Breathing Deeply

[ladysprite]

For the first time in months, I finally feel like I can relax and exhale. It's a scary, kind of alien feeling - I've been crumpled up into a ball of anxiety and worry and pessimism for so long that it almost aches, like using muscles that have atrophied.

My husband is gainfully employed, with a real full-time job that pays something like a living wage. I've got enough work to last me through most of the month, and a couple of interviews for full-time positions. And in the meantime, relief work is turning out to be amazingly enjoyable - the clinics are nice, the staff treat me like I'm a gold-plated goddess, and they've already started requesting that I come back when they need coverage in the future. It's amazing how much being appreciated professionally has turned my world around, and it makes me wonder just how much internal damage was done when that was missing.

The promise of financial stability is strong healing magic, too. Money isn't everything, I know, but the lack can make life look pretty grim. But somehow it looks like, over the next few months, we'll be going from scraping along and surviving by eating away at the savings while surreptitiously searching for a cheaper place to live to comfortable and safe. And with that biggest of all worries out of the way, not needing to wonder if we'll be able to cover rent long-term, a lot of other worries and issues and complexities suddenly seem so much smaller and more handle-able.

I can breathe again. I can unclench my shoulders. Damn, it feels good.

Comments

[jducoeur]

Hmm. While a reasonable theory, it's not likely to actually work. The problem is that, while a lightly trained dancer has some hope of correcting based on the music, a lightly trained musician is *very* unlikely to be able to make the same adjustment. Odd are that the dancers and the musicians would just keep going in separate directions. (It might work if the musicians know the dance well enough to figure out from the movement where they should be, but that didn't look like the case here.)

I agree that rehearsing together is important for really getting it right. This is one reason why the Waytes try to play at dance practice once a month -- it just feels different when you have real people dancing as you play...

[new-man.livejournal.com]

The problem is that, while a lightly trained dancer has some hope of correcting based on the music, a lightly trained musician is *very* unlikely to be able to make the same adjustment.

I fully admit to neither being a dance expert nor a music expert. But I know what I like -- and what I don't. During the performance in question, one of the musicans screwed up. The dancers tried to compensate AND the musican tried to compensate. The result was an embarrassment of failure on stage.

I have more influence over the actors than I do over the musicians. In an ideal world, mistakes wouldn't happen at all. Second to that, if a mistake does happen, the two groups will know whose job it is to play catch-up, regardless of who made the mistake. If both groups change things to fix an error, we end up worse than we started with. So, my direction for the actors to stay the course so the musicians can correct their error. Regardless of whether or not it's a period model, it's one way of dealing with the problem when it came up.