Boo-blog: May day

January 30, 2004

May day

In the process of figuring out just how fucked up she got from the Turkish kids, Girl-E has become hypersensitive to the details of pre-existing personality quirks. This may not be news to you if you've been reading for a few months, but bear with us. Anyway, for someone who has pretty much always had her shit immaculately together, and is pretty damn smug about it at that, this is a fascinating and yet thoroughly annoying exercise.

This week's topic is Inability for Self-Sacrifice. Now this doesn't mean she wouldn't defend her loved ones to her death-- the sacrifices she shuns are superficial, unimportant, everyday shit that she swears she can't live without. For example, if two super-fun things are planned for the same night and she has to choose, she's a basketcase. Similarly, she lives in mortal fear that any two or more of her seventeen engaged friends will choose the same date for their weddings. If she finds the perfect sweater and can't decide between colors, nine times out of 10 she will buy both, and the tenth time she will suffer regret for days until she finally goes back and buys the other one. Etcetera.

She's pretty sure this explains her inability to realize her dream of being really really good at one thing. It doesn't matter what that thing is, but she's spent her life trying to find the thing that one can be really really good at with minimal sacrifice of free time, diet, or discomfort. This search has led her through passable compency at sports, music, academic distinction, whatever. Apparently she's a whiz at synthesizing and summarizing information, but that's hardly sexy. The fact of the matter is, it takes focused sacrifice of varying kinds to truly excel, and since this means practicing whatever the thing is during The West Wing, things don't look good.

Last night, she came face to face with this story of her life. She complained to her voice teacher that one of the things that keeps her from singing her very best is that she gets hoarse easily, feels discomfort when she sings or speaks for a long time, blah blah. He assured her that these things are totally treatable, she just has to keep up with vocal exercises to relax the muscles, drink lots of water mixed with Gatorade, and cut out caffeine.

Um, dude. Serious breech of all things holy alert. Why don't you just ask her to cut off a toe, or tell her she'd have healthier vocal chords if she became a Republican? In case we haven't mentioned it, Girl-E started drinking coffee when she was two. TWO. And, no, "can you switch to decaf?" is not the response we were looking for. Nor is "I know it's tough, I cut out coffee six months ago and it almost killed me, but now my range and quality is better than ever before." The Diet Coke she could probably be weaned from with serious but possible effort. But the coffee? Things are dire here, people. We are at a crossroads. Fuck and fuck.

Posted by The Twins at January 30, 2004 10:27 AM

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Comments

hmmm. can you just shoot up the caffiene? sort of free base some vivarin it to by-pass those vocal chords?
they should make a patch for this kind of thing, no?

Posted by: snowy at January 30, 2004 04:24 PM

If it's any consolation, I cut out caffeine once and I was still totally tone-deaf.

Posted by: Jess at January 30, 2004 05:49 PM

this post made me laugh. as i type, coffee squirted from my laughing lips is dribbling down the monitor.

just kidding.

seriously, though, i have a message from coffee: it really doesn't want to lose you.

Posted by: kate at January 30, 2004 08:01 PM