ugh

There's too much going on right now.  All I want to do is practice and be left alone.

... kind of.  Except I miss my friends.  The only people I talked to today aside from my students and their parents were Jen (the music director at the school I play for), Georgia (the accounts manager at the school I play for), and my mom.

...oh yeah, and the guy who did my mom's pedicure for her.  She thought it would be funny to hand the phone over to him so we could chat for a bit seeing as how I apparently don't get out much.  I guess it's true.  I'm blogging about it.  But whatever... I'm contemplating leaving society and living in a cave right now anyway.

And can I just take this opportunity to say that my mother is always trying to set me up with someone???  If it's not her male pedicurist (a man I'm convinced is 30 yrs old and doing toenails for a living), then it's the male nurse tech at the emergency room last month.  My parents look harder for a mate for me than I do.  It's a little unnerving sometimes... as in, "No, Mom.  I really have no desire to talk to the man who's painting your toenails right now... thanks."  Or maybe, "Mom, I'm sure this man is a lovely, caring nurse, but clearly he's just as uncomfortable as I am right now.  Perhaps we should save awkward introductions for a time when you aren't having chest pains..."

But I digress.  All I want to do is practice and be left alone so I can get work done... and work on my stuff.  But I have a teaching and rehearsal schedule to keep.  And multiple performances coming up.  Ugh.  So I burn both ends of the day.  And I start having 10 and 12-hour days in a row.  Again:  ugh.

Sometimes when I have free time, I wonder what I used to do with it... today I had an hour for lunch around 2 pm and I wondered what I was supposed to be doing with myself other than eating and getting myself from point A to point B.

And then of course there's everyone else's stress... I need to get better at saying no to all of that in my brain.  As in, "Ok, yes, you're telling me all of this but it is not my problem.  And I love you and I'm sorry but there's nothing I can really do about it.  Emotional detachment commence."

That sounds horrible.  I sound like all the other jerks out there in the world... I guess you have to be a little bit of a jerkface now and then to protect yourself.  But I don't like that either... being an adult is really lame and unfeeling sometimes.

Anyway, all that to say... Lent / contest season / spring has basically become my own version of tax season.  I'm just glad to get to the end of each day.  It's frankly a minor miracle if I crawl into bed at night and haven't resolved to give up on society and go live in a cave by the end of the week...

... but honestly, I'd probably take my piano with me if I did.  Because then I'd finally make some serious headway in my Beethoven.