Floydian Slip (And Panic Attacks)

First of all, a big thank you to the wonderful Jackson Teller; for creating this blog layout for me! I'm afraid I'm pretty hopeless with layouts. I just don't have the patience for them.

Anyway, today was...an interesting day.

Started out pretty shitty. I blogged about that earlier, no need to rehash that. But I've had bad anxiety all day because of it. Just awful.

And then I did a really stupid thing: I had Pepsi.

I've probably told you guys before that I am really sensitive to caffeine. Unfortunately one of the side effects is that if I'm experiencing anxiety, caffeine greatly exacerbates it. Soooo about three hours later, when the class I was in got really chaotic and loud and everyone was talking over everyone and ignoring the task at hand and I couldn't even walk from one side of the room to the other because everyone was crowding around everyone...I basically had a mild panic attack. In front of a room full of people.

And then when I went to ask my professor for my next class a question, I hadn't quite come down from that anxiety spike yet so my voice started shaking and I couldn't breathe and she asked if I was okay and I just started crying and god I felt dumb. I get so embarrassed when I have anxiety issues in front of people. My professor was super nice about it, though. She asked if I was okay and if I was able to breathe, and then talked to me about other things for a minute to help take my mind off it, then asked if there was anything she had said or done that had concerned me, and walked me back to class and offered to let me do the small group assignment later in a separate room so I wouldn't get so overwhelmed again.

So that was nice. The last part turned out to be unnecessary, though, because I left class early because...

My husband and I had bought tickets to a cool concert MONTHS ago. It was a Pink Floyd tribute show called Floydian Slip and it was AWESOME. The bassist of the band that does the tribute is also the guitar tech my husband takes his guitars in to for maintenance, so we figured we'd go and support them. And it was totally worth it.

They played the entirety of Dark Side of the Moon, followed by a large, carefully selected portion of The Wall. The theatrics of it were just spot-on, especially the parts from The Wall.

The cool thing about Pink Floyd's music is that you can actually feel the unsettling aspects of the music. I don't mean "the lyrics and performance are really moving and you can feel it emotionally." I mean, the way Pink Floyd music is written and arranged, the aspects of cacophony and discordance, the way the harmonies work together, all of it creates a sound that is physically unsettling to listen to, and it's absolutely perfect.

That's what I want to learn to do with my poetry. I want the poem to have a physical effect on the listener/reader. I want not only the meaning of the words but the sound of them to have an effect.

Man. That was such a cool show. It did kind of amp up my anxiety at some points, though--the loudness of it, and the packed crowd, and that unsettling aspect of the music, it was tough. I frequently found myself consciously working through the anxiety and it was a little distracting from the show and the music. I kind of wish we could have gone to this show on any other night.

But I'm glad we went. With everything going on lately, it was nice to do something fun. And since we bought the tickets way back before the wedding, it didn't affect our current bank balance at all.

On a totally different note, I've been saying this in every comment I leave on a Candy Bowl post, and I already did a whole blog to say this, too, but thank you so much to everyone who is doing a Candy Bowl for Halloween. It's awesome. It's so good to see the Mibba community this active, all commenting on each other's stuff and what not. You guys are doing a great thing and I know it's not easy to keep up with so thanks for being awesome.
October 2nd, 2014 at 06:08am