this is a reminder and a table of contents, sort of.

Gloomy. Why? Health? Work? Family? Oxford? Music? (yes and no.) Weight loss? Is this a cause for gloom? (yes and no. with rambly thoughts on selfhood, and also finances.)

Back to all this later, I suppose. Busy at work just now, or at least I should be.

right. things what have been bothering me. (this is not fox. she's some other where.)

Several hours ago, I went down the hall into ellen_fremedon's office and sat down on the floor and curled up against her filing cabinet so I'd have something to lean my head against. A few minutes later I said maybe I should scoot over and sit in the corner, "huddled up as if someone were attacking me with a firehose" -- because when you want to feel safe you make yourself as small as possible, right -- and pretty much since then have been trying to work out what is going on in my head that I have such a need to feel safe that I'm going and cowering in other people's offices.

( Health? )

( Work? )

( Family? )

( Oxford? )

Leaving music and weight-loss, both of which I am realizing are huge self-image things for me at the moment. Viz:

I am in fact losing weight. Go me! I've lost 10% of my body weight in the past, oh, eleven or twelve weeks, and that is awesome. I really am very pleased. My clothes are variously roomy and actually too big, which is starting to pass the point of nifty and reach the point of yeah, my clothes don't actually fit; this is less pleasing, because one wants to look more pulled-together than one looks in ill-fitting clothes, and I can't afford to replace the quantity of things I'd need to replace for this not to be an issue. Still less can I afford to do this when at the rate I'm going I'd just need to do it all again in another three months.

My cheekbones are, hmm, prominent. I've always had a bit of a hollow between my cheekbone and my jaw, on each side; it's the place where the peel-off masque doesn't ever really dry, for instance. It's just there. Made it easy to do my highlight/shadow makeup in high school, because on my face the lines already existed. It never really occurred to me that other people noticed it until the time at curling when I went to join Skip R in the house and she said "Oh my god, what happened?" and I said "Um, what?" and she said "You have a bruise on your face! -- oh, wait, no, hang on -- wow, it's just a shadow. Okay." And I've been noticing lately, as I lose weight, that the round bits of my face, which is the jowls, really, have been sort of falling away. The hollow there is becoming more visible, and the cheekbones are standing out further. Not a lot, I expect, but enough that I can see it, and dudes, last night I looked in the mirror and for a second I didn't know myself. It was kind of startling. Have I reached a point, this early in the process, where I've lost enough weight that my face is no longer my face?

Meanwhile, the Agnus Dei (a vocal setting of Barber's Adagio for Strings, set by Barber himself, so it's okay) begins with the sopranos on the B-flat in the treble clef two beats ahead of everyone else coming in on the chord. The dynamic is no louder than mp, I think, and of course the music is for strings, so it's very interlocky and it's important to keep the lines smooth. That B-flat is a difficult note for a lot of us, because it's right in the break between the lower and higher register. So we're being careful not to start off too loudly, too roughly, too warbly, etc., and also to be bang on the pitch, and we opened our mouths and started to sing and S the Associate Director stopped us immediately and said "Okay, but if it sounds like high school choir at this point, the whole thing is done." And he demonstrated with a timid sort of 'ah'.

Okay, so I've mentioned before how I am a soprano who sounds like a treble. I can control it, of course -- I can sound more like a grown woman or more like a youth pretty much at will, and I can even fake it either way and sound actually like a warbly soprano or actually like an actual child, though neither of these is precisely a good idea -- but in its natural state, my voice has the sort of tone usually described as "bright" or "clear", which is characteristic of younger voices. I've never been especially touchy about that, because I've always found it easier to warm up that tone than it seems to be for other people to straighten out their "colorful" voices -- but it turns out that "high school choir" crack really stung. He wasn't speaking directly to me, of course, but I know this about my voice, and the more I thought about it today, the more it bugged me.

So that's two things. On the second point, I sent the following ( e-mail to T the Chorus Master: )

And he responded fairly promptly with No problem, here's a list, I recommend this person, we can talk more at rehearsals -- very pleasant, if plagued by comma splices. :-) So I was glad I'd identified what was bugging me and taken a proactive step toward fixing it. Go me. [pats self carefully on shoulder]

The not-knowing-my-own-face thing, though, I don't know what to do about.