Synthesis Sunday: The Aftermath of OCMT

My busiest weekend of the year is almost over, and I have survived with little to no aftereffects (as of now!).

Last night, at 5:45pm (my time), the eleventh Online Conference for Music Therapy finished up. We had started the evening before and then hosted music therapists from all over the world as presenters and attendees in our online format. I have been part of the planning of these conferences from the beginning of it all, and I love and dread every moment!

Now, the love of this conference definitely overcomes the dread that I get, but the weekend of conference is usually my most stressful weekend of the entire year. I have anxiety dreams about the internet going down, missing presenters, things that I have to do not getting done, trying to talk and not being able to use my technology, and all sorts of things that are related to helping to run an online conference and many other things that have absolutely NOTHING to do with anything!

It is the one Saturday morning per year that I use an auditory alarm to wake me up. I never sleep through an auditory alarm, and most of the time, I do not use a sound-based alarm. I use a light on a timer instead. For OCMT weekend, though, I set an alarm to startle me out of bed if I happen to be very sleepy. I rarely sleep until the alarm because my anxiety response is to resist deep sleep and check the clock every hour or two. I woke up about an hour before my set alarm yesterday morning and got going with the conference.

I was the second moderator for one session, the presenter for the next, the lead moderator for our second keynote session, the second moderator for three more presentations, and then finished my shift as moderator as lead for two more sessions. Once that nine and a half hour stretch of sitting in front of the computer was over, I took a quick break and then hopped back onto the platform to give directions to attendees who completed the continuing music therapy education coursework. After that, we had a quick meet with the Board of Directors, and then I called Mom. My sister then called me, and I fell asleep at 8-ish pm.

I woke up at 3am this morning and then laid in bed, watching TikTok videos until 5. It is now 6:15 and I am blogging. I haven't been able to think about the presentations that I was able to moderate yesterday, so the synthesis part of this Sunday is going to be short.

I am really looking forward to watching some of the presentations that I missed when I went to sleep a bit. Since I tend to sleep during the first part of the conference, I rarely get to see our Eastern hemisphere colleagues do their presentations live. So, I watch them in the recordings. 

I have learned that I cannot do all-nighters. When I was younger (not much, but a bit), I tried to stay up all night for this conference, but I always ended up with bronchitis or pneumonia after the weekend. I have now decided that I need to sleep during conference. There are other members of the Board who are more than capable of running things without my oversight. I will not magically make things run more smoothly by my presence, so it is better to take care of my health than to risk it. Fortunately, my Board of Director colleagues understand and can cover those times. We are a good team of people. We work well together, and I think we genuinely enjoy each other!

My brain is mush. My back is hurting because I spent the entire day sitting in my hard desk chair, and my scoliosis is acting up a bit. I need to spend some time stretching and reclining so things can get back into better alignment.

I have also realized some things about how my office is set up that I want to change. For one thing, the way my computer is arranged makes it difficult to watch things on online platforms from my comfy chair. Last year, I was able to move to my loveseat when my back started to hurt. I can't do that at the moment the way things are set up. I tried my lazy susan idea from a couple of days ago, but it did not work well. My comfy chair was significantly lower than the monitor, AND the lazy susan would not stay where it needed to be. It kept trying to spin back the way it was originally. I might need a different lazy susan. Basically, what I learned yesterday was that I need to think a bit more about how I will be using my computer (or buy a laptop which I am trying to avoid but just might have to do for things like this). I do not want to keep things this way, but I am not sure what I want to try right now. I also need a better background for my webinars. I moved some things around yesterday before my presentation, but it is not the way I think about it yet. I want the background to represent the things that I feel are most important about what I try to do - be functional and to help me work smarter. This will take some thought and some planning...and money.

Ugh. Everything I want to do takes money.

Sigh.

On a completely unrelated "me" note, I have found one of my inspirations on Facebook and YouTube - her name is Lindsay Ostrum, and she is a graphic artist and junk journaler and author of some of my favorite "How to Letter" books. I had a brainstorm to look her up yesterday in one of my brief breaks, and I found her! She was finishing up a song lyric commission project that reminded me of my own. Here is my favorite song lyric picture. I want to frame it and put it in my background for my camera...

Lyrics from The River as performed by Garth Brooks

I also want to do some more of these. I wonder if my brain would release We Don't Talk About Bruno long enough for me to make some art from it. That one I would want to give away rather than keeping it because the song is my current earworm and will not get out of my head! Perhaps making art would exorcise the song from my head - it might just cement it in there permanently, though, so I might not take the risk.

Okay...

To sum up. OCMT 2022 is over. We are already planning for OCMT 2023. We never really stop planning. I have some things to do to make my home a bit more functional for participating in online conference type things and decorating is not finished yet. I am exhausted but proud of the work that we did this weekend. I am ready to move forward and do what I need to do to get things happening! Time to prepare for my day of church, takeout, and rest before the week starts tomorrow.

Thank you for being on this journey with me.