bjarvis | Today is better than yesterday

I spent much of yesterday alternating between depression and anger but am in a somewhat lighter mood today, largely thanks to a good night's sleep and not insignificant quantities of chocolate. My recent anxiety is entirely related to square dance calling, primarily singing calls.

Let me preface that with a bit of family background: I had a pretty good childhood overall (as much as I can remember... it was a while ago) but the key hang-up deeply implanted for as long as I can remember is that public singing is a character defect. Allowances could be made for, say, a church choir as that's both devotional & a group activity, but to pursue a spotlight for oneself for the viewing/listening pleasure of other people was declared to be profoundly immodest, self-aggrandizing and prideful. In short, my family isn't big on it and it was actively discouraged for as long as I remember.

For most of the past year as I've been studying calling, I could work around the issue. While a caller on stage is working in a spotlight, it's the dancing that's the focus with the caller as facilitator and mechanism to enable the dance. For reasons I can't fully explain, singing calls feel emotionally different than patter calls: my mental tricks on myself don't work in this scenario even though logically there is no obvious difference but vocal style. I'm making some progress on this but the slow pace of improvement is frustrating.

The biggest problem though is simply my utter lack of vocal experience & technique: with almost no prior experience attempting to sing, even in private, for 38 years, I have no idea how to do it effectively. Most friends describe singing as like riding a bike: you never really forget how. But this is a bicycle I've never ridden before and, until this year, didn't miss in the least.

Trying to control my volume, air flow, breath timing and still hold a tune while simultaneously remembering the lyrics and sight-calling the dance has been extremely difficult. Most folks I know already have the first four down automatically; conscious effort is only required to juggle the latter two balls instead of all six. I've been trying to keep all six working simultaneously and failing more often than not.

I'm also a perfectionist. If you've ever seen anything from me marked "draft" or "work in progress," it's either a lie or I was coerced: nothing goes on public display until I'm finished. I've been working on my singing while driving to & from work and some at home: I couldn't bear the embarrassment should someone hear my mistakes. At least I get a couple of hours alone at home daily before Kent comes home.

Dayle has been very supportive as I work on calling but he's gradually stepping up the pressure to keep improving. I haven't felt or seen any progress since May and the lack of momentum has really pissed me off. I don't deal well with frustration, less so failure. After a particularly amelodic, badly timed and otherwise horrific practice Monday night, I was ready to call it quits: I understand square dance calling better than ever, but there is some magic element which eludes me.

To be truly good at something requires a certain essence or poetry in the soul. I have the mindset of a bureaucrat and the creative soul of a rock: this yields a comfortable living, but I've realized recently it also means there are some things which will remain beyond my reach. Creeping middle age carries the cruel knowledge that there's not enough time left for the infinite possibilities we dreamed in our early years, and some hard decisions must thus be made and truths accepted. I'll never be a great writer, I'll never truly master any of the languages I've studied and while I'm generally a competent systems administrator, I'll never be an extraordinary one.

Monday night, I was ready to admit I'll never be even an adequate caller either.

I skipped Baltimore's club night last night (Tuesday). I couldn't face either Dayle or the floor of dancers.

Working on square dance stuff was the last thing I wanted to do, but I had promised Kent that since I wouldn't go to club night, I would at least work on digitizing the newly arrived stack of caller records from eBay and sifting through some choreographic notes I had accumulated. (I suppose that's one minor virtue in my favour: I do keep my word.)

After listening to the stack of 25 records, I selected six which I could see myself potentially using. Once converted to MP3 format and copied to my iMac, I listened to them again and tried calling along with them. A funny thing happened: I didn't suck as badly as Monday night. It wasn't great and still needed a great deal of polish, but it wasn't anything like as horrible as the previous night. I tried again with the same recordings in the car this morning as I drove to work. Again, not great, but better than Monday.

I may yet have to admit failure at some point, but I'm feeling better today that any point of capitulation is in the future. I'm not sure if I'll have re-assembled myself in time for club night on Thursday (tomorrow), but I'll make that decision closer to that time.