I hate when my mind has no direction.  I literally walked back and forth across my living room floor this morning because I would remember something I needed, turn around and remember something else, then remember I didn’t get the first thing and have to go back.  There are way too many diverse things happening in my life right now and my usual strategy of compartmentalizing is NOT working.  It’s hard when everything happens at the same time.  This completely screws me up when trying to write because my mind shifts from one thing to another.

Like tomorrow.  I have two performances tomorrow.  I’m not sufficiently worried about it for some reason.  In fact, it caught me by surprise when I realized it was tomorrow.  Is this a problem?  It ought to be.  My day is so packed tomorrow by everything EXCEPT prepping for the concert that I have no choice.  Meetings, a shortened plan time, having to take kids while we’re setting up the stage.  I have to just go on automatic.  No pressure that I’ve got four professional musicians playing with my kids tomorrow and I haven’t quite figured out where I’m putting anything.  I suppose experience is good for something.  I wonder what classroom teachers would do if the results of their teaching had to be put on display in front of an audience of peers, colleagues, and parents.

Then I’m taking kids to the opera on Saturday.  I’m pretty sure that’s set to go.  Just hoping the content is pretty straight ahead and the director hasn’t gone off the deep end in an attempt to “modernize” the production.  Not everything has to be sex and violence, although it IS La Traviata….

Oh, and my kids want to do a fundraiser that seems to all have landed in my lap and boy am I behind!  In my spare time I suppose.  Before I do a school wide sing next week, at the end of the last day before break, because every teacher wants all the kids in the school to lead at the bitter end, of course.  None of this work is really assessable and so I feel like I end up wasting 2-3 weeks right before the end of the quarter.  And I’m so sick of holiday music I can’t begin to tell you.  Kinda ruins the holiday spirit.

I finally put up my Christmas tree this past weekend but haven’t even begun to shop for gifts.  Not sure when that’s going to happen.  Especially when we’re leaving the day after the last day of school to fly to Kentucky for my in-laws 60th anniversary.  A wonderful thing with marvelous people to hang out and celebrate with.  We’ll be back late on the 23rd.  Still no idea when gifts will be bought.

This lifestyle is not unique.  Ask any teacher, any MUSIC teacher and you’ll get very similar stories.  I’m grateful that I don’t have to raise children anymore – not sure how I did it back in the day.  Probably not very well.  So tonight, part of my therapy is to write with a glass of my favorite wine and contemplate how I’m going to get through my 12 hour work day tomorrow.  And when that day is over and I finally sit down for a dinner somewhere with my great husband, who by the way wrote an arrangement for horns for my choir and will perform with us, I will breathe for a little while until I have to turn in the next direction.