The Peninsula Cantare concert went pretty well. For my part I decided that I didn't like the notes Henry Purcell wrote, so I changed them, but overall it came out okay.
I'm noticing more than in the past that in between relationships I acquire a certain oblivion that enables me to move on and eventually try it again. I get a sudden shift where I realize the world hasn't ended and I sort of forget what the relationship was like, inasfar as I can no longer, through memory, summon the emotions involved. It recedes into the background a bit, until the life-I'm-living-right-now looks okay or even more interesting than the life-I-remember, and I no longer mourn (or at least minimally so) the past. Not feeling everything so sharply, I eventually feel like hey, maybe a relationship isn't such a bad thing, could be kinda fun, and someone shows up to play with me and we start the cycle over again.
I wonder if this is an evolutionary mechanism. In college I had a classic codependent relationship with a talented neuropsych major who tends to be a bit more bitter about the world than I am; one week it came out that mothers, during childbirth, secrete a whole bunch of hormones that actually alter their memory of the experience, so that they remember it as less painful than it actually was, thus helping them be willing to have more children. My girlfriend referred to this as "an evil trick nature plays on women"; I view it a bit more neutrally. With relationships there's not really any way to say: it's just what we are, the course of our lives. For me, at least.
I've discovered that all the fun things I want to do--traveling to a couple of aikido retreats, traveling to Seattle, taking a blacksmithing workshop, going to my college reunion--all cost $300-600. I've also realized that I only have so many chunks of $300-600 to spend, and while it's sad that I can't do everything I want, I think it's pretty neat that it all divides into evenly-spaced chunks of money. It's also sad that one of those chunks is now occupied by the taxes I owe to the great State of California.
I stopped by an Irish place in Los Altos tonight, where a weekly ceili (KAY-lee) has started up--essentially a night of Irish dancing with a pickup band of whoever brings an instrument. I made several people smile by saying I played a little guitar, so I went home and finished putting on the new strings and played a little bit. I haven't played much in years: I never had the passion or aptitude for it that I do for singing, so I didn't practice enough and the whole operation ended up being unsatisfying for everyone involved. I played classical as well as steel-string and am really just kind of competent at either. But this seems perfect, a pressure-free environment where people will actually listen to the music. We'll see how it works out.
I've been feeling crabby today, since I woke up at 3 AM, got to work by 6:30, got handed piles of last-minute changes to things I thought were done, and topped off with my boss asking me (without malice or criticism) that I not make that schedule a regular thing, because there's stuff that needs to get communicated so the work can get done. I had some choice rants about that, but it was time to go home, and I realize I'm also cranky about what passes for my review, and the presumed raise--the general lesson of my career has been "The Company will screw you over", so it's difficult to be neutral. None of this is really the problem, though: I'm just twitchy and restless. I went to aikido to settle myself, and ended up training at both classes and having a good time, and ending the class more relaxed than when I started, which is excellent.