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Catching Folks Up
Nov. 28th, 2017 10:11 amSometimes I turn around and realize it’s been three months since I last posted on my blog. I have a very active social media presence between Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, each of which has its strengths, but I’ve missed the luxury of being able to more fully explore my thoughts.
As a traveling performer, I often repeat my schedule from year to year and therefore have a large number of friends I see only when I come to their area. We do keep up with each other via social media, which means that each of us has a grip on the key events of the other’s life, but it does drive home what I’m not posting online when I find myself repeating the same conversation to catch people up.
I pushed myself this year. It was a deliberate choice, and one where I weighed the risks fairly accurately, but I was definitely getting crispy in the fall. I didn’t burn out, thankfully, which happened in 2011, but I got closer than I’m comfortable with.
At the end of 2011 (which I still call “Black ‘11”) I was tired and questioning a lot about my life. I questioned my career choices, life choices, and even my continued existence in my first suicidal ideation since my twenties. In response, I made a few ground rules for myself that have served me very well in the meantime.
Some of them were creative choices that I’ve described elsewhere, a decision to prize artistic vision over potential commercial success, but some were very practical. My European tours that year had been overwhelming, and I decided to cap my busking tours at eight weeks. The intervening years have shown this to be a good rule, but this year I got ambitious. I was turning forty, after all.
I figured I had something to prove, and so I booked a three-month tour of Europe. It was fantastic, and I was very careful with my spoons, but it was still very tiring. Around week ten I realized that eight weeks was a good tour limit, but I wrapped up the tour on a high note and was looking forward to returning to Italy even as I left.
This is where I got careless. I landed Thursday night and I was at Pennsic Friday morning. Pennsic is a two-week immersively-medieval event in southwestern Pennsylvania, which I’ve been attending for over fifteen years. The quick turnaround hadn’t been my original plan, since I had intended to take a few days off, but someone in our group couldn’t fulfill their commitment to deal with the bureaucracy and I was the only person physically capable of stepping in (for SCAdians: we lost our Land Agent and I was only two hours away).
From there things started to cascade. As is my usual habit, I played music at Pennsic for the week before leaving to open the New York Renaissance Faire, returning to play again Monday through Friday and then back to New York for the second weekend. I’ve been doing this for years with little difficulty, but coming immediately on the heels of an already-overlong summer tour was a bit much. Looking at pictures taken of me that second weekend, I’m pretty confident I know what I’ll look like in ten years having seen such ravages of fatigue on my face.
I don’t regret any of my choices, and taking long breaks from music during the weeks between New York Faire weekends was deeply restorative, but it’s not a lesson I’m eager to repeat. I’ll try to keep that in mind as future birthday milestones parade toward me.
As a traveling performer, I often repeat my schedule from year to year and therefore have a large number of friends I see only when I come to their area. We do keep up with each other via social media, which means that each of us has a grip on the key events of the other’s life, but it does drive home what I’m not posting online when I find myself repeating the same conversation to catch people up.
I pushed myself this year. It was a deliberate choice, and one where I weighed the risks fairly accurately, but I was definitely getting crispy in the fall. I didn’t burn out, thankfully, which happened in 2011, but I got closer than I’m comfortable with.
At the end of 2011 (which I still call “Black ‘11”) I was tired and questioning a lot about my life. I questioned my career choices, life choices, and even my continued existence in my first suicidal ideation since my twenties. In response, I made a few ground rules for myself that have served me very well in the meantime.
Some of them were creative choices that I’ve described elsewhere, a decision to prize artistic vision over potential commercial success, but some were very practical. My European tours that year had been overwhelming, and I decided to cap my busking tours at eight weeks. The intervening years have shown this to be a good rule, but this year I got ambitious. I was turning forty, after all.
I figured I had something to prove, and so I booked a three-month tour of Europe. It was fantastic, and I was very careful with my spoons, but it was still very tiring. Around week ten I realized that eight weeks was a good tour limit, but I wrapped up the tour on a high note and was looking forward to returning to Italy even as I left.
This is where I got careless. I landed Thursday night and I was at Pennsic Friday morning. Pennsic is a two-week immersively-medieval event in southwestern Pennsylvania, which I’ve been attending for over fifteen years. The quick turnaround hadn’t been my original plan, since I had intended to take a few days off, but someone in our group couldn’t fulfill their commitment to deal with the bureaucracy and I was the only person physically capable of stepping in (for SCAdians: we lost our Land Agent and I was only two hours away).
From there things started to cascade. As is my usual habit, I played music at Pennsic for the week before leaving to open the New York Renaissance Faire, returning to play again Monday through Friday and then back to New York for the second weekend. I’ve been doing this for years with little difficulty, but coming immediately on the heels of an already-overlong summer tour was a bit much. Looking at pictures taken of me that second weekend, I’m pretty confident I know what I’ll look like in ten years having seen such ravages of fatigue on my face.
I don’t regret any of my choices, and taking long breaks from music during the weeks between New York Faire weekends was deeply restorative, but it’s not a lesson I’m eager to repeat. I’ll try to keep that in mind as future birthday milestones parade toward me.
