SO in retrograde....

After many blunders yesterday and today, I decided that Mercury has GOT to be in retrograde.

It all started with a very depressing rehearsal for the "soloists" in Chamber Singers. There are a bunch of solos throughout, divided by soprano, alto, tenor, bass (naturally), and our conductor put three of us on each part (except for the two basses). He didn't really sit down and figure out who would sing what ahead of time; he just told us that he wanted it to be divided up equally. Well, he gave me all "amen" passages. In other words, I only sing the WORD amen. And I'm the one with good Latin diction (and translation--see below). Also, each of the passages I'm assigned is in about a four-note range, and right in my break. Which totally sucks. The other two people assigned to alto solos are a friend of mine, who has a lovely voice and one I find appropriate for the mid-Baroque work we're doing, and another woman who has a nice voice but one that doesn't jive well at all with that time period. Both of them got more than I did. I found out later that there's at least one person per voice part who is really ticked off about these decisions, and that I wasn't the only one screwed (a couple of people were much worse off than I was and they are both excellent singers). Which led me to believe that it wasn't intentional at all and wasn't well thought-out and....was a big miscommunication.

I went to Krannert yesterday evening and got drinks with my boss and his wife, after we went to a musicology/ethnomusicology lecture on Gideon Klein and a trio he wrote in Auschwitz or Terezin or some horrible death camp. I got completely plastered on two glasses of wine (really, really pathetic) and came home and accidentally used bleach cleaner instead of Shout on a stain on my slacks. Then I went to another rehearsal (for a doctoral recital) and lost my ID, which meant I lost access to my building. By the way, don't EVER try to sightread Bach cantatas (sans chorales, of course--those are easy) when plastered. I was making a total ass out of myself. (Bach is next to impossible to sightread even when you're sober, but with all the other stuff we were sightreading, I was surprised at how well I was doing, even while drunk. :)

So today I had to go get a new ID. Then I went to Espresso to get coffee. Their credit-card machine wasn't working. So I went to the ATM. Which was out of cash. Then Espresso told me they don't take checks.

All of these things point in one direction--Mercury is in retrograde. I checked it out online and it IS. Until March 25 everything is going to be freaking miscommunicated, misdirected, misunderstood. And bad things are more likely to happen like plane crashes and train wrecks. I know it sounds crazy but pay attention and you will see that I'm right.

Anyway, that aside, I had to do a booktalk today on Helter Skelter. Which I totally messed up. I should have practiced in front of someone. The biggest mistake I made was assuming that everyone knows about the Manson murders the same way everyone knows about September 11. It was too easy for me to conveniently forget that most people in my class were born well into the 1980s. I was born five years after the Manson murders, so in my lifetime it was considered recent history. So I just figured I didn't need to go into any background because that would be redundant and boring. I will never make THAT mistake again.