I managed to draw three family members into an emotional exchange on Facebooger yesterday. Damn! I found it very upsetting to read their exchange and didn’t sleep very well last night. This morning I got up and carefully composed an answer that I hope may sufficiently apologize for getting them going. Whether it does that or not, I do feel a bit better.

In fact this morning is the first day of vacation that I actually feel a sense of well being. This has been missing since I have been so stressed by whatever is stressing me (work, age, fatigue?). I do find that not only am I slowing down physically but also emotionally (hopefully not too much mentally but that’s probably denial, heh).

I’m wondering how I’ll make it through another year of working doing all the stuff I have been doing. I do need to make adjustments to make it a workable year. But Eileen and I are counting on me bringing in my part of the money we need to live. So there’s that.

I can try to improve my physical well being through exercise and diet and get enough rest.

I will probably have to drink less in order to be better rested. Dang.

Today is the last full day of vacation here in Grayling so I’m glad that I am beginning this day with some sense of being rested. I’m not quite ready to plunge into my next phase of activity which will be planning the next year at church and pulling together the final steps of an organ purchase recommendation with that committee. But it’s beginning to look like this next phase will be possible.

I’m working on evolving an effective approach to learning classical Greek. This time I haven’t used flash cards much. Also I’m behind on the exercises and grammar sections that accompany the texts I am reading daily. But I read somewhere recently where the way to learn is largely in the doing not drilling.

I do find that in my daily reading I am asking deeper questions about the words and the grammar of myself than I did when I studied Greek before. I try to read over the new section four times. Since I’m at the cabin I do this pretty inaudibly but still try to quietly vocalize the reading since this seems to help understanding and retention.

Planning to read another fifty pages in Gardiner today (the Bach book). If I do that I will only have about a hundred pages left to read in it.

I have been wondering about where profundity of musical ideas fits in to people’s lives these days if they aren’t predisposed to listening to and thinking about music that isn’t popular music. I think that mostly it doesn’t. People need profundity but I think in popular music they are getting it more from the words than the sound of the music.

This comes home very clearly as I listen and think about Bach’s cantatas and the St. John Passion. I don’t see very much music being written these days which can achieve the depth and coherence of Bach’s music, but that is probably largely because of our fragmented context. There’s no larger common language to draw on but popular music which tends to be pretty simple. Don’t get me wrong I like the simple. But Bach is not simple and it boggles my mind what he can say and with what beauty he says it.