If ever I had time to engage in a more extended period of self-assessment, it's now. I just had my last exam ever on Saturday -- and I still got a chill of excitement just mentioning it again. (No more exams, ever!) Rather than immediately plan a trip away for repose, I was looking forward to two weeks of just tooling around my apartment and environs. I have acutely felt for some time that with all of the ridiculous trivialities (well, school and work) swirling around me, I have never really been able to enjoy the many wonderful aspects of my daily life.
Better than that, because it was the week of my birthday, I have been seriously wined and dined by my bevy of remarkable friends. 2004 has thus far been an amazing year, one of the best of my short life. And on the topic of short lives, I hate when people make comments like, "Damn, we're getting old," or "It's all downhill from here!" I just don't understand the hurry to get to 21 and then feeling the irrepressible need to resent aging beyond that point. I still feel so young, and almost anxious to get to 30. I feel that 25 still makes me a kid. People have so much get-up-and-go in them, and with attention spans becoming shorter and shorter in modern society, you really do have so much time to experience many things. I think of the things I've done in the past couple of days and cannot imagine stretching that across some interminable lifetime. When I'm 30, I'll be able to buy Ethan Allen furniture or buy lots of custom-made cherry-wood pieces. Somehow, that just isn't suitable for someone in their 20's. It's like your early 20's are reserved for IKEA, and your late 20's for Pottery Barn. And then when you're 40 you're supposed to pick up antiques or collecting or something. And then when you're in your 50's, well that means you get to wear really garish, sparkling jewelry. See, there's always something to look forward to, and I really don't care to be in my 20's forever. If I were, how would I ever be able to experience the medical wonder of Botox?
Reveling in aging isn't the only experiment of my two weeks of self-assessment. I have known for some time that I speak too quickly. It's unnerving and I see it as a genuine impediment for my professional success. Tonight, I took out my digital camera and filmed a few MPEGs (now erased) of myself reading different articles on Reuters. Some of it was acting out a fantasy of being a news anchor; but mostly, it was a clinical analysis of the many distractions in my manner of speaking. I was shocked at how much I slur syllables no matter how much I had tried to enunciate. I was displeased at the lack of cadence in my sentences that made me resemble the Micro-Machine man more than a pleasant presentatrice. Most disappointing of all was how expressive my face unavoidably was. My eyebrows were flying all over the place and I have a real knack for working that crease between my eyebrows. At the end of each clip, I felt like the only solution was to Botox my entire face. But of course, that's just silly -- I don't have $8000. So I practiced and recorded some more, until I could wrest some control into the top portion of my face, and divert attention away from seeing my darting eyes to hearing my speech.
It was actually a real physical task and now I have a newfound respect for on-camera "talent" (as they were referred to back at Fox News Channel). We used to snicker and ridicule the talking heads for sounding like charismatic robots. But, it's difficult to sound natural and controlled at the same time, and seldom are people a genuine balance of the two.
Well, that's enough prattle for the evening. Forensic Files is on. I'm going to turn my attention now to poorly executed crimes where suspects left a damning trail of irrefutable scientific evidence.
posted by Lucy Sloan @ 1:07 AM
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