I’m taking most of this week off. Megan’s grandmother on her father’s side passed away last Thursday — memory eternal, Frances — and while we’re not traveling for her funeral, it was evident that it would be beneficial for me to spend a few days at home. Plus, I have some vacation time I need to use or lose, and our friend Benjamin Czarnota has been here for a visit.
The other positive, if not exactly enjoyable, thing has been using the time to make use of my insurance benefits while I still have them. So, Monday, I got an eye exam — dilation makes me intensely irritable, by the way, because I can’t bloody read, but the upshot is that my prescription hasn’t changed — Tuesday I got a dental checkup and cleaning, and then, this morning, as a result of yesterday’s dental checkup, I got a root canal. For a variety of reasons, this was not entirely unexpected — let me simply say that delaying having one’s wisdom teeth removed by five years can have far-reaching consequences, and I do not recommend it as a course of action.
I am hopeful that tomorrow might not randomly involve invasive surgery.
Anyway, something very unexpectedly cool that happened today is that, after four years of talking about the whole choir schools thing and having people not get it and/or otherwise ignore me, the publication of the piece in AGAIN has generated interest from a rather unanticipated source. I got a phone call from the church today saying that such-and-such person from such-and-such entity had read my article, really liked it, and wanted to do an interview about the ideas I was discussing. I called this person back, we had a lovely chat, and it looks like this is going to happen in a couple of weeks.
Now, similar interest in a different piece has come from a different-but-similar source before, but this is different in that what’s been asked for is an interview rather than a reading, and the entity in question is taking responsibility for the recording and editing themselves. (Since I didn’t say anything else about that recording, I’ll say now that after posting the file to the FTP site specified, I never heard from the people in question again. I’m reasonably certain that what happened is that probably the quality I was able to achieve at home wasn’t up to snuff, which is not anything I take personally, but this particular institution not having the wherewithal to make its own recording arrangements is something that’s going to rather severely limit its potential contributors. Oh well). Anyway, I’m still not going to go into too many details until it’s a done deal and I know exactly what’s going to happen and when, but it’s still a rather exciting development, and we’ll see if it’s actually meant to be.
Leitourgeia kai Qurbana: Contra den Zeitgeist 