Pensive Window Gazing

It’s working. Really, it is. Not even I can deny that. Though I would love it if someone could explain to me how the hell I was persuaded into learning a sport.

Don’t follow?

See with most things the major part of it, sometimes all of it is thinking. The hardest part is getting the information into your brain and getting it to stay there.

(the 65+ bus driver is tapping along to Wolfmother’s Joker And The Thief, which is blaring out of one of those iPod boom boxes - priceless).

The next step is getting the information to work for you, and after that using it creatively. Of course I knew that singing wasn’t exactly like, I don’t know, history; but it’s also so much different it’s freaky. Singing is most akin to writing. Not only do you have to learn how to represent the language that you are only just learning, you have to learn all the subtle rules that bind it all together that you were previously unaware of, but you have to learn to write. To physically move your hand and that pen in exactly the right way, repeatedly and fast. How long it was before one had a formed hand is what I calculate to be how long it will take one to learn how to sing. The principles are remarkably similar. So much of singing is muscles and muscle memory. You can’t force that, you can’t think yourself into it; a book won’t make you better. This in not my world. I’m not a physical person. I can run and I always collect ribbons at athletics but that’s only because I’m fit. If someone asked me to get good or change my poorly developed technique I’d have just as much trouble with that as The Vacluse Lament. Singing is athletic; it’s more like sport than maths. It kills me.

Bubbles she says, blowing her lips in that perfectly formed and tuneful and yet equally ridiculous fashion.

Bwbbbbbbbbe!

Boys have been doing that to imitate motor bikes for generations, and I still can’t do it properly. Maybe if I’d been a stupider child I’d find it easier. And that breathing through your stomach shit I could never get. Even though my mother is very much into yoga. With yoga the point is that you do breathe. Not where.

My lungs are up here!

What difference does it make? It’s just the cynic in me I know. Stubborn, resistant to change all of that…

You know, I taught a class today. The teacher was away and she left me with instructions. I gave out the tests, played the video, opened and closed the class room, marked the roll, collected the tests, told people off – the works. Being a teacher is hard. But I won’t pretend not to have enjoyed it. I arrived 10 minutes early just in case she gave instructions to other people who might want to take over. She had, but even though the kids hate me they were too busy being grateful that someone had actually taken over and it didn’t have to be them. I fit somehow, even if it doesn’t feel like acceptance 98% of the time.

With Mr. Emo and Mr. Crushing, I am the kind to let it lie unless its pressing or I have nothing else to do. Mr. Crushing is my friend and I can always talk to and flirt with him if I am that way inclined and Mr. Emo is a nice bit of eye candy.

Nothing will come of either of them.

But there always has to be something of that sort in my life and they happen to be it. Mr. Crushing is scared of me, my forwardness, and my quick mind - mainly because I am scary. Someone as shy as Mr. Emo wouldn’t stand a chance. I like Mr. Crushing because he is strong, inquisitive and challenging; he also gives great energy to our debates and will always appreciate a good argument. This is a much better reason than ‘I like the culture he’s into and he’s really cute’.

I always thought I would fall for someone of inescapable seductive eloquence, but that is a dwindling commodity these days…

Did you ever get the feeling, or know; that you were having an impact on someone’s life? Changing, developing or shaping their perception of something forever? It’s a magic scary powerful feeling. I wouldn’t think most people would get a chance to feel that, mostly because they don’t look for it and also because that stuff happens between young kids. Kids don’t know about that. Or care. It just happens. The school bully doesn’t know that the weak kid with the snotty nose may be discussing his bullying as balding middle-aged man in the process of dealing with the issues he has with his current boss...

But I say it a few days ago. I am challenging a few peoples’ whole perception of women, among other things. I got the tangible feeling that I did something, that I would be remembered. Maybe it wasn’t for the better, maybe in some small way I am breaking down the stereotype; but I felt it. Some people spend a long time too late in life wondering if they ever did that. And yet here I am. I think I may have had some impact on a few of my teachers but its harder to see the older the person is.

I spent half my time looking out the window into the next room in this singing lesson. Wondering what they were up to, mostly if they could hear me. I’m annoyed that I can hear me, imagine how the teacher feels! But after much deliberation I concluded that since one of them was playing a trumpet and I couldn’t hear that - they couldn’t hear me. I was happier then.

I’ve hit a wall. It all started with the denouncement of my first chosen institution and then got more desperate from there. Now there is the option of being an English tutor at my school ‘just because it will look good on my resume’ as my mother suggested.

It doesn’t sound too bad, I can see myself doing it. But why??? I was going to be in fantastic exciting university in the city. I was supposed to be living, and now...

It’s all getting harder, I feel like I only have a limited amount of creative energy and I am putting the last of I here. I haven’t written a song in so long and I haven’t even named the last three. I haven’t even bothered with the usual diversions from not writing songs, like drawing. I bother with everything else, only you and my mother know any better. But I just feel like that part of me is out to lunch. This was the redeeming end to my years of struggle in a small town and without the right type of education.

And now I’m lost.

I have to stay here and be nothing. I could cope with simply living, I could be a checkout chick by day for years at a time as long as I had a nice house to come home to, maybe a nice someone. But I always thought that I would get to do this first. Me, in the city, with like minded people, doing something to head in the right direction.

I went and saw a show last night.

(Blogs are taking longer, by the way, it’s Wednesday)

It was a comedy show. Really very good. And the guy was picking on members of the audience and I was thinking of quips I’d come back with if I were them. But then I thought I’d just get steam-rollered by this comedian, after all – that is his job.

That’s his job.

That is what it is most important for him to be good at. That is what he wanted to spend his life doing and spent many many many nights practicing. And I have to sing. Me, make my life out of sharing my voice with the world...

It hit me, it shouldn’t have, but I never thought of it like that. I liked every other aspect of it. The songs, the show-ponying, the fans, the life, designing lyrics booklets, DVDs, being interviewed, putting weird hidden goodies on the album, naming albums, touring (apart from that plane business).

But I forgot about the singing. I don’t want to start simply existing now, I’m sixteen! I should still be out there being an idiot. I shouldn’t even care about this shit. I was fine with my childhood disappearing in a blur behind me but where I am now happens to be not all that bad compared to where I could end up. I know you thought you’d never hear me say it and neither did I - but I want it all to stop. I’m with that girl I told you about, I don’t want to miss this all quite yet. I don’t want to be looking out a window for the rest of eternity wondering whether they can hear me, because I’m dying in here.

☆Anika☆