fox

Last Sunday a friend sang a little song that summed up my then-upcoming few days: "Hooray for Holy Week, da da da da da da da Holy Week ..." I had done two Masses that day for Palm Sunday, and then this week we had seder at Himself's mother's house on Monday, Tax Day Happy Hour with a former colleague on Tuesday, Mass on Holy Thursday, non-Mass on Good Friday, Easter Vigil last night (three. and. a quarter. hours. long), and two Masses today for Easter. (I insisted that we put Captain America on the schedule for Wednesday, because our plans to see it had been thwarted twice before and I didn't want to wait any longer. [g])

This morning I finally dragged my ass out of bed with the promise that the sooner I got up, the sooner it would be nap time. I sang the two Masses and have not felt less musically invested in anything I was singing in ages. (I mean, I grant it's not my religious tradition. But by the middle of the second Mass today I really felt like I was phoning it in. I didn't enjoy feeling like that. Fortunately, I was able to sing the Byrd "Haec Dies" like I meant it, and was really only going through the motions on stuff that was overaccompanied, so probably hardly anyone could hear me anyway.) I did the standard two-stop grocery shopping on the way home - there are some things we really prefer to get at Whole Foods, and some things we literally cannot get at Whole Foods, so - and dealt with some effed up Beltway traffic for which there was no excuse. I remember feeling pretty good, despite the traffic, and thinking Oh, maybe I'm not as tired as all that after all. And then I got home and the minute I was inside the house all my energy left me. I think I napped for about three hours, after which Himself went out and fetched dinner, because he is awesome.

I normally tune out during the readings and homilies in my church job, just listening for the cues that mean I'm going to have to sing in a moment ("the word of the Lord"; "the Gospel of the Lord"; "as without end they acclaim"; "the mystery of faith"; "through Him and with Him and in Him ..."; "let us offer each other the sign of peace"; and any time anyone announces a hymn), but last night I had to pay closer attention because a lot of responses that are normally spoken were sung at the Easter Vigil. And so the reading from Exodus included the line, "The Lord said to Moses, why are you crying out to Me?" and I shared with one of my colleagues my opinion that Moses might have been excused for sort of spreading his hands and making the world's biggest "duh" face.

But my thinkiest thoughts had to do with the second reading from Genesis, in fact, the reading about the Akedah. Of course Easter-wise a lot of comparison is made between Abraham being willing to sacrifice Isaac and God himself giving his only begotten son. They do like their prefigures, I mean to say. But not for the first time, I found myself really uncomfortable with the whole thing. ( Of course it's an uncomfortable story. (Or, 'o hai i upgraded ur ram.') )

Anyway. Stuff has Got Done today. I earned some money and bought some groceries. Himself mowed the lawn and went out to get me dinner. Back to work tomorrow. Wedding is in five weeks. Onward.

+ I apparently have magic skills that make it possible for me to ask procedural questions of a music director who is extremely on-edge and in fact had snapped at a colleague for asking a similar question less than a minute earlier, and have those questions answered calmly and helpfully (and even be thanked for having asked them).

+ My class today has been cancelled. (The professor has laryngitis, which is too bad, but she isn't feeling ill, so I'm not even feeling guilty for being all yay about this.)

- My Holy Week musical obligations include Good Friday, which service begins at 7:30, and probably precludes attending seder at Gentleman Caller's mother's house.

- One of the other two soprano section leaders over in Catholic-land has been going through quite a lot of stress, the details of which I don't know or care to know, but a week or so ago the choir director hired a substitute for her for the duration of Holy Week.

+ Stressed-Out Soprano was there on Palm Sunday and will be there Good Friday and Easter, along with Emergency Substitute and Second Soprano, and SOS encouraged me to talk to the choir director about leaving at some point during the service when all the tricky need-the-pros music is done and only hymns and things remain, because she really feels like a family thing should trump.

+ So I did, and after some discussion, music director and choir director offered me three options: (1) slip out after the last tricky need-the-pros number; (2) move that number earlier so I could slip out even sooner; or (3) have a lovely time at seder but don't get paid. !!! My feeling is, moving the number earlier would still probably not move it early enough to get me out of there before they spend aaages reading the Passion (they read Mark's version, I think, on Palm Sunday, and it took forever, and I understand Matthew's version on Friday will take even longer), so if they're sure they can manage with three sopranos (which is normally the maximum number of paid sopranos, after all), then I'd much rather go to the whole of seder than get paid. (Plus between last Saturday and next Sunday inclusive I'll have sung ten services even without Good Friday, where normally in that time span I'd only sing two, so.)

+ So when I see GC tonight (because no class, so I can go watch him make a stained-glass window hanging for his mother's Christmas-or-Hannukah present, yes, he's a little behind the calendar) I can tell him that I won't be coming to seder late after all, and the gladness will be extra, because that means that for the first time in probably his whole life, he won't be the youngest one there and have to ask the Questions.

:-D

I'll tell you something. When you go to bed drunk (not falling-down drunk, just been-sipping-wine-steadily-all-day-and-quite-a-ways-past-safe-to-drive drunk), the first few hours you sleep quite soundly! ... and then you wake up, when you sober up, and if that happens to be at 4am, well, then you're lying there at 4am completely wide awake and sober as a judge and absolutely unable, for what feels like an hour or more, to fall back asleep. And there's something in the parking lot or across the street behind your building that is catching the light from a streetlamp and bouncing it just back through the gap in your blinds, so you can't lie on your side facing the window because if you shift at all you'll get bright light in your eyes --

-- and then the songbirds get going.

HOWEVER! You will all be pleased, I'm sure, to learn that I found a pair of those foam earplugs they give you on airplanes, so I was effectively able to make the birds shut up; and I turned my back to the window and did eventually fall asleep; and I woke up about half an hour ago with no hangover. That's freedom for you. :-)

Happy Easter.

i know a fair number of irreverent jokes not inappropriate for the easter season. i wonder if i know 40 of them -- doubt it. shame, really, because if i'm to share a metropolitan area with the living embodiment(s) of the erosion of civil liberties and endure all the press surrounding that nazi mel gibson's the passion of the christ (go ahead, passion-spammer, spam me, see if i care), it'd be pretty slick to be in a position to post a joke a day. or even just a punch line.

will think about this and consider compiling a list.

update: stop the clock: 20 minutes between my posting an entry with the words [that film title] in it and the passion-spam hitting my journal. interesting, though -- because i have my no-i'm-not-going-to-specify-what-kind-of-marriage entry backdated up at the top of the page, that's the entry the spammer hit, rather than the one with the title in it. ("what do you think of the film? i'm going to see it for sure." actually i would pay money, if i had to, not to see it; partly because the idea of watching that much violence makes me a little sick to my stomach, but mainly, as i said to shezan the other day, because i don't care to put another dollar of my money in mel gibson's pocket ever again.)