Challenges
- wildlife dancing
It’s only early February, and I am already embarking on a number of challenges for 2015.
I started a barbershop quartet last week, and the first rehearsal went surprisingly well, even though none of us had done anything like it before. Mind you, my bass wanted a voice recording of his part instead of the piano recording I had made at home over Christmas, to put words and music together. As I couldn’t find any recording software on my computer, for a while I was contemplating to just call him and leave it as a voice message. But then I ran into my friend Ronnie on the bus, and his pal Mike suggested Audacity, which is a free recording and mixing software. So home I went and did a quick and dirty recording of the bass part, one octave higher of course. Singing on my own in front of people was challenge number one. To be fair, doing karaoke the other week had helped to lose some inhibition.
The other challenge is clubbing. As in dancing in front of other people. It’s quite ironic, as I dance every week, but partner dancing and club dancing are two different worlds in my opinion. Or are they? We’ll find out at Balkanarama, a Balkan music themed club night this Friday. I usually tell myself that I hate clubs, but if I am absolutely honest with myself it’s that I’m too self-conscious most of the time to enjoy dancing on my own, even if I like the music. Therefore, the challenge is to have fun at a club night - no drinking allowed, because that would be cheating (and also make me tired and bored).
On a slightly related note, I was challenged to eat the eye of the fish (sea bass) I had at my friend Leila’s birthday dinner. The eye was white and only the inner part was left, or it had shrunk in the pan. But when I took it out of the eye socket with my fork there was a transparent glob attached to it which made swallowing a bit of a mental effort.
I started a barbershop quartet last week, and the first rehearsal went surprisingly well, even though none of us had done anything like it before. Mind you, my bass wanted a voice recording of his part instead of the piano recording I had made at home over Christmas, to put words and music together. As I couldn’t find any recording software on my computer, for a while I was contemplating to just call him and leave it as a voice message. But then I ran into my friend Ronnie on the bus, and his pal Mike suggested Audacity, which is a free recording and mixing software. So home I went and did a quick and dirty recording of the bass part, one octave higher of course. Singing on my own in front of people was challenge number one. To be fair, doing karaoke the other week had helped to lose some inhibition.
The other challenge is clubbing. As in dancing in front of other people. It’s quite ironic, as I dance every week, but partner dancing and club dancing are two different worlds in my opinion. Or are they? We’ll find out at Balkanarama, a Balkan music themed club night this Friday. I usually tell myself that I hate clubs, but if I am absolutely honest with myself it’s that I’m too self-conscious most of the time to enjoy dancing on my own, even if I like the music. Therefore, the challenge is to have fun at a club night - no drinking allowed, because that would be cheating (and also make me tired and bored).
On a slightly related note, I was challenged to eat the eye of the fish (sea bass) I had at my friend Leila’s birthday dinner. The eye was white and only the inner part was left, or it had shrunk in the pan. But when I took it out of the eye socket with my fork there was a transparent glob attached to it which made swallowing a bit of a mental effort.