cimorene

I voluntarily engaged in a conversation that was mostly my idea yesterday!

This is a highly unusual occurrence offline, where the barriers to communication are higher and so is my anxiety. Which is why as a direct result of this, I have a numb spot on the roof of my mouth and a large blister on my lip!

What happened is this.

The week's guest lecturer was a music therapist who had this amazing voice modulation going on (although I don't literally suspect it of magic, I do wonder if she's had theater or opera training). I was fascinated by her lecture and loved the clips she selected (one of them was from The Planets, which is definitely one of my favorite classical pieces). She talked about all kinds of comfortable and familiar subjects from childhood¹.

I've been yawning my way through the second half of the lectures for months, so last night I brought a packet of instant Café au Chocolat, and at breaktime I went to the kitchenette to make it. While I was pouring hot water into my thermos, she came in and said confidingly that it was so oppressive back in the classroom, where the rest of the students were just sitting in silence.

Music theory fascinates me, so I had a pile of things I'd thought of during the first half of her lecture and hadn't said out loud for fear of sidetracking. Also she struck me as easy to talk to: there was the voice modulation I was talking about - I challenge anyone to listen to her and find it anything other than soothing - and then there was the fact that she sort of reminded me of my mother (count on me to have my ONE conversation in six months with the one person closest to my parents' age!).

So anyway, I turned around and just said to her, "I've always preferred minor music to major!" and sat down at the coffee table with her and - well, we talked for the whole fifteen minutes. I told her my whole history with music, my favorite piece (Hungarian Dance #5), my angst about having quit the oboe in high school, my idle thoughts about taking up the recorder and even the emotional connection I feel to the recorder because my grandmother played it. We talked about medieval music! She told me about how she came to play the tuba in school!

I don't even know. I never have conversations like this. I know that other people have them every day, but... I've been going to these classes weekly since August, and I've only had one conversation with one of the classmates I see every week, and it only lasted maybe 5 minutes! I don't even remember all my classmates' names, even though now there are only eight of us who regularly show up! This is really, really weird for me. (If she'd been talking about art or science fiction, I wouldn't have had any hesitation and wouldn't have been surprised in the least; so I guess what's really surprising is that I did not realize that Music Is My Fandom too.)

Even though I was enjoying talking, I was so distracted by the socialness of the situation that I barely knew what I was doing with my hands, so I almost threw the coffee spoon away instead of washing it, and then I burned my mouth drinking straight from the thermos, but rather than stopping and doing something about it, I couldn't even finish the thought, and just kept drinking like that for, oh, another five minutes or so! It wasn't until she left the room to get her own coffee that my brain came online and I got a mini paper cup to pour the coffee out into.

In the end, there was no real harm done, because the blister doesn't hurt. But still. My brain.

1. I studied oboe in middle and high school under a series of grad students at one of the best public university Schools of Music in the country, plus a great deal of music theory combined with basic piano training from a good family friend who happened to be a composer.