I nailed my scales last night.
Teach was impressed, whoopin' and hollerin' even.
I abashedly (yes, it happens more than you'd think) admitted that I realized what my problem had been the last few weeks.
What? Said she.
And I rehashed how frustrated we've both been with my lagging control, how the improvement has been so slow as to seem rescinding.
Using my great big brain with all it's great big brain juice I finally put two and seven together and came up with eighty one and realized that my pronounced difficulties with control coincided with the lack of exciting arias that we were no longer working on, as well as my slightly beyond insane workload of the past two months..
It took me a while to get over the immature urge to demand to throw myself into songs that I am not ready for, and realized
that I hadn't been practicing because I wasn't as motivated to sing scales an hour a day as I was to sing mozart (and that I had been a little too constantly worrying about work to focus on other commitments properly).
So I got over it, and made a Vaccaj tape which I am clever enough to convince myself are more like songs than scales and I did them an hour a day every day all week.
And last night I nailed my scales, and then I nailed "Stormy Weather" -- our first step in teaching me how not to take myself so seriously.
I nailed my scales and Heather asked me to try a new one, and then she used that fated line "this one is too difficult to give most of my students" and boy oh BOY did I not make it pretty, each octave jump came fully equipped with my voice cracking -- not from the difficulty of the note, but from the stiffness in my throat keeping it from transitioning smoothly across eight notes.
You'd think I'd have practiced this morning, after all the lessons I'd learned.
I did practice in my head a little, visualizing the octave jump, which sounds an awful lot more trite and boring than it really is.
I was a little too tired from all the excitement of wedding ring design theory last night.
We have the most amazing friends here. Superdee and her celtic-knot-trees who has all this space in her heart to want to work on our wedding invitations, superNorah who really is a craftsman and has this great universe of metallurgy and lapidary and shapes and figures behind her eyes...
we talked and shrieked with laughter and shared drinking stories and bruise stories and I learned eight new volumes of things I'd never even thought to think about.
I left with this feeling of...
...how special the people in my life are, how every day I discover more and more about just how true that is.
And I'm still convinced that an 85-year-old german engraver would really enjoy playing Nethack.