I’ve always loved singing along with the radio and, if nobody was looking, doing my fair share of chair-dancing. If you get caught doing something like that, it’s best to play it off because everyone does it anyway, right? I’m pretty sure everyone I know sings along with their favorite songs, and to a lesser extent top 40 dance music with difficult-to-understand lyrics. I bet you know someone, who you wouldn’t expect, sings along with “Like a G6″ and glosses over most of the song.
I bet you do it too.
I got a pair of noise cancellation headphones for Christmas, and they’ve made a huge difference for my car-singing career. With the earbuds, you hear yourself muffled like you’ve got your fingers in your ears, and with the stereo turned up, you can never seem to get it quite loud enough to cancel out your own voice. These headphones masked my own voice so well that I started to think I really had this singing thing down.
I believed this (or wanted to believe this) so much that, when I had to wait in the car for a while, I decided to video record myself singing along with Hall & Oates – I Can’t Go For That. The outcome was… Well, I sucked. I’ve never heard such terrible singing in my life, and the awkward visual only made it worse. You are out of luck, by the way. The recording was deleted immediately with plans to burn my phone in a fiery pit on the other side of the world.
I’m just waiting to buy plane tickets.
I can’t decide if it’s just me, or if everyone has this “problem”. Being able to sing is something that is always useful, whether you join a band or play the ukulele. Is it something that everyone can do, but some are better at, or is it something that some people can never have?
And what about all this fancy dancing? I think I’ve got the rhythm. I’ve got neat moves. I generally draw a lot of attention on the dance floor at weddings, after my 4th or 5th Black Russian. (The drink, I’m not the worldly.) I’m getting the feeling I’m terrible at that too.
Why is something so simple and seemingly straightforward as singing and dancing so impossibly difficult to be reasonably decent at? Why does the microwave steal 40 seconds from me, every time I tell it to cook my food for 100 seconds? Why is a single side of a pair of pants, called a pant leg, when it’s clearly a pant, and half of the pair. Why am I still asking stupid questions?