#12

Today someone asked
if you still make me happy.
I told them no,
but I also learned today
that children don't make us happy,
even though we think that they do.
I promise to care for you as if you were my child.

Let's pray that, like being thirteen, this too shall pass.

On being a singer who is unable to sing

            One time on facebook a friend of mine asked her friends what object we thought best exemplified our souls. Or our lives. Or maybe she just asked what our favorite objects were… Honestly, I don’t remember exactly what the question was. But my answer was “voice box.” For those of you who know me, you will hardly find that surprising. I love words and music and almost anything that the voice has the capability to do. When I was little I would read stories with different voices because I was so fascinated by accents. To this day I have to refrain myself from interrogating people I’ve just met about their linguistic backgrounds, because most people would get freaked out by me going “OH MY GOSH SAY THAT WORD AGAIN YOU SAY ____ IN THIS WAY, WHICH IS SO COOL.” I love studying language because it is so infinite. My favorite Bible verse is John 1:1 “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” There are all sorts of cool theological interpretations of this- go look them up, but the reason that I love it so much is that Words=God. So by studying linguistics (in my view), I’m studying God in all of God’s complex, hard to decipher infiniteness. How cool is that?! Also, have you seen a video of vocal folds? So tiny yet so so so powerful.

            But more than any of that, the reason I answered with “voice box” is because I’m a singer. Singing and music are how I express myself. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to sing since September, and for a long time I didn’t know why. Singing all of a sudden became painful. I would get tired after singing for only a few minutes.

            On October 24^th I was diagnosed with muscle tension dysphonia. What this means, essentially, is that the muscles around my vocal tract work too hard and work ineffectively. So, the more I use my voice, the tighter my muscles get and the more pain I’m in. Fun, huh? I even got this snazzy little camera stuck through my nose and into my throat. So now I have an awesome and only slightly embarrassing video of my very own voice box in action. So at least that’s something.

            Muscle tension dysphonia is apparently one of the most common voice disorders. My vocal folds are completely healthy and I am told (and have to have faith) that this is curable. So I’m currently in voice therapy.

            And I’m so, so lucky to have the privilege to be able to get this taken care of, but it’s been the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. Not being able to sing really, really sucks.

1) I have to do voice therapy exercises that make me sound like a dying cow (sorry, all of my family and everyone in the general area of the JWall practice rooms).

2) I never know when my voice will or will not fail me.

3) I’ve had to push off so many deadlines and take so many incompletes for voice lessons.

4) I never know when I’m going to be in pain next.

5) I have to sit around with ice packs and heat packs wrapped around my throat to ease the pain.

6) I won’t be able to do my community theatre’s 24 hour musical they’re doing next week because I can barely sing for 24 minutes let alone 24 hours.

7) I’m not able to perform in my student theatre group’s musical we’re doing this semester.

8) I had to withdraw from choir this week. The choir I have wanted to be in ever since the day I first visited Macalester. I’ve been trying to ease my way into singing again, but every time I do I can’t sing for days after the fact. There’s something about choral singing.

9) I am so, so tired of being near tears about this.

But, as much as this sucks, and boy does it suck, I am so, so lucky to be surrounded with so much love.

1) When I was home over winter break and had to make my dying cow noises, no one complained once, even though our house is really small and is chaotic as it is.

2) Although my voice more often than not doesn’t work, there are days when I can sing and there is no better feeling in the world.

3) I’m in a department that is supportive and patient and has let me do what I have needed to do for my health. This wouldn’t be true everywhere.

4) Even though I’m usually in pain, sometimes I’m not.

5) Heat packs actually feel really freaking good wrapped around your neck. Just saying. Plus, it’s cold in Minnesota right now, so added heat is always nice. Also, what a fashion statement to walk around with one wrapped around your neck, am I right?

6) I’ll hopefully at least be home and able to watch the 24 hour musical. We’ll see.

7) I’ve been getting a lot of great producing experience through getting this musical project off the ground, even though I won’t be performing.

8) Sitting in choir practice not being able to sing has forced me to be a really good musical listener. Also, since I won’t be going on tour with them over spring break, I get a few more days to snuggle with my cats at home.

9) Have I been crying a lot? Yes. More than I would like to. But I have a voice teacher who is incredibly supportive and who has faith that things are going to get better and that the Universe is trying to tell us something even when I’m at my most cynical. I have a great voice therapist who is doing everything she can to help me. I have wonderful parents who have somehow found the way to help me with these really expensive therapy sessions and who understand that singing is a necessity for me. When I withdrew from choir my director told me that they would welcome me back whenever I was ready. My acting teacher had the whole class give me a hug when he saw how not okay I was. This disorder has caused me to consider careers that I had never even thought of before. I am surrounded by friends who have put up with how distracted I have been and how much of a mess I have been. I am loved by a God who is teaching me to be patient and trusting and who I believe is somehow suffering alongside me through this. I don’t talk about this a lot, but at times this is all that is holding me together.

This is hard. I grow more frustrated by the day. I can’t wait for the day that I will be able to sing again without pain. But until then, I am so grateful for all of the people who have been taking care of me. Thank you if this has been you.

           

Persona Poem

This month I've been taking part in a 10/10, where I'm supposed to write 10 poems in 10 days. Prompts have been posted on my school's poetry slam page. I've been cheating and doing the prompts out of order and not on the days they've been posted, but whatever. Here's a prompt that I was particularly nervous about, but had a lot of fun with:

PROMPT #8: This prompt requires a little research! I think that New Year's time can be very wistful and full of bittersweetness. Or else it's just an arbitrary marker of time. You know, either or. There are OODLES Facebook statuses with summaries about the 2013 year. PICK ONE. It can be a stranger, it can be yourself, it can be mine, whatever. Pick someone's (probably too long and indulgent) 2013 New Year's status and write a persona poem from one of the events. Try to make it funny and wild and exciting! (Don't worry about whether or not you're actually funny, just try to be). Test out funny voices to read it in. Make up words like Dr. Seuss. Add dramatic pauses. Fling rainbow dust across the span of the universe. Make this event seem like the coolest, most entertaining event that ever happened.

For some reason, I'm friends with like 5 million people who got engaged this year, so my newsfeed had all sorts of "2013 WAS THE YEAR I GOT ENGAGED" statuses. That served as the starting point for this persona poem, which is completely fictitious and not actually about anyone I know or anything I've experienced.

We met each other in our freshman year music theory class.

I was a beautiful angel of dominant seven chords,

He was a pretentious douchebag.

The first time we talked was at a party.

You know, one of the ones your first week of college,

Where nobody has ever had alcohol before,

So everyone is puking in everyone else’s faces?

Mmm yeah. Romance.

Love smells like partially digested pizza from Little Caesar’s.

Everyone is a little different when drunk,

But at the time I thought that everyone was the same kind of drunk: freaking annoying.

I went to the party to pick up my roommate who was passed out on a thrift store love seat.

As I woke her up and let her lean on my shoulder, ready for the long trek back to our dorm room, she vomited all over my sweatshirt. The sweatshirt I didn’t even like. The sweatshirt I wore specifically because I knew she would vomit on it.

What a sweet girl.

Like I said, nothing smells like love like vomit does, which I guess is why he came over to help me take her back to our room.

Everyone is a little different when drunk.

He was the type that rambled about Wagner, Foucault, and Freud.

All the way back to my dorm room where we dropped my roommate off.

All the way to the lounge where I had been doing my homework.

All the way to 2:00 when he finally fell asleep and I could finish my music theory homework in peace.

He was the most pathetic 18 year old drunk philosopher I had ever met, and that made me love him.

I realized that I had been spending too much time searching for a love that smelled like roses and chocolate.

A love too sweet to be of any substance.

And here I had love in the form of an inebriated 18 year old misquoting Europeans into a puddle of his own bile.

This love was gross. It smelled bad. It was too human.

But it stuck.

The first time we kissed was after figuring out how to spell Neapolitan 6^th chords.

He had mellowed to the point that he stopped trying to show off his smarts around me.

He wasn’t as pretentious as he once was. But he was 5 million times more awkward.

When we kissed our teeth knocked.

Our love smelled like the gross fake Chinese food we had just eaten in the cafeteria.

When he asked me to marry him it was cold, grey, pouring rain, and muddy.

The forecast had been for 75 degree sunny weather, my favorite.

He had intended to have a bunch of people come and sing some stupid pop song from the radio,

But everyone was sick with the swine flu or something.

It was just me and him and the rain and the homeless guy passed out on the park bench.

“You’d better have a good reason for making me come outside in this, idiot,” I shivered.

As he got down on one knee he slipped in the mud and the ring he had been saving up for for months flew out of his hands into a puddle.

Embarrassed, my vomit- smelling, teeth-knocking, Foucault-quoting idiot sat in the mud, covered head to toe, sitting cross-legged. He smiled nervously.

I went and picked the ring out of the polluted water and sat down next to him.

“Yes.” 

Whip it real good

So, last week (two weeks ago?) my friends were taking part in GISHWES (the Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World has Ever Seen)- and one of the tasks they had to complete was to get a church choir to sing a 30 second beautiful, moving, remix of Willow Smith's "I Whip My Hair Back and Forth." I found out about it when I was at their house for Halloween, and figured that I might as well use my music major for something... so I threw together an arrangement Halloween night (while dressed as a tiger, of course), invited my music friends to come sing it in our campus chapel, and this is the result:

Watch the video here because I couldn't find it when I tried putting it in this post!

Terrible voice leading... but I arranged it at 11 at night... just don't tell my theory teacher.

Thanks for helping me sing it, guys!

Exams, Features, and Some Mean Girl Named Amaryllis

No time for an Etsy feature this week... As you may or may not already know, I've secretly been doing all of my blogging on the weekends during my building monitoring shift for work... but on Monday I have my first test for Medieval to Mozart, so I really only have time to listen to tons of Madrigals.

But! Check out this blog feature!
http://wist-etsy.blogspot.com/2012/10/fridays-featured-fabricator-judith-of.html

And, listen to this hilarious piece by Monteverdi. At least, I think it's hilarious...

I don't know how to decorate my dorm room (but Sonia and Kendra do)!

Okay, the title isn't completely true. I have some nice pictures hanging on my wall and some lanterns hung on the ceiling. I have crazy bright turquoise sheets... but that's about as creative as I get. My friends Sonia and Kendra, on the other hand, have all the cool ideas. Having tea parties or awkward 3-6 person dance parties in their room is always the best... because they are so sweet, but also because their room is just so darn spiffy looking. Check it out!

I love their color scheme. What I especially admire, though, is their creative use of fabric. The organza(?) hanging from the ceiling is so magical looking (don't worry- they never turn that light on... so no fire hazards!), and the fabric they taped to the front of their drawers is certainly more exciting than the boring wood that would show up otherwise.
Keep being cool, guys!

Impressionism?

So in French class, we watched this super bizarre movie called 8 Femmes (8 Women)... Which I guess some critics have described as being impressionistic... I'm not sure if I agree, but I'm no expert, so maybe it's a possibility. For me it has all the weirdness of impressionism, but without any of the finesse and subtlety that makes me usually love it so much.
Anyway, in French class we did this activity that Mme Sauret claims was used by the impressionists to help them write poetry... I'm not sure how true that is, but it was fun anyway. We each got a piece of paper out and wrote a noun down (this was all in French, of course). We then folded the top of the paper over and passed it to the person next to us. Then we wrote an adjective down, folded it, passed it, and then wrote a verb and an adverb using the same process. My favorite one that was generated was:

La couleur rouge a chanté doucement. (The color red sang sweetly).

Friday night I went to this year's first poetry slam... I love going to slams and I keep trying to write my own poems... but I've just been writing analytically for so long that it's almost like I've forgotten how to be creative and symbolic in my writing. It's not like I can make the audience members sit through 3 minutes and 10 seconds of every single problem I've had in my life, systematically written down in chronological order.
So, I try to come up with metaphors. But my brain can't figure them out...

So, I was thinking maybe what I'll do someday is put a few jars on my desk with different parts of speech in each one... I'll then pick words out of the jars to make sentences like the one above... most of them will be dumb. (Like, the depressed lamp rolled languidly... which is funny I guess, but not that applicable to my life, usually)... but maybe something beautiful will happen...

Or maybe I'll just write a poem with as many stupid sentences as I can.

How do you get over creative writing blocks?

Lake Street Dive

Saturday was one of those days where I had things lined up back to back, but they were all wonderful things, so I didn't mind!
I had a read through for For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls, a really funny parody of The Glass Menagerie that I'm doing with MacPlayers this semester... It's super super hilarious.
Then I went to a talk given by a local music therapist, which was super inspiring and made me consider this career path again (4 years ago I was convinced I wanted to be a music therapist. Convinced).
Then I went to see PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION. I got super lucky that some of my friends had an extra ticket and invited me along... It was super fun to hang out with them, and I've been listening to that show on the radio since forever, so seeing it live for the first time was hilarious. And it was the 3rd time seeing Garrison Keillor live in a year (one of the many perks of going to school in St. Paul). The show was hilarious as always... they had this awesome blues singer from Rome... I don't remember her name, so maybe I'll have to post about her later. But, they had a super super super good band called Lake Street Dive play... give them a listen!

I keep talking about how I want to be a bass so I can sing Erlkonig by Schubert, or a coloratura, or Kristin Chenoweth, or Aretha Franklin. But now I just want to be Lake Street Dive lead singer, Rachael Price. Can't I have it all?
And let's just talk about how crazy awesome bassist Bridget Kearney is.
And super cool Mike Olson and Mike Calabrese.
Thanks for the great show, guys!

(After Prairie Home Companion I went to a gala concert given by the music department faculty in honor of our shiny new building... So good!)

Sushi Manga

So, this semester I'm taking French 305: Advanced Expression... it's a pretty fun class, and I like the professor... it's a good time.
For our homework, we were supposed to find a French article to bring to class for discussion/new vocabulary/conversation practice... I headed over to le monde, and sure, I could have chosen an article about something important and political, but I ended up finding this one about Chihiro Masui's new book, Sushi Manga. It's a cute little book done in a Manga/comic book style all about making sushi. And it's in French. Isn't it the cutest? These are the few images of it I could find online:

                                 

 

Sorry some of them are so baby tiny, but doesn't this look like the best thing? You can buy it for me whenever you want, really.

My babiest kitty.

Okay, so I've gotten featured in a couple of Etsy treasuries recently: here, here, here, here, and here. Which is all super awesome... I would have talked about all of them if school didn't have the audacity to get in the way... but I just got featured in this one, with this photo:

The reason this one is so special is because it's a photo of my cat, Paka, who is the sweetest baby fat cat ever and I miss him so much. Why can't they have pet dorms at my college?! I won't get to see him until November, which is pretty sad. So I'll just gaze at this picture forever, I guess...

(P.S. Paka means cat in Swahili... and he's an orange tabby... named cat... which makes me feel like I'm Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany's... which is cool, I guess).

Excitement! Janet Wallace Fine Arts Center

So, I go back to school in just a couple of weeks. I'm excited to see all of my friends again, and everything... but looking over my schedule, I'm feeling stressed out already- Between four 4-credit classes, four 1-credit classes, my church job, my work study, driving to the University of Minnesota for my Korean class, my clubs, practicing for voice/piano lessons, and possibly play practice if I get cast... I'll have my hands full to say the least. Yet, in spite of that, I'm super super excited for one thing: Our new music building!

Last year, the building was under construction, which meant that the music department was alllll sorts of crazy. We were kind of the nomads of campus. Our lessons were held in a tiny annex off of campus, our classes were in dorm buildings and social science buildings, choir rehearsals and performances were held in nearby churches, our recitals were held in the on campus chapel, and our practice rooms were in the basement of the library. There were some in the music annex, but their walls were lined with foam... which meant that you could hear the other people practicing, and they could hear you, a little too well. So, there was all sorts of running around. But no longer! How gorgeous is this building?!

A for real recital hall! So beautiful...

I was there a couple of weeks ago to warm up before an audition... and I had chills and tears in my eyes it was all so beautiful. And the best part? I'll  almost never have to go outside in the cold Minnesota winters... all of my classes are in music and humanities and I work in the theatre department... and all of those buildings are connected! It'll be a good year.