Friday, April 16, 2010

Limits; watching; intensity

I've spent the last two weeks at some sort of "limit line." Everything that I do, turns out to have been too much to ask of myself. I'm not at "physical" exhaustion, I'm at emotional, and most of all, energetic, exhaustion.

Two weeks ago was spring break. Last week, I took sick days and took the week off. Of everything. No school, no church. I worked with my wife on some voice-over auditions, it was often harder work than I wanted to do, but she is so good, and I really, really enjoyed just hearing her voice, hearing her give voice to her incredible talent as a performer, in my headphones. It was the best part of the week.

As of this writing, there are only 57 days until the school's commencement exercises. I'm wondering how I'll make it.

Oh, I'm sure that I can. After a fashion. Somehow. There's only a couple of Really Big Events left (a couple next week, one the aforementioned commencement, which for about 10 minutes--the processional--is my biggest show of the year). What I schedule to teach for the last quarter of the year is some of my easiest material, and I try to back off on what I ask of the students because everyone else is tightening the screws in the academic subjects, and I have no need to do that in this course, since it's not "academic" as such; and frankly, they need the breathing room. So, this part of the year is theoretically the "easiest" to get through.

We'll see about that.

I definitely don't think I want to pull the "temporarily disabled" levers right now, I really just want to make it through to the end of the year. But I am completely out of juice. My acupuncturist tells me my energy levels are up at the end of the treatments, but they're just not staying up. Even to the day after the treatment.

We'll see what happens.

Something else I've noticed myself noticing... I find myself taking notice of how other people walk. Without difficulty. They just walk. I don't. I still walk... sort of. (Damn, I'm sick of those words. I wish they weren't so... accurate.)

I'm not envious of them. I'm not angry at them. I'm not jealous of them. I don't have any emotion towards them, or their non-disabilities. Or towards counting myself not among their number.

But I watch myself noticing them. I watch myself seeing more, nowadays.

The world is very intense. Not "bad." Not "scary." Not "imposing," nothing negative. But it's a very, very rich environment.

And just being in it can be very intense.

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