Curious Things

"Yomi no Tsugai (Daemons of the Shadow Realm)" new illustration by U-suke (@u_skeeep) artist to celebrate surpassing 7.5 million copies in circulation of manga series by Hiromu Arakawa and the second cour of the anime

Victor Frankenstein: Nuh-uh

So I took these vocal lessons for 2 years and it helped improve my singing voice and confidence dramatically. I went from full body embarrassment on the mic to an unbearable ham at parties. When someone says karaoke I react like those dogs hearing their favorite words. I’m not amazing, no one’s gonna go home and talk about me when they get back from the karaoke bar lol but the difference is that I’m good enough for me to only care about the amazing time I’m having. Singing feels like such a critical part of being alive and I’m forever grateful for those lessons. It’s one of my greatest sources of happiness.

However!!! I could never figure out vibrato. Our focus in my lessons was classical fundamentals and improving range, but every now and then we’d do exercises to try and unlock my vibrato. She had a suspicion it was a soft palate issue but it just couldn’t click for me. After switching jobs and moving, I had to stop taking the lessons because I couldn’t afford them anymore. 😞 I never stopped practicing and I’ve improved some since my lessons but the damn vibrato!!! It would come out sometimes by accident but I could never figure it out.

(Sorry for being long winded as usual lmao) But okay flash forward to one week ago. My pal had pitched playing a tabletop role-playing game called Good Society, which is a Jane Austen themed game. I pulled the Foreigner card, so someone from out of town arriving in England shaking things up. I looked up common immigrants from England during the 1800s (nobody asked me to do this but I’m a freak) and saw that German immigrants were common. I didn’t know a thing about German but I love research and I love learning and taking notes so I went apeshit on this self-assigned project. I watched dozens of German language videos, listened to German podcasts about culture and history, and my favorite part is practicing pronunciation. I fucking love linguistic differences across cultures and noting the similarities. German has been so fun to learn and I want to keep at it even when my game is over, I feel so drawn to it. The biggest challenge in pronunciation as you might guess, has been the German R. I’m not used to having to use the back of my throat for speech so that has taken a LOT of work but I love the challenge.

So last night I was studying one of my German lessons on an app, taking a lot of care to say things as correctly as I could, and afterwards I started doing karaoke. A couple songs in I was like…… damn my vibrato sounds like it’s getting way better. I put the mic down and stood up and started singing a few Disney songs so I could hear myself better and confirmed YES I HAD FINALLY FUCKING UNLOCKED IT. I showed my husband and he was like, “woah!! when did that happen?” I was trying to rack my brain about what I was doing differently and then I was like…. Babe… THE GERMAN R!!!!!

Practicing that sound finally, finally lifted my soft palate so I’m capable of producing vibrato. I sobbed all over my husband from happiness. I’m so shocked that this is what finally helped me figure it out and delighted that my silly German character was the path that led me there.

and better

A very tiny percentage of creators go on to be famous, but that doesn’t mean that people don’t remember little things you did for years and years. Who came up with most of the world’s most famous jump rope rhymes? Who coined some of the famous idioms we use in daily speech? Who made up ‘Jingle Bells, Batman Smells?” Somehow, all of these things stuck and spread around.

When I was a small child, I saw a high school put on a production of the musical HONK. In one song, the mother duck describes various dangers that her baby should avoid in the water, including fishing line, which could strangle him. A member of the ensemble played the role of fishing line, doing a maniacal laugh and over-the-top strangling motions, and I found it hilarious– and to this day, that’s an example I often think of when talking about how ensemble members can still stand out in theatre. The guy who played the role might not even remember that he did that, but I do.

I took Suzuki violin lessons as a kid. The teacher made up lyrics to some of the songs, and she let her students make some up, too. Now whenever I hear the instrumental of one of those pieces, I always remember these ridiculous lyrics about a skunk that we sang in violin class. I don’t even know which student invented them!

In middle school, I found a video about atoms parodying Bill Nye made by some kids for a school product. It probably had less than 1,000 views, but I think of quotes from that video all the time. They had a parody of “We Will Rock You” with the chorus, “Protons, neutrons, electrons” that I think about a lot.