Christmas Songs in my Head

1. My Husky Voice

My colleague said I should have recorded a new voice-mail message while I had my sexy-voice (in the early stages).

Had laryngitis again for a couple of days. It's the best of all the cool sounding diseases to have - you get visible symptoms, but feel pretty good inside! Great for sympathy, yet you can easily soldier on and look like a martyr when you actually feel better than you would with a run-of-the-mill head-cold.

It's quite an occupational hazard for a teacher. I had to plan a day of lessons where I had no need to talk - videos and essays, baby.

From googling my symptoms I have deduced that it probably somehow spread down from my impacted wisdom tooth, which seemed to infect that side of my mouth and lymph nodes a few days earlier. Either a viral or bacterial infection (I'm not sure of the difference). This is a good thing, since it means it was only acute laryngitis, rather than chronic. Chronic laryngitis means you need to go to something called a speech pathologist.

I don't like the idea of having a dying voice.

2. Healing the World

I spent quality time with my family today. My dad's wife had back surgery (relatively minor this time, though it went wrong and they had to operate again a couple of days later to take out a wonky screw, which means she can make good jokes about having a screw loose now).

Dad took me and my brother to the Michael Jackson movie. I paid though - a monumental ocassion, given my dad recently retired and it evidently costs $60 for three people to go to the movies and have ice creams! Who knew? I am now the bread-winner of the family.

I had cringed when I heard that was what we were seeing. It made sense, given my brother was a massive fan back in his youth.... And the first few minutes of the film made me cringe, with back up dancers gushing is a really put-on sort of way about how this was the highlight of their life.

But after that it was quite good. There was no narrator (they didn't mention his death at all), so it was just these really raw clips that showed the behind-the-scenes of the lead-up to a concert. You got to see the dance rehearsals and the band rehearsals. And I'd never realised how good his voice actually was - he's not like these modern pop singers who have to lip synch when they're live. He really is a perfectionist, but in a professional way. I liked seeing all the tiny details that they sorted out - the timing of everything is so intricate.

And he moved pretty good for an old fella. Certainly didn't look like a guy about to go into cardiac arrest or anything. It was actually better than a film of the live concert would have been, in terms of Michael being more animated and natural.

I liked it.