passion

I got some rest (I was SO tired on Monday because I hadn't slept well) but I have to say, I still hate my life and don't see how I'm going to keep doing it for any length of time.

However, I don't hate everything. On Monday night I had a revelation - I love to sing.

Not much of a revelation, I agree, because I've always loved to sing but what I realized on Monday (at chorus rehearsal) is that my love of singing can transcend whatever is going on in the rest of my life.

I drove to rehearsal Monday night feeling very discouraged, the hour I'd spent at home after work had seemed endless. And then we started to sing and I felt light and happy. Really happy. All the tiredness and discouragement were lifted, at least for that 90 minutes.

That rehearsal room is as familiar and comfortable as my home used to be. The people I sing with are friends. This is my 5th year in chorus. It was hard to start, my shyness makes new situations almost impossible but my passion for singing overcame the shyness and I forced myself to go week after week into a room of strangers. And then, little by little, I found my group to sit with and now walking in there is like hanging out with family.

The music for this season covers the decades from 1940s to 1980s. In many ways, this is more difficult to sing than regular classical choral music even though the arrangements are much less complicated. Sometimes having a choral group try to go pop has less than desirable results, kinda cheesy. Hopefully we'll do it all justice.

I enjoy some of the music better than others. Not a big fan of the 70s but I do love the Beatles and there's a Billy Joel song from the 80s that I adore. We haven't practiced the 40s music yet but that's usually my favorite era to sing so I'm really looking forward to it.

There's even some solo opportunities and I'm definitely going to give that a try.

Taz was all about passion and he truly felt that everybody needed to find something to be passionate about in order to make life worth living. His catchphrase was Excellence Through Passion and he tried very hard to live that every day.

I haven't had a lot of passions in my life, I'm more easy going because passion requires a lot of energy and isn't always a positive force but I do know that my passion for music and singing is going to help me get through all of the other shit. I'm going to try very hard to focus on one happy thing each day in order to survive.

So for Monday, that happy thing was singing. It lifted my spirits and made me smile. I drove back home much lighter and happier...and then I escaped into my room to watch TV. LOL Baby steps.

Yesterday was a good day too, my happy thing was cat trivia and the return of something I thought I'd lost but that's a story for another day.