Hibernation

I woke up at noon, exhausted. After “breakfast”, I drove to the post office to return the movie I'd watched the night before, Gosford Park. It was an authentic portrayal of wealthy British people and their servants, and a classic whodunit murder mystery with exceptional performances. It was a good movie that, while I appreciated all these things about it, bored me with nonstop dialogue and heavy accents. I get that Altman was making a commentary on the old class system, I do. I just had trouble sitting through well over an hour of people talking before the murder actually takes place. The movie didn't have to be two-and-a-half hours long. I feel like a moron saying I was bored, like there's some intellectual failing on my part. The only way I can reconcile this is to say that it was good, great even, if you like this sort of thing, and decide that it just wasn't for me. If that makes me dumb, so be it. ”I think I'm dumb, or maybe just happy. Think I'm just happy...”

Today was one of THOSE days, those nothing days where time flies without me having fun. I'd taken a vacation day yesterday, gone for a nice drive and gotten a card and some snacks for my parents for that holiday on Monday. I came home, called Earthlink, and finally canceled my dial-up service so I wouldn't be paying for a service I was no longer using since getting DSL, and an e-mail address that now exclusively got spam since telling all my friends my new address. Spam is frightening. Not only have I been deleting a mixed bag of over 100 e-mails offering to increase girth, cup sizes, and cure anxiety, but it's not uncommon for the return address to be disguised as a hybrid of my friends' names(i.e. “Reynaldo C. Novick”) with personalized subject lines like, “Hey, it's me.” I've had e-mails pretending to be Earthlink asking me to click a link and re-enter my credit card information to “verify”. I've even seen e-mails with my own address. Like I'm going to think, “Hey, I wonder what I sent me? This must be important! Huh, do I really need Cialis? Oh well, it DID come from me....” When the girl asked me if I wanted to pay $9.95 to keep my e-mail address it was hard not to laugh.

Yesterday was an efficient day. My dad has been nagging me to practice my instrument for weeks now. It's important, especially as a brass musician, to play a little each day to maintain one's embouchure. The lip muscles will deteriorate and soften over time, resulting in a loss of range and endurance. In other words, I wouldn't be able to get out high notes or play for an extended period of time. After twenty years I should have the discipline to practice without being reminded, but I get burned out every year. Every year parades and Italian feasts start up around March or April, increasing every week until I'm playing 2 or 3 gigs a weekend in addition to my day job. In July these performances peak, and I also play in a summer band for my dad's high school alumni. We rehearse 2 hours a night on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and play concerts on Fridays, for four consecutive weeks. July is the most stress filled month of the year for me. In August things start to subside and by September there's maybe 2 gigs a month. There's one or two in October and maybe a holiday parade in November, and then I have several months off. Usually, from November to March I put the horn in its case and don't touch it. It's a bad habit to have gotten into, especially since I'm squandering a talent, but one I've become overly comfortable with. My dad often regrets that he gave up playing after high school, and didn't pick it up again until 20 years later when my mom bought him a horn for their first wedding anniversary after seeing his high school year book. I appreciate that I should learn from his mistakes, but sometimes his incessant, “Are you going to practice? When are you going to practice? Are you going to give it up like everyone else in your school did? You'd better practice. It's going to be embarrassing when you go to band and can't play.” gets really, REALLY, annoying, and has the opposite of its intended effect.

I went off on a bit of a tangential rant there; the reason he wanted me to practice this weekend is because Monday night I'm filing in at a rehearsal for another player who couldn't make it and asked me to sit in. I sat in for him one other time a few months ago and did like the challenging music the group played, but I'm not looking for another group to join, during my off months and especially in the Summer when I get busy again. After work I like to go to gym for an hour, then come home and eat dinner, and then just watch television. There's little chance of me leaving work at 5:00 even if my work was done, because I hate the traffic, so I'm probably going to go directly to this rehearsal. Just thinking about it makes me tired. Yesterday, I did practice after calling Earthlink, and wasn't in as bad a shape as I would expect to have been. I recover surprisingly fast from musical inactivity. While I was downstairs playing I noticed my dad had shoved the plastic cover to a phone jack over some rewiring I had done in order to put a DSL filter on their rotary phone. It couldn't close with the wires in the way and there was a hole for them to go through, but they had to be repositioned. When I finished playing, I took the cover off and made the wire arrangement much neater so the cover would fit properly.

If yesterday was efficient, today was anything but. When I got home from the post office, I lay down “for a minute”. Suddenly, my mom was yelling from the other room that she was going to church early because she had to stop at the supermarket first, and threatened to leave without me if I wasn't ready. I grabbed my watch and saw it was 4:30 already. It was cold out when we went to church. Colder still when we came out, and stopped off to pick up some dinner. And now I'm blogging.

I've always napped when I was bored. I don't know why. Sometimes, all the things there are to do that are fun don't appeal to me for some reason. I get in a mood where I don't want to read, or play a game, or watch t.v., or watch a movie, and there's no place to go. When there's nothing to do and nothing appeals to me, I just sort of hibernate. My dad's variation of this is to sit in a chair. Even when he was younger, when nothing was on television and it wasn't time to eat yet and he'd already practiced, I'd see him just sit in a chair, fold his hands, and just sort of stare and wait. I found him like that this afternoon when I got up, and when he heard me he snapped out of it and asked me a question about some music he was writing. My mom's variation is to fall asleep watching television. She wakes up pretty quickly when you talk to her and denies having slept, using my dad's trademark “resting my eyes” as an explanation, but of course doesn't know what's happened in the program she had been watching.

Today was one of THOSE days, those nothing days where time flies without me having fun. I did have a pretty cool dream this afternoon about my new cubicle, which I moved in to on Thursday, and how apparently there's a spa with a jacuzzi and stuff just on the other side of where I now sit, as well as a Sears where cubicles are in real life. Tomorrow's supposed to be a fairly nice day for this time of year. Maybe I should take a sketchbook down to one of the five beaches in my area that I never go to....