Chat today gave me an excellent piece on the big problems with the music industry, long predating the current problems with the digital revolution.

No aikido test this time around. My uke said he'd do it if I wanted to, but since his reservations and my instructor's are roughly the same as my reservations, when I think about it I'd really rather wait three months and do a good or perfect test. I'm not ready. So much for ignoring my intuition: I think it's just the contrarian in me that makes me even try at all any more. The inner voice is right.

My adorable little guitar came back from the shop today, with the action (vertical distance from the strings to the fretboard) nice and lowered, so it's a lot more fun to play. The cost of getting it set up more than wiped out the money I saved buying it over the Internet (Gryphon does setups for free on guitars they sell, so buying from them would have saved me twenty bucks), but it makes me smile and I get a pleasant guitar to travel around with, so that's okay.

The last (thank God) Star Wars movie is out. Reportedly it sucks vastly less than the previous two, but I'm joining the crowd of people staging a minor protest by refusing to go see it on opening weekend. In the meantime I can just re-read the New Yorker review, which is astute and less than kind.

It's so very hard to let go of things, or to "process" them, or whatever--pick the words that work for you. It's the story of taking our experiences, absorbing them, learning our lessons, stashing our memories, and moving on. There's no recipe, no magic bullet for it. You can develop a lot of skills to help it along, of acknowledging your feelings and talking about them and learning not to judge yourself for them...and I have a lot of those tools, through a lot of work and pain and suffering. But things take however much time they're going to take: I'll be ready for my aikido test whenever I'm ready, relationships come together and come apart in their own good time, we make the changes in our lives with some balance of when we really have to and when we feel we're ready. The tides of our daily lives flow in and out.

I think I've been feeling a turning point, a fluctuation reminding that...I don't know. That things change, nothing ever remains the way it is, that I will come out the other side of where I am (though really this is a fine place to be), threads will converge again, and I'll find the next thing I'm supposed to be doing.

The universe makes me giggle and laugh sometimes. I don't have a metaphor for it. It's too big and wonderful. And the trees are so pretty.