The Story Of One Year: Chapter 207: Few Days Down

This weekend has been a very good thing for me, I think. I feel so much more relaxed and laid back than I have in a while, which is a really amazing thing to be feeling right now. It seems like I have allowed my workplace and all the mess that comes along with it to leave me feeling really tense and fucked up recently. This step away has been a really great thing for improving that. Of course, it isn’t anywhere near being over yet. Sure, I have to go back to work on Wednesday and Thursday but then I have five more days off. I am looking forward to that but I am also aware that those days off won’t be like these past few have been. They will be jam-packed with family and wedding stuff. They will be fun but I don’t really foresee them being overly relaxing. They’ll definitely be more relaxing than work, though, so that will be a good thing. That is a large part of why I used so much of this past weekend to just relax and zone out at home. Saturday I went out and spent some time with my dear friends Whitney, Nate, April & Devin, which was a lot of fun and I was really happy about it because I hadn’t gotten together with them in a really long time. Still, I did absolutely nothing productive on Sunday. Today wasn’t a very productive day, either. I mean, I finished up the cleaning that needed doing in my bedroom and it is pretty much entirely ready for company. Sure, it could be perfected further but I don’t really feel like it needs to be perfect. There is still work to be done in my bathroom, though, as well as some stuff to do in the living room and kitchen. I intend to use tomorrow completely for finishing up everything. It’s mainly a lot of little things that need to be done, like cleaning my bathroom mirror, scrubbing my toilet and the walls in my shower. This is all stuff that I can absolutely get done tomorrow. I just can’t allow myself to do what I did today, which was allow myself to be distracted by random outside things like the television.

Yes, I wound up watching quite a bit of television today. Much like how I spent Sunday finishing off the season of “The Vampire Diaries,” which I kind of stopped watching months ago, I did the same thing today with the series “Parenthood.” “Parenthood” was a new mid-season replacement series for NBC this season, which is not a network I watch very often, but I was kind of drawn in by the cast of this series, particularly it’s “lead character” played by Lauren Graham, who I have always had a weird thing for. The series centers on four adult siblings all dealing with their own different issues in life, involving their children and marriages and such. I am not doing a very good job of explaining this but it is a really great show. I was very impressed with the pilot episode and kind of made it a point to set my DVR to record the series. However, as with many other TV shows, I kind of stopped watching after a few episodes. So, I spent a large portion of today catching up on that. It was really good, too, although that time really could have been spent in a much more productive way. I mean, I did finish off the cleaning of my bedroom and got my laundry out of the kitchen and put away, so it’s not like I didn’t do anything at all. I just didn’t do enough. This became painfully clear when my Mom arrived home from work this evening. I saw her briefly this morning when she came home before heading to work and again for a very brief time when she came home for her lunch break. Still, when she got home from work she was in a very sour mood and immediately became really upset with me for not having done enough cleaning today. It was really not a positive situation and I became very defensive about it. I told her I would get everything done tomorrow and she was pissed off that I put it all off until my last day off before her mother arrives on Thursday evening because that means that if I don’t get it done tomorrow I won’t really have another chance. I really felt like she was overreacting to the whole thing and I assured her that I would get it ALL done tomorrow and that she doesn’t need to worry about it. It was awkward for a minute then she transitioned into telling me about a situation with her boyfriend that pissed her off. I couldn’t help but feel like the one had to do with the other much more than it would seem, in general. Shortly after that, she got a phone call from her boyfriend and went into the other room and I sat on the couch stewing a bit and watching “The Bachelorette,” which I randomly stumbled into watching last week and just decided to go with again this week. It’s really stupid, though.

I spoke with Viktor this afternoon about the piece he gave me to work on and just told him that it is really confusing to me. He was in the middle of something so he was kind of rushed but he told me to continue working on trying to tighten up the previous pieces and do as much as I can figure out with the new piece and he may have a different one for me on Wednesday. I don’t necessarily want to give up on this piece I just don’t really understand it. It seems like the notes are all really far apart and I am having to stretch my hand in really odd and uncomfortable ways. When he played the piece for me last week I don’t recall seeing him doing any of that strange stretching, which tells me I must have gotten something wrong in reading this one. Still, it is a beautiful piece and I would like to try to move forward with it, if possible. We’ll see. Since he was in the middle of something I decided not to broach the topic of payment with him. Like I mentioned in last night’s blog, I didn’t really feel like it would be appropriate to discuss with him, anyway. So, a little later in the afternoon I decided to call the Allegro Academy itself and try to find out anything I could about the topic of delaying payment. The girl that works at the front desk told me that I could either wait and just pay the late payment fee at the time or that I could come in and pay for my individual lessons for the next two weeks and then pay for the rest after I have been paid again. I am kind of leaning towards the second option, or paying for two weeks when I go on Wednesday this week and then paying for the remaining three lessons this month after I get my next paycheck. That would be a good way to make the whole thing a little less shocking to me, financially, right now. I don’t know what I’m going to do exactly but I do know that whatever I choose, this is a really big relief to me. It really takes a huge burden off of my shoulders right now. Of course, I have this fucked up thing going on in my head where I am already thinking about ordering this really awesome mineral eye shadow palette I saw at Victoria’s Secret over the weekend since I’m not going to be entirely broke. That is ridiculous, though, and of course I am not actually going to do it. I will wait until after I have been paid again, at least. It is a really gorgeous palette, though. Victoria’s Secret has a lot more makeup than I realized and it is actually really good stuff, too. This shouldn’t be surprising considering the fact that the Christian Siriano shadows I have from them are amazing. I guess I always attributed that to Christian Siriano more than to Victoria’s Secret. I figure, if I wait until I get paid again I can order more than just the one palette and play around with some of their other stuff, as well. Still, buying more makeup should be the last thing on my mind right now. This is some sort of malfunction I have in my head, apparently. I just don’t know when to stop.

After fighting with my Mom for a bit earlier and stewing over it for a while when she was in the other room talking to her boyfriend, eventually she came back out and was in much better spirits than she had been before. We talked for a little while and watched a rerun of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” before she went off to bed. I also made her come into the bedroom so we could get on YouTube and watch the premiere of the brand new music video from Kylie Minogue, “All The Lovers.” “All The Lovers” is one of Kylie’s most gorgeous songs of her career and the video matches it perfectly. It is absolutely stunning to watch. I don’t know how to explain it exactly but the video is set in the middle of a city block where people randomly start stripping to their underwear and kind of form a small platform which slowly grows into a giant mountain for Kylie to perform on. I am not explaining this well enough but definitely go watch the video – it is absolutely stunning. Also, I don’t know that I can recall a time when Kylie has ever looked more beautiful than she does in this video – her hair, her very natural makeup with bright shimmery white eyeshadow and lots of bronzer, her simple yet gorgeously accessorized ensemble, etc. It is simply a beautiful video. In fact, I am going to include it here.