Burn out in Trichotomy

This past few weeks I’ve taken to working from home a day each week because I’m always tired and not sleeping well. It didn’t help that there were many small fire-fighting exercises at work because we’d just launched our project, so it makes for a very tiring time, especially because we have our normal engineering work on top of it.

But such is software engineering.

The human orchestra had another rehearsal last weekend. The Amateur Musician Group Organizer invited more people into the group. I think there should be 14 total now. Basically he’s getting musicians from who auditioned for the carnegie hall concert to join. Few of them are actual singers, and even fewer have choral experience, so that is worrisome. And, he somehow neglected to invite the Dramatic Sop, who said she is insulted now. I don’t think his idea of assigning a voice to an instrument will work either - to begin with, human voice range don’t co-incide with instrument range, and most instruments are silent during any given time, so I think you ought to be able to rearrange the piece to turn it into a choral piece. But we’ll see. I still cannot listen to this rehearsal’s recording without laughing.

Last Saturday we hosted a music party. Unfortunately the only other pianist who could come was Ex-Chamber Music Group Organizer, so I did most of the accompanying. Which was fine, but I’m not the best sight-reader. We also invited Self-Taught soprano, the dramatic soprano, the Jazz pianist, the Violist and his wife, the Violist’s friend, the Treasurer, and Marius from Les Miz. The ENT doctor pianist stopped by for a while too; but he didn’t stay long. A good time was had by all.

The gig at the Maple Grove cemetery was a lot nicer than I’d expected. Basically there is a historian who volunteers at the cemetery and very knowledgeable about the residents there. He dug up (haha) musical pieces that are related to famous musicians buried there, and had us - a group organized by the Treasurer - perform it. It just so happened that there was a civil war reenactment happening on the site the day after the concert and the actors were rehearsing in costume, and they came to the concert. It was surreal having Frederick Douglass at the audience.

The weekend before that was a little more relaxed. We only had a dance recital for a daughter of La Professeure’s co-worker. It seemed to have become a ritual for us, though now it’s more routine now. We just go, watch the dance recital (she would be just in one act out of about 2 dozen), and then leave. After a few years, you start to notice they’re similar dance routines, but performed by different students.

The weekend before that, La Professeure’s childhood friend (her Maid of Honor) drove down here to visit from Binghamton. Her other childhood friends came to visit. One of her friends have family with a house in Long Beach, so we went out there and spent a day on the beach. It was quite relaxing, but boring after a while. You can only watch the wave come in for so long. And all of us forgot to put sunscreen on our feet, so our feet hurt. But it was nice to see La Professeure’s friends and their kids.

We also went to Little Boo-boo’s end-of-semester student violin recital last month. He is getting very good on the violin now - I think he is a better violinist than I was. I also like that he has a good musical sense; when I play with him I could hear him respond to the dynamic or tempo change I made. That’s innate. La Professeure was most excited about the recital because we were sitting across the hall from Rachel Weisz. She was also there to listen to her son (who wasn’t all that great). At first I wasn’t sure if it was her, though she looked exactly like herself on screen; I only knew when they announced her son’s name as Aronofsky. When La Professeure later tried to tell people about our brush with fame, all they said was, “who’s Rachel Weisz?”

Last updated March 26, 2020