all hands on deck

I can tell I'm really busy when I can't quite figure out when, within the space of a week or two, I'll be able to do laundry. Certainly I'm not one to read a book about the seven habits of highly successful people, or care about those habits or even those people, but if I were a betting man I'd say those people habitually keep a washer and dryer in their residences. It would save me a lot of time, anyway.

I'm in rehearsals for Copenhagen now, and it's difficult in the best way possible. Tonight was a long night, over four hours of blocking dense material on a unit set. I told the cast that they're the most enjoyable cast I've had to work with since the last time I had a cast as enjoyable to work with as they, and I meant that in the best way possible too. It's astonishing and tragic to me that such talented people will work for so little money. It's twice as much as we paid anyone a year ago, but it's still peanuts. I'm working for peanuts, too, but the production company is my company, which ostensibly holds my future. For these fine folks, it would seem to be all about the love of the work.

A strange thing about rehearsals, though. I'd rather be in rehearsal than do just about any of the other stuff that's filling my time these days. But tomorrow I have office hours at NCStage and then an afternoon preparing for immediate theatre project's inaugural meeting of the Board of Trustees which takes place tomorrow night (there's a lot of preparing to do, and there's also that laundry), and somewhere in there is a trip to the printers and some shopping for the set; and yet I'm anticipating it like a day at the beach because it's a day without rehearsal.

My point is just that it's strange to relish so deeply a day off from the thing I love doing most. But then I'm also a great believer in incubation, and a day off from rehearsal is a lot more productive than a day off from bartending.

I could go on, maybe pull out my pocket PC and show you just how busy I am these days as indicated by the appointments on my calendar, but I won't. Instead I'm going to take 45 minutes of personal time and watch an episode of The West Wing (season 4), have a beer and go to bed.