I saw something nasty in the woodshed!

Ahhh. This blog title comes from "Cold Comfort Farm" and it is appropriate for a couple of reasons:

1. I think we need to start a meme in which we list things introduced to us by friends which we now love. I'll begin the meme with my next post- today will be a twofer.

2. On Tuesday, I have an appointment with a hypnotist/past-life regression therapist. Thus begins the bulk of this present post:

I spoke to BCSM yesterday on the phone, and he mentioned that I hadn't been blogging lately.

"Yeah," I said. "Just too much gloom and doom. Nobody wants to read that shit."

However, gloom and doom seem to have lifted, and for the strangest reason ever: yesterday I was diagnosed with vocal nodes. Yup- the singer's nightmare. Little callouses preventing the vocal cords from closing fully, the way that healthy cords should.

Remember in my last post how I was bemoaning my inability to sound good? Yeah, that would be the node-thing. A week or two after I wrote that post, I thought to myself, "Okay, Dom. Maybe you're not a complete idiot. You know how to sing, so there's probably something physiologically wrong with your instrument. Go get it checked out."

Check. After crying to the ENT sexcretary (I swear, everytime I speak to an ENT sexcretary, I have to resort to tears to explain how urgent the sitch is) I was able to get an appointment many days away, as opposed to many weeks. Score! Yesterday, sitting in the examination room, looking at all the computers, scopes and gadgets, a palpable calm came over me, as I knew that an answer was right on the horizon.

The first ENT (a resident) didn't see anything wrong with the little mirror he stuck down my throat. He kept marveling at my lack of a gag reflex. I felt slightly ashamed, as if he were calling me a slut, but whatever. I'ma do me, boo. He managed to gag me once with his Extend-o-Mirroir, and we both burst into laughter because the sound was hilarious. Anyway, since I was so specific in describing my symptoms and communicating the severity of my problems, he had the attending ENT stroboscope me, whereupon they found the offending lumpy callouses.

I doubt that they've ever encountered someone so relieved to be diagnosed with nodes, as I felt vindicated knowing that I wasn't just imagining things, or making up problems. Actually, scratch that last thing: nodes can be an indication that you are making up problems, in a vocal sense. In my case, I've just been way too focused on getting all of my shit in a pile so that I can jump on the next opera train heading out. In addition, I was scheduled to sing in two concerts at the end of this month, and the stuff I was to have sung is among the hardest stuff in the repertoire to sing. Add that pressure to the pressures of my living/social/employment circumstances, and it's a recipe for a disaster omelette all up in the Thoat. (That's how you say 'throat' in the Dirty Dirty.)

A week ago, conversating with my voice teacher, after going over all the technical stuff that could be causing my problems, he ended the conversation by saying that above all, I needed to allow myself the pleasure of singing that comes from being musically engaged, as opposed to constant technical engagement. While I had unkowingly abandoned this aspect of my practice in favor of trying to refine technique, learn notes and get jobs, it seemed so obvious to me that that was a huge part of why I was fucking up so much. The pressure of being good enough to accomplish XY and Z transferred into pressure on the cords, which are Not Having It.

Anyway, the whole thing boils down to this: my cords are shot for a little bit. Some rest and careful retraining should take care of the problem. In the meantime, I've had to cancel everything I had planned for this month. This is where the happiness comes in. I'm not sure if I had ever felt so much pressure in my life over these two concerts in MN later this month. Between the rep, the financial burden and the timing, I was probably pretty close to having a nervous breakdown. Now that I have nothing to do this month but get better, I feel like a new man. I even feel mostly at peace with the prospect of canceling auditions this year. Of course, I'd rather not, having already invested hundreds of dollars into it, but if my voice won't co-operate with me, there's nothing I can do. Sometimes being helpless is the best way to be.

Anyway, this whole thing started with me seeing something nasty in the woodshed. For those of you unlucky enough to have seen Cold Comfort Farm, the first thing you should do is ask Maven to borrow it. Or Netflix it. Or whatever. There is a character in the movie whose entire existence revolves around a "traumatic" childhood incident- to humorous effect, I should add. As for me, I'm not sure I have a woodshed incident, although I've been interested for quite a while in exploring the whole past-life regression thing. I'm not even sure I believe in it, but at the very least, maybe some hypnosis will help me to be more calm in the face of mounting pressure. Of coruse, if anything interesting comes of the past-life session I'll be sure to holler at y'all about it.