Sometimes Being Practical Is No Fun

Do you ever have those moments when you have a choice between two things you want where one is fun but practical and the other is just fun?  Yeah, me too.  I hate decisions like that, but its a part of growing up, something else I'm not a huge fan of.  Can I please just go back to being a little girl playing in the mud not worried about how I looked or what I was going to do with my life?  Nope, stuck being an adult.  Ah, well.  In any case, I recently struggled with one of those choices.  Since its unlikely that I'm going to be able to take any classes at CNM this semester, my parents mentioned that I should check and see if UNM Continuing Education had any cooking classes I could take in the meantime.  So I went and checked and sure enough they had quite a few one night cooking classes.  There were also a lot of other classes with arts and crafts, music, writing, exercise, etc.  As I set about exploring the various classes I could take, the music ones caught my eye.  One of them was for the University Chorus, a choir that you didn't have to audition for that was going to be working towards a performance of a The Defiant Requiem, part of Verdi's Requiem, a beautiful piece of music.  I immediately decided I wanted to take this class not just because of the piece being sung, but because it culminated in a performance in Popejoy Hall.

Having grown up going to numerous performances at Popejoy, you can understand that I've always wondered what it would be like to be on that stage.  Any stage that I've ever performed on has been maybe a quarter of the size of Popejoy Hall's.  For me, its the place where magic is made, the place where I always feel inspired, where some of the most exciting moments of my life have taken place.  While some people dream of singing at Carnegie Hall, I've always dreamed of singing or performing at Popejoy.  As far as singing goes, Carnegie has never been a dream of mine, probably because I've always known that I would never possess a singing voice that would be asked to sing there.  Popejoy though, seemed maybe barely within my reach.  And then suddenly here was this opportunity to do what I had dreamed.  But, of course, there was a catch.  Many of the culinary classes I wanted to take, that would be fun and practical at the same time, were on Tuesday nights at the same time as the choir rehearsals.  My immediate impulse was to say, forget the culinary classes, I want to sing at Popejoy!  That is until the adult, more practical, side of me popped up and reminded me that the culinary classes would help with a career whereas the singing was strictly for fun.  And in this case, I couldn't even make the excuse that it was a once in a lifetime opportunity because for all I know, they might do something in the fall and I'll have another chance or something else will work out and at some point I might find myself up there.

So although there is no Popejoy performance in my future for now, I am excited about the various cooking classes I'll be able to take as well as fiction and screenwriting classes which I'm hoping will help with my writing.  And I'll keep hoping and praying that I do have another opportunity to perform at Popejoy.