Doin' What You Do Well

Yes, I'm exhausted. But it's such a happy and fulfilled exhaustion. (No traffic on the way home tonight, only rain.)

Despite the exhaustion, I sit in the rehearsal and I know I'm good at what I'm doing. I curse my nerves for screwing up my audition and not allowing me to have the COC seat secured already. But I'm so happy to sit there singing fabulous music, listening to great voices all around me. Tonight I sat next to Ginny, a first alto. In the divisi parts, I was thrilled to be harmonizing with her.

I'm going through a difficult time at work. Because telephony is a new area of technology for me, the learning curve is enormously steep. I try to gather information from the various technical people at work, and sometimes it backfires. A month ago someone sent me an incomplete answer. I asked him for more detail and he e-mailed my boss to say he didn't know the answer. I don't know all the details of the e-mail response, but my sense was my boss felt like he was being yelled at by his colleagues for my behavior. So now I have to send all my requests to my boss and he'll see if he knows the answer or ask others for the answer. He said these guys feel dumb when I ask them something they don't know. (Yeah, and how do you think I feel when I have to ask and ask and ask to get information?) I've always been very good at communicating with colleagues, at gathering information to code database applications to solve all kinds of problems. Why am I now having my hand slapped for the way I gather information. Something's not right here.

D'ya think there's anything to this "mercury in retrograde" stuff?

I've had several days in the past couple of weeks when I just wanted to sit there at my desk and cry. I don't know that I've ever had a job where I felt so stupid and useless. I've always walked into jobs and "hit the ground running" (direct quote from a letter of reference written by my boss at a big downtown D.C. law firm where I was manager of database systems). I walked into my job at IBM two years ago and everything just fell into place. And here I am, almost fifty-whatever years old and feeling like a summer intern trying to figure things out. I hate this feeling. Hate it.

So you can understand how wonderfully freeing it feels to sit in that rehearsal, nailing every note, pronouncing the Russian impeccably, knowing that this is something I do very, very well.

Too bad singing doesn't pay as well as technical writing.

(Oh, that reminds me. If you're a technical writer looking for a job, my boss told me today he's going to hire an additional writer. Hmmm.)