It’s not that I don’t want to talk; it’s that I’ve been superstitious about how it all might turn out.   I feel as if the current narrative has to reach a certain point of no return before I’ll feel okay slapping a frame on it.  Fear not, though:  it might not be very much longer before we get there.

I’m still in school and doing well,  for anybody who cares about that.

I want to tell you about it here, but I need to wait.

Suffice for the moment to say that the deceased was delivered to his intended final resting place, more or less.

Stress………………………………

Pride was mostly pretty good, although I was WAY more social than I usually am or thought I could manage at this juncture.  Our set was plagued by tuning problems, but the PA and the sound guy were excellent, and nobody else said they noticed the tuning or other glitches (for example, at one point C looked up, saw a girl she’d been crushing on and forgot where she was at in the song… normally it’s me who does that stuff).  Opening the festival was passably OK in terms of audience — we’d have gotten a much larger crowd in our original time slot today, but we wouldn’t have in the closing slot we were given before we got the one we finally got, since everybody partied so hard last night they all pooped out hours before Pride festivities closed (including me, although I didn’t drink much at all last night).  So yeah, smaller crowd, but I honestly don’t know where I would have gotten the energy today unless I’d passed up hanging with friends yesterday, which I’m very glad I didn’t.

The aggregation of friends hanging out most of the weekend included X-Girl (now Boi).   At one point between activities we took a nap in my bed, along with another friend visiting from out of town.  Listening to him snore was sadly nostalgic.

The rest of Pride, well, there were a lot of very very very cute people around, and mostly I just felt sorry for myself about that. 

Some great music in the lineup, though.  Overall I was most impressed with the littler acts, although Chris Pureka did a nice set.  Emily Herring too… <3 her.  Uh Huh Her… well, not my thing:  the Blake Babies did that style of music much better in the 90s already, and I can’t be into UHH just because of Leisha Hailey like everybody else is.  Gone Against Blue has turned into a really fun energetic band, and have tightened up a LOT since they first started out, which was when I saw them last.   And PDXMajesty did a nice job on the main stage yesterday — I regret to say I went home and fell over with my stomachache before her set today on the cafe stage.

And now  I have to clean and pack for the trip home….

Thank the gods we are relatively early on the roster of party entertainment. 

Course, the whole stinkin’ world is going to DQ tonight.  Not I.

I cannot WAIT for this weekend to be over and done with.  I could nearly say the same about the entire month, but there’ll be some good stuff in there, I hope.

I should *know* by now that there are going to be problems.

However:  despite a series of communication SNAFUs and scheduling and advertising mixups which had me pretty irritated if not downright despairing earlier in the day,  within the past few hours two lovely souls have yanked assorted strings to put us in a different time slot.  We’re now opening the festival, still not playing the day or time when we’re listed in the program but also no longer closing the festivities after most people have left.  I’m much happier about this for many reasons, not the least of which is that my Pride responsibilities will end very early in the weekend and I can relax and enjoy it a little bit (or enjoy avoiding the whole rest of the festival, not sure yet) when I’m not busy packing for my trip home.

And I  bought a couple new hats today… not the hip sideman fedora I’d envisioned (head’s too small for all the cool ones I found), but two caps in styles I *know* work for me.  I’ll wear the jauntier of the two on stage Saturday.

I recently acquired a new therapist who noticed that I sometimes seem to have a slightly easier job receiving feedback orally than I do when it’s written.   She’d suggested in our last session that as a first step toward fixing the problem, I could do worse than to enlist a helper from within the class to read my returned papers before I do and help administer the feedback to me.

So I did.  I also administered beer to both myself and the classmate first, you know, just in case.

Excellent grade.  Professor would like to see me work it up into a thesis. 

Of course, there were little things she wanted to see changed, and I’ve got the gist of what those are (I’ll bring the stupid thing to therapy with me to try to hear the rest — I guess if this is what I have to do in order to get through the second half of the program, it’s what I have to do), but overall, this is good news.

That’s the second time in two weeks I’d been genuinely fearful I’d been exposed as an academic impostor and would have to leave school, and the opposite turned out to be true.

But there does seem to need to be a place where I can post a more general smattering of ideas and goings-on to a more general smattering of people.  Rather than post new entries to the 4.0 blog, I decided to start over on WP, mostly for usability reasons.

More substantive content to follow…