Thank you, Ethan Ponedel...

I don't mind telling you that I'm in a grunk* tonight. I'm at a bit of a crossroads, personally and professionally...my nascent relationship is foundering on that perverse little fulcrum known as bad timing (i.e., I'm ready to move forward, he isn't), and I'm on tenterhooks waiting to hear whether I'm hired back full-time (with all its attendant benefits) or will be bumped back to Extra chorus. Right now, it feels like everything is in limbo; will we work out our issues? Will I have a job? Is it time for me to move on, pursue the solo career more aggressively, go back to school, move to NYC, throw caution to the wind and go live the Boho life in Europe and make ceramic neti pots (OK, maybe not that last one)?

It's funny how odd memories can pop up when least expected. I was reminded of something that happened when I was in college. I had an obnoxious skater-punk type named Ethan Ponedel (funny how I can remember his name so clearly when half the time I forget my OWN name, eh?) in my poetry class. At the end of the semester, we each had to turn in a booklet containing all the poems we'd written for class, and in addition to the grade we received from the teacher, we were critiqued by, and got to critique in return, all our classmates. I remember none of my other classmates, none of their critiques (all of which, I'm sure, were very kind, very well-intentioned, and absolutely useless to me as a writer or as a person), except for his, because, at the time, it puzzled and annoyed me: instead of a written critique, he'd drawn a crude pastel of a swimmer in choppy waters with a red arrow pointing to it and a single sentence written below, without even the benefit of punctuation--

You can't go fast if you're afraid to wobble


--I dismissed it (and him) in disgust at the time: What a pretentious little jerk! I thought. Couldn't even be bothered to read my poetry, to give me an actual criticism I can USE? What! An! ASSHOLE!!!

But now I see that he HAD read my work, had gotten it--and me--in a way nobody else did, and had had the courage to tell me the truth, in a way I only now, twenty years later, can really appreciate...

You can't go fast if you're afraid to wobble

It's taken me all these years of living with the brakes on to see just how true his words are...so no matter what happens I'll just have to keep swimming, won't I....

RM



*Grunk=grumpy funk, i.e. cranky AND depressed