beautiful, funny, sad & true

Yesterday at work I felt achy and weird all day. Didn’t feel sick as much as exhausted and spacy. Walked home and decided that a bath was the best idea ever. Someone in my building must have been doing laundry at the same time or something, because the water never really got more than lukewarm. I had already ‘committed’ to the idea of a bath, though, so I took one anyway. When I got out I started shivering like crazy, so I bundled up and went to bed at 6:00 p.m., and I stayed there until about ten minutes ago. It’s now 11:30ish the next morning. The moral of the story is, IF YOU”RE SICK, STAY HOME FROM WORK. This guy I work with has had a fever for the last two weeks, and he refuses to stay home. Thanks, a-hole. Thanks for passing your Ebola on to the rest of us.

I’m supposed to go see Ben Lee tonight with my friend Shelby. Hope I feel up to it. I sure don’t want to miss the show, though. Guess I’ll stay in bed all day and see how I feel when the time comes. I’m feeling much better after spending the last seventeen and a half hours in bed. I’m also hungry, which is a good sign.

I have lots of things I’ve been wanting to write about lately, but they’re pretty huge stories–at least as far as blog entries are concerned–and I haven’t had a chance to whittle them all down into coherent and concise entries. The subjects include:

They’re all fairly interesting (hopefully), and all at least tangentially related. But instead I’m sitting here writing the substitute for all of them, entitled Dang It All, I’m Sick Again.

Thpffft.

What a weekend.

The show on Friday night was pretty stellar. It was fun to play with BassPlayerDamian (Stephanie’s previous bass player) and DrummerNed (from Dirty Martini) again. We’ve all played together separately many times, but never all together. Breanna sang backup with us, and Paul Brainard played pedal steel (that twangy-sounding instrument that’s usually associated with country music) and trumpet like a champion. “Enough of Empty” went in a completely different and cool direction with the addition of a trumpet solo. This show was also the debut of my new red Hofner guitar. It sounded great, and I can’t wait to see what it looks like in a picture. After we were done, we pretty much stayed backstage in the green room the entire time, talking and relaxing (Incidentally, ‘relaxing’ may be spelled r-e-l-a-x-i-n-g, but in this case it’s pronounced ‘drinking wine’. We had plenty, and not much food to soak it up. Ohmygawd.) We missed the second band, but we came out and sat up front for the third band, Richmond Fontaine. They were excellent, as usual.

Saturday night was the full-band show with Breanna. It was good, but we haven’t been playing as an electric band for a while, so it never quite felt like we really gelled. We never sounded bad or anything–in fact I’d say we sounded pretty dang good–but it just never quite felt as good as it usually does, which is fine. If you’ve spent any kind of time reading this blog, you’ll know that some gigs are just better than others. Ain’t no thang.

Yesterday afternoon was a recording session for a new song of Breanna’s. I got there really early, brought in my cello and accordion, and then, since it would be a while before I was needed, I ended up going for an hour-long walk around the neighborhood because it was so beautiful outside. When I got home, I had a message on MySpace from a girl I went on a couple of dates with a year and a half ago. “I saw you! Walking on 22nd, talking on your cell phone.” It was very funny, in a small-world kind of way.

I think that the Dread Pirate Exhaustion may have been setting in, though, because with the exception of the show on Friday night, I never really felt ‘present’ for the rest of the weekend. I felt like I was going through the motions, even during the recording session.

By all standards, this should have been a two-thumbs-up weekend, but realistically, I think I’m only gonna be able to give it a thumb and a half, because I felt so exhausted and weird for so much of it.

I don’t have any kind of substantial basis for feeling this way, but I feel like this is going to be a good week.

What a weekend.

Friday night I had rehearsal with Breanna and the band. BassPlayerChris was really sick, so he left kinda early, but I stayed around for a while to play through songs with Breanna and NewBandMemberJon. It was 11:30 p.m. by the time we finished. As I was loading my instruments into the back of my car, the hatch started to fall, and the corner of it hit me in the side of the head. Not a fun night. I went home and laid down on the sofa with a bag of frozen peas pressed to my temple.

Saturday J and I went out and about during the day, but we were both exhausted and groggy for some reason, so naps were in order. I laid down at 5:30ish, got up once or twice for a little while, but then went back down until 10:30, got up and dinked around on the computer for an hour or so, then went to bed for real and slept in until 10:30 the next day.

Yesterday, I sorta teased J about something I didn’t realize she was sensitive about, so I inadvertently hurt her feelings. Last night we e-mailed back and forth, trying to work it out, but as of this moment it’s still hanging there in the air between us. I’m sure we’ll be fine; we have a great track record of working things out.

There are a couple of other things happening that I’m not going to write about here, but they’ve been bouncing around in my head for the last few days too.

This morning, waking up was brutally hard after being up so late the night before. I didn’t even have time to take a shower, and I still dragged into work ten minutes late. Went to the deli downstairs to get an egg-and-cheese croissant, but it tasted stale and chewy. I ate about two-thirds of it and threw the rest in the garbage, then went to get some apple cider to wash the taste out of my mouth. Apparently my workplace has ‘secretly replaced their usual brand’ of apple cider with a crappy-tasting impostor.

I’m home for lunch now, hoping that the rest of this week improves really quickly.

Tonight is the performers-and-volunteers party for the Voices For Silent Disasters show that starts this weekend. It’s in a nice venue downtown, where we can all meet each other, catch up with friends, and also find out more about the cause and the events. So that should be fun.

In other news, I finally got a toy piano. I’ve been looking for one for years.

This video just totally brought tears to my eyes and put a smile on my face.

Here’s the story.

Don’t forget to watch Part 2 also!

Hope it moves you as much as it did me. Thank you, Crystin, for sharing this.

As soon as I finished that last entry, I grabbed my bass, jumped in my car, and headed to Sarah Castro’s for rehearsal. Or so I thought.

You see, she lives just off Capitol Highway in Beaverton. For some reason, though, I had it in my head that I needed to go to SUNSET Highway instead. These are very different freeways, in completely opposite parts of town. I was through the tunnel and heading up the hill on the Sunset Highway when I realized, ‘Shit. What am I doing?’ It never really got any better after that.

I instantly thought, ‘Okay, I’ll just turn around at the next exit and come back up the Sunset Highway’ but there must have been a wreck or something in the tunnel, because traffic was at a dead stop for a couple of miles. I decided to go the only other way I knew, which was to take Highway 217 clear around Beaverton and meet up with I-5, where I could come back north and hit Capitol Highway from there. Wrong again.

Turns out that I-5 North doesn’t have an exit for Capitol Highway. Not only that, but that area of town is very confusing, so if you’re not very familiar with the area, it’s hard to tell which exit will get you where you need to go until you get downtown, by which time you’re in the thick of ugly traffic and construction. But I looked over in the direction of I-5 South anyway, only to find that there was an ambulance, a police car, and another two-mile, dead-stop traffic jam.

At that point I called Sarah. “I don’t think I’m gonna make it, unfortunately.” I told her about my 45-minute circle of the metropolitan area, to which she responded, “That’s okay; it happens. No biggie.” I apologized and told her I’d see her for sure on Sunday.

On the way back up I-5 toward my exit, the city lights were particularly bright, and the Willamette River particularly calm, so the lights of downtown were reflecting beautifully. I always have my camera with me, so I thought I would pull over somewhere and take some pictures. The exit I took put me right near the Coliseum, which was fine, but then the road split and wouldn’t let me go straight where I needed to go straight in order to get to the park I had in mind. In fact, the road put me on the Steel Bridge headed over the river and toward downtown. I cursed under my breath and drove over the bridge.

Once I was in downtown, I went around the block and back over the bridge, only to find all the parking spaces full and a bunch of ne’er-do-wells milling around underneath the overpass. I decided to give it a miss.

So the best-laid schemes of mice and men went awry on this sorry excuse for an eve, and I have neither rehearsal nor pictures to show for my fruitless travels.

Still thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me
The present only toucheth thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e’e.
On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!

Or something like that.