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

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

Yay! *hugs* of congratulation and happiness. :)

[pixel.livejournal.com]

"Glad to see things are turning around for you two. Sorry I haven't gotten back to youabout the Jeep, I have yet to see the neighbor who owns it."

[sebastian-tombs.livejournal.com]

wren13 has been much happier in her time as a relief vet. I have campaigned a couple of times for her not to even consider going back to a "real" job.

[new-man.livejournal.com]

Glad to hear things are picking up. See you Thursday. We discovered the hard way they don't know the dance will enouhg to do it if the musicians screw up.

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

Double yay! Glad that A. has a job, and that you're enjoying the relief work - I hope the next position you take is with someplace that really appreciates you.

[warinbear.livejournal.com]

the staff treat me like I'm a gold-plated goddess

Well, good for them! I'm glad they got that much right, at least.

[ladysprite.livejournal.com]

Eek. I wish I could help there, but even I tend to have problems remembering a dance in the face of musical error.... Y'all have my sympathy.

[braider.livejournal.com]

*hug* It's wonderful to have complete strangers see you as competent, worthwhile, and someone they would like to see again. It makes other things in life look so much different.

[mermaidlady]

Hey! That's not really fair. I knew exactly what steps we should have been doing. It seemed at first like the musicians had skipped a section, so we tried to correct. That was the wrong course of action. There was just no hope as the song devolved into two different tunes...

[new-man.livejournal.com]

It seemed at first like the musicians had skipped a section, so we tried to correct. That was the wrong course of action.

Right. You guys should just dance the same dance no matter what happens. I should be able to stick you in a silent room in the dark and get you to hit the same marks at the same time every time.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Good.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

Money worries make everything worse. Conversely, the knowledge that you don't have to worry about your next rent payment or meal makes it much easier to deal with other worries. This is pretty universal.

Glad to hear that being a relief vet is working out for you. Your comment about needing professional validation is spot-on -- I have a friend, a very good family lawyer, who was nearly driven out of the field by a boss who could only comment on what he saw as her flaws, and did so incessantly. I'm sure you already have enough professional confidence that the occasional critical remark doesn't send you into a tailspin, but there's a HUGE difference between "the occasional critical remark" and "the boss constantly telling you that you can't do anything right". It's similar to the difference between normal marital spats and living with an abusive spouse.

[jducoeur]

Except that that isn't how most period dance works, and it isn't how it's *designed* to work. With the exception of simple stuff like some ECD, the dance and the music are designed to interweave, and it's more or less impossible to dance them truly out of synch -- it's like trying to sing the bridge of a song while the musicians are playing the chorus.

If the musicians play the wrong section, the correct response of the dancers is to skip to that section, and fudge as best they can. That's just the way balli like this function. It's not like modern dance, where the music is really just an overlay for a consistent beat. In general, the notion of the dance being about hitting precise marks at precise times is a *very* modern outlook -- period dance, even with choreographed pieces in a performance context, typically had a far more improvisational tone than that...

[new-man.livejournal.com]

The problem comes from the lack of rehearsal with both dancers and musicians. The musicians rehearsed without the dancers, while the dancers rehearsed (for the most part) to a tape.

Since neither group had any experience correcting for the other one, in the case of a mistake, I wanted one group to remain steady on while the other one corrected, rather than both groups trying to correct and us ending up in a train wreck (which is what happened). If we spent more time rehearsing together, I'm sure the strategy would be different.

[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.