I have been singing along to the practice CD for the choral group in my car pretty much every time I drive somewhere for the past week or so, and a number of times I have sat down at the piano with my music to pick out the parts I'm having a harder time with, and when I do those things, I feel as if I am getting the parts down; they are sticking inside my head and I can do them right. But then I get to rehearsal and it feels as if all that work was just brushed off to the side and I am fumbling for notes in places where I *know* the darn notes by now, and I just feel so frustrated and worse, I am disappointed in annoyed at myself for not nailing the notes each and every time I make a mistake.

It is, unfortunately, no consolation that I am not the only one who is having just as much difficulty; that even the best singers in the group are still struggling in the hardest of songs. I know I have to work harder; we all have to work harder, and the concert date is fast approaching, and even though I know that it *will* come together, because that is always the way of these things and because I suspect I am not the only one who tends to shine under pressure, it still is a bitter pill to swallow. It is easy to ignore how much I have managed to learn in such a short time and how far I have learned to extend my voice beyond what has been my comfort zone for far too many years, in order to focus more sharply on how much I still have yet to learn.

Tonight, at rehearsal, several of us decided that we needed to schedule some extra practice time among ourselves, to focus on the parts we're struggling the most on. And rehearsal ran nearly an hour late tonight, but we stayed because we needed to; because singing in a group is still far better than picking out your part at home on a piano, alone.

This is a NaBloPoMo entry