despite the stupid shit, the music keeps me going

 

Yesterday, I had a meltdown privately before choir rehearsal. The sheer banality of my day, the pressure, the stress, all blinded and constricted me.

It’s not that necessary to rehearse it all here. But stupid shit is getting me down and putting me off balance.

Although outside of the house I try to keep quiet, I am losing perspective about stupid shit.

Stupid shit like the new sound system at church actually hums and fills the quiet of the choir area with a sound just a bit louder than our wheezy old pipe organ blower which I can clearly hear in every service. I sometimes close the swell box just to lessen the noise from the old organ. Now, I will also have a little humming sound unless the case that will be coming soon will dampen it.

Stupid shit like the fact that people at church are worried about the color (THE COLOR) of the new pipe organ and have asked the builder to darken the beautiful wood of his
lovely instrument.

Stupid shit like the fact that I spent an hour in a staff meeting listening to tech people explain Windows Outlook and how wonderful it is despite the fact that my boss and I
privatedly later confided to each other that we have both have decided to
limit our use of it to church shit. All this of course, so that our small little staff can have
emails with a cute churchy domain name. Stupid shit like the tech guy telling us he would take all the contacts of our present email and email them our new email address. This was the point at which I raised my hand and asked him not to do that for me. I guess jupe is not quite the team player, eh?

So I found myself in a nonsensical argument with the love of my life, beautiful Eileen, with jupe spluttering and spouting nonsense as I am wont to do.

As I realized what was happening, I was overcome by a sense of quiet despair and sadness. I quieted down. We went to the Sushi restaurant for for a quiet supper. Choir rehearsal was the usual little bit of hell with people acting out. It’s my job.

On the other hand in between the banality, I rehearsed organ and piano. Excellent music by Francis Jackson and The Art of Fugue by Bach. The music keeps me going.

From the Aeneid Book VI – The New Yorker

My six issue discount subscription with the New Yorker is now over. I put the magazine on trial in my mind. Could I find anything redeeming or interesting in each issue besides the cartoons. This poem was a redeeming aspect of the last issue. I guess I’ll keep the subscription. I hope it’s not too expensive.

My deceased Father’s birthday is next Wednesday. This poem is about Aeneas’s father. The last lines of this translation of an excerpt I found haunting.

… And as he [Aeneas’s father] spoke he wept.
Three times he [Aeneas] tried to reach arms round that neck.
Three times the form, reached for in vain, escaped.
Like a breeze between his hands, a dream on wings.

FiveThirtyEight Explains Super Tuesday – On The Media

Okay. This is a podcast that On the Media excerpted recently that was done just prior to Tuesday’s primaries. In it, one of the staff talks about the fact that a large percentage of the American people (60 or so per cent) disapprove of Trump and that does not get reported much. I couldn’t find anything online to back this up. It would be a bit of comfort if it were true.

Episode 19: Father Pfleger, Larry David, and the History of Autism – The New Yorker

Speaking of the New Yorker and podcasts, I listened to the beginning of this one this morning. Father Pfleger is a startling story about someone doing good on the streets of Chicago and finding a way to daily suspect realistic cynicism.

2 thoughts on “despite the stupid shit, the music keeps me going

  1. Here’s a link to a survey of polls on Trump’s favorability ratings:

    http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/donald-trump-favorable-rating

    As of two days ago, a combination of 105 polls showed Trump with 36.5% of Americans having a favorable opinion of him. 58.2% of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of him. The question I have is whether or not people will vote their opinions. For example, the Clintons don’t score very high in my personal favor but I will still vote for Hillary if she’s the nominee. Hell, I’ll vote for Bozo the clown before I vote for a Republican.

    Another link if you don’t have it:

    http://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/favorability-ratings/

    Sorry you’re having a rough time. Our door is open if you need to get away.

    And I know that advice is blocking but whoever told your staff that they need to use Outlook in order to have an email with a Grace Church domain name doesn’t know what s/he’s talking about. At St. James our emails were all @stjameskeene.com or @stjameskeene.org and we all used the regular old gmail web interface. And my @sometimeaway.com address is accessed through gmail. You just have to register your domain name through Google Apps. I have the Google Apps Legacy from back when it was free. But non-profits can get a free Google Apps Work account (https://support.google.com/nonprofits/answer/3367223?hl=en&rd=1).

    Even if you don’t do it that way, you can still just have them set it up to forward your office emails to your gmail account and set up your gmail account so that the “reply-to” for those incoming emails is your Grace Account. So the person who emails you at Grace never sees that their email is actually going to your gmail account and, whenever you leave the position, you just turn off the forwarding and you no longer receive Grace emails… I’d be willing to talk with your tech people if it would help. FWIW…

    M

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