Friday night... live (or adventures in free culture)

Well, it would seem that whenever life starts feeling like it is one big downward swoop, a free-fall into nothing, you hit rock bottom with a jolt and rebound into the air. Perhaps it is more like a perpetual motion machine, circling, cycling, round and round. I come to the bottom and just as I realize that I am there, I am already climbing back up heading towards the top.

It has been a rough couple of weeks. I start to get sick at the end of the quarter, and then papers are due. I have a hard time staying focused, I'll admit. But, things are looking better, after the opening of classes, my first week back, desperately preparing for a conference presentation, a performance and trying, trying to write a paper that didn't want to be written. Yet.

I have learned to ride out the cycles, wait for the pain to subside, climb back on the bicycle and start again. I am learning. I stood up for myself. That was another biggie. I so rarely am able to have any sort of confrontation, but I summoned the guts to fight for myself, and it turned out well. Well, as well as could be expected... I didn't get a week back, minus the anxiety, but heck, at least my career isn't decimated. Yet.

So this week, I. went back to school, really last week was a treat because she got to go back to her old after-school program and all sorts of field trips (not to be confused with "after-school Bob" of rock and roll fame, who will, incidentally be playing out again in a few weeks, and having had such a marvelous time last show, I will likely be there, mildly lit, like before. Girls only this time, I think). So if there were a theme to my days, this week would be that of live music. I got to go to the Arlington with I.'s class, a bus full of elementary school children and a teacher (not hers) who thought she had lost a few children (it turned out she never took roll in the first place and was miscounting, to boot). We saw the Soweto Gospel Choir, from South Africa. I love the Arlington for all its cutesy, Disneyfied starry ceiling. We ended up separated from her class, with another mom and her daughter, on the balcony, and it was excellent. I love the South African dancing, there was so much energy in the room, and the entire auditorium, replete with children was mesmerized in a hushed lull. I. sucked her thumb assiduously, curled into my lap. God I am going to miss that kid.

Then, I got an email from a woman on campus with whom I have developed a relationship through booking her space for conferences. She offered me comp tickets to see the Celso Duarte band play, and it was unbelievably good. (Becky and I briefly ditched our kids and had some adult time). He is a virtuoso on the harpa jarocha, and I was rocking in my seat, drumming on my uncovered thighs, closing my eyes, losing myself in the thumping of feet on the tarima, the upright bass, the words and voices blending in and out, the encore left me smiling, "chupa chupa, chupa chupa, cuando la chupas le sacas lo mejor" of course referring to the guanábana... or maybe not. My skin prickled in ecstasy, riding the chair, in place, in trance-like connection. There is nothing, nothing like living the act in person.

I have been settling in to having a new housemate. He is sweet and fun, and convinces me to buy things I want, drinks wine and eats my food happily (really there is nothing more that you could ask for in a housemate, except maybe that he be neater than me - not hard to do, and pay the rent promptly, which he also has done.) There is the added benefit that I. has decided that he is a Spanish-speaker, and therefore will speak to him in Spanish, unlike other people whose English is too good to trick her. He is here to teach Catalán, but he promised to teach me Italian, we'll see, one new language a quarter might be enough and right now I am working in triplicate, two new alphabets and a germanic language, with which I have very little contact.

So tomorrow we are taking our first (my first, not hers) Santa Barbara hike... that is, not on the beach, but an actual trail. Becky and Nate, with whom I. and I went to Bakersfield last weekend (see slideshow here) and the kids are coming, and then, as if I wasn't way behind on work already, I am going out dancing with a girlfriend who is stalking a boy, a dj, and needed moral support. Hey, I do what I can, and stalking has always been a favorite pastime (NOTE to FBI, CIA, NSA... this is meant as a lighthearted joke, please read as such). I will consider this outing to be research for the soundtrack of undergraduate party music that I have been assigned to do. I will stay sober, but probably get hot and sweaty dancing. I need that release sometimes. Don't we all?

Then, surprisingly, I.'s therapist called me, Thursday afternoon while I was desperately naked and trying to finish my brutal paper (which I finally, finally did, and am thus awarding myself by narrating my absurdly mundane life), and I flew down the stairs thinking it a more exciting call, holding each breast in its respective hand so that bouncing would not tear flesh, or throw out my back (ok, I am not quite so delicate, but running with no bra isn't the best for long-term perk maintenance either, I am told) only to be offered tickets to the SB symphony for Sunday. Free tickets to the symphony for I.? Sure, I didn't even ask what they were playing, the last time we went, incidentally also for free, it was great, and I have a hard time saying no to any sort of live performance. It isn't so much that I am cheap, I am willing to pay for tickets to see things I want, although price acts as a deterrant, but I am usually unwilling to commit to spending the time, that I never think I have, but then find in order to write other inane things, like this post, for example. And somewhere in all this I must write the paper that I am presenting next week in Kentucky. It'll happen, though. Sunday I'll start writing. I need a day just to relax. Just one. This time it is actually something I know and like, so I think I can easily pull an 8-pager in a few hours, and if it is horrible, and I crash and burn and destroy single-handedly my career, at least I can rest calmly knowing that I provided free entertainment to somebody, somewhere, if only for a fleeting moment.