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The singing year has started for me as well as the Arbourist. My teacher and I have set two goals for this year:
- That I will develop good practicing habits
- That I will finally let my big voice out at its full size
In furtherance of these goals, she’s assigned me big, challenging repertoire that there’s no way I’ll be able to manage without practicing my butt off. Which, it turns out, means All the Wagner.
Since the theme for this semester is Art Song, I’m working on three of his five Wesendonck Lieder. Two (“Traume” and “Der Engel”) I’ve tried before and found I’d bitten off more than I could chew but maybe I’ll be ready for them now; new into the mix this year is “Stehe Still”. It is an absolute privilege to be challenged with such gorgeous music. Here’s Jessye Norman, my vocal hero, singing “Stehe Still”:
Is it an amazing piece of music or what? All those weird intervals, and completely unexpected chord changes, and yet it just completely works!
Richard Wagner wrote the Wesendonck Lieder while he was staying at the estate of Otto and Mathilde Wesendonck. There’s controversy over exactly what may or may not have transpired between Richard and Mathilde, but there’s little doubt that they were intensely infatuated with one another. Wagner put aside his work on the Ring Cycle during his time at the Wesendonck’s, and wrote his Wesendonck Lieder – settings of Mathilde Wesendonck’s poetry – and Tristan und Isolde during this period. Wikipedia entry
Back in 2012, Arb and I got married, bought a house, and adopted a dog, all within the space of three months. When we took possession of the house, there really wasn’t time to paint. Which was a shame, because the previous owners had done the place in a very tasteful, marketable, beigey earth-tone scheme. It was so not us. Last week, we made our beach-head against beige, and redid the bedroom! Before, it was a sickly grey-green colour:
Originally, I wanted to change it to a soft, greyish lavender.
Arb vetoed that: “We’re not going to all that work, to change one boring neutral into another!”
Well. Go big or go home then. How about the purplest purple that ever purpled?
Arb was all over that idea! We decided on “Purplicious” from Benjamin Moore. So last week I took some vacation time, and we made our bedroom, really ours!
We painted:
We finally got the nice bed we’d been pining for:
And it was promptly colonized by the White Cat:
And we got doors for our wardrobe! No more cat nests in our dress slacks! Here’s a selfie from our cozy bed, in the wardrobe mirrored doors, showing the cozy purple walls.
OMG the wardrobe doors, gentle readers. When you assemble Ikea furniture, the screws have to line up with the pre-drilled holes. These didn’t quite. And the doors were heavy and awkward and fragile and had to be held just so to be able to get any holes to line up – which of course put other holes out of alignment… I got so angry trying to get the screws into the mismatched holes, that I said words I never say. And of course, on the last door (there are four), we figured out an easier way of maneuvering that didn’t require any anger or aggression at all.
Our marriage has now survived the Assembling Ikea Furniture Test, and the Picking a Bedroom Colour Test!
Do you snore? Get tested for sleep apnea.
I (used to) snore. Loudly. One time, when I fell asleep before Arb, he took his phone and recorded me snoring, then played it back in my ear until it woke me up. It was ghastly.
I also used to be incredibly tired all the time, and just about never woke up feeling like I’d gotten enough sleep. Most days I felt like I needed a nap, but then the nap wasn’t awfully helpful either. I assumed it was either the remaining depression symptom that my meds just couldn’t help, or else a medication side effect that was worth living with because it beats the hell out of being suicidal.
Arb had been after me for years to do something to treat my snoring, as much for his comfort as mine. I was resistant – not for any good reason, just stubborn. I didn’t want to have to wear one of those Darth Vader mask machines. I didn’t want another chronic illness diagnosis. I didn’t want to be told losing weight would cure it all, when I’ve snored since I was a medium sized, very active teenager.
This summer I finally gave in and got tested for sleep apnea. The link says people with sleep apnea may stop breathing as many as 30 times an hour – the night I was tested, I stopped breathing an average of 47 times an hour (not sure when I actually was breathing), and my blood oxygen saturation was dipping into the low 80%s. That freaked me the hell out, and I agreed to do a trial with a CPAP machine – the dreaded Darth Vader mask.
The first night with the machine, I had a hell of a time getting comfortable. I think I slept two or three hours at the most. And I woke up… feeling rested! It was the weirdest feeling: the thought of getting out of bed didn’t make me want to cry; I was ready to get up and face the day. And that day, I did ALL THE THINGS, without needing a nap.
The next night I slept six hours, and woke up feeling great in the morning again, with no tiredness-hangover from having done all the things the day before. So I got up and did all the things again. And again and again and again. It’s literally been that kind of night and day change. It seems some very large percentage of what I thought was pure laziness, was actually due to untreated sleep apnea.
I will disclose up front, using a CPAP machine is not all kittens and roses. Or maybe it is, complete with claws and thorns:
- You pretty much have to sleep on your back for the mask to seal properly against your skin, which takes some getting used to
- If the seal breaks during the night, you’re woken up by your whole face blowing a raspberry
- The mask and hose make it awkward to fall asleep in your partner’s arms (but hey, your partner won’t be driven to the sofa by your snores; it’s a trade-off)
On the other hand, besides giving you crappy sleep and pissing off your partner, sleep apnea can:
- increase the risk of high blood pressure, heart attack, stroke, obesity, and diabetes
- increase the risk of heart failure, or if you have heart failure, make it worse
- put you at increased risk of motor vehicle and workplace accidents
- may be linked with depression, though causation has not been established
- in rare cases, it can kill you directly
In conclusion, gentle readers, again I urge you, if you snore, or if you are tired all the time and don’t know why, or especially if you have both those symptoms, go get tested for sleep apnea. I’m telling everybody who will listen in hopes that somebody else can be helped as much as I have been.
So I was perusing a Christian’s blog, as I am sometimes wont to do, and she was discussing the Biblical creation story (version 2, which contradicts version 1 from a few verses earlier, but anyway…) In this creation account, Yahweh creates everything else, then places one man (Adam) in the Garden of Eden. He sends all the animals to Adam to be named, and to see if any of them will make a worthy companion for him, and Adam names all the animals and likes some of them but none are quite right.
And God says, “It is not good that the man should be alone” (and creates Eve from Adam’s rib).
No shit, Sherlock. Humans are social animals. We need one another, deeply and desperately, both for physical and psychological survival. And here, God goes and creates a man, and puts him in a (very large and very beautiful) solitary confinement cell.
Now, when you confront Christians with the fact that the world today is full of needless suffering, and God, being omnipotent, could alleviate all that suffering with a word, but he never does, Christians will tend to respond with some bafflegab about this being a fallen, sinful world and/or God working in mysterious ways. Here’s the thing: in the above story, Eve hasn’t even been created yet, let alone been tempted by the devil/snake to eat the apple and feed it to Adam.
Adam is perfectly innocent; sin has not yet entered this shiny, new, perfect world that God has declared good. And here is Adam, suffering for no reason except that God did creation this way and not some other way. (Hey God, when you declared your creation good, was Adam’s suffering part of that good?) What would it have cost God to create Adam and Eve at the same time, or better yet, breathe on enough dust to create a whole tribe? Being omniscient, God knew before he put Adam all alone in that garden, that it would not be good for him to be alone. And the God who is Love went ahead and did it anyway.
It’s also interesting to note, in the most famous story of gratuitous suffering in the Bible, the Book of Job, God doesn’t actually directly cause Job’s suffering. He agrees to let the devil do whatever he wants to Job – who is not innocent like Adam, but still a very good and devout man. In the creation account, God sticks it to Man directly. Either way, what a dick this Supreme Arbiter of Morality seems to be.
Snapped at a red light on the way home last week
This ad only makes sense in the presence of the following cultural subtext:
Women’s anger is not valid in the same way that full adult humans’ (i.e. men’s) anger is valid. You don’t need to get to the root of the problem and address it; just spend the right amount of money to show you love her. She couldn’t possibly be having a reasonable reaction to being treated badly, she’s just feeling insecure or jealous or maybe on her period.
It was July 7. He’s six now, which makes him a senior kitty according to the local Humane Society.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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