Still mostly sickly, and still on a ridiculous amount of medication with side-effects I don't care to mention, but I'll give you a little bit of what I've been thinking about, aside from my dislike for being sick and all the associated stuff.
Success. That's what I've been thinking about. Mostly as it relates to specific things I do and how I measure whether or not I was successful at them. I haven't spent too much time thinking about the wide-range definition of what it means to be successful at life, but I think the answer to that is something about earning the respect of the people you respect... or something.
No, I've been thinking much more narrowly about success as it pertains to being a wife, a home owner, and a renaissance festival performer. I'm going to skip the first completely because I don't have a good answer yet. As for number two, all I'm gonna say about that is that floors are not the answer.* Clean floors do not define my worth as a home-maker.
Now, as for the last on that list, I have some thing to say. If you're tired of hearing about Faire stuff, take heart--this is the last weekend. 3 final days of performance. I might have a few more things to say about it next week as I sit in a stupor, recovering on my couch, but for the most part, come June, I should be done thinking & talking about Faire for a while.
So, how do I define my success as a renaissance festival performer? I'm not sure. I mean, if I was sure, I probably wouldn't be thinking about it. In the beginning, when I didn't know what I was doing, I looked to the people who had been doing it to see if I was doing it right. I thought if I had their praise and recognition that I must be succeeding. That's where the mug and rose come in--tangible recognition from my peers.
There's another way that is totally wrong, but still true...which will make sense in a minute (I hope). Pictures.
This one is from Photography on the Run. I once believed that if I was out and about enough, then there would be lots of pictures of me, so I decided that if there were lots of pictures of me, then I was doing my job well. This is really silly as most of my actual "work" wasn't caught on film, but I do have a knack for resting photogenically.None of this was really important until I discovered that for all the 9 hours of show time that we actually have, my four 30 minute scheduled show times had consumed all of my time. I know it seems silly that 2 hours can take 9 hours to do, and it is silly. First of all, it's not just four 30 minute shows.
