antidote

Today was a nice antidote to a weird week.

In addition to the incredible tragedy that I wrote about yesterday, we attended a play on Tuesday night that was disturbing and brutal. It was a premiere called Trojan Barbie, staged at the oh-so-intellectual and oh-so-avant-garde and oh-I'm-so-over-it ART (something something Theater). TB was inspired by Trojan Women, itself a purely tragic play from all I've heard.

The premise was kind of interesting, the execution less so. A precious, shallow doll repairwoman vacations in Troy, falls through the cracks (of archaeological layers? of time?), and lands in the detention camps of the Trojan Women, who are now all modern. We witnessed horrible tragedy after horrible tragedy, and heard more described in graphic detail. The tourist is "rescued" and brought home. Eventually, she re-encounters Hecuba who by now has gone completely mad.

I think the main points are that "war is hell," times never change, and we keep a neat distance between ourselves and evil until we're directly involved.

There's a reason some plays don't have an intermission, this being a good example. I was fairly shaken up by the play. The only thing that kept me from leaving about half an hour in was that I would have had to disturb way too many people on my way out. So I sat through the whole thing. Ick.

Then yesterday, I wangled a doctor's appointment at lunch time to start understanding something that might be minor (would be nice); we'll see. Of course, the doctor couldn't see anything and the whole point of that exercise was to get a referral, and I'll have to wait a few weeks until the next appointment. More on that if anything happens.

And work has been very intense. I've been fairly busy lately and had mapped out all of this week to get a surge of work done when... at the last minute... I was informed that I had meetings every day for about four hours each day. I managed to fit everything in -- the pre-mapped work wasn't as bad as I'd feared -- but it was intense.

Today is a relatively quiet day before I go away for that conference I'm speaking at. I got up early (thanks, kitties!) and went for a nice long swim, then came home for a spot of coffee, and out again to get my hair cut. It's always a pleasure to see my hair cutter. Then I went to a recently-opened coffee shop in town and ran into someone I know distantly, a rather lovely woman, and was brave enough to ask if I could sit with her. We ended up having a nice conversation and we were even joined for a bit by the shop owner.

On top of that, it's a beautiful spring day. Colors are intense, temperatures are mild, and everyone has a smile on their face.

Now I just need to get ready for the trip and off I go!