The dangers of frustration

I’m about to go shopping (again) today, to try and get the things I failed to get yesterday.  Target, apparently, found out what was on my list and immediately rid their shelves of all of it, and as such, I was unable to purchase one damn thing that I wanted.  Well, that’s not entirely true.  There was one thing there I could have gotten, but I had become so frustrated from not finding of the other items on my list that I somehow decided it wasn’t even worth it.  How peculiar!

The thing is, this isn’t by any means the first time I’ve let my frustration guide my actions.  It’s happened before with shopping, but I hardly go shopping, because I hate spending money.  Really, it’s almost like I’m Scrooge McDuck, only real (and human.. and not old.. and not Scottish or whatever he was supposed to be).  The one thing, though, that I’m generally willing to spend money on, though as little as I can manage, is food.  But even food (and I’m a big fan of food) is not immune to the dangers of frustration.

If something frustrates me when I’m trying to decide what to eat at a restaurant — they don’t have what I want, the prices are higher than I expected, there’s a special on buffalo wings that doesn’t include boneless wings which is nothing but pure and unadulterated bullsh*t — I often get what I call “hangry.”  To be hangry is to be hungry, but so angry that you can’t eat.  It’s not a great feeling, and it worries me that something as unimportant as the above can lead me to a state of distinct unpleasantness.  A perfect blend of seething and sulking, I’m pretty much as grey as winter until something later cheers me up, at which point I may or may not eat the previously-skipped meal.  Something’s wrong with that, right?

I’ve always had a tempestuous relationship with my own tempestuousness.  What it comes down to (I fear) may be that I’m incapable of controlling my emotions, once they’ve been let loose.  Thank goodness I hardly ever succumb to strong emotion.  In other words, it’s like I’m a hemophiliac who doesn’t wound easily.  So, a good 95% of the time, there’s not a drop of blood spilt.. but for that other 5%, you better grab a tourniquet.  That seems to be a fair analogy, so I’m sticking with it, until time and my own predisposition to disproving myself gang up on the theory.

The songs that I sing

Do they mean anything to the people I’m singing them to? People like you? (Plus ten cool points if you can name that tune without having to look it up.)

Anyway, for reals, y’all.. there are songs that I sing, after having written them. You should listen to them, is what you should do, and link to them maybe, and also maybe play them on your car stereo when you have other people in your car, but then lock all the doors and windows so there is no escape from the musical assault. Just a suggestion.

As a side note, there is an actual picture of me to go along with the actual music, and it got me to thinking (actually) that I might as well be a little more open with this blog thing. I’ve never posted a picture of myself or my apartment or my cat or my other cat before, largely due to a strange paranoia I feel about giving out information about myself. It’s the same paranoia that leads me to shred both birthday card envelopes (They show my name and address!) and cash receipts (Someone could go through my trash and learn my daily routine!). Is it healthy? Probably not, but it has also so far prevented even one crazy from shattering my personal space bubble and/or solar plexus. Whether that’s propter-hoc or just post-hoc, I don’t know, but it settles me.

Still, if I’m going to try to enter the entertainment arena — in practically any capacity, though music may be one of the most high-profile — I need to learn to provide a public persona. It doesn’t have to parallel my private persona; hell, it could be so far removed from my self (spacebar usage intended) so as to constitute an outright lie of sorts. I’m not very good at lying, though, since I eventually forget to keep up the charade and fall back to my natural, and decidedly idiosyncratic, manners and tendencies, so the idea of living as a fictional character, while attractive in a multiple-personality disorder kind of way, is ultimately inviable. The next best route, then, would be to exist in the public domain as an extension of myself. Not a caricature — that would require the same attentive self-awareness that we’ve already established I lack — but an incomplete picture that authenticates my humanity without compromising it. The industry is a machine, after all, and you’ll get chewed up by the cogs if you don’t keep yourself tethered to reality.

That said, it’s a long way off before any such thing would become a substantial issue, so I think I can (and in some sense, have to) present myself as more of an entire person than I have up to this point. I can write with a bit more candor, with a bit more willingness to claim an identity. So, here I go. This is me:

This is my apartment:

This is my cat:

This is my other cat:

Nice to meet you.

Smooth(ish)ly

Yeah, so you know how I was all, “The Top Model post will be up tonight!” and then it wasn’t? Yeah, so it’s not going to be. EVER.

Sorry, I’m lazy and a liar and I’m sorry, but baby, you know I still love you. Really, it’s just that the past three weeks have been what can only be described as a clusterf*ck of busyness. (That’s spelled as such for clarity’s sake, yo.) I’ll break it down, as I’m wont to do, enumerated-list style!

1. Mass murder
Or at least, three weeks ago, I thought we were going to murder Schubert’s Mass in E. We’ve been practicing our collective ass off, and I can’t deny that choir rehearsal became, for me, a frustration. After all, we’ve been working on the same piece for the past two quarters, and until the very end, we never really ran the piece.. we only trudged it. I even had called my parents and told them not to come to the concert, that it would be a waste of time for them to drive up from Kentucky to see us flounder on stage like a beached whale. Or a beached flounder. I mean, at least the whale can still breathe.

But as it turns out, we rocked that sh*t.. for the most part. (Pacememem, anyone?) I even managed to keep a “pleasant” expression, as we’re told to, instead of looking tired and haggard like I normally do. I did not, however, manage to look pleasant in any other regard, as the amount of sweat that poured from my pores (Yay, homophones!) roughly totalled the volume of Lake Erie. And was roughly as gnarsty. I mean, really. There were a good hundred singers on stage, plus an orchestra, belting it out for the better part of an hour, in an un-air-conditioned hall, with about eight trillion* lights helping to illuminate our drenched, glistening faces. Afterwards, though, I felt happy about how well we performed.. and happier still to take off my shirt.

*Rough estimate.

2. Movin’ on uuuup.. to the east north side
This is it, y’all: the move is imminent. I’m a good mix of nervous and excited, which I guess are denotatively the same, but you know how connotations are. It’s strange the things you suddenly realize upon preparing for a move. Things like:
– Wow, I’ve lived here for two years, and I never managed to put any pictures in the frames on my wall.
- Have I ever cleaned under my bed? I could knit a really disgusting sweater with this sh*t.
- Oh, so that’s where my AbSlide went!
- This packing tape smells like paint thinner. I wonder if you could use packing tape to get high. But then what if it got stuck to your face when you were sniffing it, and then you had to rip it off? I guess maybe you wouldn’t notice if you were high. Maybe you’d just think it was funny. It would be pretty funny, man.

No, I’m still not done packing, but I’m damn closer than I expected to be. Frankly, I figured I’d put everything off until the last minute, like I always do, but I totally got a multi-minute jump on it. Boo yah! It’s like I’m a responsible adult or something. Scary. The cats (‘Cause, yeah, there’s a second one now, remember?) know something’s up, but frankly, I don’t think they care. I know there’s always the chance that a cat’s gonna freak out about moving, but Burrito hasn’t given two sh*ts with any move we’ve made yet, and Gutterball hasn’t been in this place long enough to be attached to it. The fun part is going to be actually moving them to the new apartment. Gutterball has been in a car exactly once, but seemed fine with it, but Burrito.. Burrito does not like the car. It’s only a short ride, but God help us if we hear (dun dun DUN!) the evacuation noise. The evacuation noise is a very low-pitched meow, used to warn fellow passengers that an evacuation is about to take place. From which orifice? Who knows! But rest assured, it will be swift-in-coming, and it will be gross.

Follow-up: The move went smooth(ish)ly, and our apartment is livable.  Oh, and the evacuation was Burrito’s first-ever hairball.  Fantastic!

So.. I mean, I guess that’s it.  I thought there’d be more than two things on the list.  It’s telling that two things took over my life, consuming me outright.  Since then, however, I have tried to leave myself a little more open to fun bursts of boundary-breaking spontaneity.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some pajamas to put on and some Cinnamon Bun ice cream to annihilate.

Model post up tonight

The ANTM recap will be up tonight, though most likely sans pictures. I just got home from work, and in a few minutes, I have to leave fro choir rehearsal, but damn it I WILL POST.

Update.  Ha ha, I lied.  Yeah, so.. no.  Sorry, I accidentally fell asleep last night, so when I woke up on top of my bed nearly naked to the lights sill on, I was confused and cold (though rested).  We’ll shoot for today, then.

New! Different! Wow!

Or as Naima might say, “Waaaaaaaaoooooooowwwwwwww.”  We have a lot to go through.