Moaning on key

 

The ME is being an evil humourless ferocious ratbag*.  It's been more on than off for probably the last fortnight**.  I knew I was in trouble last night, for example, when I was too tired to play Montezuma.  Montezuma is one of these blow-as-many-tiny-sparkling-objects-up-as-possible-within-a-ridiculously-short-time-span games, which means you have to be able both to focus and refocus your eyes and to move your fingers around the screen and tap with extreme speed and agility.  None of these skills was much in evidence last night.  At least I slept.  But I slept about forty-seven hours*** and it still took me three tries and another forty-five minutes before I could claw my way out of bed this morning.†

            My Inner Child and Outer Adult spent the next six hours arguing.  You should cancel your voice lesson, said the Adult.

            Won't, said the Child.

            You need to work, said the Adult.  You don't have time or energy to hurtle hounds, practise for your lesson—do I have to remind you you're already behind on practise time?

            Oh shut up, said the Child.

            —ingest enough caffeine to make even marginal functioning possible, continued the Adult, unmoved, and get some work done.  Do you want hellhounds to starve because you can't afford to buy dog food?

            Very funny, said the Child.

            The only responsible thing to do is to cancel your voice lesson, said the Adult.

            Won't, said the Child.  Besides, I cancelled only a fortnight ago, and I was traumatized for the entire week.

            Well, maybe you're doing too much, said the Adult.  Maybe you should rethink your schedule.

            Maybe you should find a large body of water to fall in, said the Child.  You can't swim, can you?

            Actually, I can, said the Adult, stiffly.

            That won't work then, said the Child.  You could fall on your sword.

            You could cancel your voice lesson, said the Adult.

            Could, said the Child.  Won't. 

            Cancel, you little sod, said the Adult.

            Won't, said the Child.

            At 3:30 I tucked my music under my arm, took hellhounds back to the cottage and went off to my voice lesson.  About an hour before this the caffeine had finally begun to kick in and I figured I probably would get there and, with luck, home again, without running off the road.  I might even be able to speak to Nadia in complete sentences, although that was probably pushing it.  I'd had a kind of go at running through Sebben Crudele, but it had been a bit sad, not least because frelling Atlas was at the mews today and I do not sing if anyone can hear me, †† except Peter, hellhounds and (occasionally) Oisin. †††  But I went, with the Adult still snarling in the background, and the Child going nyah, nyah, nyah. 

            And then the lesson was not too bad.  I had done some practising earlier in the week before the ME knocked me over again, and there was some discernable residue of this, plus Nadia's teacher-magic in extracting some of those sounds out of me that only she seems able to do.  There is some dastardly irony developing however:  partly because I'm so embarrassed by my Amer-italian and partly because some of what Nadia is trying to teach me is beginning to stick enough that I can use it without her there to chivvy me, there are moments when I'm singing more freely at home than I do in my lesson.  There is just beginning to be some dynamic arc to the awful muddle of my Sebben Crudele, and Nadia plucked it from the affray and brushed it off.  Here, she said, polishing it on her sleeve.  Look.

             Yaay.  I think. 

 

I was much too tired to go bell ringing.  But Niall was driving and . . . ‡             

* * *

 * I'm working too hard.  Don't bother trying to disguise your delight. 

** This seems to be running more or less parallel with the hellhounds' latest attack of not eating.  There is perhaps some connection.  I don't have the time and energy to spare waiting with apparent serenity for them to come round to the idea of eating while Chaos demonstrates his opinion by trying to bury his latest meal^ and Darkness deliberately re-lies down so he can curl up with his back to his bowl.  ARRRRRRRGH.  Repressing the screams of rage and frustration is even more tiring than the apparent-serenity shtick.  

^ Be thankful for small favours:  both the dog bed mattress and the floor are resistant to being scooped up by a hellhound nose and flung over a bowl of dog food.  Occasionally, however, when there's a blanket in the dog bed. . . . 

*** Which would explain a lot about how blurry my memory of the last two days is.

 † 'Morning' is, of course, a relative term.  

†† And yes, it's perverse that I should be taking voice lessons to get louder.  I want to sing in a choir, okay?  With other people.^ 

^ I am not thinking about the next time Percival and Andraste visit.  Not.  Not.     

††† I have, however, found an excellent study aid on YouTube.  I was preparing to burn myself in effigy when I discovered that there was a clip of Cecilia Bartoli singing Sebben Crudele and it's not available in the UK.  ARRRRGH.  I suppose it's Customs & Excise I should be burning.  Not in effigy.  However, there is available a performance from a vocal-arts school by a young woman whom I hope I will hear singing Verdi any day now and Wagner in another decade or so.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEfFCftI3kg

Sebben Crudele as I will never sing it.  SIIIIIIGH.  I used YouTube a lot when I was taking lessons from Blondel, because he was always throwing new music at me, and it was a personal floatation device.  Nadia has more the sneaky, gradual approach—plus I've been mostly singing stuff I sort of know already.  Also, everything with Nadia heretofore has been in English.  I'm sweating the frelling Italian a lot, and while I wouldn't know how good this young woman's Italian is, I can tell you it's a lot better than mine^.  So this afternoon I was playing this clip over and over, and sort of breathing it along with her. 

^ One of the things I've finally twigged is what Nadia keeps telling me about how it's all vowels, and you sort of tack the consonants on briefly here and there.  You'd think, after forty years of listening to Verdi voluntarily, that I'd have some clue what she meant.  No.  But I'm finally getting it, listening here.  Whether I can reproduce it or not is a whole other, ugly question.  

‡ . . . and I rang Kent.  Which should not be worthy of note.  Except that—you know this chorus—Ionlylearnbygrind, and I haven't rung nearly enough Kent to have an auto-pilot for it, and, the first time I'd rung it in months last Friday I made the most awful hash.  Uggh.  So when Colin asked me what I wanted to ring, I asked for Kent.  Everybody else held their heads and moaned—I like Kent, but this tends to be a minority opinion—but I got straight through it like 'there was a problem?  What problem?'  Mind you my striking is still . . . fairly dire.  But I was nearly enough in the right place not to lead anyone else astray.