Many many things to do: this is the high-pressure week, probably of the entire year. Grant application, promotion application, leave application, masses of administration, three courses to start teaching (one entirely new), and of course that PAPER to finish (aargh).
(The paper is about 5/6 complete – but the last part is just, well, it's just not. Yet.)
Today I looked at the whole grant application and realized how huge it was, what a mess, how unfinished, how impossible, how on-the-verge-of-being-absolutely-due. My reaction was, however, tough: I had that Don't Mess With Me, I Have Work To Do attitude that got me through so much chaos, poverty, and uncertainty in the mid-1980s and 1990s in San Francisco and Los Angeles; when I was the inexperienced assistant manager for a financially collapsing dance company, when I was assistant to the most famous of Colt models, when I was singing in bars, when I was auditioning and working and fighting to get along, one little underpaying job to the next. There were points in those years when I was frankly heroic – in an admittedly rather pushy way; that was the period when I developed that style which I called, years later when it was no longer entirely appropriate (i.e. when I was a professional with a real job and administrative support), my Get Out Of My Way Unless You Want A Me-Shaped Hole In You approach.
Well, it was sort of cool to feel that way again. Invincible, powerful: I can get grants, I can get jobs, I can get things finished – look, the program notes; look, the music is copied and in order; look, I took three buses across town to get the letter signed and back to the post office by the deadline, and even rush hour and a broken doorbell and the wrong address couldn't stop me.
Unfortunately, an unhelpful afternoon meeting on the grant application, then hours working on it this evening, have left me feeling less heroic – it just all feels so made up, so sketchy: and since British grants are more competitive and bureaucratic, any flaw will be attacked sharply. Feeling a bit more, well, cowardly – or anyway easier to beat.
Ah well, it's all feelings. But it was nice to remember that sense of power, of ability: of a certain sense that if I keep battling on and doing things one after another, some of them would actually succeed....
Perhaps I need to remember that energy these days. Even at my age.
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