Bleary, Weary Eyes
In ten minutes it will be Thursday. In ten minutes my audition will be TOMORROW! Holy Guacamole!
I'm feeling very...potent right now. Very alive. In control of myself in relation to space and time and other people. I'm going to pull the AP Lit card here and venture to say that I am experiencing a Moment of Being, thanks Virginia. (Is it just me or is Mrs. Woolf incredibly attractive?)
The time for sleep is now, but first I want to share something. One of the elements of my audition is the relating of a childhood experience. I keep thinking of mine. I wrote it as a short story a little while ago, here it is.
The Tennis Lesson
Even as a young child, sports have always eluded me. The height that could have given me an edge was always negated by my oblivious nature on the playing field. A mixture of extreme timidity and over-active imagination ensured that whenever the ball came my way I would have my eyes intensely focused on the imaginary robot war taking place on the sidelines.
Not having many friends as a child, my recesses were spent circling the playground with my hands in my pockets, acting out epic dramas in my head and softly muttering the dialogue of my many characters. As proficient as they were in the twenty-five types of karate I’d invented, I still could not so much as dribble a basketball without it ricocheting off my stubby knees. Unaware of the blooming social life in my head, my parents worried that I had no friends. Their solution was to enroll me in an endless procession of community sports teams and classes, praying that I’d actually talk to someone or find an activity I enjoyed more than staring in the mirror and making faces.
I, too, wanted to make friends. Countless times I’d imagined what an actual conversation would be like. Everyone I’d ever met had a double inside my head, with whom I’d converse for hours, and it could be about anything. They had full access to my brain and understood my every point to the finest detail. Not so with their real world equals. These children would occasionally venture to ask me a question or tell me some joke, to which I would mumble a reply either incomprehensible or passive enough to end the exchange immediately. Confused, the child would leave, and I would quickly rush back into my head to give their double an apology for my rudeness, and proceed to have an enlightening chat.
At the age of nine my social skills were at an all time low. My lack of friends had never really bothered me, but adolescence had made me painfully aware of girls and my inability to talk to them. The loneliness was killing me, so when my parents signed me up for a tennis class at the local JCC I resolved that this class would be the one that changed my life. I would not only work hard and become an excellent tennis player, but I would talk to my fellow classmates, be funny and charming, and make my long overdue friends.
Classes started on a Tuesday evening at eight o’clock. My good attitude was paying off, as I’d said hello to a young boy named Alex and had been treated to a dirty joke. Yes, having friends was going to be fun. It was a perfect world until our instructor began class. She introduced herself and began reading off names for attendance. After running through a couple dozen names like; Maria Nickolia, Alec Vlodoshvire, and Boris Heltsven, she got a strange look in her eye. I wondered what was wrong, sure these names where a bit rough on the tongue, but nothing to get excited about. After a moment of contemplation she proceeded to produce a series of sounds one might achieve reading a word search aloud. Amazingly the class excitedly echoed back this alien speech as if it actually held some meaning. After a few more verbal volleys my anxiety was elevated from mild shock to absolute terror, when I realized that they were speaking Russian. As fate would have it, twenty-seven Russian-speaking Jews had found themselves in a room together. They’d each struggled with English’s inconsistent rules and un-pronounced letters. They’d been made to feel stupid for their accents and errors in syntax. They’d felt like outsiders in a country that looks down on foreigners. But now, they were among friends, and intended to enjoy it.
My conduct during the following four weeks is an everlasting testament to how far social anxiety was able to take me. Petrified by the thought of telling my teacher that I didn’t speak Russian and the class would have to ignore the one thing that brought them all together, I decided to act as though I spoke Russian perfectly, but simply chose not to. In-between activities others students would try to talk to me. I played it shy. When they told me jokes I took their laughter as a cue for my own and laughed loud enough to hopefully hide my secret. My instructor was easily satisfied with a quick nod or shake of the head, and when yes/no didn’t seem an acceptable answer I could always grunt and run away. By the fifth week I was so far behind the rest of the class that I couldn’t help drawing attention to myself, the whole ordeal had become far too symbolic, and I knew I wouldn’t last much longer. While trying to correct my horrible technique one day, my instructor pronounced what appeared to be a question. Sticking to what worked, I nodded my head. This produced a look of confusion on my instructor’s face. I quickly corrected myself, shaking my head a definitive “no.” This further confused her. Panicking, I let out a few low wheezes, before taking a wild guess at what “Thank you. I’m fine. Go away now.” might be in Russian. My pronunciation must have been a little off, because wide-eyed and sympathetic, my Tuesday night tennis instructor asked me, clear as day, “You don’t speak Russian, do you?” Staring back, I couldn’t say a word.
I'm feeling very...potent right now. Very alive. In control of myself in relation to space and time and other people. I'm going to pull the AP Lit card here and venture to say that I am experiencing a Moment of Being, thanks Virginia. (Is it just me or is Mrs. Woolf incredibly attractive?)
The time for sleep is now, but first I want to share something. One of the elements of my audition is the relating of a childhood experience. I keep thinking of mine. I wrote it as a short story a little while ago, here it is.
The Tennis Lesson
Even as a young child, sports have always eluded me. The height that could have given me an edge was always negated by my oblivious nature on the playing field. A mixture of extreme timidity and over-active imagination ensured that whenever the ball came my way I would have my eyes intensely focused on the imaginary robot war taking place on the sidelines.
Not having many friends as a child, my recesses were spent circling the playground with my hands in my pockets, acting out epic dramas in my head and softly muttering the dialogue of my many characters. As proficient as they were in the twenty-five types of karate I’d invented, I still could not so much as dribble a basketball without it ricocheting off my stubby knees. Unaware of the blooming social life in my head, my parents worried that I had no friends. Their solution was to enroll me in an endless procession of community sports teams and classes, praying that I’d actually talk to someone or find an activity I enjoyed more than staring in the mirror and making faces.
I, too, wanted to make friends. Countless times I’d imagined what an actual conversation would be like. Everyone I’d ever met had a double inside my head, with whom I’d converse for hours, and it could be about anything. They had full access to my brain and understood my every point to the finest detail. Not so with their real world equals. These children would occasionally venture to ask me a question or tell me some joke, to which I would mumble a reply either incomprehensible or passive enough to end the exchange immediately. Confused, the child would leave, and I would quickly rush back into my head to give their double an apology for my rudeness, and proceed to have an enlightening chat.
At the age of nine my social skills were at an all time low. My lack of friends had never really bothered me, but adolescence had made me painfully aware of girls and my inability to talk to them. The loneliness was killing me, so when my parents signed me up for a tennis class at the local JCC I resolved that this class would be the one that changed my life. I would not only work hard and become an excellent tennis player, but I would talk to my fellow classmates, be funny and charming, and make my long overdue friends.
Classes started on a Tuesday evening at eight o’clock. My good attitude was paying off, as I’d said hello to a young boy named Alex and had been treated to a dirty joke. Yes, having friends was going to be fun. It was a perfect world until our instructor began class. She introduced herself and began reading off names for attendance. After running through a couple dozen names like; Maria Nickolia, Alec Vlodoshvire, and Boris Heltsven, she got a strange look in her eye. I wondered what was wrong, sure these names where a bit rough on the tongue, but nothing to get excited about. After a moment of contemplation she proceeded to produce a series of sounds one might achieve reading a word search aloud. Amazingly the class excitedly echoed back this alien speech as if it actually held some meaning. After a few more verbal volleys my anxiety was elevated from mild shock to absolute terror, when I realized that they were speaking Russian. As fate would have it, twenty-seven Russian-speaking Jews had found themselves in a room together. They’d each struggled with English’s inconsistent rules and un-pronounced letters. They’d been made to feel stupid for their accents and errors in syntax. They’d felt like outsiders in a country that looks down on foreigners. But now, they were among friends, and intended to enjoy it.
My conduct during the following four weeks is an everlasting testament to how far social anxiety was able to take me. Petrified by the thought of telling my teacher that I didn’t speak Russian and the class would have to ignore the one thing that brought them all together, I decided to act as though I spoke Russian perfectly, but simply chose not to. In-between activities others students would try to talk to me. I played it shy. When they told me jokes I took their laughter as a cue for my own and laughed loud enough to hopefully hide my secret. My instructor was easily satisfied with a quick nod or shake of the head, and when yes/no didn’t seem an acceptable answer I could always grunt and run away. By the fifth week I was so far behind the rest of the class that I couldn’t help drawing attention to myself, the whole ordeal had become far too symbolic, and I knew I wouldn’t last much longer. While trying to correct my horrible technique one day, my instructor pronounced what appeared to be a question. Sticking to what worked, I nodded my head. This produced a look of confusion on my instructor’s face. I quickly corrected myself, shaking my head a definitive “no.” This further confused her. Panicking, I let out a few low wheezes, before taking a wild guess at what “Thank you. I’m fine. Go away now.” might be in Russian. My pronunciation must have been a little off, because wide-eyed and sympathetic, my Tuesday night tennis instructor asked me, clear as day, “You don’t speak Russian, do you?” Staring back, I couldn’t say a word.