VISI, day 18

Also a fairly uneventful day.  Woke up feeling absolutely lousy, so I texted my pianist saying I would be late to the first coaching.  Had a shower, felt marginally better, headed over.  The coaching was quite good actually.  

I brought my dress and some lunch along, so I ate quickly then changed and brushed my teeth, as I was singing in a concert at one o'clock.  I sang Die Mainacht and Les chemins de l'amour.  It went quite well, I thought: not a perfect performance by any means, but I managed to stay in the moment, focused, got over mistakes and went on, and was overall happy with my performance.  Yay!

I had one more coaching at four, so I went home and ... watched more My Little Pony.  A good pick-me-up after a somewhat-depressing missive received from a good friend. 

My second coaching was a staging session, so it was alright.  I like to work with this sort of thing.  

After that coaching I headed back to dorm, made some food and had a chat with my mother, which was good.  Tomorrow looks vaguely complicated but I'm sure it'll all get figured out.

Oh!  Bird story!  While I'm thinking about it!  So this is Friday morning, and I'm asleep, and I'm dreaming, and suddenly I think I hear one of the cats making a strange sort of coo/meow noise.  It sounds a bit like a bird, but I associate it with a cat, since I've grown up with cats.  Except then I start to wake up, and the sound's not going away, and I remember that I'm in Vancouver, and there is no cat in my room.

oh my gosh.  It's a bird.  It has to be a bird.  There is no screen on the window of my room, and I have been keeping it open.  It's a bird.  There is a bird in my room.

It's not flapping around.  I open my eyes, and look around a bit.  I don't see it.  I sit up.  Still don't see it.  Look at the window.  Oh, the curtain is flapping a bit, maybe it's just standing on the ledge.  Maybe if I twitch the curtain it'll fly out the window.  I slide forward in bed a bit, toward the window, and suddenly there's this great flapping and a coo, and I scream out of surprise as the bird flies up from where it was standing beside my bed (on the floor) to my desk.

We both stop.  I take a look at it.  It's a decently big bird - maybe two and a half times the size of a robin?  Not the size of a seagull, though.  A medium-sized bird.  It's a steely, muted greyish-blue, and looks like it has some speckles on its tail.  But I don't have my glasses on, so it's a bit hard to tell.  

I'm nervous - if it gets mad at me, it's a lot faster than I am, and I don't have anything to defend myself in easy reach (I suppose a pillow might have worked).  I can't really get to the door.  The curtain is still closed.  I have no idea (duh) what this bird is thinking.  Maybe it just doesn't know how to get out.  I inch over, reach and grab the curtain, then pull it open.  I wait.  It flies to the ledge, then hops out the window.  I lean over, carefully, and wait for it to hop a bit along the ledge before pulling the window mostly shut.

Luckily, I did not wake anyone, and luckily, the bird did not decide to be mad at me.  

So that is the bird story!

VISI, day 13

Today went pretty well, considering last night went quite horribly.  

I decided not to go to performance psychology class, so instead my day started at 10 with presentations from Emily Ezust, webmistress of the Lied, Art Song and Choral Texts website, and Robert Crawford, the owner of the site and a musical artist in his own right.  I had been very interested in hearing Ms. Ezust speak, as I've used her website for a long time; I would have enjoyed more details on the computer-science side of things, but then, I have the background in it ... most of the people in the room wouldn't have cared much.  Mr. Crawford's presentation was not, I thought, as interesting: he works on software that is basically enhanced supertitles, pushing the notion that the audience needs to see the text in order to fully appreciate the music.  I don't disagree, but he was a bit aggressive and repetitive.  Oh well.  I would have also liked to hear more about why Ms. Ezust does what she does - what her philosophy is.  Why does she care enough to put this database out there and work on it full-time?

After that lecture was an hour about Peace it Together, a summer program uniting teenagers from Israel, Palestine and Canada in a month of filmmaking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  I was all teary in about ... five minutes.  I don't know very much about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict beyond the very, very basic sides, but still.  The work this program causes is inspiring and impressive.  What I found most striking was that no one, either staff or participants, is under the impression that peace may be reached in the near future (much less be caused directly by this program): they are concerned with initiating dialogue and connecting with the other side of the conflict, finding common ground and hoping for peace in the further future.  I don't quite know if that makes sense, but I'm not sure how else to say it right now.  Maybe I'll come back to it.

I then made lunch, and since I didn't have a coaching until 4, I relaxed and then took a nap.  The coaching today was the polar opposite of yesterday's: we worked with Tyler Duncan, a Canadian singer.  He was very encouraging (sometimes I thought he was perhaps too much so, but that could be a combination of personal self-deprecation, a tendency to put my talent above other people's, and the aftereffects of both yesterday's really tough coaching and the horrid evening), and yet still, somehow, we managed to work through a couple things that I hadn't been able to fix for a long time.  In some ways, the no-holds-barred encouragement and steady praise worked wonders.  Hard to believe, sometimes, but little bits of it got lodged in there somewhere.

After coaching, I checked on the score of the hockey game, figured there was time for it to turn around in our favour, and decided to head to downtown Vancouver.  I took the SkyTrain.  :D  It kind of made me sad to see how many people were drunk even just on the bus - and this was about one period into the game.  Once I got to downtown, I managed to walk seven blocks in the wrong direction, threading my way along Granville among all the people smoking (I have never seen so many people smoking at once in my life) ... and then realized I was going the wrong way, turned around and walked back.  I ate dinner in a food court, watched a very little bit of the game, decided we were definitely not going to win and I didn't want to be there when it was official, and went to catch a bus.  The bus pulled away at 7.53, just after the game ended and just before the fairly small-scale riots started.

I got ice cream on the way home.  And now here I am!  It is time to turn off the computer and relax ...