After another unsuccessful audition yesterday, I spent all of today doing nothing. Nooooooothing. Nothing.

Literally, this is what I did today.
9 – Got up, made coffee and muffins. Moped.
11 – Recorded and edited my podcast.
12 – Grocery shopping. Grocery store resembles a zoo. Why, if I don’t have a traditional day job, do I always end up in the grocery store on weekends? Little old lady tries to get ahead of me in line. I defeat her the Canadian way: by pointedly ignoring her and standing very very close to the cart ahead of me.
1 – Had lunch. Moped.
1:30 – 3 – Read old comment threads on blogs I like.
3 – 5 – Attempted to install Unetbootin on my eee so I could create a bootable usb drive on it.
5 – Fed dogs.
5 – 6 – Gave up on eee, attempted to make bootable usb on the Mac again.
6 – Gave up. Tried to boot eee again and realized I’d messed up something vital once more and it’s having seizures.
6 -7 – Moped.
7 – 8 – Bath. Moped while in the bath.
8 – Restored eee to factory settings. Started blogging….

And here we are. I was going to say that for having done nothing all day I certainly don’t feel very relaxed, but looking back on it I actually did a bunch of frustrating stuff. True, I didn’t accomplish anything, other than buying potatoes and dried beans, but I was certainly doing stuff for at least 25% of the day.

I feel vaguely out of sorts, a bit stuffy, a bit achy in the shoulders, a bit dissatisfied with my lot in life. Is this what it’s like to have a real job where you do pointless and frustrating things on a computer all day while wishing for things that are just out of reach?

If it is, I certainly understand why people get depression and headaches and lower back pain. The symptoms of life my ass. Maybe we should call them “the symptoms of a wasted life”. Seems more accurate.

As a gift I give you a dictionary.

In this episode:
- Socialism? Really?
- The one thing I have in common with Glen Beck: I love America, and I fear for her, because something is *not* connecting here.
- That is not socialism. That is Gilded Age robber baron capitalism with some protection for the proletariat. That’s why things are the way they are.
- Yet another failed audition: I had to watch a Muppet movie last night to get over it.
- I withdraw from the competition – the rest of the sopranos who are just as good as me can fight over small roles from minor opera companies.
- My voice is not so unbelievably fantastic that you go “AAAAAAHHHHHH!” and wet your pants.
- Email feedback to kaythecomplainer@gmail.com and I will send you a cookie.

Link.

Coming soon to a theatre near you: A race against time, as one woman struggles with a small army of USB drives, a Linux distro, and a recalcitrant netbook. Will it ever boot up again?

“All I wanted was to update Flash so I could watch Jon Stewart online! And now I’m trapped in this nightmare!”

In all seriousness, anyone out there know how to install Eeebuntu without involving a shaman or sacrificing a goat? Because I’m out of ideas.*

*Not exactly – I haven’t yet tried to do it from a bootable DVD, largely because I don’t have an external DVD drive. I may go buy one tomorrow and give it a shot.

I try to give people, even people with apparently bizarre beliefs, the benefit of the doubt.  Lots of things which are at first glance ridiculous – the success of the Left Behind books comes to mind – turn out to be real or true, after all.

But when you’re talking with someone, there are certain red flags that may indicate that they’re not altogether on the same reality train as the rest of us.

1. Insistence that they’ve discovered a hidden truth no one knows.

2. Vague plans to inform the authorities.

3. They are being stalked or harrassed in subtle ways by the nefarious evil-doers in question.  Such stalking might take the form of property damage that is too minor for others to notice, but that the putative crackpot insists was done.

4. Either no one else or a only select few are aware of the truth.

5. Yet any oppression the nefarious evil-doing group has experienced is because people won’t tolerate their wicked, wicked ways.

6. The evil that the nefarious evil-doers do is all-encompassing and vague in nature, ranging from sex crimes to drug dealing.

7.  The nefarious evil-doers are in some way sub-human.

8. Saying, “Really?  All the [insert name of purported nefarious evil-doing group here] that I’ve met have been really nice,” gets the response, “They’re good at putting on an act.  They’ve been pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes for centuries.”

9. The putative crackpot claims to practice extreme caution in spreading the truth, because the all-powerful nefarious evil-doers will come after him if he goes public.

10. Yet he’s telling total strangers at the pub all about it: in case they DO come after him someone will know why.

And lastly…

11.  General craziness red flags such as nervous laughter at odd times, an unwillingness to engage in different topics, and a moustache.

So, as you might guess, I ran into someone yesterday who displayed all of the above signs and more.  Guess what group of nefarious evil-doers he thought were making small dents on his car, staking out his house, and reading his emails.

No, it wasn’t the Jews.

Seriously, not the Jews.  Not the Illuminati, not the Pope, not the reptoid aliens.

Click through if you want to know who, according to this guy, are just as bad as the Mafia.

It was the Mennonites.

MENNONITES.   Those nice, traditional, choral singing, bonnet-wearing butter-churning unfortunately corporal-punishment believing people who to varying degrees still think it’s 1750.

The nefarious conspiracy uncovered!

This man thought Mennonites were reading his emails.

Of course he was a completely delusional nut.  I felt really sorry for him, actually.  It must really ruin your life to be convinced that sinister people in buggies are waiting just around the corner to take you out.

You know what’s kind of ironic?  Guess in what context I met the Mennonite conspiracy theorist.

It was at Skeptics in the Pub, an event put on by the Association for Science and Reason.  I went to hear a talk about the Large Hadron Collider (which was awesome).  If there was anywhere you’d be safe from conspiracy theories and other nonsense, you’d think it’d be there.

But noooooo.  I sit next to someone who thinks that Mennonites are out to get him.

Other than that it was a lot of fun, though.

Unexpected side effect of taking the week off to lie on the couch recovering from flu that I totally should have expected: Muscle atrophy!

It’s like I just started the 14 kilometre bicycle commute all over again.  After two days of biking so far I am very, very sore.

OW MY LEGS.

(If you follow the link in the previous post, there IS a picture of me in which my legs are clearly visible.  In case you’re wondering.)

In other news, I had a dream the other night that I was biking down an alley and ran into a tiger wearing a toupee.

No, I really have nothing to say.  I’m still pondering Plan C.

Forgot to do this earlier – I said in the podcast that I’d put up a note about whether or not I was doing the lounge show.  Unfortunately, while I’m a lot better, I’m still too sick to do a show.  Next gig of the same type will be Dec. 20.  I will learn Christmas songs.

Until then, go to Ben’s blog and listen to some clips from the show we did last Saturday, at which I most likely caught the pigdogbirdmanalien flu.

The title of this post has, obviously, nothing to do with its content. Again I have done nothing today but watch movies, eat ice cream, and agonize.  There is nothing like a bout of enforced inactivity to make you feel sorry for yourself.

Seriously, though, I have a new respect/sympathy for people with chronic illnesses that deplete their energy.  Today I had precisely one thing to accomplish, other than the movies/ice cream/self-pity jag: I had to print off a headshot and post an application (with the headshot in it).   Simple.   I walked to a drugstore that – I thought – had a photo lab and a post office, printed off my headshot, attempted to buy a thermometer, failed (who the hell is buying all the thermometers????), and then looked around the store for the post office counter….

….then realized there wasn’t one.

I swear there used to be.

Anyway, as I said, I have a newfound respect for people with medical conditions that limit their mobility.  In my normal state I a)would have biked, not walked to the drugstore b) would thus have said, “Huh,” and  biked to the nearest post office that actually existed.  Today, however, I was too woozy and ill to bike, and just walking for 20 minutes was about as much activity as I could handle.  These were my options:

1) Walk home, get my bike, and bike to another post office.

2) Take a taxi to the nearest post office.

3)  Put a lot of stamps on the envelope, put it in the mailbox, and hope for the best.

I did plan 3).  I knew I didn’t have the energy for 1) – I barely had the energy for the original plan – or the money for 2), and I did happen to have stamps.  I already knew how much postage that size/weight of letter needs, and it was only to placate my inner screaming anxiety freak that I wanted to find a post office and have the envelope weighed officially.  But the point – the point is that this was a trivial little errand which would normally have taken me ten minutes, and today took an hour and a half to accomplish.
I can’t imagine what life would be like if every day was like this.

I posted this to the RSS last night and completely forgot to set up a post for it here.  Apologies.  Anyway, in this episode I complain about have the pigdogbirdman flu, and ponder my next career move.

Link.

OK, so I don’t know for a *fact* that I have swine flu. I do have something, either a bad cold or a flu of some type, so I’ve spent the past couple days off work, lying around and watching movies. It would be a lot of fun if I weren’t physically so miserable, though there’s a sort of anomie that comes over you when it’s 5 PM and starting to get dark and you’ve done nothing all day but watch The Thing, Porco Rosso, and The Great Muppet Caper.

But I have managed to get some knitting done, so it’s not a TOTAL waste.

Anyway, if it is swine flu, my apologies to anyone I came in contact with while I was incubating and shedding virus like Gus sheds white fur in the springtime. I sincerely hope you don’t get infected and die. But moving on: in between anime and horror movies I have been thinking.

If you want to read some feverish ramblings, please click through.

I do not know yet if I’ll be called back for the second round of the audition I did two weeks ago. But say I am, and say I get the job. Say everything goes completely as I hope. What then? What’s the best case scenario?

The *best* case is I become a full-time opera singer in a few years. I travel to different cities to do different roles, I sing with orchestras here and there, I record stuff. It’s possible. People do it. I’m good enough to do it.

But do I want to? Will it make me happy?

The way I’m living now isn’t tenable in the long term. I can’t continue to teach 20+ hours a week and sing at the level I’m singing at now when I’m 40. I can’t do the work of what is basically running a small business (teaching) and running another small business (auditioning, gigging, self-producing stuff) and helping run another small business (the band) forever. One of them’s got to go. And as much as I like teaching, the reason why I keep working at getting other stuff going is that when I’m just teaching – when I don’t have anything else in the works or going on – I’m not happy.

My original plan, or the plan I came up with after winning the Eckhardt-Grammate, was something like this:

Plan A – Try as hard as I can to make it as an opera/concert singer for the next five or six years.

Plan B – If it doesn’t work, go back to school, get a Masters, and just teach full-time.

But if neither of those options is really what I want, then I think it’s time for:

Plan C – Be a truly independent artist. Find a way to express who you are and use all your talents fully.

Plan C is really scary. There is no one to help you with Plan C. There is no summer programme to apply for. There is no career ladder. There is no specific grant set up for it. There’s no guarantee and no safety net.

But I think it’s what I have to do. I don’t know exactly what it looks like yet, but I think I need to do it. And if I spent the time and energy I’ve been spending on trying to break into the opera world on it – then I think I could do something amazing.

As soon as I’m over this flu.

I had an awful dream last night. I had an audition for something – I can’t remember what, but instead of arias they wanted two art songs. OK, I thought, and picked two that were impressive and I sing well, and put the sheet music in a binder.

The audition was in one of those only-in-dreams scrambled spaces where my studio was somehow or other attached to a theatre or rehearsal space. I arrived just as my audition was about to start. I wasn’t dressed, just wearing sweats or street clothes, and I was called.

“I’ll just change and grab my music,” I said. This was fine, so I went into the studio…

…And I couldn’t find the binder. It was NOWHERE. I had lost it or forgotten it somewhere or it had just disappeared. I was in a room full of music, and I couldn’t find anything.

So I kept thinking, “Oh, I’ll do that song instead,” and then I wouldn’t be able to find THAT piece of music.

And the minutes were ticking away, and every now and then someone would poke their head through the door and see how I was doing.

“Just fine!” I’d say. “Just give me a minute longer, I can’t find this one score.”

But of course I was getting more and more desperate and frantic and I hadn’t even changed yet.

(This is, I should add, not at all like real life, where I’m always hyper-prepared for auditions and show up super early with too many copies of everything in binders and extra headshots just in case. As you can see I appear to have some anxieties around punctuality and preparedness.)

What I eventually decided to do was sing something I knew that was unaccompanied (because then the accompanist wouldn’t need the music!) and something, anything else at all that I could find. I don’t remember what the second song I eventually found was. To top it all off the room I was supposed to audition in had to be used for a choir practice, so I was going to have to audition in front of eighty snarky gum-chewing teenagers.

I woke up before the actual auditioning began. This may not sound like much of a nightmare to you – but to me it’s enough to wake me up in a cold sweat.

And I don’t even have any auditions booked for the near future…