A Side of Snark

There are no words to sum up the last month. I am tired, achy, hungry, annoyed, angry, sad, tired… Just so tired. Work today was so… It was just such a chore, a job to make it through today. This week. These last few weeks.

This night, other than my foul mood, is rather lovely… I have to admit. There’s a stillness… as I walk further and further from the train, I can feel the night calm me down.

As a song from State Radio begins to play through my earbuds, a very strange thing happens. I smile.

It’s not much of a smile, really, just the corners turn up, but it doesn’t hurt my mouth like so many smiles this month have. I don’t feel like I’m smiling through a vat of oil.

The fatigue begins to lift from my shoulders.

A familiar sound makes me pull out my left earbud; someone is doing a long tone series on a trombone. A full blown grin appears.

It’s Friday night and someone is rehearsing. I wonder if it’s a kid, nervous about auditions next week.

I remember trying really hard for first chair one year… Only to be disappointed with third. I can’t believe that I actually feel… Nostalgic.

I allow myself to smirk, remembering stupid things - the smell of valve oil, the necessary speed needed to get the good stands, the sound of a watch hitting a piccolo player after flying off a conductor’s wrist - and I enjoy those memories.

As I enter my house, my barking dog the only welcome, the only sign of life, I feel… Less of everything. For now.

As I’ve left this place pretty dusty, I feel as though I should give an explanation.  

In short: I didn’t want to be mean. 

When you have nothing nice to say… blah blah blah.

Recently I’ve had an epiphany:

Eff that.

So here it is, bullet style:

• The infamous song tells us that the internet is for pron, but really, if you look around here, it’s for advertisements, recipes, “expert” opinions and photography sites. Nothing is original.
• Over-sharing is the new flannel shirt; tell me all about your dinner, your date, your body functions, all before I really know your name or if I like you.
• Advice might be the new over-sharing; all people need is the ability to program a little CSS, a thesaurus and WHAM, instant ADVICE MAVEN.  
• The word maven is far too over used on the internet.

Despite all of the above, the internet is still a place where a jock can bond with a nerd over a tweet, an at home chef can admire those photographs taken with cheap glass, a writer can read better material on a poster on Pinterest and where we can all have a little space to bitch about our bosses, family, friends and pets. 

Fantastic.

I just had a thought - let me poop it out all over the internet!

Every time someone tweets, then posts the same feelings on their Facebook wall, then blogs about it, I have to wonder if repeating themselves helps at all.

Or perhaps what I am witnessing is, as Albert Einstein defined it, insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

At one point, we all had similar boxes of crayons and we all colored our own simple pictures.

Now that we’re older and some of us have better, newer, cooler boxes of crayons AND bigger, prettier and more fulfilling pictures to color, we find ourselves comparing crayons, pictures and levels of completeness.

That’s all natural, I’m sure.  Though why we feel the need to be “finished” faster or slower than anyone else is beyond me… there’s no prize at the end of the picture, because there will always be another picture to complete. I guess the ultimate prize is always “You’re never finished! You can always start afresh!”

If starting afresh was in and of itself enough… well, then other people wouldn’t feel the need to lean over, comparing their green grass to my blue sky, their red house to my white one. Sure, I lean over too, sometimes wishing I could get that shade of orange in my sunset, or that my picture still contained that solid, fatherly figure in the background of so many pictures around me.

Finishing your picture in a bubble wouldn’t be rewarding either - there wouldn’t be anyone to be excited when you finished that winding creek, nor would anyone notice that your picture lost some important color and consisted of more shadows.

It’s a fine balance… not envying someone’s Shocking Pink, yet admiring their beautifully shaded meadow. Being happy for but not jealous of someone’s stunning artwork is a sign of growth and maturity.

But at this time… a small part of me would just like to lean lower in my seat, cover my paper with my arm and work on my picture all by myself for a little while…

Maybe after snack time I’ll want to share.