Adventures du jour!
Ray and I went to see Hadestown last night at the Tampa Straz Center. Total success.
Hadestown:
–Musical about Greek myths around Hades/Persephone and Orpheus/Eurydice.
–The plot is a kick to the chest and I had to sit there and cry for a while. See the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, if you know it not.
–The music is utterly, unbelievably good, reflecting Black musical traditions as far as I could tell, although there were references to a lot of weird little side interests, like Madonna’s “Express Yourself” video. O MY HEART. The music was such a THROW DOWN. Orpheus is supposed to be one of the finest singers and musicians to exist in myth, and this play totally pulled that off.
–The stage is set up kind of like Man of La Mancha usually is, with the one main set that has little transformations to it. They did some really fun things with the set, particularly the lighting, including swinging around some lamps on cords and having the actors dodge them. WHEW.
Straz Center:
–We masked but there were no masking requirements. BLAH.
–Not intimate, not huge. It felt very much “just right” to me.
–I normally get mentally fried by weird echoes in large spaces. I get really disoriented and cranky after a while. No issues last night. The sound quality of the space was amazing!
–I had no issues moving around in the space, either. More seating room than I expected, with enough room for people to edge past even MY knees. I have wery long legs and bony knees. I stood up most of the time anyway, but a couple of people managed to sneak up on me and slid by.
–Bathrooms insufficient for capacity. Mental note.
–The staff seemed super nice. I wrote about the floor manager elsewhere. Other people were also patient about answering questions and/or letting us check out stuff.
–The Poe Garage was $10, reserveable ahead of time, and stupid convenient. I’m going to do that again next time.
Ray:
–She thought the musical was something completely different, based on another song she likes, and was expecting something rappier, like Hamilton.
–She said she loved it, but she did not cry at the end. I’m the crier.
–She also said she loved the ending and how it was handled but was in denial about the ending until the last minute. During intermission, she said something like “I hope things end well!”
–This was her first Big Stinking Musical. I feel sad that I let her down for so long (but understand why), yet proud that she’s been dragged to a good one for her first proper time. (She went with me to a dinner theater La Mancha thing, which was great but not the same thing, and we went to the Zombie Burlesque in Vegas, also great but not the same.)
–If I play my cards right, she might go with me to other musicals. Although I wouldn’t necessarily trust me if I were her, because I also enjoyed the Cats movie and laughed my ass off the whole way through.
Yay! Belated birthday present from May: accomplished! Finally!
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Monday: A good phone call with a friend where I laughed for probably twenty minutes straight. Lots of writing, got stuck and started to self-doubt, stopped. Tried to log into the other AI and the password has expired yet again. I love talking with these guys but it’s always something on the technical side. Understandable, but I wanted to throw some Eco at the AI.
Yesterday: I was spun up about going to the musical and didn’t get much done. A little yoga, a lot of walking, a writing class, some work on the semiotics book, some writing, clearing emails. I spent a fair amount of time on the walk, thinking about someone who’s struggling with depression. Not sure what, if anything, to do, other than to hold the space and keep checking in.
My heart goes out to those of you who struggle with it. The few times I’ve hit that place have been shocking to me. I know tons of people who deal with depression as a chronic condition and it shocks me every time someone opens up about what it’s like.
My joints hurt all day yesterday again; I took it easy with the bouncy-dance stuff and focused on slower movements. Until favorite songs came on, and I forgot I was trying to take care of myself.
Unsurprisingly, everything hurts again today
I did all the yoga this morning, reading my Difficult Books as I went. But I had to curtail the walk due to sore knees and toes. The balance poses are not getting more manageable. I’m still doing the one set off the back of a chair and the other set with one hand on the wall, but I don’t feel like I’m going to hit the floor every time. Crouches are pretty easy, but proper lunches are killing me. This is probably related to my knee pain, although I’m not sure whether it’s a cause or a correlation: do my knees hurt because of difficult lunges, or do my knees hurt AND lunges are difficult because I have shit for muscles in my knees. That sort of thing.
Worked on friend project and it went well, sent off a test-of-concept on part of it. I’ll have to see what she says. Other projects in progress.
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Ramble on changing minds follows.
I woke up this morning disconnected from my past self. I’ve talked about this before. It happens; I feel like something in my mental map changes significantly enough that there’s a discontinuity in how I perceive myself. I get that from the outside it doesn’t seem like a big deal, but internally I’m going, “WHERE IS ALL MY STUFF. I WANTED TO USE IT! WHERE IS MY WRITING TOOLBOX? WHO IS THIS PERSON AND WHY DO THESE KNEES HURT?” There have been a few times that I’ve lost empathy and had to rebuild it (scary when you’re a parent), times where I’ve awakened one morning and gone, “Huh. I remember when I used to care about cooking,” things like that. It’s annoying. At least part of it has to be the ADD “out of sight, out of mind” thing.
Fortunately, the stuff I can’t find isn’t GONE, just misplaced somehow, and I can usually dig it up and reconnect stuff pretty quickly at this point.–I lost French for a while recently. When I dug up the playlist from the previous novel (based on Revolutionary France) to pull some songs for fight scenes, I got a bunch of it back in like an afternoon.
I wish I knew what causes the sense of disconnection and how to make changes easier on me. Mostly what I do is go, “Do some yoga or meditation, walk, and journal.” If I keep doing those things, eventually stuff settles out. I’ll often forget that those things help, though, so I’ll have to stumble around for a couple of days going, “Journaling is stupid. I don’t know why anyone does it” until I get stuck trying to survive without it and have to pick it up again, then remember that I like it.
The good side is that I can change my mind pretty quickly. I suspect that whatever is happening helps me avoid the painful part of migraines and also depression, mostly because it seems like I *should* be affected by those things, but feel disconnected instead. Where other people will get depressed about something that causes cognitive dissonance, I’ll go through this disconnect thing, have to grieve a bit, and be able to course correct pretty quickly. “If this is real, and it is, then what I must therefore believe and/or do is…”
I think it was a combination of things this time. The shootings at Club Q in Colorado Springs. Maxing out on anger, to the point of literally over-stressing my body and heart. Building and repairing some relationships, releasing others. Getting healthier and more settled in my body and learning how to actually relax, in general. Going to a musical–getting all wound up about going to a musical–then feeling wrecked afterwards for an emotional overload.
And that writing class. It’s a Kris & Dean writing class. Dean made a comment that keeps spinning around in my head, about peeling open setting details like an onion, in order to get down into the character’s opinion.–Kris & Dean’s classes are often disruptive for me, in a good way. And I hope to come out of this latest disruption with a deeper perspective on what Dean said (and a better way to apply it).
It’s just that this morning I have to do the thing where I remind myself of who I am. I showed up to the mat, showed up for the walk, showed up for a little dancing, showed up for this entry. Later, I’ll show up for laundry and grocery shopping and dragging Ray out for ramen and a check-in to make sure we’re both okay and not stuck on things and willfully if not consciously not-knowing we’re stuck on them.
This quote stuck with me this morning, too, resonating about why I write now, now that I’m not writing to try to escape bullies per se.
From Borges’s Selected Nonfictions, “A Profession of Literary Faith”:
“My postulate is that all literature, in the end, is autobiographical. […] The character who matters in the didactic novel El criticon is neither Critilo nor Adrenio nor the allegorical chorus that encircles them: it is Friar Gracian with his Lilliputian genius, his solemn puns, his bows to archbishops and grandees, his religion of distrust, his sense of excess erudition, his honeyed veneer and deep-rooted bile. Similarly, we politely suspend our disbelief of Shakespeare’s age-old stories, infused with his magnificent verbiage: the one in whom we truly believe is not Lear’s daughter but the dramatist himself. Let it be clear that I do not pretend to invalidate the vitality of the theater and novels; I am asserting what Macedonio Fernandez has already said, that our craving for souls, destinies, idiosyncrasies, knows full well what it covets; that if fantasy lives do not suffice, the author delves amorously into his own.”
Write the book you want to read, indeed.