sensations over sounds

Apr 18, 2023

I had drafted a piece on fear & horror inspired by a recent visit to Seattle’s MoPop Museum to share this week. But then a black teenager was shot in the head when he knocked on the wrong door picking up his siblings, and I read the New York Times piece on 2 eleven year old Uvalde shooting survivors, and the anti-trans and anti-abortion legislation continues to become law…and I just didn’t want to think about how, as quoted at the exhibit entrance, “Horror is the dark realization and subsequent revulsion that the world is now fundamentally, shockingly, and permanently altered.”

Soooo instead, I want to talk about something that has brought me endless amounts of joy in the last several months - singing lessons.

Singing lessons were something I have wanted for a long time, but couldn’t justify the expense. After all, I thought of myself as a “bad singer”, and I figured if I wasn’t innately talented at something it wasn’t worth doing (thanks perfectionism!). Most importantly, I was terrified of being laughed at. Admitting I wanted to take beginner singing lessons as a thirty-year-old business professional felt akin to ripping out my heart and asking someone to please stomp on it.

Of all the goals I set for myself in the last year, “take one singing lesson” scared me the most. But I had this idea that learning how to sing was an important aspect of quote-unquote “finding my voice” and I wanted to be able to belt Indigo Girls and HAIM and A Chorus Line in my car without self-cringing.

[Pro tip for accomplishing scary goals - make them so teeny tiny that it is almost impossible not to do. Hence, why I only needed to take one singing lesson to be rewarded with the cross-off-to-do-list-item serotonin boost.]

A few lessons a month since October, and my hour-long call with my voice teacher (shout out to Emily!) is now a weekly highlight. I genuinely feel like my singing voice is improving, and I am far less self-conscious about being overheard practicing scales. Best of all, I am finding singing to be an incredibly effective way to get into my body (another thing I am “bad” at). I am grateful I found a teacher that emphasizes singing as a sensation over a sound, because guess what? Focusing on “how did that feel in my body” versus “how did my voice sound” makes singing a fun catharsis I didn’t know I could have.

So there’s your unsolicited advice for the week - live your dumb dreams ✨. Hobbies are important, you don’t have to be good at them, cool is dead anyways, and the best remedy to the lived daily horror we experience is finding joy in seemingly silly little human things.

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good things on the internet

LoFi Girl “lore” and absurdly precious world building 🎧
NPR’s Tiny Desk concert with Fred Again. I have not been this impressed by musical talent in a long time. 🎹
The “If I were a fish” TikTok song is a self-love earworm that I can’t stop singing 🎣

currently reading

“Blurred Lines,” Harbinger of Doom by Jayson Greene: “Pick any disheartening pop-cultural trend of the past decade and chances are it applies to “Blurred Lines”: The hollow outrage cycle in news, increasingly reliant on hot takes tossed out with superhuman speed, often without a speck of human logic? The predatory power dynamics of the entertainment industry, and American society’s ongoing dismissal of consent? The increasingly litigious pop landscape, in which lawyers and music publishers fight for scraps, and every pop song feels safely Xeroxed from the last one? Every decade gets the songs it needs and the songs it deserves.”
Lyz of Men Yell at Me interviewing Taylor K. Phillips on being Midwestern: “I'll go home and I'll go to a barbecue outside in someone's yard and you feel what you're missing. And what I’m missing isn’t what I want. But there are some people who are like, "Yeah, I would like the pace of New York. But you know what I really want is my own house and my own yard, and to decorate it for people to come over every Friday and have a book club.” But so often people who aren’t from the Midwest think that staying here isn’t a choice. They think people in the Midwest feel stuck. And it's like, "Actually, we are happy. And you feel stuck in New York sometimes."
Aubrey Gordon of Maintenance Phase discussing her new book on All Things Considered: “They're not disputing that my body is, like, actually small. They're sort of shadowboxing with their own kind of assumptions about what it means to be a fat person, right? They're assuming that what I am saying is that I am unlovable, that I am undesirable, that I'm ugly, that I'm rejected, that I'm unlikable, all of these sorts of things.”