Changes

This past Tuesday was my last day working my dreadful summer job. On Wednesday, I loaded my car & parents' van with pretty much everything to my name and drove to my brother's apartment in Hoffman Estates. The next morning my mom let me know that, something we all were expecting for most of the summer, my grandmother passed away, and then we drove to DeKalb where we unloaded car + van into my new apartment.

Thursday night, it's confirmed that the funeral is to happen early Saturday. This means my immediate family, in its entirety, needed to be in Iowa on Friday night. So, I rode with my parents back to my brother's in Hoffman, then rode with him to my mom's hometown in Iowa.

The funeral went well . . . I mean, as well as a funeral could go, which is to say it was nice to see a lot of extended family folk I rarely interact with. I was a pall-bearer, which worked out . . . I didn't drop the casket or anything. The entire family had lunch together, and then my brother and I made our way back to our respective places in Illinois.

Somehow, I found the energy to visit 'Studio B' in DeKalb last night for an encore performance of the Toybox Theatre / Teletextile show that happened back in May. Actualyl, I was the first person to show up, besides the performers, even though I made sure to arrive 30 minutes late remembering how long it took for things to get started the last time.

I chatted with the vocalist and keyboard/bass player for about two hours until things actually started closer to 10:30. I don't know where the social energy came from, especially considering how much I had managed to move my mouth that morning, talking to various family people.

The show was nice. I made it to bed around 2am, and have been processing everything since. Altogether, it feels to me like I've managed at least as much since Tuesday than I had between May 20th and August 10th.

There is more to think about . . . but I want an interlude for now . . . emotionally, I am a little winded right now (such that I'm not going back to fix the messy tensing in the post).

Music amplifies the heart, extends the soul . . .

Music offers salvation to the beleaguered mind . . .

My weekend has been spent, largely, with family visiting from far away. In particular, with many very young family folk I don't see often . . . and whom I really don't have the energy for (at least not for all of them at once).

I have trouble with young children . . . I find it hard to ever justify simplifying any part of myself, and as such there's almost nothing I feel comfortable talking to young people about. If they ask me about something, I will respond as I would to the same question asked by an adult . . . if they don't understand, I'll struggle for an explanation, but it's very important to me to always look for a reason beyond "Well . . . well because."

What seems to happen is that I remain very calm and distant when I'm around very young people. In my experience, they seem to like this . . . I don't know exactly why. My best guess is that, perhaps, it's refreshing for them to be treated a little differently than most adults probably treat them. I'm not really interested enough in child psychology to find out for sure.

Yet, that was the extent of my weekend (at least thus far)--surrounded by shrieking children darting all to and fro, sitting coolly watching parents baby them.

Right now, I think I'll have children someday . . . but I won't have five of them, and I won't have the first (and probably last) until after I accomplish more of my creative goals.