{"id":23207,"date":"2024-05-25T10:13:21","date_gmt":"2024-05-25T15:13:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/?p=23207"},"modified":"2024-05-25T10:15:16","modified_gmt":"2024-05-25T15:15:16","slug":"gotta-go-with-what-youve-got","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/?p=23207","title":{"rendered":"Gotta Go With What You&#8217;ve Got"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul><li>The silent blog might have made it seem as if I&#8217;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&#8217;s not just that I&#8217;m forced to keep lark hours, which are brutal, but that I&#8217;m also having trouble falling and staying asleep. I&#8217;m lucky if I get even five hours, and five hours don&#8217;t cut it.<\/li><li>I wrote, checked, and approved a work document recently, then happened to look at it again and saw that I&#8217;d written &#8220;back of tricks&#8221; rather than &#8220;bag of tricks.&#8221; I&#8217;ve been making that kind of mistake more and more often, and it&#8217;s getting harder to spot afterward, which is not a good thing for an editor. It&#8217;s also a symptom of dementia, which is not a good thing, full stop. I can only hope that in this case it&#8217;s a symptom, rather, of sleep deprivation.<\/li><li>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 &#8220;Autumn Leaves&#8221; in the style of twenty different composers, and I watched the videos in awe. She&#8217;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&#8217;ll ever compose like that either. It made me feel slow, and stupid, and as if all the time I&#8217;d ever spent on music had been a complete waste.<\/li><li>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&#8217;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&#8217;d taught me, I&#8217;d struggle to implement his suggestions and probably fail even though I&#8217;d understood clearly what he was saying at the time. I felt like crying, and I nearly did.<\/li><li>I really don&#8217;t know what&#8217;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&#8217;t much.<\/li><li>And that, I guess, is the moral of the day: gotta go with what you got. Because you can&#8217;t go with what you don&#8217;t got. And you gotta go, or else you&#8217;re dead.<\/li><\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The silent blog might have made it seem as if I&#8217;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&#8217;s not just that I&#8217;m forced &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/?p=23207\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23207"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23207"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23211,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23207\/revisions\/23211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}