Back to running and writing

(Interrupted) thoughts from Friday afternoon:

Only a few hours to the weekend...The longest hours of the week...
So, not that I have changed my mind: I know and am convinced that the B&S guy is not interested in me. I don't want to take anything coming from him as a sign, like when last night he greeted me before I left, and started chatting about his Halloween night (spent at home with temperature, sweet baby). Oh, he also (apologised and) explained why he hadn't reply to my message.
But this is not a sign.
The rule is to be realistic and not build fantasies out of common, ordinary moments.
Daydreaming is to be limited.
Difficult, that.
Sometimes I think that I could let slip in the information that my parents will not be at home, and casually invite somebody for lunch (not dinner, because they work until 10 pm).

And thoughts from the weekend:

Bless business trips...
I can think of the weekend as a convergence of things to do all crashing one on the other, and suddenly it was Sunday, late afternoon, and I was on the couch watching a video of "Law and Order", which I love, and thinking "oh, Monday's here already". Which is the usual thought of Sunday, as the poet says.
Anyway, I did have a good weekend: bought shoes, relaxed, enjoyed my spare time, and in spite of going to play on Sunday morning and freezing to death while listening to the same boring speeches, I could spend some time with my friends. Winter is beautiful because the weather makes us closer to each other, in every sense.
First of all, the band: because it's my weekly drama and I am constantly thinking about it. Rehearsals on Friday were awful, and if it hadn't been for CCB (Crazy Curly Baby), with whom I laughed continuously for two hours, I swear I would have left after the first piece. We cannot seriously go to the concert with these boring, slow, useless pieces! Every year since I started we've proposed an alternation of fast and slow, of serious and fun, of easy and difficult, for us to play and for the audience to listen, like Blue Shades last year, or In Folk Style the year before, not to mention things like "Der Dämon" back in 2000, a real nightmare, but beautiful.
This year the programme is an "adagio" from Mozart...a religious piece written by Mozart...My way...Silent Night...That makes four slow songs, and two of them (unfortunately, the ones from Mozart...he wrote such splendid music and what do we play? Funeral-like stuff?) particularly hideous, and no offence, please. Then what, a march-like piece which would be decent, or maybe even nice, if:
- the girl who plays the piccolo would play just a little less: she is turning us deaf, and apparently she should clean the thing, because it's an indecent sound;
- the final part cold be rehearsed slower, so that the clarinets could learn it better. Now this is strange, and annoying: the conductor always stops in case of difficulty, and makes a certain section play the difficult bit over and over, slowly at first and then increasingly fast in order to understand and perform better. With this bit...no. I mean, he stops when my section begins an easy two-beat part because he wants a more confident sound, but won't stop the poor guys in the end when they really have troubles. Consequently, they are not too happy, they don't play too well, and frustration spreads in all the sections. I don't understand...

So, apart from me deciding to go to alternate rehearsals (two Fridays a month instead of 4, I mean, what's the point?), I was considering two things:
1. leaving the band AFTER this concert, because I see no point in playing things that I don't like or that motivate me to play well, in a place where I cannot socialise anymore, and where I have to endure the screams and frustration of the conductor, and mine too, really, since I know we can do a lot better than this.
2. Leaving the band BEFORE this concert, for how can I seriously go there and play those awfully boring things? And feel the warm cheers of the audience, when every year we get less and less approval, and think that up to a few years ago we would set them on fire, so to speak, they would cheer, and scream, and keep the time by clapping their hands, never ending cheers and whistles and screams that make me shiver even now when I think of it. Now...

Then yesterday we were out playing. Apart from freezing to death and listening to the boring speeches, as I said, there were a few positive points: going for a hot cappuccino and fresh pain-au-chocolat while the others were at the mass, and laughing when the guy who was giving the speech said something really really silly, and me being in the front line I head to bend my head down and pretend to blow my nose to hide my laughing convulsion; jokeing with the conductor, and with the others, and going through the usual ceremony as I have done for the past nine years, feeling, after all, well. Well because I knew what to do, because I was with my friends, because I knew we would go for a coffee and a chat and we would wait in the cold November air together, complaining about the usual two girls who were wearing boots in spite of the "law" that forbids boots with the uniform, deciding that next time we will wear boots too (it will never happen, but we will always threat to do so), I mean, our ordinary things, that I would miss, that I actually missed when I lived abroad. Not that now I would miss the (lack of) events during the rehearsals. Because nothing really happens. But sometimes it is something unimportant, like the percussion guys freaking out with laughters when they couldn't find all their parts; like Gong playing as if he were hammering, a thing that makes me laugh even now, three years later; like the baritones going mad and making all the rows in front laugh till we cry; like somebody beginning to play "Jingle Bells" at then end of a song during a rehearsal in May, and suddenly we are all playing "Jingle Bells", rock-style, and at the end we laugh and we feel, somehow, lighter.
These are the good things.

I really wanted to write about serious things, today; because the situation is going crazy, and the government is talking of the use of the Army to calm things down, and the new economic reform is making everybody angry, and the Financial Times is writing awful, pathetic, stereotypical articles on mafia and football, and this mafia thing is getting stronger and stronger, so there is this guy, who's MY age, and has written a book, listing all the bosses that are literally governing the South, and now he has to be escorted because he could be killed any minute. I keep on reading articles and books and watching programmes about it, and they just make me feel weak, powerless and afraid. This, and the future, and the lack of certainty, as always.
So I think that at least when I am writing on this blog, I am allowed some easy light reflections, however confused and meaningless, and superficial maybe, but useful to take my mind off all this dark, fearful dimension we're living in, if only for a short while.