I Love what I think of as “my job” – being a musician pretty much rocks, pun absofuckinlutely intended. There’s a lot of hard work and a lot of blue balls, a lot of hurry-up-and-wait and at the end of too many days a whole lot of having to sit back and say “At least I Love what I do”. I consider myself a musician first even now, during the cold and dark winter months were we relax ourselves into mostly being home.
Of course, what does the worst storm in recent history really matter when your friends are within walking distance? Sharif and Joanna decided the snow was too exciting to stay indoors and trekked on over for a visit.
I also generally quite like my Other Job – the one where I work at House of Musical Traditions selling guitars and harps and sitars, struggling through restringing all of the above and wondering if I should learn more about lutes or leave it to a coworker. It’s constantly fascinating, you meet lots of interesting people and I like the environment. All in all I’d say I only like it 25% as My Job, but that’s none too bad because I really Love THAT job. Confusing math for you? Whatever – I’m a fortunate creature in that I generally enjoy the things that write my paychecks.
Okay – I Love snow – but we’ve got quite enough. Ladies and gentleman? Your snow dance may now please cease.
But not yesterday. Yesterday was truly Working Retail During The Christmas Season – with all the rush and hurry and rudeness that it implies. Yesterday was Commuting in the Snow, with all the stop and go and rudeness that THAT implies. And yesterday was simply the Longest Day Ever with all the exhaustion and struggle that THAT implies – with most of THAT struggle being about trying not to snap at those around me, avoiding keying the cars of my parking-space-stealing neighbours and about trying not to just SCREAM.
Last night, after flat tires, retrieving our parking-space-token chairs from random snowdrifts and drowning my sorrows in Amy’s fantabulous lemon bars, I simply couldn’t sleep. All the negative thoughts were squirreling around in my head, launching themselves at one another and feeding, taking bloody chunks out of themselves and growing bloated. In the grey light of winter’s morning, things do seem so much better, but we’re dodging the chunks of ice and the powdered snow storms flying off of people who can’t be bothered to clear off their trucks and passing the carcasses of minivans who’ve yet to be retrieved from snow drifts. I-95 is a dangerous route today and it’s reminding me that though I woke up with a firm “Tuesday can’t be as bad as Monday – Today will be better than yesterday” attitude, it’s still up to me to make it so – and beyond that – I’ll still have to actively sidestep anyone else’s efforts to bring about a recurrence of yesterday’s 24 hours of Hell.
Hrm. Which reminds me that we forgot to check our tires this morning. Damn. But today’s STILL going to be better than yesterday!
In concrete GOOD news – Heather won an honourable mention in the Mid-Atlantic Song Contest with her tune “Ask For Me”. It’s one of my absolutely favourite Heather tunes, delicious to play and heart-breaking to listen to, and I’ll be proud to update our ilyRESUMEs wherever they may be scattered. In general, Christmas is almost here and it’s time to get off my ass and turn my eyes once again to the rockstarring. It’s a rough job, but somebody’s gotta do it.
Follow up on how awesome this Tuesday’s going to be: got to the store, discovered a violation warning on the door telling us we’ve not shoveled a sidewalk we didn’t know was “ours” (but we can tell it was very serious because it was orange) and someone stole our store’s snow shovel from off our porch! Fucking yuppie-hippies!
Local Christmas lights fighting their way through the blizzard blanket of 09. There were claims that this is the worst storm we’ve had since some year or another – I don’t really care – nor do I really think it’s the worst I’ve ever seen… but then again, I was shorter in the blizzard of ’79…
