7.16.2019

i should go to bed now

my cat insists on burying the bowl of wet food i insist on feeding him, and i'm going to insist on writing for a handful of minutes when i know that i should be going to bed: typos and edits be damned!

this year is more than half over and i can tell you that i'm quickly heading in directions previously unknown to me--unforetold, unusual, underrated. really it's just that i wanted three "un" words in a row there. who has time for copious details and explanations? certainly not me. not now.

i'm 42 these days. less than a month until i'm halfway to 43. what gives with these numbers? someone just needs to stop. but enough about time, even though time is certainly what i'm running out of as i rob myself of delicate minutes of sleep.

what is it with life? what is the most important thing to communicate at This Very Minute?

bollocks, i'm drawing a complete blank. my house is a disaster since i took up volunteering and i'm lucky to get a proper dinner in. i'm hoping all the vegetables and tofu i cooked up tonight last me through the end of this week. but mostly, the important thing is that i'm volunteering and it is the best thing i could have done in response to a very unfortunate event.

without going into the details, let's just say that when my efforts to help a creature took an unexpected turn, i doubled down on educating myself and i haven't been the same since.

there's been a lot of changes in the past year, as i was explaining to a friend, and i sort of want to write everything down; however, one of the changes i've made is understanding my bandwidth. i need my sleep more than i need to blog.

so, i'm here, dear reader. i hope you are well.

1.03.2019

ringing in the new year

yes, it's the third of january already. it's taken me a week to be back to feeling myself, and even then i'm not totally over my cold. i relish the small bubbles of energy shimmying from my toes to my head. i was focused today at work. just now i played piano for three-quarters of an hour (this always leaves my hands feeling electric). and, like the eighty-year-old that lives deep, down inside of me, i'm going to brush my teeth and hop into bed with a book during the eight o'clock hour. getting sick seems to have flipped my internal clock; i got into work at 7:15 this morning. time will tell if this becomes a pattern.

i picked up aja gabel's the ensemble when i was at the portland book festival in november and i started reading it new year's eve day while i was still sick. the novel may be about a string quartet, but i'll nonetheless cite that as one of many reasons i trimmed my nails so i could let my fingers wander on the black and white keys of my childhood upright piano. i've decided to learn the downton abbey suite, which is certainly much more difficult than i thought it would be. the piano transcription highlights the weakness in my fourth (ring) finger on my left hand (time for hanon exercises?!). although the notes themselves are easy to read, i spent a healthy amount of time counting out loud, slapping the rhythms out on my thighs, and playing the first page, hands separate, at less than half of the prescribed tempo. being out of practice is tedious, but as i'm on the cusp of another birthday, i'm pleased to know that i can still dust off the years of piano lessons i keep in my back pocket and resume playing.

would you look at that? it's almost my bedtime. 2019, you old so-and-so. let's do this.