Wow.

I don't know if I ever mentioned it on here, but I have a friend with a music studio in his spare room who's been working on some original compositions lately and wanted me to sing on some of his tracks. We've fooled around with it a bit, but nothing serious... Well, lately, this friend has hooked up with another musician/sound engineer friend of his, and they've been significantly revamping his stuff. I was over at their studio last night to rerecord vocals for the track I was originally involved in, and...wow. They took what was originally a fairly simple acoustic guitar-with-electronic-underchording arrangement and turned it into something reminiscent of Delerium, and it sounds amazing. Absolutely incredible. And my vocals are on it now, which I still have trouble believing! Anyway, this second guy apparently has a few label connections, and after we put together some more songs they are planning on shopping it around, hoping to get us signed somewhere.

Needless to say this is very weird for someone who had pretty much given up on the idea of getting anywhere past the occasional amateur side project to prevent her from going insane. Not that I'm walking around figuring that I'm a few hour's work away from a big-time contract that's going to make me rich and famous, but along with the fact that my bellydance teacher thinks I could have the potential to go professional in that area, too, it's almost making me rethink this whole giving up on the artistic career/selling out idea. Or at least giving consideration to reorganizing my priorities a bit. Doing this kind of thing in the U.S. would be difficult until/unless I got a green card, of course...but if nothing else it's nice to know that doors I thought were slammed shut may instead have cracked themselves back open and waited for me to notice.

In other news...amazingly, there are actually some jobs out there for me to apply for this week! Now I just have to find the time to put the applications together. I'm still suffering from the scattered focus I talked about last week, and it's getting really, really frustrating. Day after day I look back and find that nothing I wanted to do--whether personal or work-related--seems to have gotten done, even though I feel hectic and busy all the time. This is especially annoying because I was pretty successful last month in getting on track with planning and achieving some small steps towards some of my various goals. Now February seems in some ways to be one huge setback and time is slipping through my fingers before I can get hold of it. Maybe some sleep will help bring some clarity.

Finally, I am pleased to announce that I bought my first professional dance costume this week! My teacher knows a dancer who is moving to Tampa and selling many of her costumes, accessories, and music before she leaves, so she referred all of us students to her. I've been thinking of purchasing a bedlah (the embellished bra-and-belt set that makes up the foundation of many dance costumes), but I've been having trouble finding one that I like that is not too expensive. Needless to say, when I found that this woman had one lovely silver set left that fit me as if it was made for me, and was selling it complete with accessories for a ridiculously low price, I jumped at the chance to pick it up. Insert yet another promise to get photos up on the web as soon as I can get around to it >here<.