Of course, in addition to the rediscovered joy of plugging myself back into musical theater, these past few months have also provided a forum to examine some things in need of release.
So tonight, I finally, fully, and formally resigned from the choir.
Once again, a longer pause than intended. Any number of reasons that don’t require listing off–at least not in a “justifying my absence” kind of way. There may indeed be a few of those reasons that get unwound as threads of exploration in future days and weeks.* But only because they warrant deeper examination in my ongoing life/growth journey.
So let’s start with the elephant in the room, the primary thing that demanded a majority of my extracurricular time & attention: stage managing that production of Into the Woods.
Okay, here’s might be where I flunk out of that Coursera class.
Actually, that’s an overstatement, in my usual hyperbolic fashion. However, I do have a “capstone assignment” due tomorrow evening, in which I’m supposed to craft some creative portfolio that demonstrates everything I’ve learned, both for my own benefit and for the benefit of whatever students follow along after me. It’s the kind of project that would have benefitted from regular effort over a span of time, but my report from last night should indicate why and how that hasn’t been possible.
So, in defiance of all good habits for learning, I’ll be doing this capstone assignment in a hurried rush tonight, and, in the spirit of killing two birds with one stone (and knowing that tomorrow night is for choir and not for Coursera), I’ll be doing my “portfolio reflection” a la blogpost.
Shall we begin?
I’ve talked now and again about working as non-profit fund-raiser, and how that means every now and again I fall down the rabbit hole of some big proposal cycle.
Well, it happened again. One of those perfect storm combination of factors: an unusually short response window on a federal RFP, bisected by the holiday season, and then with the added factor of one of the main project/proposal team having a medical emergency in her family. It was the kind of thing that was completely unforeseeable, legitimately important, and undeniably the kind of top priority that pulls you off the office map. Absolutely no blame or hard feelings about that.
However, the ripple effect is that the other two members of the main proposal team (including yours truly) had to carry more effort and work longer hours to get us to the finish line.
Yeah, the most boringest of boring titles. Sometimes that’s just how things go…
Lots of different shifts and movements in areas of my life, and instead of trying to do the grand interweaving thing right now, I’m just going to scatter out some news and work on any “deeper understanding” some other night.
Now that the weekend is here, I can catch up on my Blogging 101 assignments. A few of the assignments I haven’t posted about are “under-the-hood” ones: find new blogs, connect with people in the discussion boards, play around with the visual theme of your blog. I’ve done the first two and at some point I’ll make time to play a bit with the visual design here on JALC. During that Baltic cruise, I actually took a lot of landscape-orientation “texture” photos (things like a lacquered wood floor in The Hermitage, or a ceiling mosaic from the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood) thinking precisely of their use-value for Facebook and blog headers. Now if only I would actually take the time to download those July photos from my camera’s memory card to actually sort through them and start using them…
But one of the assignments was a post topic: the suggestion to
publish a post for your dream reader, and include a new-to-you element in it.
I know that the Blogging 101 assignments/prompts are piling up unattended, but it’s been another late night, so I am just going to have to write quickly about the topic that is most front of mind for me — and I’ll catch up on Blogging 101 tomorrow and over the weekend.
And why was it another late night for me?
As it turns out, that’s exactly the topic I want to be writing about tonight.
I was out late because I was auditioning for a show.
(My usual quick-like-bunny post for Wednesday night apres-rehearsal. Yes, the holiday break is over and choir season has recommenced….)
Anyone who dips into the archives here could pretty easily figure out that, however much I eschew new Year’s Resolutions, I’m all about setting various sorts of goals and structures for myself. From MOOCifying, to Blogging U challenges, to my own self-defined structures (five by five!) — there’s something I enjoy about having these regular sorts of goals and checklists to help me track my efforts and progress in various realms of my life.
So when my friend J. started gathering a group of friends together in Facebook to take on Popsugar’sReading Challenge 2015, you can probably guess what happened next.
I signed on.
Today’s post is a Blogging 101 “two-fer”: I’ll be playing catchup on the first two assignments for the challenge — a task made rather a lot easier by the fact that I completed these same two assignments back in September.
Taken as a pair, the assignments are basically a gesture of announcing one’s bloggy self to the big wide world, first with a statement of your intended focus/goals for blogging and, next, a revision of your blog name and tagline to bring it into alignment with said focus and goals.
(Tonight’s title, by the way, stems from my inability to roll with the inevitable Destiny’s Child reference and my insistence on looking to different musical inspiration…)
I’m not one for making New Year’s Resolutions. But I’ve built up a handful of New Year’s traditions over the decades.
There’s the cliched gestures of celebrations — a good bottle of champagne, watching the countdown on TV, a shared kiss with Mr. Mezzo as one year turns to another. There’s also more idiosyncratic and introspective rituals — journal-writing, drawing a Tao card to discern the theme/intention for my year.
But however cliched, common, introspective or idiosyncratic, I have an entire bushel of New Year’s traditions that’s been a little bit off-track.
Because I slid into 2015 in much the same state I was recently bemoaning from so much of my 2014 experience: sick.
Self-Love: It's Just Another Lifestyle Change 