I realized that it’s been awhile since I did a to-do list. And then I checked my online to-do list and realized that it’s been two months to the day.
This is not like me. I have always been an obsessive list-maker. Shopping lists, to do lists, bills to pay, bucket lists – it’s who I am. How on earth can I get anything done without one?
Well, I didn’t really get much done. In part because the wrist tendonitis that plagued me from mid-April to early August, and was especially bad after the move was completed, didn’t allow me to do very much. I couldn’t really do any yard work, I couldn’t do a lot of unpacking and organizing (crumpling up paper hurt), and it even hurt to write.
And I didn’t really have that much to do – I had two students at Howard Community College, both on Wednesdays. They were pretty low-maintenance, so it wasn’t like I had to do a lot of prep work.
I did a lot of traveling – I went to New York three out of the five weekends of June; the first weekend, up to Manhattan to see my dear friend Sorab Wadia on his closing weekend of Bunty Berman Presents off-Broadway and to see my I-wish-he-were-my-dear-friend Alan Cumming in his tour de force performance of Macbeth on Broadway. The second and third weekends of June I spent in Baltimore, enjoying the weirdness that is HonFest in Hampden on the 8th and spending my birthday (the 15th) with my BFF Carrie Widegren at the Penn-Mar Irish Festival (skip it) and just hanging out.
The following weekend Bill and I celebrated our tenth anniversary in the Finger Lakes in upstate New York, where we’d spent our honeymoon. We stayed in the same B&B and in the same room and drank some of the same wines – which we didn’t like as much as we did ten years ago. Our palates have changed, I guess.
And then the final weekend of June, I went up to NYC on my own and saw my wonderful friend/former student/cabaret partner/studio pianist Ryan Cappleman and other friends in the off-Broadway production of Waiting: A Song Cycle.
I felt really unproductive this summer, but I wasn’t, all told. I just wasn’t obsessing over everything that needed to be done. I think I needed that time to collect my energies to prepare for my new life.
And now that I’m here – the house is sold, I have a job, and I have a studio to market – I’ll be returning to my list-making ways, but hopefully allowing enough time for spontaneity and life to creep in.