Winter is coming; or, BS's continued adventures in narrowly-averted disaster

To be filed under: things that could have turned out much worse than they did:

I am writing about this, first of all, because my mother asked me to. Last night I was in a car accident in which both cars were totaled. Thankfully, no serious injuries were incurred, either to me or the driver of the other car, but the experience shook me pretty badly. Everything happened very quickly, and I went immediately into shock, so my memory probably isn't to be trusted completely, but here is the sequence of events as I remember them:

Some friends from book club (more on that later) and I had made plans to hold a holiday party, and as my apartment is both large and centrally-located, I volunteered to host. The whole event was thrown together very hastily, so I had decided to drive over the grocery store after work. The weather was, as everyone who was in the Midwest last night knows, terrible: freezing rain transitioning into wet snow flurries, low visibility, and extreme darkness. As it was rush-hour, I decided to take a side street rather than the heavily-crowded intersection of three streets, where cars were backed up at least two blocks to the south. I paused at a stop sign and inched into the intersection to see whether there was any oncoming traffic, but I didn't see anything so I went through the sign. I didn't see the other driver until just before she smashed into the passenger-side front door of my car, so I must have missed seeing the car approaching because it was obscured by some larger vehicles to the right of the intersection. There was a loud metallic crunching and scraping sound and the sound of breaking glass, my glasses flew off my face, and I was knocked toward a row of parked cars. I don't remember much from the next few seconds, other than that I somehow managed to avoid hitting a parked car and pulled my vehicle to a stop in the oncoming traffic lane.

I had bought a six-pack of beer at the grocery store; in the collision, the bottles were shattered and beer was soaking into the floor-mat. I remember being very afraid that the police would think I had been drinking, since the car reeked of alcohol. Someone driving by who saw the accident pulled over and called the police, who sent a State Trooper to take witness statements. A friend who was going to attend the party at my house took a taxi to sit with me as I waited for the police report to be written up, and another drove over to pick us up after the car was towed. Apart from the very few vivid memories I have of those horrible two hours (listening to the rain through the gap created by the smashed door, a pedestrian stopping to ask for directions to the Oglivie train station, explaining the concept of the Assassin's Creed series to the friend who waited with me as the State Trooper prepared the accident report to distract myself from the fact that I was sitting in a totaled car waiting for someone to come take it away), the entire experience is very much a blur.

I have only been in one other serious car accident in my life, when I was 17 and backed my Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight into an irrigation ditch during a blizzard, then crawled out of the door and up through the snow to sit on the side of the road as I shook and rocked back and forth. It doesn't feel real. The only confirmation I have, the things I keep going back to to re-ground myself in reality, are the photos I took of the damage as I waited for the tow, the fact that my car is no longer parked on the street, and a soreness on the left side of my body where, I assume, I was slammed into the driver's side door by the force of the impact. The woman driving the other car was not too badly injured; her airbag deployed, and the only injuries she suffered (at least, that she told me about) were scrapes on her face and some bruising on her chest from the force of the bag hitting her. Opa's Camry, which my family bought from him when I was finishing high school, is most likely finished. Mom says that the fact that my injuries were so limited must be due, in part, to the fact that he is still keeping an eye on me, even now that he's gone. I don't know that I believe in an afterlife or that the people we love continue to watch us after they're gone, but what I do know is that this accident could have been much, much worse than it was, and that the fact that no one was badly hurt is a small miracle. And, oh, there are the tears I've been waiting for the last 24 hours. I suppose that means the worst of the shock is over, and I can start to process what has happened.

Yeah, it happened again; or, Absence makes the heart grow . . . ?

I'm sure I've said it before, but so often it seems as if, after a long period of stillness, everything happens at once.

It started with three auditions, in three different cities, over the course of two weekends. That's enough to shake anyone up (and, yes, I'm aware that this is a big part of my chosen profession, but if I'm not allowed a jolt of apprehension before an audition, particularly in my first Real Audition Season, what's the fun in doing it in the first place?), without having to worry about getting lost, finding that a giant hole has somehow been torn in your the one pair of nylons you brought along, and coming down with chills and body aches two days prior to a weekend with multiple engagements. First World Problems all, I know, but anxiety doesn't seem to give a damn about societal privilege, so I refuse to apologize. In the end, I felt as if the auditions went well, for the most part, although now I have entered the most agonizing stage of all--the wait for results. And so it goes.

The second of these auditions took me far south, almost to St. Louis--no lie, there is actually a town in Illinois called Effingham, and I was near it, resting for the evening in a Holiday Inn in a town called Pontoon Beach, which, as far as I was able to tell, has neither a pontoon nor a beach within the city limits. The drive was rainy and took ages, as solo roadtrips usually do; I crossed through the dreaded Land Without NPR, and by the time I reached the hotel I was completely strung out from miles and miles of highway. Less than 24 hours later, I turned around and drove all the way back. This was audition number two, one of two that weekend.

Road-trippers, a friendly word of advice: if the song "Turn the Page" comes up on shuffle on your iPod as you are driving through the dark, and you feel that this song expresses the deepest feelings of your soul, you have been on the road too long. Also, did you know that the lyrics to Kanye West's "Monster" the more times you listen to them? Because they do. I promise.

So as I approached my exit on the freeway, after five hours of driving, I noticed a strange sound. "Oh my God," I thought, "please let that not be my car." And, of course, it was, in fact, my car. Thankfully, a friend with a talent for fixing cars was over to come over the next day, go for a drive with me, and determine that the horrible unsettling noise coming from the front of the car was just an early signal that the brake pads need to be replaced in the next couple hundred miles, something which he can do easily in an afternoon. So that's what we're doing tomorrow. 

Between solo road-trips and the resulting long hours spent at work trying to catch up for time lost due to traveling to and from auditions, I've had the opportunity for some serious introspection lately. I'm the sort of person who tries very hard to cling to logic at all times, even (especially) when dealing with incredibly illogical emotions. Right now, however, I'm not sure whether that tendency to seek logic in the midst of chaos is a help or a hindrance when it comes to dealing with grief, as I am at the moment.

This morning, I got the news that a friend with whom I worked at a restaurant during the gap year between college and grad school, and whose sister was one of my favorite co-workers during my time at Starbucks that same year, passed away suddenly late last night. There are no words for this feeling--mostly because the feeling hasn't really settled in yet. There are, in my experience, two different kinds of grief--when someone dies after a long illness, in many cases one does much of the grieving before the end really arrives. This is especially true when losing someone to Alzheimer's, as we did both my paternal and maternal grandfathers--we see them slip away by inches, as if their death is occurring in slow motion, in front of our eyes.

When we lose someone suddenly, especially if that person is young, grief comes on more slowly. It has been about eleven hours since I found out about this passing.  I have not cried yet, except in fits and starts, for a minute or two at a time. This slower grief feels to me like an approaching thunderstorm--the rumbles in the distance, the flashes of lightning growing gradually more frequent, the electric smell in the air. The news does not feel real yet, even though the viewing and funeral are scheduled. What I feel are not so much emotions as shadows of, or precursors to, reactions that will hit hard at some point in the very near future. Is it possible for an emotion to feel far-away? Maybe this is the shock. Distantly, I feel anger, that somebody so young, so intelligent and positive and empathetic and passionate, is gone, and yet there are horrible, selfish, apathetic people who will live for decades and decades more; it feels like there is no justice in the world, and no sense of reason governing the allotment of time to each person to contribute what they can to the world. The sadness is coming--I feel it behind my eyes, and caught in the back of my throat, and in a growing tightness in my chest--but it isn't quite here yet. This waiting, the sensation of something creeping up on me, this slow grief, is agonizing. The lack of catharsis is maddening.

He was so young. He had so much more to give. I don't understand.

I just move on; or, BS Lives And Dies by Google Calendar

I run so fast
a shotgun blast
can hurt me not one bit.
I'm on my toes
'cause Heaven knows
a moving target's hard to hit.
-"I Move On," Chicago

Very, very suddenly, there has been an extreme uptick in the number of calls I get asking me to substitute teach. And by "extreme," I mean "at least one call every day for the past three weeks." This is, at least, a much-needed additional source of income, even if I feel guilty every time I have to turn down a call. Now I'm slightly less hesitant to turn on the heat in my apartment, meaning I don't have to work morning shifts at my other job wearing a scarf, hat, sweater, and fingerless mittens. Si, mi chiamano Mimi, indeed.

It seems unthinkable these days that there was ever a point in my life where I eschewed the use of Google Calendar; now, with my life simultaneously so packed with things to do and so up-in-the-air, I can't imagine keeping track of everything without being able to switch appointments around on my phone as-needed. Also, those half-hour empty blocks that appear periodically in my schedule? That's a friendly reminder: Eat something. Because otherwise I'd forget.

(Penny is rolling around on the floor, playing with a catnip mouse and occasionally getting distracted by the texture of the fireplace bricks. What a stoner.)

As I write this, I am planning for my first real audition season. Quelle aventure! Already there are two lined up in two weeks, with the very real possibility of a third to be scheduled in the near future. Among the other singers I know, I am late to this particular party, but, as a very wise woman once told me, it is the responsibility of every working musician to find a path that works for them, and not to bind herself to any predetermined idea of what one should have accomplished by a certain age. Finally, at 26, I find myself vocally and emotionally prepared to deal with the insanity associated with this process. So, come on, Audition Season 2012: let's do this.

For a Few Dollars More is on television, and I am left thinking how incredibly weird I find the entire concept of Spaghetti Westerns. Obviously I don't have much experience watching them, but it's so strange to see a movie where all of the dialogue is dubbed, and even more so one in which one or two of the characters are obviously speaking English and the rest are obviously not. Watching someone's mouth moving out of sync with his words jars me in the same way as a movie string quartet composed of people who have obviously never played a string instrument: the incongruity is shudder-inducing if I pay too much attention. (Also, why is there nudity in this film, but no blood when someone is shot?)

So, that's life at the moment: running. So much running. Last-minute changes to plans and lots of narrowly-averted disaster. And, in the end, I guess that's where I feel most content.

Always through the changing

I posted the music video a while ago, but I really am still completely enamored of A City on a Lake's song "Oceanside," to the point where I even recently downloaded it from iTunes so I could play it on a loop when the mood strikes me. I first found out about it when Vienna Teng mentioned the music video at her impromptu not-concert and mentioned that she had been watching it over and over since Alex Wong uploaded it to YouTube. It feels right, for some reason, to be listening to this particular song during the transition from summer to fall.

Meanwhile, the cat and I continue to go about our daily business--working, in my case; for her, alternately sleeping and begging me to play fetch. I've started sleeping again, finally, and am able (for the most part) to function in the Real World. That being said, I still don't leave the house much, since I work from home and the farthest I trek on a given day is to the local coffee-shop, where I can be at least around other people, even if I don't feel like interacting with them. I'm reading a lot--I just finished The Devil in the White City (from which my head is still spinning, because whose mind works like H. H. Holmes's did, really?!) and have begun The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

We underestimate the extent to which sleep, or the lack of it, affects our lives--or, at least, I did until I wasn't sleeping any more. I'm still dealing with insomnia, but it's much, much less intense. A while ago, during the Month Of No Rest, my sister bought me an insomniacs' journal and I've been writing things down during the worst nights. I don't think much about the things I write as I'm putting them down and sometimes when I go back to re-read, it's sort of bizarre--dreams and musings and whatever thoughts I need to exorcise in order for my brain to shut down. And it helps. I hope I don't have to use it much, I hope that these incidences of insomnia continue to decrease, but it's nice to have a specific place to write things down when I need to.

What else? My apartment is a mess right now. Well. Maybe not by other peoples' standards, but by mine it is a disaster zone: my work computer is on the dining room table instead of on the desk in my bedroom, I haven't vacuumed in a couple of weeks, a couple of cardigans are slung over the backs of chairs because I didn't feel like hanging them up, I haven't put away the clean laundry from a few days ago. I realize that this sounds ridiculous, but to me it feels like chaos, so tomorrow will be dedicated to some serious cleaning.

Also--and this is a big thing--I am finally beginning to feel as if my voice is my own again. Lack of sleep took a serious toll on my singing. In the middle of that horrible, horrible month, I made a recording for audition season pre-screening requirements. It came out pretty well, but I definitely felt as if I was listening to a voice that belonged to someone else. And after two weeks of sleep--the real kind, where my brain got rest as well as my body--I sang again, for a voice studio recital. I haven't heard the official recording yet, but Mom took some video for Dad, who had a gig back home and was unable to attend, and I listened to that. The singing felt good, it felt easy. And the recording sounded like me again--less thin, less obviously strained (although I am fully aware that I am my own worst critic when it comes to listening to recordings, which I hate anyway, and I'm sure people who don't know my voice wouldn't be able to hear much of a difference). I feel ready for audition season--one appointment is already scheduled, and the penciling-in of another may be imminent. There are so many more applications to be filled out and sent, but the notes and the words finally feel connected to my body again. It feels good to love what I am doing, and to be able to trust my instincts again.

The "Nimrod" variation of Elgar's Enigma Variations just began playing on my iTunes. Oh, my heart. Sometimes, when I listen to this piece, I feel as if it is very slowly trying to push its way out of my chest. Elgar. You destroy me.

All through the winter I'm alive; or, The Return of BS

First things first: the chair in which I currently sit is the best chair. Following the sudden departure of my second roommate in five months (and, no, not going into it, possibly ever, so let's pretend this whole second-roommate thing never happened in the first place), I found myself bereft of items of furniture in which to sit as I do things like, for example, blog and watch Gilmore Girls. Penny and I drove up to visit the parents for a couple of days, and while I was there I found the best chair. It is short, plush, and upholstered in the most hideous 1970s velveteen, which has faded everywhere except on one side of the seat cushion. And it was $30. I haven't taken a look-at-my-freaking-awesome-chair photo yet, but Penny, who is currently perched on the back and is purring, has apparently given her seal of approval. Oh. She has moved, and is currently draped over one of the arm-rests.

And now my lap. Cat, there is not room for both you and my MacBook.

(This is really how my life goes.)

So my life kind of fell apart for a while there, which is the best explanation I can offer for my recent radio silence. It happens.

I spent much of my month away from the blogosphere not sleeping. This wasn't by choice, obviously, and it took me more than two weeks to realize that my sleeplessness was connected to the CVS debacle detailed in my previous entry. As it turns out, the staff of the drugstore ended up calling the police on my behalf, and not, as I had previously thought, because two homeless guys had gotten into a fight outside, although that did happen.

But now the cat wants my attention. I just wanted to send a message out into the void and say that, hey, two people who read this, I'm still alive.  For your trouble, here, have a music video:

Thank you and goodnight.

I don't even know.

I'm shaking. I can't even bring myself to title this.

So, here's the thing: tonight, for the first time, I felt unsafe in my (relatively secure) neighborhood. This evening, I met with a new coworker in Wicker Park for pizza and a beer, then headed home. I exited the subway and crossed the street to buy shampoo and hand soap at the local 24-hour CVS. I was talking to my mom on the phone as I made my way toward the cash register. And then I heard this voice--

"Hey, sweetie. You look real good tonight. You so pretty, sweetheart." Et cetera. Et cetera. He kept walking closer up behind me.

This is nothing (too) new, although the incidence of my being whistled at in the street as I walk from my home to the local coffeehouse, of being shouted at from cars, is something that has ramped up significantly as the temperature in the city has soared. Maybe the heat does something to people's inhibition, accounting for the rise in both homicides and street harassment. I don't know. But, anonymous sir who tried to holla at me at 9:30 p.m. in the drugstore, you picked the wrong goddamn day.

"Hold on," I said to my mom. I turned around and looked him right in the eye. "Are you kidding me? Are you fucking kidding me? Really. What kind of response are you expecting from me?" This guy was my age, maybe a little younger. He looked shocked that I would actually call him out on it.

"Oh, not you, sweetie. I was talking to my friend." His slightly older male friend, who was walking behind him. No. I'm sorry. Bullshit.

"Seriously," I said, and headed for the register, ending the phone call with my mom. As I was checking out at the self-scanner, I heard him again, scanning his items two machines down. I finished first. They seemed to be finishing, too. He kept looking over at me. There was one woman working, a younger Latina girl. I walked over to her and said, as quietly as I could, "Listen, those guys--one of them was saying stuff to me, walking behind me in the store. I called him on it. I just don't feel comfortable leaving right now. Is it all right if I hang around for a couple minutes until they're gone?"

"Those guys over there?" She nodded when I indicated that, yeah, that one there. "Yeah, sure, you can go, like, look at a magazine or something."

And I stayed, for around ten minutes more, just to make sure they were gone, because, after having embarrassed that asshole in front of his friend, who is to say that he wouldn't have followed me, or waited to harass me outside? I know literally nothing about either of those men, and no amount of experience I have being in the presence of men could possibly assure me that they wouldn't take action beyond calling out at me behind my back as I walked down the tissue paper aisle talking to my mother.

I just arrived home. It was a half-mile walk, and I went the whole way with my mother on the phone again (so someone would know exactly where I was if, god forbid, anything went down), my keys clutched in one hand like a knife, my heavy bag held so I could swing it at someone if I needed to. I have never, never felt unsafe in this neighborhood before. I have always been aware of the threat--statistics say that, in the United States, 1 in 5 women will be sexually assaulted (and that doesn't include assaults which go unreported)--but never before have I felt personally threatened or at-risk.

Of course, there is someone out there reading this who will say to him- or herself, "You're overreacting." But with statistics like that (ONE IN FIVE), with the number of my friends who have themselves been victims of sexual assault, with the knowledge that we live in a society which, should the worst happen, would ask me, "Why were you wearing that dress?" or "What were you doing walking down that street at that time of night?," how can I not?

The pepper spray is going in my purse now, permanently, and it will, to me, feel like an added weight, a constant reminder that, yes, you are at risk, it could happen at any moment, and there is, in all likelihood, nothing you can do about it. I want to cry. I want to scream. I want to rail at a world in which I am held responsible for the prevention of my own possible rape, in which so many of my friends who have been violated in the most horrible and demeaning of ways are hesitant to speak out about it for fear of facing the humiliation associated with reporting their assault.

I am tired of being treated like an object, because when a man whistles at woman on the street, when he shouts at her out a car window, he is not expressing his appreciation of her as a person, as a complete human being, but reminding her that she is an object presented for his, and other men's, visual consumption. Because when I wear a dress, when I put on high heels and makeup and jewelry, I am not dressing myself up for the approval of men, even if I happen to be going into a situation in which I will encounter men; these are things I do for myself. In the summer, I wear skirts and dresses because it is more comfortable than squeezing myself into a pair of confining trousers. I wear makeup because I like to, and I wear heels because public transportation gives me the privilege of never having to walk farther than I want to.

I am angry. I am so, so, so angry. I am angry for the one in five American women who will be assaulted in their lifetime. I am angry for my friends. I am angry for Savannah Dietrich, the young woman who had the courage to call out her rapists, then to defy the court-issued gag order which prevented her from making their names public. I am angry because this isn't just me, isn't an isolated incident where a man tried to chat me up in a drugstore without knowing what he had just stepped in. This is something that I--and so many other young women--deal with every. single. day.

A few thoughts

It's much too late for me to even be awake, given that I've got a full day of work tomorrow followed by rehearsal followed by more work, but I just wanted to get one or two things down before I sleep so I don't forget them by the morning.

First: I purchased a copy of Dave Eggers' new book, A Hologram for the King, at least a week ago and have not yet cracked the cover. I see it every day, because it is sitting on top of the fabric-cabinet which doubles as the table on which my laptop sits. So why, instead of reading this book, whose release I so highly anticipated, am I rereading Pride and Prejudice for the thousandth time? I had a theory the other day, which I shared with my barista who, it is entirely possible, thinks I am a crazy person: I am hesitant to start reading this book because I am afraid of finishing it.

Let me explain: there is something very special about the first time you read a book. There are several first-time reading experiences that stand out to me immediately: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Gone with the Wind, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, The Woman in White . . . before you have read a book until its pages are dog-eared, before you know every line of dialogue, every description of a sunset or a bridge, before that book becomes an old friend, every page is an adventure. And, with some very special books, some remnant of that sense of excitement remains, and there are still things to discover long after the pages are yellowed and torn where you have folded them over to mark your place (shamefully, I admit to mistreating my books in this way on occasion). There will, however, never be anything like the experience of reading the first part of Heartbreaking Work for the very first time, where, at seventeen, I learned for the first time what it felt like to laugh and cry simultaneously. After years of resisting delving into what I had pre-judged to be an overly-wordy romance about awful people doing horrible things to each other, I was amazed to discover that Gone with the Wind dealt with a young woman coming to terms with the fact that the world in which she has been brought up to thrive no longer exists, and trying to carve out a new existence despite the resistance of those around her who cling to the old world--particularly relevant today, when a generation which has been brought up to believe that education is the key to success and financial stability finds itself crushed under a mountain of student loan debt, often having to put off the supposed hallmarks of adulthood (marriage, children, home ownership, a steady job) while struggling to pay the bills. But I digress, going off yet again on a topic that could fill its own overly-long blog post.

. . .

. . .

. . .

Days later


Well. I say "days." It could well be a week, for all my ability to mark time by sense alone. Between work, rehearsal, learning new music, sewing, preparing for auditions, &c., &c., &c., I barely remember what day it is without looking at my Google Calendar, in whose half-hour increments I measure my life.

A centipede just crawled across the wall below the windowsill where I keep my Jane Austen novels and the baseball Jim Leyland signed for me on my 25th birthday. This is not an uncommon occurrence--the centipedes, that is. It is a basement apartment, after all, and I don't mind them as long as they continue to prey on any smaller insects who wander in and stay out of my immediate vicinity.

I haven't got much to say, but I thought that I ought to finally post this, as it's been sitting around for ages. In the meantime, until life calms down (will it ever? we can only hope), I will leave you with a video of the first flashmob ever to make me cry:

My life goes on in endless song; or, BS takes a moment to breathe

Tonight, on the way back from rehearsal, I stopped by CVS to pick up a soda for my roommate, who is exhausted by unpacking and was craving. I grabbed one for myself, and only noticed when I took a sip a half hour later that it was Diet Wild Cherry Pepsi. 

Then, I went to make a salad (my one meal today was consumed at the family-owned Italian restaurant down the street as I sat with the staff, watching the Euro 2012 Final and exclaiming rude things in Italian at the screen). As I cut into the avocado I had bought earlier today, I noticed that its flesh had gone brown.

The fact that these are the two biggest disappointments  I faced today may be a sign that, for the moment, my mood is in an upswing. 

That's not to say that life is not completely overwhelming. Having finally found a roommate to share the (relatively inexpensive, but still inconvenient when paid out of one's minimal income) rent and bills, I cleaned the apartment to allow her some space to move her things in. Moving is always messy, and one always seems to have so many more belongings than one needs until they are removed from their cardboard boxes and put away. Movers are also very messy--the amount of dirt tracked in as they unloaded box after box after box actually rendered one floor-runner basically unusable (bought at Goodwill and easily replaceable but still, gentlemen, wipe your damn feet) and left me itching to vacuum the floor. My knee-jerk reaction was panic. However, after 24 hours or so had elapsed, it became clear to me that my new roommate is potentially the most organized person I have ever met, in addition to having more energy for unpacking and sorting than I had ever imagined possible, and is getting on admirably in a situation that would have reduced me to a useless puddle of anxious tears within half an hour. I expect that my previously-spartan little apartment will look considerably more lived-in (in a good way, a way that says "people actually live here and have real-people lives" rather than messy) by week's end. Even in my room I have managed to set up a small workspace that doubles as a sewing table and home office. 

And, oh, am I sewing. A shop in my hometown, owned by a high school friend, has agreed to sell some of the purses I make, so I have very suddenly found myself needing to treat sewing as a Real (very-part-time) Job. As things are still being unpacked however, there is no place at present to set up an ironing board. Tomorrow I ship out my first two bags, with plans to make as many more as possible during our five-day break from Don Giovanni rehearsals and send them home with Mom when she visits.

Don Giovanni is also taking up significant brain-space at the moment. I blame the combination of Mozart writing obnoxiously catchy melodies and having to repeat those melodies so frequently in rehearsal. I've always had an affinity for this opera over all of the others Mozart wrote, mostly because it gives me so many Feelings--I've got a whole other blog entry locked away in my brain concerning the characters and how the trap with Giovanni is to fall back on convention when it comes to characterization rather than letting the characters sort of develop themselves--and, to be honest, I would say that characters like Leporello or Elvira or Zerlina or even Giovanni do a fair job of asserting their own personalities, desires, motivations, quirks, &c., and the best thing to do when portraying one of those roles is not to try and impose your own limitations on them. There are so many angles from which to consider Don Giovanni, and even twelve years after the first time I watched it, I am still fascinated by the intricate ways in which the characters interact (but mostly Elvira and Leporello, who put up with more of Giovanni's shit than anyone else in the show), and I still start shuddering when the statue begins speaking. Every. Single. Time. Because a damn statue comes to life. And that statue is vindictive as hell (uh, literally). And that is terrifying.

"So why then, Bee," you may be asking, "when your life is hectic and full of crazy, did you take an interview for a part-time barista position?" 

The answer: masochism. Obviously.

But--and this is the strangest thing--I know that I am busy. Intellectually, I am able to look at my GoogleCalendar (the fact that I rely on GoogleCalendar to remind me that I must, twice a day, eat something, Bee, you are not capable of photosynthesis, is probably a good indication of just how busy I am) and say to myself, "Damn, there's not a lot of free time there." But, as I experience everyday life, it is the busiest days and weeks when I feel the most free and easygoing. I suppose this can be chalked up to momentum, to the fact that when I have so much to do my thought process speeds up and it is as if the events of my day go by in slow-motion. With that in mind, knowing that I feel the most centered and comfortable when I have a set of goals to achieve in a specified amount of time, why the hell not try to find a second job, one that can keep me from having too much time to think (which inevitably leads to overanalyzing, which often leads to panicking about Who am I and what am I going to do with my life?!) after this show wraps?

And, of course, all this positive thinking could go to hell tomorrow. This is another thing I know intellectually. But right now my cat is ridiculous (especially when she tries to intimidate my roommate's cat by hissing, which is more adorable than menacing), there is someone to talk to, my monthly financial burden has just been slashed in half, Dave Eggers just released a new book, and it is thunderstorm season in Chicago. Yes, life could definitely be worse.

When the words won't come; or, BS really hasn't got much to say

Well. This is awkward. I'm sitting here in my living-room couch and I honestly can't think of anything to say. I've been on an "austerity budget" for some time (keeping in mind, of course, that "austerity" in my case allows for an occasional trip to the cinema, since I mostly live off romaine lettuce, avocados, and homemade bread) and, consequently, not many adventures have come my way.

Here's what has come my way: the Midwest summer heat. When I was in Italy in June 2010, I wrote about the heat, about sleeping with the third-level balcony window open even though it meant being picked half to death by mosquitoes. This summer, I am not in Italy and there are no mosquitoes, just the overpowering humidity and a strong breeze that does nothing to ease the heat. This time, however, I have an air-conditioned apartment built halfway underground. I'm going to consider that a win.

This heat makes me feel lazy, sleepy, unmotivated. Everything feels like a stream of consciousness, events and thoughts and conversations (mostly with the cat) following one after another with little connection between them other than temporal proximity. I just wrote the words "temporal proximity." That alone should signal that, where my brain is concerned, it is quitting time. If it weren't for Google Calendar, I would get absolutely nothing done.

So, here we go. A placeholder until the words come back. And here's the piece of music currently occupying most of my available brainspace: Don Giovanni--or, at least, a trailer for the new recording featuring some of the badassiest classical singers working today.

Sumer is icumen in

Well, then, as threatened ages ago, I skipped town for the duration of the NATO Summit, which, as I saw on the news, was equal parts riot (in the area immediately surrounding McCormick Place) and deserted (everywhere else).

As a matter of fact, I found myself in Orlando, Florida for a week, navigating all the typical tourist attractions on my own, even swinging by Universal's Islands of Adventure for a day, since how on earth is someone so unrepentantly geeky as me supposed to pass up the opportunity to visit fake-Hogwarts? It was hot and humid--in Florida! imagine!--and, as such, I drank gallons of water, did multiple passes on any Disney ride with a short enough line (air conditioning is golden, even if it means riding a slow-moving cart through the most terrifying moments of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), and even passed up the chance to see Micky Dolenz perform at Epcot (to be honest, Micky, m'dear, I'd prefer to remember you the way you were, and I certainly won't wait for two hours in someplace with no shade for nostalgia's sake).

(As I was finishing that last sentence, the timer went off on my bread machine, and I had to wander to the kitchen to knead the dough and set it out for a second rise on the stovetop. Consequently, I have lost my train of thought. Where was I?)

(Ah. Yes. Florida.)

The excursion to Orlando combined my old love of traveling alone and my new love of traveling off-season--and, of course, airports are the worst, but everyone hates the awkwardness of going barefoot through O'Hare security and having to repackage shampoo and conditioner into travel-sized containers, so I figure my adventures with air travel can be inferred by the reader rather than stated outright--but I digress. Traveling alone. It is the best. No passive-aggressive shilly-shallying is necessary in order to make dinner plans and, for that matter, restaurant wait times are significantly reduced when seeking a table for one as opposed to, oh, four or five. None of the hassle of coming up with a daily itinerary which can be agreed upon by all members of the party. No fighting over the TV remote at one in the morning when you want to flip between a replay of the day's Rays game and the latest Game of Thrones episode. And, of course, on the day when it was hellishly hot and even the combination of coffee, water, and the two doses of Tylenol Extra Strength I purchased at Epcot's Germany pavilion failed to make a dent in what may have been the Worst Headache Ever, I was able to head back to the hotel and sleep without having to explain anything to anyone. Because it was just me.

By the way, grown-ups and potential Disney travelers, I can tell you from experience that, although Epcot has a reputation for being the most boring of the four parks in Orlando, it is also where they keep the booze. While my only hands-on experience was grabbing a glass of prosecco at the Italy pavilion while waiting out a rainstorm, I saw more than a few margarita stands, and not just in the Mexico pavilion. Have at it, lovers of delicious alcoholic fun and parents of unruly children!

But every vacation inevitably comes to an end, and so it was with the complete panic that marks my existence that I realized, upon checking my phone after lunch on my last day in Florida, that my flight had been rescheduled to depart two and a half hours earlier than I had planned. And, oh, I ran--well, drove, and then walked with great haste, and then cried a little when the ticket agent couldn't find my reservation. Because I am BS, and my life is chaos, and this sort of thing is a fairly common occurrence.

I can't say that life has been too thrilling since I returned to Chicago, although summer seems to have arrived, signaling the beginning of three months of constant skirt-wearing. I work, I sleep, I have strange dreams which are probably brought on by the heat (last night: I had recently become a vampire and was distressed at the fact that blood, which could be purchased on tap at any neighborhood bar, tasted like watered-down V-8 juice), I yell at my cat for sitting on the kitchen counter. Most of my Chicago-based friends seem to be either out of town or busy with Grown-Up Responsibilities, so I have taken to re-reading the A Song of Ice and Fire series and marathoning episodes of How I Met Your Mother.

One new thing in my life--opera-related, of course, because when is it not?--is a sudden interest in singing French arias from the Romantic period. I don't know if other musicians are like this, but I tend to favor music from different stylistic periods according to a seasonal schedule. In the spring, of course, it is Baroque opera, where everything is fresh and energetic and awake after the long months of cold, dark, moody winter (German and Italian verisimo, usually--lots of Strauss and Puccini). And in the summer, I just want to sing in French. My current fixation is "Adieu, notre petite table" from Massenet's Manon, although next week it could be "Ah, je veux vivre" or--I don't know. Whatever. For right now, it's Manon, who is possibly the most amoral fictional character I have ever loved.

And, to be honest, at this point I've run out of things to say, and I'm just waiting for my bread to finish baking so I can go to sleep. Twenty-five minutes to go.

Thank you and good night.

And after the earthquake there came a fire!; or, BS's continued adventures in calamity

I truly did mean to write a follow-up to my most recent post. And, then, of course, life delivered me a swift kick in the ass. Because that is what life does.

It is a running joke between my friends and myself that my life is infinitely blog-about-able. And, more or less, that is true. The trouble, however, with having the sort of life which is continually filled with adventure is that there never seems to be enough time to write any of it down. The only solution seems to be to jot things down quickly as they are happening, and move past the stories that pass to quickly to be recorded. That being said, I do tell a lot of stories to my friends and family, and most of them are the sort that are too strange to have been made up. For example: on St. Patrick's Day I met some friends at a bar and was propositioned by a young man in the most ungraceful way possible (Do people really say "DTF" outside of the Jersey Shore? Really? And does it ever work?) before going home with his gay brother-slash-temporary-roommate, who cut my hair. Upon telling my father this story, he informed me that "I've come to expect that this is the sort of thing that happens on a regular basis in your life, so I've stopped worrying about it."

The fact is that, for about two weeks, it was hot in Chicago, the kind of hot that makes me nostalgic for Italy in June (with or without the infected mosquito bites). It may not be a big deal to people in Texas or Florida or below the Mason-Dixon Line in general, but those of us up in the frozen North generally expect to be shivering in our winter coats until well into April. Those two weeks of 80-plus-degree weather caught the entire city by surprise and between the weather and the impending holiday (St. Patrick's Day, during which the whole of reality shifts sideways and drunk becomes the standard, sober the exception), people did some crazy things.

My roommate, for example, informed me that she was moving out two months before our lease expired.

Without going too far into the situation--about which I am still fairly emotional--I will say that my roommate's sudden departure forced me to make a lot of plans very quickly. With rehearsals for Elijah increasing in frequency and free time becoming more and more scarce, my life devolved into chaos in a hurry. This past weekend, that chaos reached a climax: we gave four performances of the show, I competed at the National Association of Teachers of Singing competition, and most of the furniture in my house was packed up into a moving truck and driven back to Michigan. And then I came down with the epic cold virus making its way through the Elijah cast.

One of the most important things I continually forget about performing, particularly with a small cast, is that if one person in the cast gets sick, no matter how many precautions you take (handwashing, Vitamin C, sleep, fluids), you. will. catch. that. virus. I woke up Monday morning feeling as if I had swallowed a handful of razorblades. I have been sleeping on the couch because it takes too much effort to climb the stepladder up into my loft bed. Because I have a loft bed. Because I am an adult and because I can. I have also gone through nearly an entire box of Kleenex over the past three days, which is making me very glad that I decided to buy the three-pack of Kleenex boxes the last time I got groceries, before I got sick. As previously stated: I am a grown-up. BOOM.

So, given the chaos of the past month, my current task is to put my life back together. But, hell, at least I have a plan. The gas bill has been switched over to my name; cable service has been cancelled, since I haven't watched TV in almost a month, and I am now paying only for internet. Tomorrow I will switch over the electric bill to my name, and then the apartment is all mine. I am looking for a roommate to take the small bedroom for the summer. If I can set up a voice studio with 8-10 students during those three months, I can afford the place all by myself. And that would be something really amazing.

The Heights and the Depths, pt. I; or, the triumphs and trials of being BS

Well.

There is enough to say about the past few weeks, I think, to fill three or four blog entries. Suffice it to say that at the moment I feel very much as if I am living the part of Through the Looking Glass where Alice and the Red Queen have to run as fast as they can to stay exactly where they are, and while I'm not proud to say that I have been flighty and inconsistent and rapid mood swings have caused me to lash out at people  who absolutely don't deserve it, I am very pleased to have survived. So far.

First, the good: March provided me with about a thousand opportunities to hear early music. This was due partially to the fact that the Lyric's last production of the year was Handel's Rinaldo, featuring not one, not two, but three countertenors. A countertenor, for the uninitiated, sounds like this or this, and sings roles traditionally written for castrati--and I'll just let you Google that one on your own, because I don't feel like going into particulars about the methods and socio-political reasons behind the rise of the castrato voice in liturgical and secular music in the 16th and 17th centuries just now.

Never one to pass up the rare opportunity to see a countertenor In The Live (as opposed to on a CD, YouTube, or Met HD Simulcast, which is rare enough), I purchased the cheapest, nosebleediest tickets I could find for the first show which fell on a night off from Elijah rehearsal. A friend whose husband was covering the role sung by this fellow had warned me about the "loopiness" of the staging--something about a giant floating harpsichord with balloons attached--and, yes, the soprano heroine did spend approximately half the opera imprisoned in said floating harpsichord, but damn if the cast didn't take some of the most out-there staging I've seen and run with it. Rinaldo Team Chicago: I salute you for your commitment to duty, and while I'm sure it felt ridiculous, it looked amazing. In fact, it looked so amazing that I purchased tickets to see it again the following Friday and, during first intermission, sneaked from the upper balcony to the orchestra level so I could pay closer attention to the staging. The audience, apart from the destroyers-of-fun who walked out after the first act (we didn't want you there anyway), loved it, and, at one point, broke into applause three times during the opening aria of Act II.

Chicago's Baroque Band also presented two concerts featuring Maestro Harry Bicket (the conductor for Lyric's Rinaldo) and countertenor Iestyn Davies, who sang the role of Eustazio--thankfully, I have a friend who keeps abreast of local early music happenings and was able to let me know about this event before it happened. On March 9 we drove down to Hyde Park to see the first of these performances, featuring nearly two hours of Handel arias accompanied by a period-instrument orchestra. I believe my brain shorted out at some point during this performance, because all the description I can offer of this event can be expressed only in the form of an animated GIF:

For a couple of weeks, I was floating three inches off the ground. Handel! Countertenors! Improbably complicated plot devices! Coloratura with back-up dancers! All of this was a beautiful and welcome distraction from the looming sense of dread concerning my impending loss of health care coverage and the US government's apparent growing disregard for policies which benefit the majority of its constituency. Everything was going to be okay, and, with Holy Week coming up, I could at least take a one-off church gig to cover the extra money I spent in March in order to afford tickets to Rinaldo (twice!) and the Baroque Band concert. If I wasn't completely content (and who ever is, really?), at least I was hopeful for the future.

If past experience has taught me anything, however, it is that, the moment you begin to feel as if everything is going to be all right after all, some shock will come to drop the floor out from under you. This sudden sensation of falling is something to which I ought to be accustomed by now, but, yet again, it caught me completely off-guard . . . 

( . . . To be continued . . . )

A Degree in Calamity; or, BS's continued adventures in narrowly-averted disaster

Every performer, I have been told, has a recurring nightmare in which one finds oneself in the middle of a performance for which one is thoroughly unprepared.

This nightmare scenario just happened to me In Real Life.

In early November, I applied to participate in NATSAA (the National Association of Teachers of Singing Artist Award), a biennial competition requiring vocalists to prepare an hours' worth of repertoire meeting a series of requirements relating to language, stylistic period, and composition date. The District competition was scheduled to take place on the 25th of February, allowing ample time for the competition's organizers to collect and review applications and make preparations for the event. This is, for the most part, what happened. 

Until the informational e-mail sent out in mid-January was eaten by the internet. This e-mail included, among other details relating to the event, the vital information that singers were to provide their own accompanists for the District and Regional auditions. It never arrived--was never even filtered into my Spam folder--so I did not receive this information until February 22. Three days before the competition. 

At this point I feel that it is important for me to point out that this type of crazy random happenstance is fairly typical of my luck--if there is a pit in the cherry pie or an eggshell in the brownie batter, that slice of pie or brownie usually finds its way to my plate. So, really, given my history, I probably should have expected something along the lines of an e-mail containing crucial information disappearing into the vastness of the internet and reached out to The Powers That Be much earlier. However, I did not. Instead, I waited. And then I had a crisis.

In the end, it took me all of about four hours to find a pianist--and, thank goodness, I found one who was  both willing to and capable of learning a recital program's worth of incredibly difficult music (Ravel and Marx and Barber, oh my!) in a span of 24 hours. We ended up winning Districts and, although I didn't win Regionals, the judges were very positive and encouraging. And so, NATSAA, I will see you again in two years, when I will no longer be the youngest competitor by a margin of 4-5 years.

My mother, who was a witness to this entire situation as it unfolded (including many tearful phone calls and a particularly harrowing last-minute search for a copy of Handel's Messiah), has offered the following advice: "Get used to it. You chose this life. Also, maybe you should start looking for a copy of the music you need before the day of a competition." Words to live by.

Opera-tunity knocks; or, What BS has been up to all this time

It's Business Time in the life of BS--and by "business" I mean busy-ness, which is not the same thing at all.

Unsurprising though this may be, as it's my chosen professional field, music has taken over my life once more. With Elijah rehearsals beginning at American Chamber Opera and both NATSAA (National Association of Teachers of Singing Artist Awards) and NATS (National Association of Teachers of Singing) competitions looming in the too-near future, what I have been up to is singing. And thinking about singing. And learning new music to sing. And listening to other people sing. And planning to go hear other people sing. That is to say, it's nice when your obsessions and compulsions complement each other: my current obsession is opera; its related compulsion is seeing operas. It all works out very easily, you see.

I do feel a little sorry for the people who follow me on Tumblr and Twitter, especially those who aren't musically-inclined, because I've been spamming YouTube links of my favorite singers lately. Then again, my roommate, who I finally wheedled into seeing a Met HD Simulcast with me (first Faust, then, upon her insistence, The Enchanted Island) seems to have taken very quickly to Joyce DiDonato and Luca Pisaroni, so at least I'm in no danger of being smothered in my sleep by a housemate sick of my constant cries of, "Jonas Kaufmann's hair! My god, his hair!"

Don't even try to act surprised that I included an illustrative example.

It is true, though, that I am experiencing a resurgence of love for opera. To be fair, I was never really indifferent to it, but the sudden ease of its access (performing with ACO, being able to attend the Chicago Lyric Opera, finally learning about the Met HD Simulcasts) has caused me to fall in love all over again. Since October, I have seen two live performances in which I was not a participant (the Lyric's Lucia di Lammermoor and Aida) and three not-live performances (Anna Bolena, Faust, and The Enchanted Island). I have been listening to the Sutherland/Pavarotti/Caballe recording of Turandot on the bus--this is mostly due to the fact that the first act is terrifying and I am afraid to listen to it at home alone when it is dark (I had the same problem with Poe's album Haunted).

This process of re-discovery leads, naturally, to a lot of Feelings, which can sometimes be difficult. I realize that in our society it is, for some reason, not cool to be enthusiastic about things, but when I go to the opera to spend four hours sitting in the dark having all these emotions forcibly drawn out of my body, slowly, and I leave exhausted and wired all at the same time--after seeing Anna Bolena I walked home from the movie theater, two miles in the cold--I can't help but let some of it spill out. It's like falling in love, except the honeymoon phase never ends. It's amazing. I am unapologetically enthusiastic about opera. Do I want to curl up inside "E lucevan le stelle" (here, if you've never had the pleasure) and never leave? Yes. I could live in that damn aria these days.

It makes me sad sometimes to think of how many misconceptions there are about opera, even among my friends and family. Here's the thing: opera isn't boring, or outdated, or "too long" (well--most of it, but for the sake of argument, let's ignore Wagner for right now). Interestingly, a lot of people who tell me that they can't sit through an opera because it's too long have no issue with watching a football game, which is the one place I can think of where thirty seconds can last for twenty minutes. Opera isn't always depressing, although I'm perfectly willing to let Mario Cavaradossi or Salome break my heart on a regular basis. It is okay to enjoy yourself at the opera; it is even okay to laugh. This is something I recently re-learned as I laughed out loud through a good portion of The Enchanted Island or giggled while showing my roommate YouTube videos of Leporello's Catalogue Aria from Don Giovanni (one of my favorite recent performances of which can be seen here). The best part of opera is that it not only depicts the complete range of human emotion, but makes you feel those emotions, too: giddiness, despair, terror, hope. I often feel that the entire second act of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor is written to feel like a nightmare you can't wake up from, and that the audience is dragged alone for the ride like Lucia, almost carried to the altar for a wedding in which she doesn't want to be a participant. It's no surprise that Lucia goes crazy, since the constant spinning in the music, the gradually accelerating tempo, and wildly distorted recalled melodies make even the audience feel disoriented.

Incidentally, today I was feeling especially positive after my voice lesson and as one the baristas (a friend of mine) was taking my order, she said, "You look really happy, is there a guy?" I laughed. "No, no guy. There's almost never a guy, really. Just opera."

And I don't feel any different; or, BS does New Years

First of all: I am not going to make any jokes about the Apocalypse. I am sick to death of the word "Apocalypse" at this point. Since I am, in general, very interested in eschatological scenarios, this is a clear sign of how saturated our culture has become with end-of-world predictions of late. The world will not end in December 2012, and if it does, at least people will stop talking about how this is the year the Apocalypse is going to happen. Finally.

The New Year was rung in quietly at the BS household (that is, in my apartment): Mom drove me back to Chicago, since I refused to celebrate another New Year's Eve in my tiny hometown, and, since my roommate was working late for the holiday, we sat on the couch and snacked on apples and cheese and watched the 2009 BBC Emma. All four hours of it. I didn't get blitzed at some divey bar and I didn't watch the ball drop in Times Square--although at midnight someone in my neighborhood began setting off fireworks--because with every year that passes, New Year's Eve just makes me feel increasingly old. I mean, obviously, in terms of years spent on this earth, of course I get older every year, but now, where I used to be able to stay up till all hours drinking bottles of cheap red wine with friends and talking about which composers we'd most like to invite to a dinner party (Schubert, obviously, and maybe Puccini but definitely not Wagner), now just the merest idea of getting dressed up and going to some club to dance exhausts me. Graduate school, you have robbed me of my youth!

I have made a few New Year's resolutions, for once:

• Aided by Wii Fit, Zumba for Wii, and living in city of pedestrians, work out at least 4 times a week.
• Eat meals. Actual meals. Made of actual food. A spoonful of peanut butter does not count.
• And, most importantly--in the immortal words of The Specials (and Prince Buster before them, and Guy Lombardo first): "Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think."

One thing I have been enjoying, and immensely, is reading. A good friend of mine, Lindsey, occasionally lends me a paper bag full of books she has read and enjoyed, and while in college/grad school I never got around to reading as many of those books as I meant to--although, through Lindsey's recommendations, I discovered several wonderful books I might have otherwise not looked twice at, like Neil Gaiman's American Gods or The Time Traveller's Wife (which was gorgeous, but terribly sad). At the moment, she has me reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog and it is SO FRENCH: the two main characters, whose shared occupation seems to be musing about the meaninglessness of life and the beauty found in simple things, have just had their first face-to-face interaction--nearly two hundred pages in. And I love it! It is a translation, albeit a very good one, and I would like to one day read it in the original French, as well as Muriel Barbery's first book, Gourmet Rhapsody (I have just looked up the book on Wikipedia to determine the correct spelling of Mme. Barbery's name, and, of course, she is a professor of philosophy, which is unsurprising, given the content and tone of the novel). A couple of reviews I came across dismissed The Elegance of the Hedgehog as "pretentious," or of being devoid of actual plot, but I, for one, don't find this problematic, especially when considering the alternative; Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons certainly have a lot going on but, when you get down to it, they are basically glorified self-insert fan fiction, where Dan Brown invents for his alter ego the discipline of "Symbology" (I always think of The Boondock Saints and Willem Dafoe here: "I think the word you're looking for is symbolism. What is the ssssssymbolism here?") and concocts improbable, if readable, stories in which he traipses across the globe with attractive women in whose presence he can display his considerable . . . ahem . . . knowledge. So, yes, with that in mind, I have no issue with reading an introspective, philosophical novel every now and again, between my re-readings of the Song of Ice And Fire series and Jane Austen's comedies of manners. And besides, what semi-intelligent person who paid attention in college writing classes doesn't cringe when someone grossly abuses grammar or selects the wrong your/you're, even when jotting a brief note?

I'm not a snob, really, I promise. I just love words, and I paid attention in school for twenty-one years, even when my grades (Music Theory) didn't reflect it.

But what else? I have been knitting and sewing like a fiend; during the month of December break I finished six projects, and an seventh upon returning to Chicago in the New Year. I have just cast on for a hat that I don't need, and will probably frog in the morning, but I need something to do with my hands to burn off all of this nervous energy. I finished a purse whose main panel features a tsunami print, of which I am immensely proud. It holds, at the very least, two books, my wallet and checkbook, a knitting project, and a bottle of wine, all without becoming unbearably heavy. Soon I plan to begin making headbands/earwarmers like the ones I have seen everyone wearing this season, with a knitted flower (I can't crochet, I'm sorry, it's a personality defect or something) and a button in the back. I do have those buttons I never managed to use in any of my projects . . .

So that's my life. I am busy. The things going on around me often seem surreal, but this is probably due to the fact that grown-up life moves so quickly, and, to keep up, I always seem to be running, running, running, phoning orchestras in Europe and putting the kettle on for another cup of tea before dashing off to a voice lesson or opera rehearsal. After four months of what felt like complete stasis, it is comforting to have settled into a routine and gained momentum. Life is good, for now.