my heart is a glorious machine;

You know those stories that musicians sometimes tell you at concerts, about how they wrote and composed this or that song fifteen or twenty minutes before they performed it on stage or recorded it? Well, um, that kind of happened today. It was interesting. Now, It wasn't so much writing a new song whole cloth as writing new lyrics to a traditional song and taking it from sing-song children's church song to something with a little actual depth inside the same repetitive field-spiritual sort of format. And I'd had bits of it in my head for a while. But I kind of made up the set list in the car on the way to church, and added another song in the middle of the performance before mine (my father's friend Jim), and then everything went astonishingly well, considering. Except for the rather discouraging and depressing fact that almost no-one was even listening to me and most of them were talking fairly loudly. (And when there are only about eight people in the room, having most of them talk loudly through your performance tends to make one feel a bit... well, not terrifically valued, anyway.) I kind of had to curb my rising frustration before it boiled over into actual fury, which mostly meant concentrating more on the music than on the people not listening to it. And it did feel nice, to be sitting up on a stage, albeit a very little one, and hearing one's voice stretching out through the sound system and filling up a room, albeit also a very little room.

After my set I lay down and went to sleep on a pew, at least half by accident.

Last night was not of the good. I lay in bed for hours not sleeping and not knowing why I couldn't fall asleep, seeing as I was so exhausted that my eyes were stinging. By the time I was woken in the early morning to go to the church, I may have attained about four hours of sleep. So, you know, things have been... weird. (Am going to sleep any minute now. Honest. If I shut my eyes right now, I probably would.)

Morning was mixed; I was cross and physically miserable (and hideously unwell-feeling in the early morning; don't even know if I had some tiny bug that goes away with standing up for more than two minutes or if I was so sleepy that it actually caused a more than usually bizarre sort of nausea), and we didn't get nearly the crowd we'd hoped, and oh how I wanted to go home and sleep. But... I found some parts of the celebration/service fulfilling. I'd rather not have another go at it, though...

I keep meaning to post, but d'you know, the more I procrastinate, the more daunting the post becomes. Things keep on happening -- little things, mostly, but things I feel obligated to write about for my own posterity if not your entertainment. (And I feel both as though I am harried and have too much pressing on me, and that there isn't anything to occupy me at all. I'm restless. And confused, but confusion is pretty much like breathing oxygen anymore.)

Well, the weekend will be busy; Dad's church has got an Easter party tomorrow morning and I am slated to awake at six thirty, which I am not looking forward to (and should probably start working on any minute now; I seem to require an obscene amount of sleep). I'm hoping it goes well, as we're trying to draw some more people, particularly families, to our church, which is currently very small and in need of growth. There will be food (breakfast), and -- I'm singing. Which I am kind of not very prepared for, so. Okay, they're easy songs, and I've mostly got them down, and they're the sort of folk songs that my voice wraps itself around the most easily, but I am nothing if not perpetually nervous and paranoid anyway.

Sunday is Easter. Where did that come from? All of the holidays have been springing up on me unawares this year, and Easter being unusually early does not help. I missed St. Patrick's Day entirely -- it was a Saturday, and I was out and about, as usual, and I didn't even listen to the radio. Or wear green. Or put on Solas, or the Chieftains, or anything. Actually I feel as though I've been missing a lot; days are going by much too quickly and insubstantially, and yet why do I feel that the moments are dragging on? Even spring -- I've been longing for it, and then suddenly -- oh, well, look, birds. Go back to my breakfast.

 Easter is always an awkward holiday for me, as I may or may not have mentioned before, because I never feel like I get it right. I feel like it ought to be sacramental, like it ought to feel important,  like I ought to feel more solemn or at least think about something, but I get up and watch the sunrise, eat a doughnut, put on a pretty dress that's entirely inappropriate for the weather, go to church, have a nice lunch, and then sleep off and on most of the rest of the day, and I think -- where's the reverence? Maybe everyone else is getting it and I'm not. I don't know. So I'm confused all over again every year.

And now I really ought to practice "By the Mark" about forty more times and force myself to sleep. World, why do we run on different clocks?