I never thought it was for certain than Kamala could win, but I did have some hope. However, I also knew that this country was full of the sort of people who thought it was more important to own guns than to protect elementary school children from being shot, and that misogyny runs very deep…so here we are.

I titled the post Grief, but really I pre-grieved. I spent a day being sad, and a day being angry, and now I’m just, I don’t know. We’ve been keeping busy. It’s hard, feeling like you are surrounded by people who hate you, and blame you for everything. And yet, I have so much gratitude. Gratitude for my job, that I am surrounded by children and kind adults. Gratitude for my “bubble” where I am surrounded by people who want to make the world better AS WE ARE IN THIS LIFE and who support progressive policies and think that women are as or more capable than men in every way (with the possible exception of opening jars, but there are tools for that.) And fully support people who are different, who are LGBTQIA+, who support people who want children and who don’t want children. And read newspapers, and magazines, and listen to a variety of news, and study history and read literature. And I am so grateful to my partner Louie and my family for being the same way. If you voted the other way and all of those things are also true for you, I apologize for making you feel less than, but know that when your vice presidential candidate said that women without children didn’t deserve to vote it did far worse than making me feel less than.

Louie and I have decided, of course, that the best medicine is to attempt to continue to live our best lives, which of course means completely overscheduling ourselves and over working, as usual. So that means that on Tuesday we got up very early to vote, then worked all day. Miles (the cat) had a check up at the vet: he’s lost one pound since last year but this is good news not bad news. And he didn’t care for the experience and was very happy to get back into his crate to go home, thank you very much. The vet did say that he was perfect though, but we already knew that.

Wednesday I wanted absolutely nothing more than to sleep in and wallow, but I teach Wednesday mornings so I had to get up and get at it. I am not always sure of my student’s families political beliefs so I didn’t talk about politics for several hours and it was actually quite lovely. I know that all of my families are kind and lovely and treat me with respect–that may seem like a disconnect from what I wrote earlier in the post, but that’s really what it’s about. I live in an urban environment so most people are used to being around all sorts of people. And teaching violin to kids is just such a positive thing and my Wednesday morning students are some of my favorites.

So that was okay, and then I had the afternoon off because a college student canceled her lesson (I think she just couldn’t deal) and I grocery shopped and talked with my sister Leslie and just wallowed a bit. Then more teaching until late.

Thursday: day 2 of grief. Haha. I had to get up quite early to play for a wedding (yes, really!) which was very sweet and was small. Then I had teaching at the college (where a colleague I ran into joked that she assumed I was wearing black because I was in mourning…), a nice lunch with a friend where we talked about politics but also not politics, because it’s just too stressed to worry about things that haven’t happened yet and who knows what will actually happen: it will likely be both worse than we could imagine and also not as bad in other ways.

Then more teaching, and capping off with a little recording session in the evening which was a lot of fun: I did a recording where I played two different violin parts, plus a viola part, and we recorded 4 takes of each with some different mic setups, ending up with an entire string ensemble which was…all me. I joked to Louie that I’m not used to playing with musicians of such a high caliber, so easy to blend with 😉

Today I got to sleep in a little bit more, which was greatly needed as yesterday I had a migraine all day long. Usually getting more sleep helps a bit, and today was no exception. I have teaching and a wedding–I got annoyed because I had my schedule all set up for the wedding and then yesterday they moved it one hour earlier, which surely somebody knew before yesterday…so I had to cancel a student which I hate doing last minute. And I will have to make that up and I wasn’t able to get my schedule to end any earlier so it’s still the same amount of working hours…annoying. I could have backed out of the wedding of course, but I didn’t want to leave them in the lurch.

This weekend I have my student recital (so much fun!) as well a recital at Wash U (only one student playing on that one.) We were going to be attended a neighborhood event tomorrow but it was canceled due to a variety of factors including the predicted all day rain. It’ll be a fairly relaxing weekend I think. Life goes on, and we will do what we can when we can and need to.