Unlike real life…

I had an awful dream last night. I had an audition for something – I can’t remember what, but instead of arias they wanted two art songs. OK, I thought, and picked two that were impressive and I sing well, and put the sheet music in a binder.

The audition was in one of those only-in-dreams scrambled spaces where my studio was somehow or other attached to a theatre or rehearsal space. I arrived just as my audition was about to start. I wasn’t dressed, just wearing sweats or street clothes, and I was called.

“I’ll just change and grab my music,” I said. This was fine, so I went into the studio…

…And I couldn’t find the binder. It was NOWHERE. I had lost it or forgotten it somewhere or it had just disappeared. I was in a room full of music, and I couldn’t find anything.

So I kept thinking, “Oh, I’ll do that song instead,” and then I wouldn’t be able to find THAT piece of music.

And the minutes were ticking away, and every now and then someone would poke their head through the door and see how I was doing.

“Just fine!” I’d say. “Just give me a minute longer, I can’t find this one score.”

But of course I was getting more and more desperate and frantic and I hadn’t even changed yet.

(This is, I should add, not at all like real life, where I’m always hyper-prepared for auditions and show up super early with too many copies of everything in binders and extra headshots just in case. As you can see I appear to have some anxieties around punctuality and preparedness.)

What I eventually decided to do was sing something I knew that was unaccompanied (because then the accompanist wouldn’t need the music!) and something, anything else at all that I could find. I don’t remember what the second song I eventually found was. To top it all off the room I was supposed to audition in had to be used for a choir practice, so I was going to have to audition in front of eighty snarky gum-chewing teenagers.

I woke up before the actual auditioning began. This may not sound like much of a nightmare to you – but to me it’s enough to wake me up in a cold sweat.

And I don’t even have any auditions booked for the near future…

Hound party manifesto, part 2: Why Gus would make a better Prime Minister than Stephen Harper

Item:

1 While he doesn’t LIKE them, Gus does not actually eat cats.* Unlike Stephen Harper.

2 Gus is lazy enough to avoid antagonizing foreign leaders, but tough enough to growl at them if they approach his food.

3 He will encourage agriculture, especially animal husbandry.

4 He is a symbol the country could unite around – who doesn’t love cute puppy dogs?

5 He will lead energy conservation efforts by encouraging/insisting that people stay home and do as little as possible.

6 Gus will never, ever involve Canada in a pointless dick-measuring excuse for a war**, unless someone tries to steal his food. Then it’s nuke time.

7 He will decrease healthcare costs by introducing the revolutionary new Hound Therapy. When you feel sick, sad, or just worn out, you go to Gus’ office and spend half an hour just hanging out on the couch with him. Safe, cheap and effective.***

8 Gus won’t promote anti-gay, racial, or religious bigotry, since he loves everyone without qualification.

9 Because this country needs change, and a mildly brain-damaged basset hound/beagle couldn’t POSSIBLY do any worse than we’ve had already.

* Mostly because he can’t catch them.

** He’s been neutered.

*** Obviously this won’t cure your cancer or genital warts, but it does make you feel better in the case of a mild cold or just a bad day, and is certainly more plausible as a therapy than, say, Reiki.

Celebrity

Someone has probably said this already.  In fact, I have vague memories of reading it somewhere before.  But nevertheless…

…I cannot find a source of it online, but if you’ve ever read I, Claudius, you might remember some of his descriptions of the religious rites of Roman-age British.  In one particularly fun festival, a beautiful young man would be selected from the village.  He would be wined and dined, allowed to sleep with whoever he wanted, and generally treated like the bee’s knees.  Then at the summer solstice – or possibly fall equinox, I can’t remember which – he would be sacrificed.

You wonder how many good-looking young men would think to themselves in early July, “Hey, why is everyone being so nice to me?” and make a mental note to pack their bags and head for the hills on July 20th.

Anyway, for some reason I was thinking about Britney Spears yesterday.  I  have an odd affection for her.  She is, after all, a year younger than I am, and has been presented to the public in midriff-baring outfits since the mid-1990’s.  I remember her from back then.  I didn’t *like* her or her music or anything, but she was part of the landscape of my teen years.  And while she’s apparently doing better these days – or at least not doing much that’s newsworthy – she’s had her share of spectacular meltdowns and personal crises.

And she’s a year younger than I am.

So I drew this probably unoriginal parallel: Britney was chosen, like the young man from ~ 0 AD Britain, for her good looks, given all the material things one could desire, then axed on the back of the neck when the time came.  What the druids did literally and fatally to their beautiful young people, we do figuratively and perhaps more cruelly to ours, only we call them “Celebrities” instead of “human sacrifices”.  Very sad.

Totally *not* feeding the trolls

This is why I don’t have a “Recent Comments” sidebar on here.

(Scroll down for the new comments.)

As much as I enjoy a good blog war (hell, it’s why I read scienceblogs.com), I don’t like encouraging this kind of moronicity. It started out fun. Now it’s just depressing.

I like my blog and my modest little corner of the internet. I have no interest, no interest at all in whatever the hell Josh Reichmann thinks makes a good blog (pizza reviews? Huh?). It’s funny, however, that what started with my extremely brief and mildly negative review of his performance has led to his own outburst of hyperbole and vitriol, directed at me and this humble little blog.

One of these things is not like the other, you know.

So I bow out. If Josh wants to consider himself to have won, he’s welcome to. I’m not engaging with this bullshit anymore.

Complaining with Kay, Episode 35.5: OW MY LEGS

Complaining with Kay returns – there WAS an episode 35, but it was too heavy and I decided not to release it. In this episode:

- OW MY LEGS
- He’s a Machiavellian long-haired hot sauce salesman
- I said “That sucks” to a child and they were vaguely shocked
- Nerds of a feather flock together.

Or, in other words, I discuss the new lifestyle of cycling across town to work three days a week, and review the film “King of Kong: Fistful of quarters”.

Link.

Unwise Ipod blogging

So here I am, on my couch, barely able to type because there are two basset hounds lying on me, about to unwisely discuss sensitive personal and professional matters on the internet.

I blame the combination of fish & chips, beer, and anime.

So I had an audition today. For what I will not say, except that it was no mere song and dance; yet I am not blameless in this happenstance. Enough rhyming. It wasn’t that I flubbed the timing. Nor did I muddle up the tune – my pitch was so perfect it was importune. In fact, if so one could be said to sing, I sang the hell out of the thing.

No, seriously, that’s enough rhyming. I did have an audition, and I did sing about as well as I possibly could. Still…

…I don’t think it was good enough. The panel did not seem interested. They were nice etc., but not enthusiastic. On the way out I met a girl who was a year or two ahead of me in school, always a much better singer than me, with a beautiful voice – this was her 3rd audition for this same thing, with no success yet. Dammit.

The superstitious side of me says, “Sometimes when you think you’ve done badly you get it, and when you think you’ve done well you don’t.” The skeptic side of me says, “Correlation does not equal causation.” The Ipod user side of me says “Apple wants to replace ‘anime’ with ‘amine’? What’s an amine?”

For this I blame the Ipod Touch software update.

Anyway, I have done my best and can do no more. J’y suis, j’y reste.

Brief movie review: King of Kong

I’m probably going to podcast about this, so I will be brief. but if you haven’t seen it already you HAVE to see King of Kong: Fist Full of Quarters.

I may be a nerd, but I’m not a videogame nerd.  Other than Super Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt when I was about 9, I have never spent much time gaming.  The only game I currently play is the Sudoku app on my Ipod.  So this movie – about one man’s struggle to get his Donkey Kong world record recognized – does not, on the surface, look like something that would appeal to me.

However, this is a classic tale of sportsmanship, corruption, and truly Luciferian pride.  Like I said, I’m not going to go into great detail because a) you really should watch it, b) I’m going to podcast about it and c) I have an audition tomorrow and have a million little things I need to do this afternoon, but one little observation: Everyone interviewed in this film (all the men, anyway) was a massive, massive nerd.  Not like *I’m* a nerd – not just a nerd in the sense of “really enthusiastically into something unpopular”, but a nerd in the sense of “perpetual victims of cruel peers since early childhood”.  They were the kinds of guys who are teased in kindergarten, beaten up in grade school, and mercilessly tortured in high school.  So it was kind of sad to see how they treated a newcomer, someone who shared their interests and loves, someone who just wanted to have his achievements in their field recognized.  They shut him out and plot against him, and generally treat him like shit.  Very sad.

Anyway, I have an audition tomorrow and will report back.  Think kind thoughts about me at 3:10 PM.

Once I unpack the camera, I will post a picture of my legs

Until then, be patient.

But if you live in the Toronto area and are free tonight, you can see my legs in real life!

I’m playing a set of cabaret/lounge stuff at the Tranzac tonight at 7:30…just me singing and playing the piano.  Come listen and have a beer!

Just so you know I’m alive

Just so you know I’m alive, that’s why I’m writing. From my Ipod, no less.

You know, when I was about 18 I joined a gym. (Bear with me, there is a point.). Like all 18-year-olds, I thought I needed to lose ~ 10 pounds, though in fact I was then ~ 10 pounds thinner than I am now, and I’m in pretty damn good shape now. But anyway, I joined a gym. When you join a gym, or when you joined a gym in the late 90’s, you are/were read a list of disclaimers when you sign up.

One of the things I was warned about lo those many years ago was “over-exercising”. Or “over-training”. Something like that. I was told that if I over did it and worked out TOO much I would start to feel dopey and tired all the time.

Well, it didn’t happen then, but I think it’s happening now. In the past three days I have spent five and a half hours on my bicycle. And I had Monday off because it was Canadian Thanksgiving. If I’d worked on Monday it would have been more than seven hours.

This is because I’ve moved across town but kept all my students from the old neighbourhood. So as well as biking between lessons I have 45-60 minutes of biking before I even start. Not that I’m complaining – I love all my students, of course, and work is work – but OW MY LEGS.

I assume I’ll adjust to it in time, but until then I’m being nice to myself, taking it pretty easy as long as I get all my practicing done. But I’m still alive. Just so you know.

Even if it weren’t like this, it would probably be like this

It may be because I grew up Catholic, or because I’m in a high-competition high-status low-pay profession, or just because the Flying Spaghetti Monster made me that way, but I’m a worrier.  I worry about pretty much everything, and I pretty much always have some nagging thing that I’m worrying about. Money, practicing, auditions, writing, the general am-I-wasting-my-life-will-it-still-be-like-this-in-ten-years stuff.

(It’s probably genetic, actually.  My father too is a major worrier.)

Part of it, of course, comes from the work I do.  I have to practice two or three hours a day and I have to keep myself in practicing condition – which means I have to do yoga and try not to get sick, really, and since I teach various germy children and ride my bicycle in the rain, this is just another thing to worry about.  I have to promote myself and try to get auditions and try to do WELL when I get them and try to keep doing SOMETHING to keep myself in the public eye, and I have to produce my own projects and do whatever support work for the band Ben needs me to do, other than actually singing in the band.  I have to study the dramatic background of the arias and roles I sing.  I have to keep up the repertoire I’ve already learned and keep adding new stuff.  I have to keep using the above-high-C register of my voice to keep it open.  I have to keep using the below-middle-C register of my voice to keep if from withering.  I have to occasionally use my chest voice so it’s there if I need it.  I have to keep up my trills even if there aren’t any in any of my repertoire right now, because I worked bloody hard to get them in the first place and it took weeks.  And so on.

All of it adds up to a checklist of things to be done pretty much every day, in addition to the work I do for money (which is a whole separate checklist).  I’m naturally pretty organized, so it’s not hard to keep track of; but it is, of course, a lot of nagging little worries and dropped threads.

So sometimes, like this morning when I stubbornly lay on the couch and refused to start working until 11:30*, I fantasize about what it would be like to have the kind of life where you go to work, come home, then just hang out. You know.  You get up at 7:30, walk the dogs, go to work, work, come home, then watch TV or read or comment on blogs or go to the movies, then go to bed, then repeat.

Sometimes I take it even further and imagine the kind of life where you don’t do very much of anything at all except home-making tasks (though I pretty much suck at all of them except needlework/crafts and food preservation).  The kind of life where you wake up, make breakfast for your husband/children, do chores/childcare and stuff all day, then watch TV/read/go to the movies in the evenings, then go to bed and repeat.

Would I still be like this, juggling eighty seven million little long-term tasks and projects?  Would I constantly be worrying about everything falling apart?

I think about it, and the answer is Yes, of course I would.  Because my dad has always as an adult had pretty much option A – a day job he loves followed by family, entertainment, and hobbies in the evenings – and he worries just as much as me, or probably more, since he worries about me and my sister and I, having no children, only worry about my dogs.

If I lived the A life, I’d be worrying about work, about money, and instead of feeling guilty about not practicing enough or not aggressively pursuing as many auditions as possible I’d be worrying about leaving the dogs alone all day or letting the house get too unkempt.  If I lived the B life I’d be frazzled to death by having to spend my life on a zillion uncongenial chores and worrying about scarring my unfortunate offspring for life by being a crazy mom.

So I guess I should just chill the fuck out.  No use worrying about things you can’t do anything about.

*Today being Canadian Thanksgiving, it wasn’t a big deal, since I didn’t teach today and could get everything done later.