Robert Manners

Revving Up

My PDA is now running my life, and it's doing a much better job than I ever did. This is a good thing, since my life is getting so blasted busy lately.



With the Living Sober Conference coming up fast, Musical rehearsals are kicking into high gear. We had our first full run-through yesterday, and I finally got to see the whole thing all together in one piece... and it's not as bad as I thought it might be. As I was telling someone yesterday, I really have very little imagination... I can't see things until I've seen them. I'm still not sure what my one line means, really, but the rest of the play makes more sense now that I've seen it completely acted out by the cast actors; further, the text seems rather less hackneyed and lame coming out of the mouths of moving people, in the context of interaction, than it did on the page or during sitting-in-a-circle read-throughs.



Of course, there is still a lot of work to do... the blocking is disastrous, with all sorts of background personnel wandering around not knowing what to do; the choreography is labor-intensive (to say the least), and not all of us have it memorized yet (I certainly don't); many of us haven't completely memorized all of the songs, either, and since my memorization hinges on following along with the soloists, and the soloists haven't gotten all their lines down, I find myself off at sea rather a lot. I thank God I didn't get cast with more than my one incomprehensible little line, I don't think I could memorize all of the lines and songs that the principals have been saddled with. There's safety in the chorus.



So as we approach the Conference, we are stepping up rehearsals to four times a week, three or four hours at a time: the Sundays we've been doing all along, and the Wednesdays that I just recently started showing up for, and now Mondays and Thursdays as well. To make it all more interesting, each day's rehearsal is in a different place. Since I have to miss one Wednesday because of my GSR meeting, I feel it incumbent upon me to attend every rehearsal that I can, and so my calendar for the next two weeks is completely packed.



On top of that, I have my weekdaily gym hour, which I daren't modify in any way, lest I lose momentum altogether and become lazy about going. I also have to find some time soon to get my nails done... they look awful, and I want to get the acrylics and extensions removed completely and replaced with something without extensions. The tiny little space between my real nail-ends and the extensions attract the most amazing amount of filth, and it's difficult to keep them clean. If I had the acrylics applied directly to the nail, without any extentions at all, it would be much tidier. The trick will be to get the acrylics off without breaking my real nails (which are nice and long now).



Actually, the trick is to squeeze in the time for an appointment. I wanted to go today, while the office is really quiet, taking a fabulously long lunch as part of my floating vacation days. Unfortunately, the salon I wanted to go to is closed on Mondays. I could go to another salon, of course (it's not like there aren't hundreds to choose from), but I really liked the last manicurist I had and am not sure I want to take a chance on an untried quantity today.



With all this going on, I'm finding it nearly impossible to get any work done on my Eighth Step, my Gratitude List, or my laundry. I did six loads of laundry on Saturday, while reading the latest posthumous Dorothy L. Sayers novel Presumption of Death (written entirely by Jill Paton Walsh, but based on and including some epistolary magazine articles written by Sayers at the beginning of WWII... it was pretty good, but not great, and the denouement was a trifle disappointing). And while those six loads relieve me of the no-underwear difficulty and the tedium of wearing the same pair of jeans over and over again, I only managed to wash the clothes that were currently in my room... there are three more large plastic garbage bags in the basement containing the clothes I gathered up when I had to make room for the window-man (regular readers will remember that this was over a month ago). While this certainly illustrates the fact that I have way more clothes than I need, the clothes are still there and need to be washed.



Well, anyway, the Musical will be over as of July 5, and my schedule will free up a bit. But then Grandmother wants to start attending church out in Walnut Creek (we went to church with my Daddy for Father's Day, and GM liked the atmosphere a whole lot), and so my Sundays are going to start earlier in the day from now on; and then when I'm no longer in weekly dance rehearsals I'm going to start taking movement classes at the gym. And I have a feeling that summer in the office isn't going to be as quiet as it has been in years past; not only do we have a contentious contract in negotiations, but my boss has this weird work-ethic where he plans to spend the entire summer in town and actually working (my previous boss pretty much disappeared in the summer, much to our relief).



Oh, well, as Daddy always says, it's better than a rap on the head with a sharp stone. At least I have a PDA to keep me on top of it all. Now if I only had the youth that would make such a schedule easier. Or maybe just a youth to stay on top of (as if I had the time or the energy for that).