An Incompetent stream of consciousness.....Nothing new there then!

Ooh things were going so well back in January. A couple of posts in quick succession and then I completely neglected you. Until now.

I am not going to promise to post next week or even more often as it doesn't work. I obviously don't really care about accountability plus, being, a woman of a certain age, going through the thing most women my age go through, I can not commit to anyone other than myself right now. Sometimes I can't even commit to myself (if that makes any sense. It does to me). What I will say is I will post again but I will not commit to a time line!

So what shall we talk about today? I actually don't know but I knew I wanted to write something and, as that feeling is almost non-existent these days, thought I would just start before the feeling disappeared again.

It is the end of the Easter holidays. Back to work tomorrow. That's fine. I actually had a pretty good holiday apart from a couple of days in self-isolation because of Covid (I wasn't ill with it but I had it and did my moral duty and stayed away from people) and then I had a small spell of vertigo yesterday which was particularly annoying as I LOVE a Saturday off and was planning to make the most of it but instead had to spend the day in bed sleeping and binge watching stuff on Prime and the like. 

I am coming into my busiest term. Normally the summer term is the easiest but the theatre school I teach at has it's big show in June and my choir has 2 big concerts planned/booked this term. I normally put the choir concerts on after the school term has finished but no, not this time, I thought I would give myself a ridiculous amount to do this year and get everything done and dusted before the schools break up. It's either a brilliant move or a crazy one. I'll tell you which it was mid-July.

Although I am still a little lazy and lacking in motivation, I am definitely better than I was. I am slightly better prepared for everything I have going on and no longer constantly tired. I still get tired but not to the point that I can't do anything.

I turned 49 a couple of weeks ago and have decided that I am going to write a list (not a bucket list per se, although I suppose it is a bucket list for the end of my 40s) of things I want to do before I'm 50. I haven't gotten around to it yet but I will start writing it when I've finished with you.

When I was 39 I decided I wanted to get fit as I wanted to be as healthy as I possibly could be in order to live well for longer in life. I definitely got fitter but fell off the wagon at about 46 for a while. I got back on the horse and am trying to regain a little of what I have lost, fitness wise, over the past 3 years so getting fitter can definitely go on my "Farewell to my 40s" list. 

I have absolutely NO idea what I want to achieve over the next year but I want to achieve something. I don't want to do anything too crazy. I don't want to skydive or go to America or anything like that. I don't even have aspirations to own property anymore as that is nigh on impossible now. Given my time again I would have bought something back in 2003/4 when I had the most well-paid job of my career and probably would have got some sort of mortgage but now it really ain't going to happen unless I save up enough to buy something outright or win the lottery. 

I think my list will be full of practical, sensible things but it might be nice to include a couple of silly things I would still like to do but my brain fog is making it hard to bring them to the forefront of my mind right now. Perhaps a bit of meditation would help. I tried meditation a few years ago but these days I have to multitask whilst doing everything these days. Actually, having said that, I am writing this with no distractions whatsoever. No radio, no TV nothing. Just writing. That hardly ever happens!

I have nothing more to say right now so I'm going to love you and leave you. But I will leave you with 2 things. The first is a link to my Enlightened Singer blog. Click here to be redirected there and also click here to come and join the Enlightened Singer Facebook group. You would be very welcome. In addition below is a video I uploaded to YouTube. I just completed another 12 weeks on The Sing Space 16 Bar Challenge. This song, Parents Lie from Freaky Friday, was the last song we were given and it was one of my faves. Pop over to Instagram and follow The Incompetent Soprano there, again, you would be very welcome or follow me on YouTube.

Until next time, whenever that might be, enjoy!

Stop moaning and do something...anything....no, don't watch another episode of Grey's Anatomy.

Actually, I don't watch "Grey's Anatomy" but a large proportion of my friends do so it seemed the obvious choice for the tilte. However, I digress (already). I feel like I may have been a bit moany (not a real word, I know) recently so I decided it was time for a good old slab of optimism. Life is good at the moment for a variety of reasons (still not financially, unfortunately). However things have only felt really great over the past couple of days.

Since writing the last diary entry (To be or not to be?...What?...To be or not to be what?) I realised that I had been, perhaps, looking for an easy way out. I like to know where my next pay packet is coming from, it makes me feel safe and cosy and, for the first time in my life I don't have that particular security in my life. Therefore, I thought if I just built up my list of singing students and concentrated on helping other people do the thing I have always wanted to do I would be happy, content and, ultimately, financially secure. But a performer's life does not work like that. This insecurity is what we signed up for. We knew it would not be easy and there would be fallow periods. It is important, however, to make those times between jobs count. By this point in my life you would think I would be used to the insecurity that comes from going from job to job. Finishing one job and not having the prospect of another on the horizon is, for me and others like me, normal.

The thing to do is embrace your free time (I covered this, sort of, in Up and at 'em Platt!.....Let's have a coffee first though)What I have had a tendency to do over the past couple of weeks is stress about having no auditions to go to or not enough teaching work to pay the rent that I ended up doing absolutely nothing but think about doing nothing. I can spend hours, nay, days doing this and achieving precisely nowt! So what has changed, I hear you yell? Well, for one, I have joined a gym. Those of you who are familiar with my physical being will attest, I am never going to be a thin woman (I have no desire to be so either. I embraced my curves a long time ago) but I could easily rein in those curves a little with a modicum of work. There is more to going to the gym than just getting skinny. I find if I do nothing then I want to do exactly that, nothing. However, if I get out of the house and do a bit of exercise I then find I want to do other things with the rest of my day other than sit around stressing about having nothing to do. 

The second thing I have done recently is to join a kind of meditation programme. My brain is full of thoughts. So many thoughts that I can not hold on to one thought for more than a couple of seconds before another thought invades the space and shoves the first thought out of the way. I have always had too much going on in my head. I have a ridiculous imagination that runs away with itself at the drop of a hat (this was part of the reason I started doing this Diary so you can blame my imagination for the bombardment of drivel). Unfortunately my imagination is not the sort of useful imagination that allows me to write stories and stuff (I wish it was), it just gets in the way to be quite frank. Anyway, the meditation idea (I know, it sounds a bit spiritual for a girl like me) is a way of quieting all these thoughts so that they can form an orderly queue. That way I can get to each one in turn instead them feeling like a tangled ball of wool that I can never untangle (ooh metaphor - that's new).

In addition to these two potential improvements I have made I have also been inspired by two other things. The first being a friend who has started blogging.  Her first offering (probably without meaning to be) has been quite inspirational. A great advocate of the "don't sweat the small stuff" camp (visit her blog via this handy link: http://paperlantern55.wordpress.com/). She was also the instigator of the meditation thing so blame her if I turn into a zoned-out hippy. The other inspiration was an online magazine article, shared by a friend on Facebook, about actors who have made their own work. Some of the people mentioned are women who have had trouble getting the sorts of roles they wanted so created their own characters, wrote their own screenplays and put themselves out there. It is so easy to sit around and wait for work to drop into your lap, Lord knows I am guilty of that, but I vow not to do this anymore. I had an idea for a one-woman-show-type-thing and, by the power of Grayskull, I am going to make it happen. (See the article here: http://www.frostmagazine.com/2013/09/actors-who-make-their-own-work/)

So there you have it. I promise from now on to be more productive, more upbeat, more vivacious, slightly less voluptuous and a lot less desperate (in all aspects of life). If I had ever been a Brownie or a Guide I would pledge allegiance to the Queen or summat like that. Unfortunately I wasn't so I pledge to serve Doris Day and work my ass off for the foreseeable future.