Tra la. In fact, tra la la la la la.
So the ME decided to start wearing off . . . at about one o’clock this morning. With the result that at five a.m. I was lying wide and gruesomely awake staring at the brightening daylight. It would be strong enough to read by soon—I having finally, despairingly, turned my light out at about four. At this point I put a pillow over my head and prayed for unconsciousness. I got unconsciousness*, but I still woke up again about five hours later and had to get up. . . . This is one of the ME’s favourite little tricks: thus effectively ruining another day . . . siiigh. There is a definable difference between ME exhaustion and no-sleep exhaustion but it’s all exhaustion and it means you have no brain and who CARES? Brainless is brainless.
I considered cancelling my voice lesson. But doing it at the last minute, either I’d have to pay her anyway, in which case I’m out of pocket, or she acknowledges that ME is a circumstance beyond my control and doesn’t charge me, in which case she’s out. And I didn’t really want to cancel. At the moment my singing lessons are mostly about the astonishing—and FRUSTRATING—difference between the noises I can make at home and the noises Nadia can get out of me during my lesson, and while the ME has a major physical impact** at the moment having no brain to engage whilst singing is not quite so important as it will be (I hope) in six months or so. Besides, I thought even pretending to have a voice lesson might cheer me up. It would at least be a change of scene.***
So I drove over to Little Warbling hugging the slow lane since driving + ME + lack of sleep = not ideal.† And stumbled into Nadia’s music room saying, today is by way of an experiment, and she said, that’s all right, I haven’t had any sleep either.†† We did waste a few minutes bonding over the excellence of chocolate under life’s little stresses†††. . . .
I hadn’t bothered even to try to sing yesterday‡ since I was finding breathing challenging, but this morning I did try to warm up and I sounded . . . mushy. And occluded, like my throat was full of mud or clay or something. Ewww. Oh dear. But Nadia has an amazing number of funny vocal exercises to pull out of her hat—and I’m sure they are partly just so you don’t settle into familiarity. And brainless or not, flabby about the knees or not, she got some real noises out of me—as she so often does—to the extent that at one point I said, that’s not me singing. I don’t know who it is but it’s not me. And she said, one of the good things about what I’m hearing is that when you’re fully engaged like that, the sound you’re making is nice and clear, not at all breathy. And that bodes well for where we’re going over the next months.
I’m going to make it into a proper choir. I am.
However we will draw a veil of kindness and discretion over tonight’s tower bell practise at Glaciation. . . .
* * *
* I had a radical, pre-eminent YAAAAAH type nightmare, which I’m a bit prone to if I’ve had a bad night and fall asleep at dawn (or frelling later). Do any of the rest of you have those nightmares where you finally come face to face with your nemesis and you can’t fight back? These are how mine go. I have the opportunity to take out the villain and can’t. I get all weak and floppy and can’t. This makes the nightmare worse, of course. This morning I was having a particularly dire version of this and I finally come face to face with the bad guy and we both know how it’s going to go. I am groping around for a weapon and I find . . . well, it looks like a bell stay, if you want to know, but call it a baseball bat only square in cross-section instead of round. And I go to whack him with it and I’m too weak. I can barely lift it, and it just slides off his shoulder. And he laughs and turns away.
And then I pick up a big roast-beast-dismembering kitchen knife and stick it between his shoulder blades and push it THROUGH and the sucker goes DOWN. Yaay me. I usually get out of nightmares by waking myself up. This was quite startling.^ But if I’m going to have a nightmare, I’d much rather, you know, win before I wake up. All very Freudian. But . . . I don’t care. I WON.
^ The villain was startled too. Just before he died.
** !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
*** Including that Nadia’s mum’s house has horses in the back garden. Well, just over the fence in the back garden. Last week there were a couple of foals trying out their voices, so I’d stop singing and there’d be this little, shrill, distant, but not all that distant, eeeeeeeeeeeee, like a sort of other-worldly commentary. Not necessarily a favourable one.
† And got there in time to knit two or three rows in a comforting and grounding sort of way. I was talking to Hannah after I got back home and she, with two teenagers to finish raising and a world to run, finds the idea of knitting attractive but has no immediate plans to try to wedge it into her life, said, When do you knit? Well, now, for example, I said, looping and twisting away like mad.^ And—er—waiting at stoplights. Waiting for watering cans to fill. Waiting for the voice lesson before me to finish. Waiting for hellhounds to eat. Waiting for the opera to start . . . it doesn’t sound like much, does it? Funny how the squares mount up though.
^ And I have GOT to get a speakerphone.
†† Nadia has a much better excuse, however. Her name is Stella, and she’s about eighteen months old. I’m in the first intake since Nadia started teaching again after Stella was born. And grew up enough to start sleeping through the night sometimes.
††† Turns out she’s also a major Diana Wynne Jones fan . . . and she bought her brother a copy of WILD ROBERT. Oh gods. Whimper. Er. I’m mostly complimentary about Wild Robert . . . sort of . . . in my own inimitable way. . . .I knew there was a reason the blog was a really bad idea.^
^ Merrilee! This is all YOUR fault! You should know how BONKERS writers are! The LAST thing we should do is run public blogs!
‡ And after being blasted out of my seat by all those Wagnerian voices on Saturday, having the excuse in this particular was not a bad idea.^ But when I said this to Nadia she said, think about it, probably even Emma Kirkby^^, listening to Wagnerians, says ‘I am a sad limp pathetic weed’.
^ Self to self, more emphatically than usual: You call that singing?
^^ http://www.emmakirkby.com/recordings.shtml
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