Silence Part I

Music has killed my life for at least the next two weeks.  Haydn is basically Soprano Show-Off Time, which is awesome, but after singing the Creation every day for a minimum of two hours this week, not to mention everything we've done this past semester, my voice has decided to rebel, and express its displeasure by simply not functioning.  That's right, I literally can't talk.  At all.

This is incredibly frustrating.  Well, that's putting it mildly: I have been quiet for less than twenty-four hours and I'm already prepared to kill things.  There are too many things in my head, and I am accustomed to getting them out via speech.  Which seems kind of weird to those who remember when I was a kid--I really didn't talk much.  Then I hit sophomore or maybe junior year of high school and all of a sudden there were WORDS.  So many words.  As it is, my voice can't keep up with my brain, and I type

SEAN GIVE ME BACK THE MAD COW CELL

slower than I speak, obviously (although really 85+ wpm isn't bad), and writing by hand takes even longer.  As it is I already have several pages full of "my side of the conversation."  I never realized exactly how much I talk until now.  Apparently I also hold all of my conversations with myself out loud, because today when I was "talking to myself" I had to consciously remind myself to keep it in my head and not even try to talk.

I actually had a bit of a scary moment today.  The whole not-talking thing technically started yesterday, but I thought that all I needed was a bit of rest after a long and quite grueling rehearsal and I'd sound okay in the morning.  The Wise Man once told me when I was a bit nervous about singing in front of people "Never be afraid that you'll open your mouth and something un-lovely will come out."  Well, today I opened my mouth--just to talk, not even to sing--and nothing happened.  I got to thinking what would have happened if that had been some kind of emergency, or if it had happened in front of people. Being female and average-sized, I usually have to talk my way out of trouble (although I readily acknowledge that I talk myself in to trouble much, much more often).  I rely on my intellect and my ability to express it to get what I want, especially since I'm so much younger than the people I work with (which is a separate post on it's own).  There was this one episode of Doctor Who during David Tennant's tenure called "Midnight."  It felt like that.   I don't like it.  I really, really don't like it.  It's sort of terrifying.

Seriously, I would love to curl up in my closet and cry a little about it, but crying out loud is bad for your vocal cords.

The extra-sucks part about this is that I just sang a huge concert today, I have another one tomorrow, and four more rehearsals and a friend's doctoral recital in the next week.  And yet I'm supposed to be on complete vocal rest.  This means no talking.  Technically it means no singing as well, and I may just sing tomorrow's gig and then not sing the recital.  I don't know.  But I can't talk for two weeks.  TWO WEEKS.  My roommate is already enjoying this way too much, and no one around me speaks my version of really shit sign language (i.e. the one person who does know sign knows way more than me, and Roommate doesn't know any).  I still have tons of class and work and exams to do before the end of the semester, grad school applications to finish, setting-up-for-next-semester details to be taken are of.  Many of which require the ability to speak.  So expect many more rants on the subject.  Or cathartic getting-out-of-thoughts-which-I-cannot-say-aloud-but-fortunately-the-Internet-doesn't-have-that-problem.

Okay, Sean's smacking the computer with a fuzzy salmonella molecule, so I'm going to interpret that as "get off the web and pay attention to me."  He says, "also this post is long enough."  Just for that, I ought to write a couple more paragraphs, but I'm trying a new thing where I don't spite people just because I can.  jk.

--C.

[Side note: the little part in caps was a "my side of the conversation thing."  Shino has this set of fluffy molecules, and I had the mad cow one on my head. Sean took it away.  It's back on my head now.  I took out the other random bits of conversation, since they were even less relevant.