I has my hedgehog, I has my johnnyhog, I guess I has it all
Rocky Dennis got picked up in Roseburg just a few days before my birthday - Roseburg Rocky or Jens Lekman he's also sometimes called. And it turns out he's more like me than nocturnal, nearsighted Johnny. Fussy, sleepy, musky, spikes out for strangers, motivated to action by food that isn't really that awesome. I went to portland for four days and when I came back and got RD from the hog sitter, he had become a little fatty, and a decent escape artist. Two nights in a row I found him out of the tupperware, curled up in some towel or another. Generation after generation of cardboard exercise maze grapples toward perfection.
I spent the weekend doing responsible thing after responsible thing, as if my birthday in the great spreadsheet alerted the people in charge of things (probably blundering phoneys, as managers of important things often are) that I was now 25 and should be entrusted to patiently manage the dozen different things I stupidly said yes to. Filing recipes, scaling flour, washing hedgehog wheels, paying bills, folding soundshells, briefing trumpet players on stage arrangement, chasing down particular and particular tenured staff members, fundraising roommates. (When you get tenure and people start bending over backward for your particularities, is it much harder to accept/believe that you're sometimes wrong? If you are a human being, very often wrong?) I knew I shouldn't complain, have known for at least a year that no one wants to hear me complain. But only recently has it really sunk in that complaining is a useless endeavor for an adult who would prefer things get done, instead of complained about. If only because anyone who will patiently listen to you complain, a person who actually cares about you as a person and your well-being, and who has the capacity to not compete complain back, is usually someone who is much more busy than you and dealing with much heavier shit.
Listening to Richard Rohr lectures on the ride back from Portland: "Immaterial gifts, unlike worldly gifts, don't diminish when you give them away. Giving patience, practicing patience, creates patience." Complaining, then, certainly creates conflict and struggle, where there doesn't have to be. I am learning to embrace the process, what amounts to be simply Work, as where life is, as where the end is, as where I am. (I don't know how to fit this in, but Rohr also spoke on love: Creating love in ourselves is fundamentally attached to seeing it in others - it's impossible to say whether seeing love or being love comes first. He says love is not something we do, but Love is what we are.)
I spent several hours this weekend working for the music department watching people not read signs. The big signs taped to the door that say "do not let door slam, show in progress" and "do not knock on the door, show in progress. An usher will let you in between pieces." and such knocking and slamming. It makes me really sad because if signs don't work then how can you communicate with anyone and how stupid is the world and how sad am I.
I'm also going to start training as a recorder for the music department. The interview was one brief moment in which all of my career skills and natural aptitudes made some sort of cohesive sense. My abilities for managing, seeing the overall picture, making sure everyone is where they are supposed to be, memorizing a lot of finicky procedures, and a sensitivity for subtleties. Also my disinterest in networking, self-promoting, self-starting, and disorganization, was not offended at all. As far as careers I change my mind a lot. But right now I am organizing the road to becoming a professional dilettante, or jack-of-many-trades if I am luckier. Stay in school another year to get my performance degree, stay another semester or year after that to prepare for grad school, to study musicology or performance. At some point learning web design or graphic design, grant writing, accumulating accompanying jobs, students. I still dream and talk about moving to the country and farming, but I'm on a section of 5 Acres and Independence that says why maybe farming isn't for city-folk like me. hm. because of lack of reliable help, lack of a guarantee someone has the same vision and work ethic. and because I have a propensity to dream too big. At some point really the only cohesion between all my careers (I'm looking for a redeeming big picture but doubt I'll find one) will be me. Everything I do will have in common only "nyssa".
Next semester I'm signed up for modern dance, history in the age of Jackson and Jefferson, recording methods and technology, percussion ensemble, brass band (as the organist), and what else is to come? All because Why Not?
I had a religious experience a few weeks ago, and I will not forgive myself for not writing about it immediately after. In fact immediately after, though neither of us had slept, JT and I spoke for two hours without breaks or lapses in new things to share. (This in itself is not so uncommon, but it was even more inspired than usual) In fact I will not forgive myself for not writing many more times when my little life was rich and I had tangibles that could have stood the test of time if I had written them down. But the running theme of our conversation was taking care of things that seem to resist care. People who are big time jerks and one person who takes care of them, because who else will? People who are lonely and constantly craving some kind of interaction, but preclude any deep interaction at the very onset because of fear (self-perpetuating isolation). People who yearn for depth and could have it, but aren't content to devote themselves to anything, to call their parents and have an hour long conversation. People who feel responsible for someone else's depression, destruction, but can't get in to help and couldn't really help anyway. My mantra, as I was lying on the floor praying like a damn grateful hippie, was "Let the people who love each other be together".
The only other thing I can immediately think to talk about and actually only mention in passing is that I am in a complicated relationship with doughnuts. A new exciting term that relates to this is dynamic inconsistency. I underestimate how likely I am to ever eat a donut again (never or immediately) based on how recently I ate a really big chocolate buttermilk (seconds ago or 23 hours ago) and am willing to pay fluctuating amounts accordingly (couldn't pay me to eat doughnut or I will pay much money for doughnut). Hyperbolic discounting: I would rather have chocolate buttermilk doughnut now rather than two tomorrow bc WHAT IF TOMORROW NEVER COMES
