Voice
I had a hard time waking up this morning, and casually fired off an email response to a friend when my thoughts were still morning quiet. “Is this the real Mia,” he asked, “you sound fake”.
my next email convinced him it was me, so that’s why most of it’s there. when i reread what it’d written it made me think about voice and tone and honesty. it’s so hard to know what we sound like. at least with karaoke (Oops i did it again last night, thus the hang over) it’s pretty clear what you sound like, especially since karaoke is as much about reception as anything else. You can tell how you sound by looking at other people’s faces, mass drunkenness or not.
>sorry, i wrote back when i first woke up and am still
>very hung over. mainly i just couldn’t think of
>anything to say.
>
>it’s mia, she’s just really dehydrated and the wilted
>fluid sack holding her brain is letting it bump along
>her skull like a small boat in dock.
>
>water.. water. reading on nerve and watching dawson’s
>creek in the background. i am embracing my inability
>to be productive at the moment. it’s the freedom i’m
>paying for.
I barely write in my blog anymore, and the truth is I’m content to let it be quiet, at least for now. All the writing goes to other purposes, and unlike the relief writing here has been on so many significant days, the writing elsewhere always begins with fear and dread about what I’m about to write, how I’ll write it. Will it make any sense, will be be good? I have a distinct voice but it wavers. The honesty is there and the dread of writing is that it’s not always what you thought the truth was going to be. It’s terrible.
And each time I have to tolerate the feeling and start writing because it’s not going to go away. Lucky for me I always feel great after writing, no matter what. Not completely great as in i-am-great but that at least I’m getting things down and figuring it out and I entered and stayed in that place where everything is silent but for what comes out of my head. And I know I get there because when I try to speak out loud afterwards my voice is choked and raw. If I have answered the phone they always ask, “Were you sleeping?” and I explain that I was writing and haven’t spoken in a long time, maybe for a day. And they say “ok” and never sound like they believe I wasn’t in fact sleeping because the way my voice sounds is more convincing than what I say. It’s always been like this. Thankfully my favorite college professor Vassily Aksyonov said that that used to happen to him all the time. His friends would say, “Were you sleeping?” and he told us that when you really Write it is like you’re in between waking and dreaming.
So, if I don’t sound like that after I’ve written something then I know it’s more on par with when I wrote an angry letter to Jiffy Lube. It might get me my money back, but it’s not something anyone really wants to read.
Hey WHO was your favorite professor in college again? Heh. Sorry Mia - couldn’t resist…
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