Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

thoughts

adventures in intentionally losing my voice

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Last month I was not allowed to sing for two entire weeks.

It was terrifying.

The vocal folds. Note the resemblance to some sort of terrifying H.R. Giger illustration of alien genitalia.

I blame Adele. Late last year she was infamously put out of commission due to surgery to remove a polyp on her vocal cord that had hemorrhaged. Symptoms can include a hoarse-sounding voice, vocal fatigue, or a reduction in range.

I don’t sing as well as Adele, but I’m willing to bet I sing just as much, between my three bands and various elevator serenades. After several years of peak vocals that were rangy and in-tune, for the past few months my voice just felt sore. I didn’t know how else to explain it. It didn’t come simply from being loud, or even just from singing. It was tired, and singing around the pain was starting to sound bad. My highs and lows weren’t as strong, and I was not as in-tune on harmonies.

Thus, a trip to my ENT, which resulted in such fun escapades as sticking a camera down my nose to watch my vocal cords while I sang.

(It really was fun! I had a special playlist of songs to sing for my follow-up appointment, but I didn’t have a long enough camera-down-my-nose set to get through them all.)

The camera revealed not nodes or polyps (hooray!), but a massive bruise on my left vocal cord. It honestly looked like someone had punched it! And, well, I had been punching it a lot – at rehearsals, in meetings, and screaming at the Garbage concert. Still, it wasn’t nodes or polyps (hooray!), so I would not need any surgery. Probably. It depended on the nature of the bruise – which was the kind of thing that could lead to nodes (boo!).

This is a set of vocal cords that look sortof like mine, except they have a cyst. But, let’s be honest – the cyst is hardly the most terrifying part of this photo.

What I did need was vocal rest. “Tell me about your bands’ schedules,” my doctor asked me. I thought she wanted to come out to a show, but really she was trying to find a window for me to keep my mouth shut for over a week – ideally two.

Luckily, this was the week prior to the #140Conf, which would preempt some of my standard rehearsals. Simply tacking a few extra days onto my break would get me through two weeks so we could follow-up.

I walked out of the appointment with a smile on my face. No surgery for nodes (hooray!), a set of custom-molded ear-plugs that would let my voice ring through, and two weeks of doctor-prescribed quiet time. It all sounded rather glamorous.

At least, it did up until my first conference call that afternoon. I was shouting across the room at the tiny speaker in the phone on my director’s desk. I caught myself absent-mindedly pressing a hand to my chest – a sure sign that my voice was aching. I quietly stood up and moved several seats closer to the phone. The next day E and I were driving somewhere with Garbage’s “Automatic Systematic Habit” blasting on the speakers. I joined Shirley for her pre-chorus harmony and E shushed me from the driver’s seat.

“No singing,” she said. The irony of the song’s title was not lost on me. I turned away from her to stare out of the window. It wasn’t just a matter of missing rehearsals. I had to intentionally lose my voice – treat it as if I couldn’t project beyond quiet, indoor tone.

My two week rest pressed on. I had to contain myself at author’s club, unable to joust loudly with my peers. I stopped singing people’s names in hello every day at the office. I could not venture inside the VIP event that Nan and I staffed at the #140Conf – it was too loud.

See, it turned out just fine for Adele.

My glamorous two weeks of vocal rest sucked. My life without the full power of my voice sucked, too. Our voice is one of the things that lets us know we’re real and alive – instant feedback that we really exist. At least I could still talk at a normal volume! I thought about Adele and her months of silence, and Julie Andrews and her ruined singing voice. It could be much worse. I caught the problem early.

My return visit to the doctor and her nose-camera was all good news. The bruise was almost gone, and my cords generally looked healthier and springier than before. But there were ramifications. It was clear that my speaking was stressing me out as much (or more?) than my singing. I needed speech therapy, different allergy medication, less of certain foods, and other tweaks to my daily life.

Tonight will be my first time fronting the full, electric version of Arcati Crisis since this whole ordeal began. I’m excited and a more than a little nervous. Will I sound okay? Will the ache return? Will I have all my typical low and high notes – the four octaves of D I need to get through an AC set?

Only time will tell. The answer I do have now is something was wrong with my voice. It could have been much worse, and if I hadn’t intervened it could have grown much worse.

The morals of this story? Listen to your body. Adele was maybe singing a little too much and a little too loudly. And appreciate your health for every day you have it.

break it and build it again

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I wasn’t allowed to sing for two weeks. It’s a story I’ll get around to telling once it stops freaking me out quite so much.

That meant no Arcati Crisis rehearsals. My singing is much less central to Filmstar, so we kept rehearsing sans my mic stand.

Right now we’re in pre- pre-production for our next recording. For our last one we started with recording drums to click tracks, and even if is taking me forever and ever to mix them into something listenable it was certainly worth the effort. Being able to steal sounds from any take and blend them together seamlessly was totally worth the tempo wrangling. Plus, everything is nice and consistent!

An outtake from our recent Filmstar photo shoot.

Unless you are playing the most obvious 1-2-3-4 rhythm on the planet, when you play to a click it is like the musical world you are creating from within has had its gravitational value altered. Songs feel too slow when you play them quietly and deliberately, but too fast at full blast. Syncopation puts your emphasis off-click, which feels like swimming against tide. You discover parts where you subtly speed up or slow down, and the seconds of discontinuity give you musical vertigo.

To that imbalance, this week we have returned my singing to the equation, but it’s different, too. Yes, I am more cautious of my high notes, but it’s more than that. My voice doesn’t have that worn-in groove that it usually has, where I can settle in and belt. I have to actually think about where I am placing my notes, and how I will support them.

Add to that a new set of strings on my bass and a handful of new effects pedals, and it really feels like I am playing these songs again for the first time, relearning my parts piece by piece.

What makes that so interesting is that these are the songs we learned after I joined the band. The pieces are mine. The parts came from my brain. Instead of fiddling with someone else’s bass line that doesn’t quite fit me to begin with, I am rebuilding each song from components of my own design.

It is totally different. I get to ask questions about my own musical logic. I am tearing down old rhythms and fingering for things that are more efficient or intricate, or both.

I know it is the same band of the same four people and these are songs I have been playing for a long time – two years, for some of them – but I can’t help it: it feels new to me.

The next Filmstar show is on Sunday, August 5th at NorthStar Bar, where we will have the pleasure of sharing the bill with the darling boys of Venice Sunlight.

You should come.

anti-social anti-media

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We spent our Independence Day holiday lazily barbecuing with our friends Chris and Courtney. E prepped a seemingly endless area of fishes and dessert dishes, and Chris manned the grill all day between trips back into the AC.

Courtney and I mostly just ate cheese.

Chris and Courtney are new friends, but Chris is an old acquaintance. In college he was always a friend-of-a-friend. The guy with the crazy stories about flipping his truck or blowing up things in his backyard. I would never call him up to offer to hang out.

As a result, E didn’t really know him at all. When we re-met him last year at her shared birthday party with Ross we laughed non-stop with him and his new girlfriend Courtney, and kept gravitating back to them in conversation in a room full of people we knew better. A few months later, we called them up for dinner on a whim, and now we’re semi-regular friends.

I find that a lot of the people I spend time with fall into the category of “new friends,” though it’s less down to meeting people at parties, and more because of social media. Yet, the things that give me fodder for discussion on Twitter are the ones keeping me from hanging out with the people I’m tweeting! And that’s okay – that’s how we Twitter-met, after all, and we still all have Twitter to chat on. I can be busy and physically anti-social, but still digitally mingle.

Chris and Courtney were an exception. They don’t tweet. They use Facebook to collect photos. They occasionally text. If we wanted to see them, we would have to put in the effort and the phone call and actually see them with our eyes instead of a screen.

We’ve kept it up over the past year, and every excursion is a fun one. Lately, we’re beginning to take the same methodology to our existing friends – both collegiate and online. Do they want to stop by for lunch? Can we meet them somewhere for a quick cup of coffee?

That’s what I spent my Monday night doing, with @PurpleCar. We sat and gabbed for two hour straight in a diner. E invited my dear high school friend Ariel over for lunch on Saturday. We might go to a BBQ that day, as well.

Friends are more than just a square of illuminated pixels and bolts of notable musings dashed off between other engagements. Friends are people who make your face hurt from smiling, whose stories you relish and rehash once you’ve known them all.

We spent our Independence Day with friends, unfettered by cell phones and check-ins. It felt apropos.

The Busy Trap

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Yesterday the New York Times featured an OpEd titled “The Busy Trap,” about how Americans seemed to delight in the sound and fury of unproductive busyness. Here is an excerpt:

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn’t allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d’être was obviated when “menu” buttons appeared on remotes, so it’s hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion. More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.

That first sentence describes me perfectly. I am too busy to think about anything off-mission, or to catch up with friends, or write this blog.

The OpEd made me think of my life from 2006, before Arcati Crisis, before I was playing open mics, before was in an acappella group. I remember trying to make plans with a pair of my friends and finding it impossible to find a free day. They were interminably booked for weeks into the future. Not a spot of daylight on the schedule for me to hang out and listen to music with them unless I could plan months ahead.

I remember thinking, “What is it you have to show for being a packrat of appointments? What have you accomplished? You just waste your money and get fatter. It’s miserable.” I had my songs to comfort me, and my ridiculous spreadsheets and fastidious budget. I loved my time to myself.

Lately I have been trying to schedule coffee dates with social media friends who I’ve never had a chance to get to know better offline. These arrangements have yet to be consummated, due to my impenetrable schedule. The first one will finally happen tomorrow, because I am free Mondays. I hate to make plans on Mondays, so they are paradoxically the best night to make plans.

Am I that person that I secretly hated, all those years prior?

I choose not to think so. I have less time for my songs, but so many more of them are being played. My spreadsheets aren’t as plentiful, but they’re more meaningful and permanent. My budget is still on-pace down to the cent, but I don’t ogle it every day. And the things I fit into my free time – my bands and my book and my comic collection – they are the things I always wanted. Coveted for myself but thought would stay relegated to some impossible adolescent dream, never to be fulfilled.

This weekend I had a free day, so I relearned the fundamentals of javascript. Now I can follow some of E’s work discussions, and I built myself a new web feature that previously defied any solution.

I don’t think busyness has to be a trap, unless you can be trapped into being happy and fulfilled. Oh no! I wish we could stretch each day a little further so I had more free time to sit and speculate, or just drape myself over furniture and listen to music, but if that’s all I ever did I wouldn’t even have a blog in the first place.

I wish my busyness on you, so long as it does not become a cage. It should be a gossamer bubble, shimmering and iridescent in the air around you, making the untouchable world beyond shimmer in delightful color as you float by.

always crashing in the same car

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I don’t know how else to start this story, so I’ll just say it.

I crashed our car.

Into our house.

Yes, you read that correctly. Don’t worry – there were no casualties. I’m here. The house is no worse for the wear. And the car… well, the car lived to tell the tale.

It was not quite this bad.

Before you start to make a number of assumption about me and my driving, allow me to point out that I have not so much as nudged another vehicle in my first year behind the wheel. On the road I am a cautious, defensive driver.

It’s off the road where I’m a danger. Particularly, in my driveway. I just don’t have the spacial relations skills to navigate the tiny space. Our car earned its first, tiny, quarter-sized ding in a tango with our garage doorframe last year. It’s just scant inches wider than our car.

This time I made it past the garage, but realized far too late I was still angled towards our house. In my defense, the house actually starts being houselike within the bounds of the frame of the garage door. You have to cut hard right to avoid backing straight into the house.

(If getting out of our driveway is starting to sound like a difficult geometry problem or a question on a Mensa test, you are starting to catch on.)

Angled towards the house does not equal crashing into the house. You see, I actually had not yet crashed. I stopped the car and got our to investigate my predicament. I had barely kissed the side of the house with the back fender of the car. I could reverse course and drive back into the garage and pull out again.

I returned to the car. I put it in drive and gingerly nudged it forward only to hear a terrifying metallic shrieking noise. Creeeeawwww-oy-eeeeeeeeee. I threw the car into park and leapt out to discover that the tiny, tangential kiss I had delivered to the house resulted in our stucco gripping the edge of my fender, and now it refused to let go – to the tune of pulling half of the fender off the car!

I’ll admit it: I panicked. How the hell was I going to get out of this? My crisis logic said, back up a little bit so there is less tension on the fender, and then pry it loose from the wall. And, well, since that was the smartest message running through my brain, I did it.

The problem was that I did it with a little too much verve. I put the car in reverse and tapped the gas slightly too hard, resulting in me colliding with the house at full ramming speed. In addition to my crumpled fender, I now had a shattered taillight, and had bent the spigot on the side of our house in half.

I meekly pulled the car forward a hair and got out to investigate the damage. The spigot was twisted back on itself like a pretzel. I applied slight pressure to try to return it to its former shape and it snapped off in my hands, spraying me with a blast of water.

Suffice to say, this was not one of the finer days in my personal history. To my credit, I had the spigot replaced and a taillight ordered by the time E returned home, which left only the bruises to the rear of the car and my pride as evidence of the mishap.

I don’t understand why the beginning of summer has officially became car calamity season, but I’m happy that last year’s exploits taught me to budget for the worst possible levy of my own personal stupidity tax against my bank account.