The entirety of an entry by susiebeeca (because there wasn't really any part that I thought could be left out), 2008-11-05:

When I was a little girl, it was anathema to think that someone like me could grow up to be the Prime Minister of Canada. After all, I was just a girl. The P.M.s were men---they were always men! It was a club with a giant 'No Girls Allowed' sign on the door!

Then, just two weeks after my ninth birthday, I saw my country being led by a woman. I cannot tell you how overjoyed I was, how inspired I was, how hopeful I felt. I remember my mother picking me up in her arms and spinning me around. A female Prime Minister! Une Mme. Premiere Ministre! God, all the raspberries I blew at the boys in my class who told me that women never amounted to anything!

 

...Now, I'm white. I have no idea what it's like to be a person of colour in America. But I still burst into tears of joy when I saw who is now taking the reins due South. I cannot imagine how many little kids of colour are starting to feel the same kind of hope that bloomed in me almost sixteen years ago.

osewalrus coined a useful word some time ago, which I've used in oral conversation but don't remember whether I've used yet in a text medium. Having recently read a post in which he gives the explicit definition, I thought it might be good to repeat that definition here for the edification of anyone who reads me and not him, and doesn't find the meaning entirely obvious from its roots:

Cassandrafruede: the bitter pleasure experienced when something awful you predicted that could have been avoided if people had listened to you comes to pass, even though you also get screwed through no fault of your own

I know several of my other friends experience this from time to time and may find the word handy.

[I can safely assume that all of my readers know which Cassandra it refers to, right?]

( Thursday, Friday, start of Saturday )

Played the concert, feeling half-present. Frustrating. Okay, non-musicians reading this might not be aware of how mistakes are perceived onstage, but for the most part one notices one's own mistakes and is convinced they were obvious to the rest of the band, but only the most glaring (and often not especially important) of anybody else's mistakes register consciously (I'm told this is different in a choir than in an instrumental band), and even those are largely forgotten by the end of the following tune ...

But on Saturday, I was hearing mistakes from my bandmates, mostly in the brain-fart category, and though I haven't asked them yet, I'm pretty sure my own were bad enough for them to notice. There's an oft-repeated bit of advice: don't leave your best performance at the dress rehearsal. I think we did exactly that. I'd love another shot at some of that setlst, with all of us rested and alert, so that the stuff we worked out in rehearsal, some nifty sounds, could be heard. (I did get a crappy recording -- mono, lots of hiss, suboptimal mic placement, wonky levels -- and listening to that later, I didn't catch any glaring mistakes from our drummer.) I suspect we were all tired and distracted; I know I was. The tune I was most worried about, I played cleanly; but the one I'd drilled and drilled until I could play it ten times in a row at various speeds with nary an error, I flubbed when I was the only one playing melody. If the audience thought we did okay then I guess we did okay, but with the repertoire, instrumentation, and arrangement notes we had, there should have been fire, and we didn't deliver fire. Frustrating.

Especially on "Tourdion" and "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen", there should have been fire.

This weekend is another gig, but it's a large group and I'd only said, 'probably' for it, so if I'm feeling so crappy that I don't think I can play well, or in too much pain to drive to it, I do have the option of punting this time. Since it'll be all sight-reading (I don't even know the setlist yet), I'll need to be feeling fairly alert and together -- anything less, and I'd better just not show up. So let's see whether I can finish recovering from Darkover by then.

More con notes (less chronological): I played eleven instruments on Saturday (an even dozen for the whole weekend). Admittedly somewhere between three and six of those were guitars, depending on how narrow your definition of 'guitar' is. ( list ) I haven't tried to figure out how many different centuries the tunes came from, but I think I count at least five genres. I brought two instruments I didn't wind up playing (tambour and tambourine, though now that I think of it, I should've used the tambour in the tune I played with Maug and Myfanwy), not counting the stuff that lives in the woodwinds case along with the recorders I used. I never got to hear a full concert by Ellen, but I did get to listen to her playing in the lobby late Friday night.

Except for a little bit of time in the lobby Friday night and a longer time in the con suite Saturday night (and the part of Maug & Myfanwy's concert that I was in the room for but not playing in), I didn't really 'attend' the con. I was performing, or setting up, or hauling instruments from place to place, or rehearsing, most of the time I was at the convention. I was working. Or recovering. This is not a complaint; it's an observation, and an explanation for folks who knew I was around but didn't get to hang out with me, and why I never saw the art show, went to any non-music programming, or browsed the merchant area. Now I like performing, and I like having opportunities to perform for my people; that's why this isn't a complaint. (This convention was rougher than most for me, by a large margin, but that's because of how poorly I was feeling physically to start with, not that it was more time and work than usual.) My point is that this is the consequence of the choice to perform and take a comp membership instead of begging off the schedule and paying for a day membership: I don't see all that much of the con, and I don't get to hang out and catch up with people as much as I would otherwise.

So there are folks who got a brief hug, or a nod and a wave, whom I would have loved to have had long conversations with, and a few people with whom I started conversations but didn't get to get back to after interruptions. I'm thankful for the time I did get with a few friends (and even for just the sight of several others I didn't get to do more than wave to). I really need, for the sake of my mental health, to get back into a regular convention cycle again ... er, and to try harder to see people outside of conventions. Money and physical health are the hurdles here. Hmm. And I'm grateful for the chance to pick a couple friends' brains for info I needed, and regret not having had a chance to be purely social with them later.

Anyhow, I'm glad I got to be there, to the extent that I did.

"My politics have not changed since I was at college; but I was then reckoned a moderate rightist, and I am now a flaming liberal. I look forward to being right of center again; it may not take very long." -- subnumine, user profile (retrieved November 2008)

"Our members want equal time. Not to muscle, not to coerce, but just to have a place at the table." -- Dan Barker, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, 2008-12-01

[Helpfully suggested by lizardlich after I let my auto-post script run out of quotes]

David Letterman: "Do you know what region of speech you represent with your American accent?"

Simon Baker: "I'm happy if I can land somewhere between the Atlantic and the Pacific, right about now. As long as I don't sound like someone from Alaska, I'm happy."

-- From the CBS television program, The Late Show with David Letterman</i>, 2008-11-24

[Australian actor Simon Baker portrays the American title character on the CBS show, The Mentalist.]

"It seems a little absurd for one in my position to be asked, or to answer, the question as to what I would do or would not do if I were President of the United States, since no such contingency has even one chance in sixty-million to be realized. But, if that chance should happen, it would probably be my experience and my misfortune to make as many blunders and give just cause for as much criticism as any one who has ever occupied the Presidential chair. One thing however I would do or try to do. I would employ every means supplied to the President by the Constitution of the United States, to secure to every citizen of the United States, without regard to race, color, sex, or religion, equal protection of the laws. No citizen, however poor or despised, should be able to say at the close of my administration that he had suffered an injustice or had been in any way oppressed or injured by any act of mine while acting as President of the United States." -- Frederick Douglass (b. 1818-02-15, d. 1895-02-20)A (thanks to sa-hall for pointing it out, having found it in an online collection of Douglass' writings)

"Rosa Parks sat so Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. could march, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. marched so Barack Obama could run. Barack Obama ran so our children and grandchildren can eventually fly." -- I've seen this variously attributed and unattributed in several places; I'm not entirely certain to whom it should be credited, but retired history professor Dr. James Horton appears to be a good candidate

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2005-07-31</a>:

"The less effort, the faster and more powerful you will be." -- Bruce Lee (b. 1940-11-27, d. 1973--07-20)

"I have always found it rather odd that everyone credits our 'freedoms' to the soldiers. The truth is that our freedoms and democratic systems are obtained by journalists and activists.

"Soldiers may protect from outside threats, but the real threat to freedom and democracy is a threat that comes from INSIDE.

-- Sunnydayz, 2008-09-05 [I don't see how to link directly to the comment; once the page loads, search for "The real troops are". Better, read the whole article first, to see why our freedom does need protecting.]

"I've always found it amusing/surprising/perplexing how so many of the religious far right are also fanatical market capitalists.

"If you consider that natural selection and the invisible hand are essentially the same concept applied to different systems, that Jesus basically preached socialism, and that the early Christians were the original communists (small c communist, as in living in communes, sharing all wealth, etc) the intellectual disconnect here boggles the mind.

-- Pharyngula reader / Scienceblogs commenter 'amphiox', 2008-10-30, reacting to the spectacle of a crowd of so-called Christians "laying on hands" to a golden calf bronze bull statue on Wall Street to pray for divine intervention in the market.

[Note: fellow commenter Walton takes issue with this interpretation of Smith's invisible hand later in the comment thread, and is in turn gently corrected by Natalie]

It's not supposed to feel this difficult.

Argh. Frustrating night. Finally resorted to a chemical solution[*] to get to sleep, after several hours of tossing and turning, and even so I only managed to stay asleep for two hours. (Gee, a few days ago the problem was not having enough awake time to get anything done because I was sleeping so long; last night/today the problem is insomnia.) I really wanted to get to sleep early enough to have decent odds of feeling well enough to drive to Mom's for family Thanksgiving.

(Hmm. Insomnia also appears to have a dramatic effect on my pre-breakfast blood sugar. Not the first time I've noticed that it's especially high after a night of no, or far too little, sleep.)

I guess now it'll be a game of balancing meds so as to be able to cope with the day despite so little sleep while not winding up feeling too drugged to drive. Argh. And if I wind up not feeling like I can reasonably (or safely) make it there, I'm not expecting huge amounts of understanding from certain quarters. (And I do want to see folks, even if my ears do the kids-voices-turn-painful trick, which I hope doesn't happen today.)

A silver lining: I have an invitation to a quieter and within-crawling-distance[**] dinner if I can't make it all the way to Bowie (or if I get back from Bowie early enough, but that's rather unlikely). So I'll get to have a holiday dinner with people I like either way.

(Practically (and responsibly) it may make more sense to beg off of the family visit in order to rest up for, and finish preparing for, my performances at Darkover (one concert and playing for two dances), but I think something like family Thanksgiving warrants making the effort to get out there even though I've got a gig to save spoons for. Maybe I should try to get home a little early though... I do need to get out of the house earlier tomorrow than I need to today, and be well enough to play decently.)

[*] It's actually pretty difficult to medicate myself into sleep, too. All the more so if I'm trying to ensure that I don't wake up still feeling drugged (logistically bad if I have someplace to go, just unpleasant and uncomfortable otherwise). A morbid thought: if I die in my sleep due to drug interactions some night, it'll be neither suicide nor recreational abuse; it'll be an accident stemming from desparation to finally get some sleep after too long awake with no end in sight. But I don't resort to that often, and I do try to be careful.

[**] Literally, though I don't foresee doing anything more dramatic than limping if it comes to that.

[To my fellow Americans: Happy Thanksgiving!]

"None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody - a parent, a teacher, an Ivy League crony or a few nuns - bent down and helped us pick up our boots." -- US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall (b. 1908-07-02, d. 1993-01-24)

"I visited downtown Silver Spring on June 23rd and to test a theory about 'no photography' rules. My theory is this: 'No photography' rules only apply to stand-alone cameras -- cameras that can be seen. If you have a cell phone camera you can snap photos to your heart's content and not be harassed at all. So I took my 3 megapixel Samsung D900 cell phone camera on a stroll through Ellsworth Avenue. Up and down I snapped photo after photo, and as far as anyone was concerned I was just having an extended phone conversation, I even took a close-up of two security guards, whose function is, among other things, to stop photographers." -- Bill Adler, "Photography Banned in Downtown Silver Spring, Maryland", 2007-06-22</a>

Argh. My body is not being cooperative lately. I did get out Saturday, then I slept all day Sunday, all the daylight hours and then some Monday, and much of today. This is not conducive to getting things accomplished.

Anyhow, the tardy announcement: I'm looking for musicians to play Playford and Regency dance tunes.

Specifically, if you are going to be attending Darkover Grand Council Meeting XXXI in Timonium, MD, this coming weekend, and play an instrument well enough to keep up at dance tempos, I could use you in the pickup band for the Playford dance on Friday from 16:00 to 18:00, and/or the Regency Ball on Saturday from 17:00 to 19:00. If you tell me you think you'll be able to play for the Regency Ball, I can point you to PDFs of the sheet music online. Sheet music for the Playford will be made available at the start of the Playford dance.

In related news, although The Homespun Ceilidh Band is skipping Darkover this year (due to fidhle's injury), I'll be performing in an act billed as "Michael Stoddard (of HCB) and friends" (with Mike, obviously, and two other friends) on Saturday at 16:00 (that is, immediately before the Regency Ball, in a different room). We'll be playing some familiar and unfamiliar tunes, and some of the famliar ones in slightly less familiar arrangements. (I'll be playing, uh, seven or eight different instruments, according to the current plan, though admittedly three to five of those are guitars depending on what you count as a guitar.)

Also, keep an eye out for maugorn on the schedule, as he has, IIRC, two concerts under his own name and one as "and special guest".

"I'm white people's best friend -- they think I'm their enemy but I'm not; I'm their best friend because I'm honest. This election thing, this whole thing with the election, it has always been racial for black people in America. Even when we couldn't vote, we always had to say, 'Is this white man liberal? Does this white man like us? What will this white man do for us?' It has never been racial for you guys. This is the very first time. And it has driven you crazy -- the things that have come out of my white friends' mouths, it scares me! And I'm saying, if this has driven you crazy, we've had to do this all these years -- how crazy must we be? Because it's been race for us, you understand?" -- Paul Mooney, on the CBS television program, The Late Show With David Letterman, 2008-10-29

"I think no one has really looked at the impact of the crackdown on the illegal immigration and what role it has played, both in the housing bust, and in the turn in the economy.

"You know, immigrants are, in many respects, including illegal aliens, they're like the canaries in the mine shaft. They tell us, they give us early warning signals that there are problems. You know, most people in this country, I think, would believe that illegal immigration right now is at an all time high.

"In fact, it's not. It's about half what it was at the peak period, which was in 1995 to 2000. So, you know, I actually believe that what you're seeing in terms of the illegal immigration issue, a lot of the people who were here, working hard, very productive folks, were trying to get a foothold, trying to get a slice of the American dream. And many of them actually did try to buy houses, and some of them did succeed in buying houses. When you had this crackdown, that's sort of they were many of the people in these sub-prime loans. That was the beginning."

-- Linda Chavez, 2008-10-17, on the PBS television program, Bill Moyers Journal

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-11-08:

"The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails." -- William Arthur Ward

(submitted to the mailing list by Brian K. Read)

"Many people hear voices when no-one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up on rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing." -- Meg Chittenden ( thanks to netpositive for quoting it earlier)