Yesterday, I went to the Hollywood Bowl again. It took over sixteen months between my last concert before the pandemic lockdowns, and it took just four days after that for my next one. The pandemic threat still hangs very much in the air, but at least I feel some sense of normalcy by being able to be back at classical music concerts. I even missed the annoying people:

• The hungry snacker reaching into a noisy bag to retrieve something and worsens the disturbance by doing so slowly and carefully which slightly lessens the noise by prolonging it over an excruciatingly long period of time.
• The music lover providing audible sound effects by sighing and moaning accompanied by head nods and sways just to show how emotionally touching they find everything and prove to no one in particular that they know what the music is about to do.
• The “connoisseur” providing audio commentary before and after so we can all know how cultured they are because they read the program or Wikipedia.
• And unique to the Hollywood Bowl: the eager patron preemptively lifting their ass out of their seat as the conductor approaches the podium so that those around can go from confusion to awe as they realize that this person has been to the Hollywood Bowl before and knows that every performance there starts with the national anthem. 

Yes, I can be slightly judgmental, but I behave and show no outward expression of what is happening in my mind. When the music begins, I let everything go and lose myself in my thoughts (barring any egregious interruptions). I like to enjoy my music simply. I like to do my research on the music and educate myself about it as much as possible, but when the music begins, I let myself fall into a state where I let go of logic and allow the emotions to take over. There is no culture or ignorance, connoisseur or novice in this state, just raw music as it exists for you. It’s your own personal experience.

About an hour past midnight, the stomach cramps were going away, and I was finally sleepy enough after reading for a couple of hours. The thermostat was set at 78º because that’s about as warm as I can tolerate it when going to sleep and because it’s better for the environment. I usually have to sleep with no covers on at this temperature, so when I got the urge to get a blanket to cover myself with, I knew that whatever had caused the stomach cramps was not sending me into a mild fever. For better or for worse, I like to let my body fight off whatever it’s fighting off on its own. I see pain as the body’s warning system, and it is something that shouldn’t be quickly dismissed using pain medication. Likewise with fevers: as long as they’re not high fevers, I think you should just let them run their course. Fever is the body’s way of preparing the battleground to make it easier to defeat whatever is infecting you. So I listened to my body and put on a blanket to “feel” comfortable even though I knew this meant an elevated body temperature. Later in the morning, I began to feel the cold sweat that usually signals the end of a fever. My body was now taking steps to bring the temperature back to normal. I felt relieved but still a little weak and with little appetite. It wouldn’t be until late in the afternoon before I felt 100% again.

I’m probably one of a few people that, in the middle of feeling like crap, you can’t help but marvel at the body’s immune response.

As occasionally happens with these posts, I’ve fallen a little behind and adding these after the fact. My posting (and all productivity, for that matter) went out the window when I either ate something bad or caught a stomach bug that gave me stomach cramps for most of my Friday. I pushed myself to finish my essential work, but it admittedly wasn’t my best quality work. It was one of those frustrating situations where it didn’t matter if I was sitting or lying down; the cramps would not go away. So that was my exciting Friday.

People have been visiting space for several decades now, but the visits to space these last couple of weeks by private citizens is a remarkable breakthrough. We’re at the very beginning of commercial traveling to space. Still, I believe that space travel will accelerate at a pace never imagined because of competition among private enterprises. I’m jealous of the future generations for whom space travel will be something they take for granted. I cannot imagine what it must be like seeing our world as the beautiful blue sphere that it is. I wonder if in my lifetime we’ll see tourism to the Moon or even Mars.

Will we ever, as a species, be able to travel to another star? The closest one, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light-years away. Using current technology, it would take 6,300 years to reach this star. 6,300 years ago humans were emerging from the Stone Age and starting working with metal. Many civilizations rose and fell during the time it would take a modern human to reach the nearest star besides the sun. As much as I like to imagine being able to travel to around the galaxy, explore new worlds, and see the supermassive blackhole at the center of the galaxy, I reazlie it is an imposibility given the unimaginably long distances and the countless number of stars in our galaxy alone.

I imagine that the explorers of the future that will be residing amongs many stars beyond our own will inevitably be a new inorganic “life” of our creation. We see the seeds of this in the Voyagers that are only now traveling past the boundaries of our solar system.

I used to run here most daily several years ago. 🙂

Things don’t always go as planned. That is something that is a lesson that life insists on teaching every one of us. And so, there is no Wagner post for today because I let my emotions get the best of me. I know I wrote about emotion a few posts ago, but it is always far more challenging to put into practice than talking or writing about it. I, in particular, need to do a better job of it because I’m the type of person that will ruminate over every excruciating detail of a previous situation that got an emotional reaction out of me. To clarify, when I speak of emotions or the emotional, I am referring to the whole range of sentiments and not sobbing or the crying that is often synonymous with “emotional.” I walked for nearly four miles and then took a long drive to clear my head and think about my career, health, and the people closest to me.

I should have enough time tomorrow to complete my post on the wonderful documentary about a staging of one of Wagner’s operas in New York.