Chirp chirp? Maybe?

 

The ME, dazzling ratbag that it is, decided to give me a few hours last night off.  This is one of its favourite tricks—I’ll feel my energy reservoirs, empty as the hob’s bowl, suddenly and without warning beginning to refill—a sort of counter leak, with energy seeping in, as if some kind of risky, unreliable guerrilla rescue.  I got all excited—as one does—and did a bunch of stupid, low-level stuff like folding laundry that I have not been getting round to* because I’m genuinely tired by the last few weeks AND because you, or anyway I, do not want to do anything too demanding when I’m hoping** to SLEEP soon.  However, by the time the laundry was folded, all the houseplants watered, the trove of puppy toys hoicked out from under the kitchen cupboard*** and various other domestic chores too embarrassing to admit were accomplished, it was well after mmph o’clock and I was still much too buzzed to sleep. . . .

STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID

. . . which is either the system, or how I’m feeling, on two hours’ sleep† and a lot of gaudy hallucinations, or both.  Probably both.

Monday is, however, my voice lesson, and very little can get between me and Nadia.  Also . . . considering the boiling-crap level of life generally it’s been a surprisingly not-bad week for singing.  One of the most frustrating things about being, well, terrible, with very little voice to begin with and what there is of it tied up in barbed wire so any movement causes a thin desperate squealing, is that it takes so much frelling effort to unwind enough of the barbed wire to make some kind of singing-facsimile possible that you’re tired, cranky and demoralised before you’ve got past your frelling warm-up exercises.  I do keep reminding myself how much more voice I have now than I did two years ago when I started with Nadia†† but it’s like the difference between a molecule and a mitochondrion—yes, in terms of percentage, huge, but no one without a microscope is going to notice.

I’ve got round the hideousness of beginning warm-up by singing folk songs††† but there have still been days/nights when F looks like too great an effort—I admit rarely any more—but beyond F there is G and then A . . . or the occasional whapped-by-an-angel frelling B.‡  And I never know.  Some nights are still hideous.

But this week, despite all, it hasn’t been too bad.  I start off with enough noise to do something with, and practising a new song is less like bending wrought iron with my bare hands than sometimes.  And this week the new song was Voi, che sapete which I ought to know instantly since I’ve been playing Marriage of Figaro about five times a week for the last forty years . . . but as many of you out there know, performing something is always a tiny bit more demanding than listening to someone else performing it.  I went in today nervous because I had a new song, still . . . it was a familiar new song, and I’ve mostly been able to sing it this week.

I think my bottom-line set point has moved up a fraction.  This is the second week in a row that we haven’t had to spend half the lesson winkling my voice out of hiding, so we got going on a song sooner than usual.  And I was way more out there than usual—I’m not sure what to call it because it’s not just volume;  I’m capable of being (relatively) loud in that small room;  this was something beyond that.  This was . . . my voice trying to become itself, to be, you know, distinctive, as I said last week.  I can hear this.  And, if you want to know, it’s frelling scary, being out there, even if only Nadia can hear me.  It has fresh drawbacks too:  there is a much greater graphic reality to the fact that I’m not Marilyn Horne or Janet Baker or Joyce DiDonato.  I don’t know how to explain it:  it’s better and worse at the same time . . . but it’s a bit exciting.  And while I’ve spent the last two and a half years being a good little dweeb about not listening to Real Singers on YouTube I’ve also thought it’s kind of a joke because I’m not capable of trying to sound like someone who knows what she’s doing . . . I’m starting to stumble over the line where I might.  I might try to do one thing rather than another.  It’s about to become significant, down here at mitochondrial level, that I learn to find my own distinctive way rather than pick up someone else’s.  Maybe.

What’s the next level after mitochondrion?  Golgi apparatus?

* * *

* Sorting and then putting the laundry into the washing machine and turning it on was challenge enough

** Against both history and reason

*** To the great joy of the puppy.  I must remember to ask Atlas to plug the frelling gap the toys disappear through, which of course was created by the puppy in question doing her ricocheting trick.  Southdowner had warned me about the hucklebutting and the high-speed end-swapping.  She hadn’t warned me that a bull terrier, being made of case-hardened steel as they all are, is perfectly happy to do this through or in spite of trees, furniture, you (ow),^ other dogs^^, etc.

^ I have a new theory that bullies are dogs for young people.

^^ Darkness runs away.  Chaos, however, does this folding-his-legs-under-him-and-floating trick like a kind of furry, fawn-coloured Yoda till she caroms past him.

† I got up when I heard Pooka ringing—despite the fact that she was turned off.  If you are so not asleep that you can hear the faint burring noise a turned-off iPhone makes when it rings, you might as well get up.

†† Two and a half, minus maternity leave, I think.

††† And old gospel thumpers.  I’ve told you before that one of the sillier bennies of this conversion shtick is the excuse to sing When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder and Shall We Gather at the River etc at top volume, doing the washing-up, behind Wolfgang’s steering wheel, and frequently when out hurtling hellcritters.  This also has to make up, however, for the tosh we sing at St Margaret’s.  I’ve pretty much given up singing.  I drop down into unreconstructed chest voice and bellow.  I have a few musical friends, including Nadia herself, who say that they keep themselves from going mad under such circumstances by singing harmony, but I’m mostly not steady enough for this—yet.  It’s on the list.  I’m still half-plotting suggesting to Buckminster we have an occasional real hymn-singing evening—but Eleanor says I’d have to be ready to go through with it, which means run the freller, because Buckminster would say ‘yes’ instantly because he likes his congregation to feel involved.  Eleanor says she’d help.  Hmmm.^

^ Yes.  Think of the blog material.

‡ Eh.  I should have a piece with a high B in it to sing when it’s visiting.  Might encourage it to stay, or at least come back oftener.  It’s always such a shock when it drops in it’s like whoa what do I do now.  And then I don’t do anything and it decides it’s not appreciated and goes away again.