It’s rare that I really understand why things happen the way they do, or why the people around me do the things they do. But sometimes the desire to understand becomes such a hopeless cause it becomes overwhelming.

For awhile, this past week seemed to be going great: on Thursday we played an excitingly well-attended show at The Viper Room for Moheak Radio, hard work and persistence in looking for and rehearsing with a new bass player meant we hadn’t had to cancel a single show since our previous bass player quit at the beginning of June, we had a music video shoot planned for Saturday, and it seemed progress would continue its slow but steady march. But appearances turned out to be deceiving.

Joel and I spent much of the week and into the weekend turning our rehearsal space into a music video set, and then spent a long day on Saturday until early in the morning shooting with the band and a volunteer crew. Things appeared to be going relatively well, and when we all went home around 1:00 a.m. we were all exhausted but felt we’d accomplished something worthwhile.

But Sunday morning brought different revelations. By 2:00 a.m., our new bass player had decided he was out, a complete surprise to us when we woke up to find the email, and upon inspection of the music video footage came the equally startling realization that the film school cinematographer we had shooting our video was not really comfortable with his camera, or maybe just never understood what we were going for, and the footage turned out to be unusable. So by the close of the weekend, much of the work of the past month had been completely undone.

Joel summed it all up pretty well, though, when he walked into the kitchen where I was doing the dishes on Sunday, “Amber, It’s a long road to the top…really long.”

We couldn’t help but laugh, because that is something we do understand.