Gotta Go With What You’ve Got

Posted on 05/25/2024 by chick
  • The silent blog might have made it seem as if I’d dropped off the face of the earth, but I am still here, still alive, barely. Lack of sleep is really messing me up. It’s not just that I’m forced to keep lark hours, which are brutal, but that I’m also having trouble falling and staying asleep. I’m lucky if I get even five hours, and five hours don’t cut it.
  • I wrote, checked, and approved a work document recently, then happened to look at it again and saw that I’d written “back of tricks” rather than “bag of tricks.” I’ve been making that kind of mistake more and more often, and it’s getting harder to spot afterward, which is not a good thing for an editor. It’s also a symptom of dementia, which is not a good thing, full stop. I can only hope that in this case it’s a symptom, rather, of sleep deprivation.
  • Fatigue makes me prone to crying, and there have been a few times recently when my lack of music composition skill has nearly brought me to tears. One night, I was browsing YouTube videos about music theory and happened upon the channel of a young, Juilliard-trained pianist/composer. She had written and performed variations on the song “Autumn Leaves” in the style of twenty different composers, and I watched the videos in awe. She’s brilliant, and her playing is beautiful and effortless. I never have and never will be able to play like that. And I doubt I’ll ever compose like that either. It made me feel slow, and stupid, and as if all the time I’d ever spent on music had been a complete waste.
  • Then there was my music lesson earlier this week. I had slaved over a piece for two weeks, made little progress, and was embarrassed to have so little to show for my time. My teacher didn’t rip the piece apart or anything, but his advice on how I might improve it was so commonsense (musically speaking) that I was pained not to have seen it myself. His ability to manipulate the music on-the-fly just rubbed salt in the wound. And I knew that later, when I sat down to apply what he’d taught me, I’d struggle to implement his suggestions and probably fail even though I’d understood clearly what he was saying at the time. I felt like crying, and I nearly did.
  • I really don’t know what’s holding me together right now. I think it might be hot beverages. They are a little less comforting now that the weather itself is hot (in $%#@ing May!), but you gotta go with what you got, even when it ain’t much.
  • And that, I guess, is the moral of the day: gotta go with what you got. Because you can’t go with what you don’t got. And you gotta go, or else you’re dead.
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One Response to Gotta Go With What You’ve Got

  1. Pingback: 2024 in Review | Blue-Footed Musings

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