Did you know that it takes 7 to 10 days to make a Jelly Belly jelly bean?
Or, more importantly, that you can buy an entire kilo just of Watermelon?
Just checking. Oh, hey, watch that drool, you don’t want to get any on the keyboard.
So, if yesterday was a kick in the ass i think today must have been a punch in the gut. The funny thing is, nothing bad happened. Nada. Actually, the day was quite nice.
In other news, i just wrote a song without the word “you” in it. Be very afraid. It’s too late to record it though (roommates are sleeping soundly below), so i’m just here. Here. No homework or anything. Well, actually my homework is mostly just staring anxiously at the silvery reinforced crate that the digital video camera for my class is sitting in. I somehow (am an idiot) managed not to purchase a DV tape before picking up the camera, so i can’t shoot any footage. So, basically, I’m just sitting here staring anxiously at the silver Camera Box. It seems to realize that it makes me uncomfortable, and so it shines unobtrusively in the manner of a much more delightful object, but still inspires terror in the depths of my soul.
Which goes along nicely with the punch in the stomach, actually.
What, me sleep?
Today kicked my ass, which is pretty sobering because Monday is the day i don’t have any classes. Part of the problem seems to be that i am physically incapable of waking up earlier than 11AM, or 10:20 if i have class at eleven. Considering that i was waking up like clockwork at nine every day last semester, this is not any improvement in my quality of life. Of course, last semester i wasn’t spending three hours a night sitting behind a tile-topped desk staring blankly at rehearsal from behind the ‘Props and Lighting’ stage-book. All that sitting leaves me wound up with nothing to do when i get home, and so i wind up surfing the internet until i’m in arm’s reach of dawn before i finally relent and snuggle up tightly for bed.
Tonight would appear to be no different, despite the thorough whupping Monday dealt out to me. Tomorrow awaits to be lived, though, and between here and there i am sure there must be dreams.
Although she has been known to veer sharply in either direction, my mother has always been just the perfect shade between crazy and inspired. I look back upon my childhood now and try to figure out what was going on on her end of things… what adult motivations were playing out behind the benevolent ‘mom’ i adored.
My mother took endless pictures of me up until i started grade school — almost enough to make up for my nearly undocumented puberty (thank the lord). Up until my parents got separated i don’t think she worked at all, and i’m sure she found herself with all sorts of odd times during the day while i napped, played, or sat through endless repetitions of The Making of Thriller. So, she sat down with rolls of film and colored paper and yarn and elmers glue and came out with these odd books… like easy-reading version of my toddling life. Peter at the Zoo. Peter at the Beach.
Construction paper shades that make up the primary colors of childhood and sentences with one subject and verb each, plus the occasional adjective. They used to live in the bottom drawer of the desk in our dining room, and every so often she would get them out and read them back to me. I suppose she would be feeling lonely, or reminiscent of when i existed without any kind of premeditation. Grade school and GI Joes make a kid grow up fast. Eventually she altogether stopped mentioning them at all, and i haven’t seen them since we moved in 1998.
I don’t know what i’m talking about. If i was four today, those books would be something like Henry’s Diary, which alternating makes me want to cry about the fact that i’m two decades old and inspires me to one day be a dad as awesome as Henry’s dad.
And a mom as awesome as my mom.
Sometimes i have trouble warming up for voice lessons… i can’t get my mouth open wide enough to let the sounds that i want to hear come out. Today it was the same old problem of me balking away from my high notes, but Becky slowly coaxed me up to them. She understands how i am… she gives me visualizations and physicalizations because i need to latch on to something before i can do it, and she keeps on talking me through it until that flicker of recognition crosses my face. Then she knows to just let me try it.
She worked me up just like that, on “ah” vowels. Slowly but surely. Form the sound, tongue down, mouth open, space for the notes to escape, feel it come up and over, tug down to go higher… finally, she had me opening my mouth and it finally stopped feeling like screaming and started to feel like singing, and we were going up and up and the notes were coming so clear … not necessarily on-pitch, but they were coming out like rung bells. And, after a while, it seemed like we’re getting pretty high — i didn’t stop because we had got momentum going, but i was mentally trying to tag notes and place them within my range to tell where we were. Finally we got up to one that i couldn’t quite wrap around… edges of my voice were straying away from it, so we slowly worked our way down.
Afterwards, i just had to ask. What was it? I’ve hit an E solidly a few times before, so it was an F, right? Or, if i had to reach, maybe it was F#?
The F might as well have been a C, she said. F# was sung without incident. We ended on G.
After that, the fifteen-beat E at the end of “Promises, Promises” didn’t seem deadly at all. I opened up, and my voice poured out of my throat like a river flowing over its banks to fill the room.
I swallowed the silence.