The perfect excuse

My musical life has been nearly obliterated for the last six months by a hellish grind at work. And whenever a vacation arrives - Christmas, spring break - I always instantly charge to the airport (the very second my last class is done! Zoom!) - and fly across the whole huge country to Boston, New York or Miami. Then the instant I get back to Portland, I leap in my car and charge off on the 3-hour drive to Seattle (related to some complicated cat-sitting arrangements), zoom back to Portland on the very last Sunday possible, try to squeeze in a Lions rehearsal, then back to work full-time the instant rehearsal ends. As I charged off to Boston on spring break two weeks ago, I felt wistful leaving; I realized I couldn't recall having had a free day in Portland since July 2008.

Then ten days ago my laptop was stolen in Seattle. Along with my driver's license and all my credit card numbers and all my online passwords and all my Lions rehearsal recordings. (The one thing that was spared, thank god: My passport and its Brazil visa! Because I'd just mailed it off to the State Department to get new visa pages, 'cause the whole thing got nearly stamped full on my Bloco X trip last year. Otherwise it definitely would have been in the travel bag that got stolen.)

Well, I really recommend a stolen laptop as an unmissable life experience, purely for the weeks of sympathy and support it engenders. Good god, the waves of sympathy and understanding I got, from colleagues and students alike! The emails of support! The immediate offers to take me off committee work, spare me a terrible grant-writing deadline, let me skip a few rehearsals, forgive my not having finished grading the last batch of exams, forgive my lack of reply to the last 200 emails!

I'm going to ride this excuse as long as I possibly can ("I'm so sorry I didn't reply to your email more promptly - my laptop was stolen 2 years ago.")

Anyway, I did lose virtually all my Lions and Axe Dide rehearsal recordings, but I was glad to get a clean slate. The only recordings spared were the ones that I'd put on a Lions website, and a decent set of Axe Dide recordings that I'd just given to both Donna and Zak; and now I'm spared the burden of feeling like I have to plow through all the hundreds of hours of other backlogged recordings from both those bands and my other two bands too.

Recording has become more trouble than it's worth. Especially when it reaches the point where people start endlessly asking me for copies of my recordings, and then (this is where it reaches the tipping point) start expecting me to record all rehearsals and even post the files on some website or other for them. "Who recorded the last workshop?" one person said at a recent band rehearsal, repeating the question a few times and then saying in an irritated tone "Didn't anybody record the last workshop??" Hey, why didn't YOU record the last workshop if you wanted it recorded? Why didn't you buy your own recorder and do the work yourself? (I'm much more tolerant if the person asking actually did make a good-faith effort to record it, but had a technical glitch)

And, as for being asked for copies, it's a nice idea, and I always WANT to share my recordings, but people don't realize that it takes TWO hours to download them a single hour's recordings, sort them, listen through them, find the thing you asked for, cut it down, convert to an mp3 and email it. (It typically takes 2x the time to process a recording than the live event took.) I just don't have the time.. At every music camp I've been to, people ask for copies of my recordings and give me their emails and each time I think "This time I'll really send them the mp3's!" and I have NEVER, EVER managed to send even ONE mp3 from a music camp to even ONE person.

So I am just relieved to have all the recordings gone. "I'm so sorry, but my laptop was stolen last week," - yay!