"I Got in a Fight With a Wall and Lost" featuring "Going Solo"

So, my jaw has a nice bruise on it from where it smacked the sidewalk on Friday. I tripped over this little wall in front of my apartment and bruised my jaw, cut the inside of my mouth with my teeth, scraped my hand, and scraped my ankle. Other than that, it seems I'm fine ("no blood, no foul," my basketball team's number one team mom, Lisa, always said). Oh, the pain a momentary loss of balance can cause me. I'm beginning to feel like my dear friend Marilyn (her hobby was falling down all the time).

Last night I was trying to explain to my neighbors what had happened, and ended up telling them, in Japanese, "Tomorrow I will fall down." They were very confused, and then I realized that I had said the wrong word, and should have said "Yesterday." We all laughed a good bit over it.

Anyway, though the area where the bruise is hurts, it isn't painful enough to take any painkiller, so I'm avoiding taking aspirin (I don't like taking medicine anyway). Well, I was doing fine, until this afternoon at choir practice when I suddenly realized, from singing, how painful it was to properly make my mouth move. I did alright, though I think I'll refrain from practicing my clarinet too much on Tuesday, even though I'm trying to prepare a piece to play in church the Sunday before Christmas.

Oh, by the way, speaking of the Gospel choir, I have a solo. Sometime in the spring we'll be performing "Oh, Happy Day" from Sister Act II. I was given the solo (I think because I'm the only native English speaker). Anyway, I kept messing up the rhythm. I've always been a follower in music and singing has never been my strong point. I have no self-confidence in my singing ability whatsoever, despite the fact that 3 Anderson University Fine Arts faculty members have said I could sing fine. I suppose my lack of confidence is primarily due to the fact that I was told most of my life by my family and close friends that the sound of my singing was nasal and nauseating. Anyway, I know that the vocal chords change until the late twenties, so it is entirely possibly that I can sing now. However, the only solos I've ever sung were for a voice class I took with 9 other people. That was nerve wracking, but I trusted half the people in the class, so I didn't have too much trouble overcoming that fear.

I remember the first time I ever performed a solo on the clarinet in public. It was for the prelude at Cornerstone Church. I remember shaking so badly. And my senior year of high school, when I suddenly found myself as 1st Chair in the clarinet section because the only other clarinet was a first year concert band student, I worried myself into a fever so that when I performed at the concert I barely made it through the pieces because I was so feverish!

Anyway, so now I've been given the task to sing a solo. Luckily I'm semi-familiar wth the piece, but the solo is actually pretty difficult! Today, during the first rehearsals of the piece, I either concentrated too hard on the sound and the rhythm was awful, or I got the rhythm right but I was off key the whole time. I kept alternating between the two each time. I need to practice this a lot, but I really hope someone volunteers for the Solo B part (that's all the "lalalalala's" -- which I didn't know were in the song in the first place). I, apparently, can't sing "lalalalala's" well at all. I also think you shouldn't have one person sing both solos anyway. Well, I've got some time to practice this.