tarotgal

It feels like "to journal" has only recently become a verb, though I'm not sure whether that's true. A quick google tells me it turned up in print for the first time back in 1803 but I also found an article from 2017 announcing that the American Heritage Dictionary had "just" made it officially both a noun and a verb. I don't generally appreciate the nouning of verbs and verbing of nouns (or worse - nouning of adjectives) but that's because there usually exists a perfectly good word that means the same thing and is already the correct part of speech. Like "ask" as a noun (instead of task) or "action" as a verb (instead of "do"). I'm not sure what you'd use here. "Write" is technically correct but not specific enough - writing in a diary is a different act from writing a novel or writing a letter or writing a graduate thesis.

All this to say that I'm glad journaling is a word, and doesn't even get flagged by spellcheck anymore.

I do a fair bit of journaling. I started my first paper diary back in 1991 and filled many a volume through the end of undergrad, when I discovered LiveJournal (which later was moved to Dreamwidth). There were a few years when I tried to keep up with both paper and blog, sometimes even printing out blog entries to paste into my diary so I kept a record of events without having to rewrite everything. Part of this shift came from spending a much larger part of my day in front of a computer - I didn't carry my diary around with me but I could dash off a quick LJ entry at my desk in grad school, where I spent the bulk of my days anyway.

Discovering Blogbooker, which allows me to export my blog into a format I can feed into Lulu to create a printed book, alleviated much of the need for rewrites, but the shift from paper to digital had already happened. For years I still had an old paper journal kicking around, neglected for weeks or months at a stretch, but over time I also discovered that a lot of my most therapeutic writing happens at a keyboard. I type far faster than I can handwrite, so my words have half a chance of keeping up with my thoughts. If my brain gets full and I just need to get it all out, I sit down at a computer, not a notebook.

My current journaling setup is a little bit complicated but it seems to be (mostly) working. I use a preprinted planner for my diary, which grants me a relatively small amount of space but encourages daily recording. This is not the same as my actual planner, which holds my calendar and to-do list (though I usually jot down a word or two about what happened that day as a reminder). I also have a couple digital calendars - my main Google calendar and the shared Timetree calendar with Jason - but the paper planner is essential since I often don't have access to those at work.

This here blog is for longer, more detailed descriptions of events, as well as the occasional off-topic ramble (like this post). Now and then I need to get a whole lot of stuff off my chest, in which case I'll write it as a private post that isn't visible here but is included in the printed book I make at the end of each year. All my posts start out as draft emails, since I always have my email open, and drafts are autosaved regularly. Once it's been posted to the blog, the draft gets deleted.

I still have dreams of One Book To Rule Them All - it contains my diary, sketchbook, planner, bullet journal, scrapbook, everything! It's amazing! I just carry around a single book everywhere I go and it's everything I need! This, obviously, does not work for my daily life. I could possibly make it work if I could rely exclusively on my phone for my calendar and to-do lists, but that would require a major career change.

There have been some special occasions that have resulted in One Book To Rule Them All - specifically long trips, mostly planned around BookCrossing conventions: Amsterdam, Japan, Sweden/Germany/Denmark, Norway, Finland, Walt Disney World in 2017, and the 2011 BookCrossing Convention in DC. But even those only work in the short term - I fill it with words and drawings while I'm there, then finish it after I get home with collages of all the pamphlets, receipts, and other assorted detritus picked up along the way. Aside from the occasional sticker or fortune cookie fortune, I don't paste stuff into my sketchbooks or diaries because I worry that the lumpiness will make drawing/writing on future pages difficult. Thus, my gluebooks are separate from my sketchbooks and diaries.

At the moment, the combination of short daily written journaling with sporadic longer blog posts and the occasional drawing or gluebook spread is working out okay. I still love the idea of keeping an illustrated diary, but that would have to be on top of what I already do. The daily entries in particular are crucial because otherwise I forget what happens with alarming speed. Heck, often my diary gets neglected over the weekend and by Monday morning I already can't remember how I spent Friday evening. I worry that a switch to an illustrated journal would result in huge swaths of forgotten time, since I'd need to devote more energy and effort to each spread and couldn't just take three minutes to jot stuff down like I do now, and thus would actually do it far less frequently.

To be clear, I don't fully understand this obsession with recording my own life. I write the date on everything I write or draw, no matter how fleeting. I don't go back and reread old diaries, though I have been known to spend rather large amounts of time rereading old blog posts. I don't think it's out of fear of forgetting important things, though that probably factors in there somewhere. I just like doing it. I like to write, and I like to write about my own life because it helps me understand my own mind. And if we can't understand ourselves, how can we ever hope to understand anybody else?

Originally I had one enormously long post but enough of it was chorus-related that I split it into two merely super long posts.

There's some chorus drama going on that I can't write about yet, but in the meantime here's other stuff, as we had Regionals and a whole pile of gigs over the course of a couple of weeks.

I roomed with Sophia at Regionals. She'd attended Region 19 contest many times with Wife Becca but this was her first time both competing in Sweet Adelines and in Region 14 in general. The hotel is under construction which meant both the restaurant and the Starbucks/cafe were closed, severely limiting our food options for the weekend. We hit up Wal-Mart on Thursday night with Martie and it's a good thing we did or we may have starved. Luckily, neither of us requires large amounts of food. And the breakfast buffet was still running, so we at least started each day with a solid meal.

Much of Regionals is a liminal space. You either have to be at this specific place at this specific time or else you have like two hours to kill with absolutely nothing to do. Thursday evening we drank wine and watched a couple episodes of the new Interview with the Vampire series, which is lush and melodramatic in ways only vampires can get away with. Friday was a prime example of the liminal space: get up, eat breakfast, wait a couple hours until the mass sing and parade of flags, watch the first set of the quartet contest to cheer on De'Vine Notes (VF's one competing quartet), hang out in the room for a few hours in case there's time for dinner before rehearsal, learn there isn't time so have snacks in room, go to rehearsal, go to bed.

Saturday was the chorus contest. We ended up snagging fifth place, which is a lovely green medal. The judges' comments sounded way more positive than the score, but that's how it goes sometimes. We dropped 34 points compared to last year, which is a bit disappointing. That said, if you go by raw numbers, the 2nd place chorus in Region 19 would have placed 6th place in Region 14 (one point behind us). After contest there was a party where the two choruses going to Harmony Classic performed - us and Carolina Harmony. They're competing in Division A (small chorus) though they have since grown to the same size as VF. They sang two songs, then we sang one song, then we invited them to join us for "Sing" by Pentatonix, claiming we were competing in the brand new AAA Large Chorus Division of Harmony Classic. It sounded amazing. After a few awards, the new Region 14 champion quartet, Avoid the Frogs, performed. They're super good. They also won novice quartet, which tells you just how fast they came screaming out of the gate their first time out.

While we were gathering and milling about, waiting for the party to start, my chorusmate Connie had a whole bunch of stickers laid out on the table in front of her. They were all unique, leftover from some collaborative project near the bazaar that I'd never stopped by to look at. As folks arrived, Connie chose a sticker specially for each member of the chorus. A couple people referred to it as Connie reading their aura. The sticker she gave me said, "Be a voice, not an echo." That was a really sweet moment.

Unmuted got to sing around to a few afterglow rooms. It was my first time singing around in Region 14 - the first year I had strep throat, the second year Lori was at a wedding (so we competed in Region 19), and last year Lori was too sick to go to contest at all. We only visited a handful of rooms before Lori turned into a pumpkin, but I was happy we managed to do even that much.

Not sure what's in the future for the quartet. Beth and Martie still want to compete, and I'd like to join them if I can, if only because being a competing quartet is a really good excuse to learn and improve. Starting a new quartet would mean losing the music we've already paid for, but we also love singing with Lori and don't want to kick her out. Some solutions have been proposed but no decisions will be made until all four of us have sat down to discuss. More on that later, hopefully.

The drive home was a bit rough - eight hours of listening to discussion of how the chorus is on the brink of utter collapse. I'd already planned on making a summer project out of visiting all the other choruses in the general area (to include such far-flung locales as Baltimore and Richmond) just to see how other folks run their rehearsals, but now I'm definitely doing it. I don't anticipate leaving VF, but I confess I was despairing a bit. There are three factors in how well someone meshes with a specific chorus: quality, culture, and distance. We all have our own personal standards of singing excellence that we need in order to be happy in a chorus; I discovered with HOM that I needed to sing with a group that could handle learning harder music more quickly. I have not visited Harbor City but from what I understand it lacks the cultural (that is, social) aspect that I desire. And of course distance is the remaining factor - Sophia thinks I'd be super happy in True North but ain't no way I'm driving to freaking Delaware on a regular basis.

Lotsa gigs in a short period these past few days: Thursday we ended up doing two honor flights because the second group pulled up just as we were finishing our performance, so we just hung around until they got settled in with their food and then put on a second show. Friday was another honor flight (just the one), then Unmuted sang at the opening reception for Fairfax Spotlight on the Arts. We had no idea what to expect but we ended up having a good time. A lady in the bathroom asked me why we were all dressed alike - she wasn't sure if we were performing or "just really good friends." We opened (introduced as Uncommitted, which was funny, but our name was correct in the program) and closed the event, which meant we had to wait through the hour-long program in between. The awards and speeches were a little boring but mostly short, but it was fun to see the other musical acts - a senior at Fairfax Academy did a couple songs on guitar (including Black by Pearl Jam, which I estimate was written about 15 years before she was born, which put me in a bit of a weird headspace) and a couple students from George Mason performed classical pieces for piano and violin. We closed the program with a singalong of This Land is Your Land.

The audience was great, very complimentary. Afterward, a gentleman stopped us to ask if we'd ever heard of Law Day. We had not. He explained that it was something Eisenhower had come up with that had never quite caught on (clearly), but that for the last 20-some years he'd been running an annual Law Day festival, and he'd love for us to sing at it. Unfortunately, it was too short notice (one week!) for us to participate, but maybe next year! The man was very nice. He said when we started singing, everyone in the room just had a huge grin on their face. He and his colleague had started laughing, they were so tickled. And that? That right there? That's why we do this.

When I got home that night, I got to thinking about just how extraordinarily lucky I am to get to do this. These are citywide events attended by the mayor and delegates and congressmen. (It occurred to me that between this and all the Memorial Day, Veterans Day, 4th of July, and Christmas events we do, the mayor of Fairfax might actually know me by sight.) Honor Flight groups from far away states request us by name. We entertain crowds at the historic Willard Hotel. We sang at a Boston Tea Party anniversary party in Vienna. People get so hung up on competition but the real gift is the opportunity to share this joy with so many people.

And we did it again last night, at the main chorus performance for Spotlight. We sang for a full hour and change. There were many hugs and some tears for Kathy, as this was her final event with the chorus. She gave me a very sweet card full of encouragement as I fill her shoes as bass section lead. I'm going to miss her so much. Jason went with me to the performance, was recognized yet again as the sole Marine in the audience during Armed Forces Medley, then we stopped by Dairy Queen for blizzards on the way home.

We have a couple weeks until the next honor flight, which is good. I have some cleaning to do. I discovered yesterday that I have absolutely no idea where my chorus black pants went, and in fact cannot be certain they came home with me from Regionals. They should have come back with the laundry like the rest of my costumes but they have not yet surfaced. Luckily Bonnie had a pair for me to wear for the performance but I really want to find the ones I had, which may mean tearing apart a couple of closets.

Oh yeah, and Sophia's new pitch pipe finally arrived. I had it custom made - bright pink with the VF logo on one side. It even came with a magnet clip so she has somewhere to put it while singing. She loves it and used it for the performance. Even better: she no longer has to borrow mine!