have any desire to pursue music - without that internal pushback, would I still have any kind of passion for it? It's a little early to tell, but I don't think that's the case; I'm still practicing, albeit at my basic fifteen-minutes-a-day level. (It's not hours of discipline, but I've seen real results with it. I got to be quite a competent guitarist by setting a rule that I had to play fifteen minutes each day, and if I felt like doing more, great.) I'm hoping that, now that I've pulled up this particularly stubborn patch, I'll have an opportunity to replace it with positive assumptions and experiences. (There's no reason someone who plays as a hobby isn't a 'real' musician! Jamming with friends is 'real' music! Even if I never perform professionally and just play for friends, that's still a worthwhile endeavour!) But at the very least, I don't feel that paralyzing sense of self-hatred and fear anymore when I think about how much I still have to learn, or how I might go about pursuing music in the future. And that feels like a big step in the right direction.

On a related note (haha), I'm thinking about getting some kind of music-themed tattoo - sort of a promise to myself that I'm a 'real' musician, even without classical training or a performing career. Have you seen any particularly interesting designs? Tell me about them!

I was working during the eclipse yesterday and it was pretty cloudy here in Chicago, so I didn't do much of anything special. I did leave for work early, expecting the traffic to be nutty - you can bet I had all my brightly colored reflective gear plus blinky lights on my bike. But if anything, it was the opposite; the on-road portions of my commute were calm, and the parks nearly deserted. I did pass a few people in various neighborhoods standing outside looking up with their eclipse glasses; combined with the quieter-than-average streets, it felt more than a bit like I'd stumbled into a sci-fi movie about a culture that takes in its energy from the noonday sun.

I was a little surprised to have three students (a not-unusual number for a daytime beginner class); I'd half-expected everyone to be busy eclipse-watching. I'd built a vaguely eclipse-themed playlist, too, but Apple Music was giving me trouble, so I wasn't able to use it. Luckily nobody there had been to my C1 class before, so I was able to reuse a previous playlist and not feel like I was slacking, heh.

I've been in a somewhat subdued place, this week. I've been ruminating on loss, and how it affects us; even something like a job or a relationship (or the hope of a relationship) ending, where there's no physical change, still causes a sense of bereavement. It occurs to me that I am experiencing a loss of sorts; even though I didn't have a lot of plans per se (it's hard to when the other party leads solely by implication), I had a lot of hopes, and ideas for the future. It's tough to realize that those are gone permanently, at least in that form. Something I'd worked carefully toward for so long has just...evanesced, and I feel a little adrift.

Relatedly, I finally finished Come As You Are, and the last section is all about emotional meta-analysis - or how you feel about your feelings. One of the things Nagoski points out that I particularly love is that emotional reactions (contrary to the claims of numerous inspirational quotes) are not something you can choose or control; what you can control is your reaction to those emotions, by either refusing to feel them - staying in the tunnel - or allowing yourself space to feel them, knowing that while they may not feel good in the moment, they will pass; eventually you'll make it through the darkness and out into the light. It's proven to be a good yoga-class theme for the week of an eclipse, as well as for my life right now.

Also, a yoga-teacher milestone reached: yesterday one of my students told me how she'd come into my CoreRestore class on Sunday night extremely nervous about an important job interview on Monday, so my theme about choosing to feel your feelings and let them go really spoke to her. Apparently she slept great on Sunday night, aced the interview, got the job, and came into my C1 class Monday afternoon to celebrate. I was so happy for her. <3

Happy Day After Loud Patriotic Noises day! On Monday I taught two classes at Sauganash, my usual 1:30 and the 6:15. What with the long holiday weekend, I had a huge crowd for the 1:30 class - 20 people (my usual count is between two and five) crammed into a relatively small studio. It turned out to be an awesome class, though; despite the fact that there was a whole range of skill levels, everyone meshed well and flowed together, and I felt like I had a good rapport with people. I got lots of positive feedback from folks afterward, too, which is always gratifying, and a teacher who took my class gave me a good tip on dealing with crowds. I was curious if the evening class was going to be similarly crowded, or if everyone was going to be drinking by then...as it happened, it was closer to the latter, with all of four people, one of them Breanne (the studio manager), taking my class so she could give me my internship evaluation. (As hinted at in the headline, it was almost completely positive; she said I was clearly already an excellent instructor, and she couldn't wait to see what I started doing with the more advanced classes. She also particularly mentioned my music and gave me possibly the best compliment I've ever had - "The choice of songs at the beginning and the way they fit with the timing made me feel like I was in a musical!" So many warm fuzzies.)

It's been a busy week, but luckily I managed to get some reading done, albeit mostly yesterday at the park. So on to the meme:


What I've just finished reading:

The Kissing Booth Girl and Other Stories, by A.C. Wise. A collection of short stories, many of them with some kind of queer romance theme. A lot of them feel like they could have been fleshed out a little more; the title story especially seemed incomplete, like it was really a novella rather than a short story. Still, there's a distinct sense of atmosphere throughout most of the stories; I found "The Final Girl Theory", about an archetypal 70s-esque slasher/mondo/gore horror film and the cult following that had sprung up around it, particularly chilling.

The Wicked + The Divine vol. 5: Imperial Phase pt. 1, by Kieron Gillen. The gods are in the second year of their supposed two-year lifespan. And, as an academic dryly notes in this volume, "There are very few stories of gods bathing in blood in the first year of their return." There's a lot to unpack here, about the effects of power on ungrounded human minds, about the ways in which various personalities deal with the stress caused by a sense of disempowerment, and about exactly how dangerous a powerful person who feels disempowered and victimized can be. (That last feels especially cogent for our times, on an individual and a group level.) Given all of that, the subplot about The Darkness - an as-yet-unexplained threat that the gods are so far the only ones equipped to deal with - feels almost like a red herring; far more interesting has been seeing how the embattled deities try to aggregate their own fecal matter, or (in the case of Sakhmet) don't even try.


What I'm currently reading:

The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue, by Mackenzi Lee. A complete impulse buy, and I'm all of one chapter in (in truth, I burned through the last of The Kissing Booth Girl almost solely so I could get to this one - I was that charmed by the description), but this is shaping up to be a new favorite. Henry Montague, a brash and self-centered young 18th-century British lord, is off on a Grand Tour of Europe with his (sigh) younger sister and his best friend/confidante/longtime secret crush. Swashbuckling action, perhaps-requited pining, and encounters with historical figures have all been promised, and given the strength of the main character's voice in the first chapter, I'm already sold. I fully intend to savor every chapter.

Future Sex, by Emily Witt. Despite being almost three-quarters done (and not a long book), this one's feeling more and more like a slog. I've been reading the chapter on polyamory, which I have something of a personal stake in, and find so many problematic aspects with her analysis, stemming in large part from the fact that her case studies come almost entirely from a single demographic (rich white Silicon Valley workers in San Francisco). While I realize most practitioners of poly come from a background with a certain level of privilege (it's hard to juggle multiple relationships when you're working three jobs just to survive), there's all sorts of unexamined assumptions here, especially in the couple privilege and unicorn-hunting fields. The entire tone is faux-supportive-while-actually-being-condescending - "Look at these adorably earnest young people and how dedicated they are to their alternate lifestyle that their parents already tried and failed at in the 70s! But they really think they can make it work!" It reminds me a lot of the New York Times article on polyamory that generated a lot of justifiable resentment from the community - it's at least a more nuanced perspective than the usual "blog post illustrated by stock photo of three pairs of feet sticking out from under the covers", but nonetheless feels written to reinforce the couple-centric monogamous norm rather than challenge it.

Now that I think about it, that's probably my biggest issue with the entire book; supposedly the author's writing about possible roadmaps to future ways humans might engage with each other sexually, thanks to technology and changing social mores, and yet the whole book is written with a sense of exoticism - "Look at this! Isn't it strange/disgusting/fascinating/novel?" - that's very much at odds with its purported mission, and only serves to reinforce the "othering" of those particular lifestyle choices. Bleh.
I'll probably finish it, if only because I'm pretty close to the end already, but for a book I had such high hopes for initially, it's been awfully disappointing.


What I plan to read next

I'm beginning to feel like my reading style is downright Heisenbergian, or perhaps Schrödingeresque - there are possibilities, and maybe even probabilities, but the fact is I just can't know until I'm there. So as usual...stay tuned!

I have an ongoing dialogue of sorts with a Facebook acquaintance about compassion, and the need to exercise it while - incongruously, it seems - maintaining strong boundaries to protect yourself. And in a recent iteration of this conversation, it occurred to me that this sort of paradox was far from unique:


What really struck me, when I was writing this out, was that I had started out phrasing it as precisely the sort of either/or setup that I later disclaimed. "We need to be compassionate, BUT we need to have strong boundaries." "We need to be open to new ideas, BUT we need to be skeptical." It was such an engrained habit of thinking that it wasn't until I reached the final sentence that I realized that I was presenting these options as choices, and thus reinforcing precisely the sort of either/or framework I was decrying.

Having recognized that, still...it was surprisingly difficult, writing these seeming contradictions out not as quandaries, but as both/and directives. Even though there's plenty of research showing that people with the strongest boundaries are also the most compassionate. Even though just about any Internet comment thread will demonstrate the dangers of both over-openmindedness and over-skepticism. Even though my own life has borne out the value of the long road to a goal. Even knowing all of this, it was almost physically painful to stop thinking of them as choices, and start thinking of both as necessities.

Thinking about why, I was put strongly in mind of Q's final admonition to Picard in All Good Things...:


Paradoxes don't sit well with human nature.  We like things to fit neatly into boxes, to be all good or all bad.  It's genuinely difficult, almost painful, to hold two seemingly-contradictory ideas in our heads, even when we know they're not a contradiction, but two halves of a greater whole.  

But while I can't speak for anyone else's experience...when I manage to hold the paradox in my head?  It's exhilarating, even elevating.  Like I've grown larger, somehow.  Like someday I might be able to understand the entire universe.  

I'm curious, now - do any of you have experiences like this?  Are there paradoxes in your own lives that you struggle with?  Things you've learned that make you feel bigger?  Tell me!

Tonight Brian and I went to see Mythbusters Unleashed, which is staged (as Brian put it) rather like a science-themed traveling medicine show; for most of the segments, Adam and Jamie would take scientific principles that are relatively dry or abstract (force equalling mass times acceleration, for instance, or the power of friction) and find colorful ways to demonstrate it (having a large male volunteer try to hit a high-striker carnival bell with a gavel versus a fourth-grade girl with a sledgehammer, or hoisting Adam up nearly to the ceiling by two shuffle-paged telephone books). It was fun, in an Exploratorium Onstage kind of way.

One of the more thought-provoking moments, however, was when Adam was talking about his personal history, and how for so much of his life he had lots of different interests, but never had a focus. So he would spend some time learning a new skill or subject and get better-than-average at it, but would inevitably hit that wall where in order to have a hope of actually becoming good, he'd have to dedicate a serious chunk of his life to it. And he'd shy away, because that wasn't what he wanted, and would lament all the time he'd wasted learning that skill, when it was apparently his destiny to only ever get a step above mediocrity.

And then the day came when the studio called him and asked him if he would be interested in joining a show called Mythbusters, which turned into, well...Mythbusters. And even though they've just finished filming the final season, and for the first time in fourteen years he won't be spending huge amounts of time at it, he's discovered through the show that his calling is in science - specifically, the storytelling and communication and public outreach aspect of it. He might not have the specialized know-how to make cutting-edge discoveries or devote his life to research, but he has the intelligence and enthusiasm and charisma to explain and demonstrate basic principles and new discoveries to folks who otherwise might never even think about them; and all his many weird and varied skills help him to do that, as they give him a broad background of experiences from which to draw, which in turn helps him solve problems by thinking in new and different ways.

People who've followed my personal agonizing over my career might recognize this theme. I have so many weird and varied skills and pockets of knowledge, but for so many years, I had no real drive to develop any of them. So I'd write a bit here, and play the guitar there, and study psychological or sociological principles one day, and then read up on how they were used in marketing, and another day I'd be looking at the latest studies in neurochemistry, or learning about physiology so I could diagnose myself and avoid a doctor's bill, and now and then there'd be some yoga in there, and then a friend suggested I go to massage school.

And I suddenly felt like the savant in her element. Helping people feel better appealed to my humanistic bent; all the basic physiology/pathology I knew gave me a good foundation and kept the science courses from being overwhelming. The psychology and sociology and storytelling helped me understand how the profession is viewed and how to frame it most attractively to potential clients; the yoga (and associated knowledge of alignment/proprioception) helped with body mechanics. Even the employment-law and ethical stuff my mother used to lecture me on when I was a kid turned out to have relevance. For the first time, I had a focus, something I was enthusiastic about and not scared to devote a good chunk of my life to; and it intersected with almost everything I enjoy. (Still working on getting the music in there.)

I still worked hard in school, don't get me wrong; there's a reason I was barely available for those seven months. But having that foundation, that basic understanding of how these subjects worked and how they fit together, made all the difference; it's why I got one of the highest MBLEx scores on local record, and why I feel I really have the potential to be great in this field. In a way, I've been studying for it my whole life.

I don't know if bodywork is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life or not. But having had that experience, of finding that point of intersectionality between so many different interests and realizing that it's not necessarily a question of either/or, was a life-altering experience. I don't think I ever consciously articulated it before now, but for so much of my life I was afraid I was going to have to Pick One Thing and focus on it exclusively - that was the message I always got about acting, about writing, about any kind of career-level undertaking (at least if you wanted to excel at your career). Now I know that, even if I do decide to do something other than bodywork later on in life, I'll still have this knowledge (plus whatever else I've picked up in the interim); and chances are I'll find something else that has a high intersectionality with my interests. I'll just have to trust that my intuition will help me figure out what.

It cost me two and a half days of work on my NaNo novel, but the audition is done! Those of you who've known me a while will know what a big deal it is when I say: I genuinely did the best job I could. I didn't let myself procrastinate (much), didn't self-sabotage, and when it came down to it I let go and trusted myself and the moment. So, really, it went better than I had any right to hope for. I have no idea if my performance (and accompanying writing portfolio/questionnaire answers, which were a whole separate exercise in self-examination and honesty) will be what they're looking for, but even if I just get a form rejection I feel like it was a successful exercise in overcoming my fears.

I finally have an appointment to get my broken tooth pulled on Thursday. Good news: between the insurance covering more than I had guessed and deciding to do it awake (see: overcoming my fears), it's looking like it'll only cost us about half the out-of-pocket amount I was originally anticipating. Hopefully the recovery period will be relatively short. I just realized that audition callbacks are next weekend...if they want me to come in again, that could get interesting if I'm still loopy on Percocet. (Maybe that'd be an advantage?)

And now I really need to get back to writing. I'm...*peeks at NaNo website for the first time in days*...about 7000 words short. Grah.

*blinks*

*taps screen*

Huh, that's weird. The entry I posted yesterday, about our Internet being intermittent for the past two weeks, has disappeared from my LiveJournal. (It was never on Dreamwidth, since I posted it from the LJ app on my phone, but still). The link still exists on Twitter and Facebook, but directs to a missing page; if it weren't for the fact that I have several comment emails in my inbox I'd be tempted to think I was hallucinating.

How bizarre. I wonder if it'll come back.

Ah well. After a truly ridiculous amount of back-and-forth with RCN's customer support line, we finally got a supervisor tech to call us back, and supposedly they're coming out tomorrow morning to have a look. Which means getting up at 7 on a Sunday so we're not in our PJ's when they show up. The things we do for Interwebs.

(To answer the person who suggested that we build a WAN with a failsafe switch, thanks for the instructions! Brian does that sort of thing pretty regularly at his job, in fact. We're just extremely Not Interested in paying for two separate internet connections, especially at American prices.)

In other news, between the lack of Internet and my shiny new Kindle, I've been doing a lot of reading - especially some m/m romance that's been recommended to me. Given that they're all indie/small-press (and therefore much more likely to benefit from additional reviews), I've been writing short reviews for them on Goodreads/Amazon; maybe I'll do a big roundup of them here for those who're curious.

I've also written (and will shortly be revising) a short story with the intent of submitting it to Fireside, which I'm actually somewhat proud of - I wrote the whole thing in one morning, which required some will to overcome my usual habit of writing a bit of it, doing something else, and never going back to it. (Admittedly, the fact that the deadline for submissions is the 30th might have had something to do with that, but as they say, if it weren't for the last minute...) I was looking back over at the wasteland of half-finished projects that is my Google Drive and realizing precisely how unusual it is for me to finish anything, even a short story. So perhaps my completely unreasonable sense of pride isn't entirely unjustified. Even if it is coupled with the usual writerly sense of "oh god this is crap and horrible and no one will like it." Now if I can just figure out where to cut a fifth of it to get it within the submissions guidelines...

Big thanks to Tess and CJ for their beta-reading efforts. You guys are seriously inspiring and help me keep the not-good-enoughs at bay in a huge way.

It's been an...eventful week. Some frustrating things have happened, but some awesome things have too. I'll definitely take that over the "nothing but frustrations" kind of week, but it does mean I can't in good conscience write a ranty "why did this week happen to me" post. Which makes me a bit grouchy on its own. Grumble.

To begin at the beginning, last Saturday Brian and I were coming back from the Farmer's Market when our car went "bing" and gave us the engine-overheating warning. We popped the hood and discovered the coolant boiling over (even through the sealed cap); given the balance of evidence (it's an eight year old car with 109,000 miles on it) we figured the water pump had given up the ghost. Hardly unexpected, but it turned out to be particularly bad timing. Most weeks we could probably have gotten by with borrowing Brian's work truck (the grocery store is right by his work, and we could have begged rides from friends to/from our mechanic's in Sierra Vista), but this particular week he had a flight to Albuquerque to catch. So that added a couple hundred bucks' worth of rental car to the bill, on top of the towing to Sierra Vista and the pump itself and labor to put it in. Unsurprisingly, that ended up more or less emptying out our emergency fund.

On the other hand, I had a nothing-but-pleasant experience with the rental car company. There's a small Enterprise franchise just a block from my mechanic's; I'd never used them before, but have friends who have nothing but good things to say Enterprise. So I wandered down there and told them "I need to rent a car, probably for about a week?" They were very flexible, and while (unsurprisingly) their least-expensive cars were all rented out, they offered me a Prius for the midsize price (just under $200 a week with tax), which I was happy to accept. Even better, the employees were all competent and polite (surprising, for Sierra Vista) they didn't try to upsell me on insurance/a GPS/roadside assistance/the other eighty billion things Hertz and the others have all tried to push on me. Needless to say, I was pleased.

I also rather enjoyed driving the Prius around. It definitely didn't have the most hamsters on the road (accelerating up the hill from Old Bisbee onto Highway 90 was a bit of an adventure), but it got us all over southern Arizona with no problems. I've heard some people say the cockpit is too strange for them, but I found it to be quite intuitively designed, and really liked the heads-up display with info like the battery charge level and your per-trip mileage. Also, the sound system has improved immensely; I remember test-driving one back in 2007 or so and being rather miffed at the tinny sound quality. This one had a perfectly respectable stereo and a USB connection to my music player, to boot. (Yay for built-in touchscreen controls without having to futz with your phone! Yay also for charging and audio through a single cable!) And the entire week's driving, which included multiple trips to Sierra Vista and back, a trip to Tucson and back, and a not-insignificant amount of driving around Tucson, cost me all of $35 in gas. (By comparison, a similar amount of driving in our BMW, which gets excellent gas mileage for its age and class, would've cost nearly twice that.) It occurred to me that if I were doing the professional-musician thing (driving around a lot for gigs and lessons and such), it would be a strong contender for the perfect car - lots of room for gear, not too expensive, economical on gas. If only a professional musician's income weren't so frustratingly inconsistent from year to year, and even month to month.

Wednesday came around, and Brian and I got up at 4:00 AM to catch his 7:30 flight to Albuquerque. The story behind this is a little convoluted, but the short version is this: back in May, he had several phone interviews with a network information and security firm in Chicago. Obviously we were pretty excited about this, as we've both wanted to move to a proper metropolitan area for a while, and while Brian's current job with the County isn't awful, its opportunities for advancement were fairly limited (and he'd just been turned down for a pretty significant one). Unfortunately, after several phone interviews, the folks from this company disappeared for a month - and when they resurfaced, they had him talk to someone in Albuquerque about what sounded like a drastically different position. (And in the meantime, Brian had been offered a non-traditional advancement path with the County, doing much more of what he liked, with more money involved too.) The Chicago folks asked him to come to Albuquerque to meet them in person, though, and while he had a lot of reservations about them (as we've already done the "move across the country to a job with people who can't keep their shit together" thing once, and it was a near-disaster), he figured it couldn't hurt to meet with them and ask what was going on in person.

Apparently things went rather better than he expected; not enough to erase all his reservations, but enough that we're adopting a "wait and see" attitude, pending what they offer him. Obviously we're both a little torn about the idea. On the one hand, things are definitely looking up here; he's getting to do some awesome (and awesomely resume-building) stuff at his job, and I'm starting to make connections with folks in the music community here. But on the other, the fact remains that opportunities for both our careers are ultimately pretty limited in this area. Which doesn't mean that saving for a couple of years before moving wouldn't be a good plan, especially as we've just had to empty out our savings. But depending on whether he can negotiate a significant relocation bonus with them...and back and forth it goes. (And that's not even getting into the more emotional aspects of "I want to live in a city, goddammit" and "I never thought I'd say this, but I kinda miss snow and rain.")

Meanwhile, since he was leaving early and coming back at 11:30, I decided to book us a hotel room in Tucson for the night so he wouldn't be driving back after a nineteen-hour day. Thanks to it being summer in Tucson, I managed to nab us a room at the Wyndham Westward Look Resort for about $100 (including resort fee). Gorgeous place - quiet, beautiful xeriscaping, great pool area, super-friendly staff (I hardly felt snooted at once!), spacious room with a bathroom larger than some apartments I've seen. I doubt I'd stay there at the full rate, especially in the busy season, but in Brian's words, "I've stayed in way crappier places for a hundred bucks a night."

Conveniently, while I was killing time down on 4th Avenue, I also discovered that Sky Bar was having an open mic that night. (Convenient because they're right next to a late-night pizza joint Brian adores, and I'd promised to bring him some when I picked him up from the airport.) So I put on my awesome Nordstrom's maxi dress (awesome because it looks great, packs easy, and I got it for $3 thanks to various discounts) and a bit of makeup, grabbed Kalia, and showed up a couple of hours in...only to discover that most people call ahead before the night even starts and all the slots were full. However, the emcee (who went by the entertainingly Regency nomenclature DJ Odious) took pity on me when I told him it was my first open mic, and managed to slip me in for a couple of songs while a Mexican ska band set up behind me. (In contrast to his name, Sir Odious was a fantastic emcee - excellent at tech, good at putting the performers at their ease, and encouraging and helpful to newbies like me. Mass props.) I was fairly nervous, but I think I at least put in a respectable performance. At the very least, I had the undivided attention of a few folks up by the stage - and in a bar environment, "undivided attention" is about the best compliment you can ask for.

Picture, compliments of the aforementioned Sir Odious:



Incidentally, I'm glad he had me go before the Mexican ska band, because holy crap. They were amazing.

The night at the hotel/obligatory Costco trip/drive home were all pleasant if uneventful*. Friday I did my usual busking after yoga class; it turned out to be my best day so far financially, bringing in nearly double my prevous record (two $5 bills, woo! plus assorted singles), and some wonderfully heartfelt compliments. And later that afternoon Brian and I drove down to Sierra Vista, dropped off the rental car, walked to our mechanic's shop, and picked up the BMW.

At which point I apparently decided two weeks was far too long to go without a physical mishap, and tripped over a concrete parking bollard and fell, scraping up my shoulder and spraining three of the fingers on my left hand in the process.

My fretting hand.

In the words of Kvothe, possibly the literary patron saint of musicians (and craftspeople, and pickpockets) everywhere...Tehlu spare my hands.

The good news is nothing seems to be broken (I can move all my fingers and I don't have that bone-deep ache that signifies a fracture somewhere), so our financial situation isn't any more precarious. The bad news is, as I discovered when I sprained both my ankles a few years ago, soft-tissue injuries are tricky and hard to predict in terms of healing time. It might be a week, it might be three or four, depending on the severity of the sprains and how good I am at keeping them immobilized. And I have a gig in a month to practice for, dammit.

So that's been my week. How was yours?

*ETA: Though at Costco I did find a fantastic 18-year-old Scotch for $32, as well as a book I'd been wanting for $9. Which both chalk definitively into the "good" column.