September 25, 2014

Went with DJ and R and M to Grey Eagle to hear a band called OK GO, which everyone knew but me. The food at the Grey Eagle is unexpectedly delicious, and I started the night right with gigantic bottles of cider. My tolerance for things that are very loud and very crowded is very low, but the room was full of happy people, dancers and smilers, and the band’s music was much to my taste– except for the volume. Makes you listen with your chest. Everyone was cute.

After my taking some pains to arrange the house and my schedule for her, the house cleaner phoned in her excuses and asked if she could come some other time. The school phoned about her son, and she had to go and pick him up. . . the 4th time this has happened.  I understand the difficulty of some people’s lives, but I need to be reminded why I should, necessarily, put up with the upheaval that causes in mine.  I do not recall ever demanding someone change their expectations or their plans for me, certainly never their offering to do so spontaneously. If you make an appointment to do something at 11 o’clock, do that thing at 11 o’clock. If you can’t do it. . . if there is a chance that you can’t do it. . .  don’t make the commitment. I don’t see why it is so difficult. I have tried to be a saint of patience, but the effort has never borne fruit, and is not doing so now.

Surprising, crushing pain in my leg.

Chatted with Frank in dark Izzy’s café downtown. Chatted with Bill in his gallery, which was closed, but I came barging in anyway. It was worth it, because I got a kiss from him.

Auditioned for NC Stage’s Amadeus. It was fun. I heard the auditions before me, and everyone else was shouting.  Perhaps I should have found reason to shout.

The mowers mowed down my fig tree. I had nursed it back from its die-back after a deadly freeze, and the loss of it affected me like the sudden death of a sick child who seemed to be recovering. I felt very bad. I called Nick the Lawn Guy, and he felt very bad, but still the leaves of my little fig wither on their broken stems.

A box of antique roses came, too soon. I wasn’t expecting them, and there is no time now to do what I wanted to do, dig a new patch of garden in slowness and ceremony and place them in. My weekend is annihilated by choir retreat. Had to dig fast, before they withered, before I go away. I’m caught in a vice. I rush from deed to deed expected by others, a whirlwind of effort for which there has been no reward in the past and none to be anticipated in time to come. If only I could be left alone. If only I could cherish an expectation higher than being left alone.

A mantis, brown with autumn, sat on my shirt as I mourned over this and that. She was a comforting angel. It shows what kind of life I lead that my comforting angel should be that.