(no subject)
There's a voice exercise I have to do at my lessons that involves "hooting" in head voice, and it always makes me extremely light-headed. I'm still stumbling around like a drunken idiot. Argh.
Speech: My Personal History With Unrequited Love
Shakespeare described love as “most worthy comfort, now my greatest grief.” Patsy Cline was “crazy for loving you.” Stephen Sondheim called it “agony that can cut like a knife.” Yet, for some reason, we are all in pursuit of it. Every last one of us, however we hide it, is looking for romance, for eye contact, the electric caress of skin on skin, lips on lips - need I go on? Sometimes, however, though even the most impervious of us long for human contact, we may find ourselves head over heels for someone who doesn’t feel the same way in return. Whether they don’t know we exist, or we are painfully aware of how much they detest us, it doesn’t matter. We can’t have what we want, and that hurts.
It seems I have been suffering of unrequited love all my life. This pattern started when I was very young - too young to understand that you’re not supposed to try to seduce your cousin. My logic was: he was cute, he was accessible, and he could string together a sentence, unlike many of my preschool colleagues. I would write him lovelorn notes and follow him around at family parties. Today, he’s an engineering student at university, and still looks at me oddly sometimes when we’re together. I guess I’ve earned it.
When I was nine, I was ridiculously infatuated with pop singer Aaron Carter. Once, I excitedly tagged along with my mom when she interviewed him for a TV segment, and when I saw what a stuck-up jerk he was, I quickly took him off my “cutest guys of all time” list.
Later, at the age of ten, I became entranced with a boy in my choir who was 14 at the time. He sang soprano, and I became convinced that I would never love another. When he quit the choir halfway through the year, I was horrified - I called up my best friend, and we agreed that my life was over and I had no reason to continue, now that this high-voiced hottie was no longer available to me. Somehow, I managed to go on.
Throughout my angsty adolescent years, I found myself crazy about a series of men with interesting hair and major guitar skills - John Mayer, Jack Black, Adam Pascal, Taylor Hicks. I guess it’s not really unrequited love if the subject is a distant celebrity, but at the time, I didn’t let that accusation bother me. I would scribble for hours on end in a notebook for that very purpose, to which I assigned the title, “The Heartbreak Files.” I still have it, and it still makes me laugh to see how fixed I was on the ultimate goal of getting married to a guitar god - even though they were all an average of 20 years older than me, and hundreds of miles away.
By the time I was fourteen, I had become a susceptible young woman in her first term of high school. My mother took me to see a musical in a small, intimate theatre. The man on the stage had wide eyes and a receding hairline. He was wearing a plaid shirt and suspenders, and he was singing about being a butterfly. Immediately, I thought: this is the man for me! I later met him and made a complete fool of myself, giggling like a - well, like a schoolgirl. My commitment to him is now so infamous in my family that my mother had his face printed on my most recent birthday cake. Upon presenting it to me, she said, “Now you’ll finally get to eat him!”
As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, I have a rather extensive history with unrequited love. It continues to fascinate me - the nonsensical exhiliration, the process of rejection, the lines that are such fun to cross. I have a feeling that I’ll be loving unrequitedly for a while, and that’s okay. Maybe someday my prince will come - and with any luck, he’ll show up in a plaid shirt and suspenders.
Speech: My Personal History With Unrequited Love
Shakespeare described love as “most worthy comfort, now my greatest grief.” Patsy Cline was “crazy for loving you.” Stephen Sondheim called it “agony that can cut like a knife.” Yet, for some reason, we are all in pursuit of it. Every last one of us, however we hide it, is looking for romance, for eye contact, the electric caress of skin on skin, lips on lips - need I go on? Sometimes, however, though even the most impervious of us long for human contact, we may find ourselves head over heels for someone who doesn’t feel the same way in return. Whether they don’t know we exist, or we are painfully aware of how much they detest us, it doesn’t matter. We can’t have what we want, and that hurts.
It seems I have been suffering of unrequited love all my life. This pattern started when I was very young - too young to understand that you’re not supposed to try to seduce your cousin. My logic was: he was cute, he was accessible, and he could string together a sentence, unlike many of my preschool colleagues. I would write him lovelorn notes and follow him around at family parties. Today, he’s an engineering student at university, and still looks at me oddly sometimes when we’re together. I guess I’ve earned it.
When I was nine, I was ridiculously infatuated with pop singer Aaron Carter. Once, I excitedly tagged along with my mom when she interviewed him for a TV segment, and when I saw what a stuck-up jerk he was, I quickly took him off my “cutest guys of all time” list.
Later, at the age of ten, I became entranced with a boy in my choir who was 14 at the time. He sang soprano, and I became convinced that I would never love another. When he quit the choir halfway through the year, I was horrified - I called up my best friend, and we agreed that my life was over and I had no reason to continue, now that this high-voiced hottie was no longer available to me. Somehow, I managed to go on.
Throughout my angsty adolescent years, I found myself crazy about a series of men with interesting hair and major guitar skills - John Mayer, Jack Black, Adam Pascal, Taylor Hicks. I guess it’s not really unrequited love if the subject is a distant celebrity, but at the time, I didn’t let that accusation bother me. I would scribble for hours on end in a notebook for that very purpose, to which I assigned the title, “The Heartbreak Files.” I still have it, and it still makes me laugh to see how fixed I was on the ultimate goal of getting married to a guitar god - even though they were all an average of 20 years older than me, and hundreds of miles away.
By the time I was fourteen, I had become a susceptible young woman in her first term of high school. My mother took me to see a musical in a small, intimate theatre. The man on the stage had wide eyes and a receding hairline. He was wearing a plaid shirt and suspenders, and he was singing about being a butterfly. Immediately, I thought: this is the man for me! I later met him and made a complete fool of myself, giggling like a - well, like a schoolgirl. My commitment to him is now so infamous in my family that my mother had his face printed on my most recent birthday cake. Upon presenting it to me, she said, “Now you’ll finally get to eat him!”
As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, I have a rather extensive history with unrequited love. It continues to fascinate me - the nonsensical exhiliration, the process of rejection, the lines that are such fun to cross. I have a feeling that I’ll be loving unrequitedly for a while, and that’s okay. Maybe someday my prince will come - and with any luck, he’ll show up in a plaid shirt and suspenders.