Dreamin

I went to bed at around 8 last night, which caused me to dream for hours. I dreamed that I had a new choir director job, where I worked with a larger choir than I had before. I wasn't prepared for the rehearsal at all, and tried to fake it, but after a while it became obvious that I hadn't even decided on which pieces we were going to do. Most of the ones I had in front of me were for Christmas, but I needed several "general use" anthems for the next weeks coming up. The worst part of the dream was that my mom was in the choir, and she kept making "helpful" suggestions while I was trying to go through the music quickly and decide what we were going to do next. Have you ever read the Vonnegut short story, "Harrison Bergeron"? It's set in a grim future where the government has reduced everyone to the same low level, to promote equality (is Vonnegut a libertarian? Sounds like a libertarian theme, doesn't it). Anyway, the one character is very smart, so he has to wear a pair of earphones that blast loud noises in his ears every few minutes, so that he can't ever put together a coherant thought. That was what the mother-suggestions were like - every time I started to get a plan together in my head, she was like, "honey, shouldn't you suggest something soon? The choir members are getting antsy."

This is one of my pet peeves, this intrusion upon the thinking process - I went to a dance class once, where I was slowly but surely putting together a concept of the dance, even though I was screwing up a lot, when the instructor noticed the problems I was having and came over to stand beside me and help. I was so mortified because then everybody began staring at me (since they were watching the instructor), and I couldn't concentrate a whit. If he left me alone, I would have danced horribly for another hour, but later been able to do the dance in my sleep. It's just how I am. Sometimes I feel like I operate in a totally different way than most people, like I'm swimming in this molasses-slow, deep comprehension mode, while everyone else is moving quickly across the surface. When I start thinking about how I look to people, which is generally pretty strange, I totally lose track of what I'm doing and start to screw up royally. That's one reason I'm scared of working in a larger church (or a church at all); I'm scared to be judged, since it's such a public role. I'm afraid people will look at me and say, "that skirt's too short for a church choir director", or "she hasn't organized things well enough this year, she's so loopy!" It's not so much that I care what other people think, it's that the observation is so distracting that it causes me to trip up. It's also the reason I hate to live with other people, they see the unfinished product, the halfway-point of my process. I tend to watch tv or get on the computer for 2 hours, then suddenly attack my current project with ferocity, and get it done well and quickly. It's what people with ADD call "hyperfocusing". The problem, of course, is that sometimes I never get to the work part at all, so not everybody believes that I really need to do things this way.