It's been twelve hours since my last confession

I keep forgetting that I’m on my lunch break and find myself trying to do more work, which is obviously stupid.

Now I work sans headphones, which means I do less out of sheer frustration and lack of ability to concentrate but I guess my superiors are happier with that scenario, so.

Meanwhile I’ve agreed to take on more responsibility as one of our fellow umbrella organisations can’t be arsed to pay another body, but I’ve been flattered with the notion that they have coerced someone else to do the ‘crap work’ before I set about making it all pretty. Oh corporation, will you never cease to amaze and disgust me all at the same time?

We’ve decided that it’s probably best to wait a while for children, since things like pay raises and accommodations (and sometimes my mental health!) (I’m only kidding) are still up in the air. A year might just be enough time to enjoy our fabulous life before we start adding dirty nappies and puke-up to the mix (just pour into a pre-greased pan and bake at gas mark 6 for 20 years).

Oh-ho-ho, look who we have here. The sales guy is back from his meeting. This might mean my entry takes a turn for the aggressive, we’ll see.

I discovered last night that I can’t play my banjo in front of Bruce, at least not nearly as well as I can play for myself. I don’t want this to become a mental block though, because first it’s Bruce and then it’s my teacher and soon I will be trying to play gigs over closed-circuit television from a sealed capsule launched in outer space. And I just can’t see that as being a viable way to live.

Actually, I have absolutely no pretensions about my future as a music artist, although the more I practice the damn thing, the happier it makes me feel. This is definitely an improvement over my inaugural experience with learning an instrument at the age of seven, when my wellbeing could be depended upon for a single day of the week – the day following a lesson. After this, the accumulation of dread would increase alarmingly until I was nearly doubled over with anxiety as once again I found myself stood outside the door of my lesson room. My own green mile was traversed this way on a weekly basis for years.

Though after twenty four years, I think I can finally extend my sadistic teacher the smallest benefit of the doubt, since she wouldn’t have shouted at me and put me in all those recitals and competitions if she didn’t think I had potential. I wonder what she thought when, seven years after my first lesson, my mother called her (on my insistence) to tell her I wouldn’t be returning. Maybe she was as relieved as I was. It takes two to make a musician and at least one of us wasn’t invested (the other was frighteningly shrill and despondently narcoleptic in turn).

Hey, that wasn’t so painful.