Bad Wimpfen

Amie, Ryan, Chris and I all discovered a new jewel in Badem-Württemberg today: Bad Wimpfen. Here are some pics.

Gobble-die Guck

I am becoming quietly obsessed about the stock market. This is not an obsession that I have previously shared with you all, but one that I have kept in my back pocket as a sort of surprise. Surprise! Anyway, it seems to me, and I know that in some ways this is a bit naive, that one can, with relative security, predict certain macrocosmic movements on the market. I started learning about markets and money last year after having won a settlement against a horrible driver who made a traffic violation resulting in my breaking both my wrists and two bones in my back. Thank you, you know who, wherever you are. The casts on both arms for 3 months were such a pleasant experience and the metal pin in my wrist will certainly remain a permanent reminder of what a bad driver can do to you... Anyway, the point being, I have some money to invest (I have, to this day, only told one person just how much it is: Christoph.) But, before I actually do something, I gots to learn how de whole thing works...

Had I invested in one of my pet projects from last year, I would have doubled my money. But, I didn’t. It all is just sitting in a bank somewhere waiting for me to build my know-how and nerve. The spiking oil prices of last summer were certain to drive the heating oil prices up, I thought. They did. This spike in how much people would have to pay to heat their homes would drive many to do what people in the 70s did—to buy solar fuel panels and put them on their roofs. They did. Over the winter, a couple of the better solar companies made quite a profit.

Anyway, that is all lead up to my newest harebrain idea...I have been watching the reports of bird flu for some time. The real threat of the flu has only been to our food source and to those humans who work closely with their own bird flocks. But, yesterday, NPR reported that there is a potential case of human-to-human bird flu in Indonesia. Just as bird flu itself moved slowly from Asia to Europe, etc., so will a human to human strain move, probably more quickly, to the entire world. Human to human transmission also means, presumably, that one only need have relatively close contact with someone who has it in order to catch it. Probably within a month, if the case in Indonesia is true, there will be a worldwide panic about the flu going on. And, there is only one company that controls the rights to the antidote: Roche Pharmaceuticals in Switzerland. Need I say more?

The most ironic thing is that I looked at solar power because I somehow believe that one can benefit from bad consumer trends and still not get one’s hands dirty. The thinking was that, even if big oil were making huge profits and would be making even more in the future at the expense of, especially, American consumers, I could still make money from anticipating the buying trends of those people who would reject the idea of being big oil’s bitch. It is a way to encourage the right kind of investment...investment in fuel efficiency and alternative energy sources. But, the whole bird flu thing is a bit more difficult to rationalize morally. Should I make big bucks off of thousands of people who will absolutely have to have a shot because of their own hypochondria even when the disease will probably be quelled within the first 6 months? Hmmm. Making money off of other people’s stupidity...I’m not sure about this one.

Perspiration/Inspiration Parody

I am more and more convinced that the greatest challenge on this earth is the challenge to love and accept yourself. I know that much of the depression that I find myself in comes from self-hatred, and many of the bad habits that I have become accustomed to are all designed to give me some kind of gratification that I cannot seem to find within myself. Eating yummy things seems to give me the most immediate, nicest feeling.

I was sitting here, wondering what to do today. There are so many things that I could do. But, all of them seem too burdensome somehow—none of them being things that will make me immediately feel better about myself. These days, I like to just stick to the big three: exercise, practicing, and my doctorate. They are hard enough to accomplish without the distractions of “things that must be done” in the garden. Isn’t that damn garden supposed to be fun, anyway?

Most of my self-hatred stems from the fact that my good friend Betsy just got her first solo Fest contract with the opera house in Wiesbaden. It is her first contract, and she got it in a super house (her first role will be Idamante in Idomeneo and she will be singing it with a tenor who has done it at the Met.) I am extremely happy for her; it made me cry from joy when I learned that she had “made it”. On the other hand, though, this great success of someone who was once in one of my classes at KU makes me look at my own life with disgust. It makes me hate where I am even more than I have already begun to.

Now begins the great, uncomfortable metamorphosis to become the auditionee again. I can’t believe I used to lecture Chris, struggling to get customers for his failing business, about the fact that no one could hire him as a web designer because no one even knew he was here. Just like he needed to “get the word out” about his talents, I, as well, need to start doing some gigs and auditions in order to let people know that I am here.

Betsy has achieved what she has because of hard work, a belief in herself, and just plain tenacity. She is both lucky for and deserves what she has. I had a terrible time auditioning in 2003, found myself a comfy position, and sat on my haunches licking my wounds for 2 years. But it is time now to strike out again into the world, to give myself a chance at the same time as finishing my degree and becoming Dr. So-and-so. Being a Heldentenor or being a college professor would both be better than being 3rd man to the left. That’s just how it is. (I think this should be read with some background music either from “Chariots of Fire” or the Air Force hymn...”Off we go into the wild blue yooooooonder”. It should at least be something triumphant. Maybe Wagner would be fitting.)

Our Topsy-Turvy Nation

You just HAVE to look at this. These are the new rankings on Congress-org. The rankings represent how powerful senators and representatives are according to “legislative records, committee assignments, news articles and fundraising documents”, according to the Washington Post.

Go here:

http://www.congress.org/congressorg/power_rankings/index.tt

Make note especially of the map further down the page. The map is color-shaded telling what areas of the country seem to have the most influence. Scarily, the parts of the country that have the most influence also seem to be the one’s with the lowest populations, are very isolated and, presumably, have the most rightwing (Christian Right) ideals. Scary. I always find it interesting to see some sort of actual calculation which backs up what we have been thinking all along: the country has been hijacked by crazies.

The most powerful man in the Senate, according to the website, is Bill Frist. Wikipedia says of him...while in medical school, Frist obtained cats from animal shelters, under pretense of adoption as pets, for school research experiments in which he killed the animals. In a 1989 autobiography, Frist described how he "spent days and nights on end in the lab, taking the hearts out of cats, dissecting each heart".

The most powerful man in the House, according to the website is Dennis Hastert. Wikipedia says of him: Hastert generated controversy on 1 September 2005 when he said spending Federal money to rebuild New Orleans from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina "doesn't make sense to me.” Hastert went on to say that "It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed.”

Stachelbeeren

My friend Stephanie is visiting me. She is doing an audition in Karlsruhe tomorrow and slept over. She did an apprenticeship last year at Deutsch Oper Berlin. Impressive. Anyway, we have talked our heads off about “the biz” and I sang her for her. I think she liked it. Anyway, she has been very encouraging about me doing some auditions as a Heldentenor. We’ll see.

I thought it was funny that the last memory that she had of me was being invited out to Lawrence with a couple of other friends to eat my homemade Gooseberry pie—weird because, that morning, I had just planted a Gooseberry Bush in the garden, one that I bought Chris for his birthday.

All you need is...

Had a day of beautiful clarity yesterday. I must have been glowing because so many people noticed it. I am in love, what can I say?

I have never been in a relationship for so long, so a lot of these waters are unchartered. My idealistic goals of what it must be like to be in a relationship were partly wrong, I have to admit. But, from having played amateur counselor for so long for so many of my friends, I have, believe it or not, gained some knowledge of how relationships work. For example, it is an impossibility to think that you will be completely enamored by your partner, to the degree that you were from your first days together, your entire life long. (People really do think that this is possible, though, and when things begin to change they assess it as a problem and then begin placing blame, either on themselves, or on their partners.) But love, folks, waxes and wanes. I never really feel like I am out of love with Chris, that I would rather not be with him anymore. I do have times, though, when it is hard for me to love anyone at all.

One of my biggest criticisms of artistic people like those with whom I work in the theatre, is that they are so fucking fickle. You never really know whether your top dog or the doormat—most of this depends only on the wind direction and the overall mood. I have always hated that any friendship with someone from the theatre is a friendship of convenience. Can you scratch my back? Then, friend, scratch away.

Perhaps even more disconcerting than this lesson in the dregs of humanity is that I, indeed, am among them. I am just as fickle as the rest of them, and, perhaps, even moodier. Grrrr. I hate having to admit this to myself. This quality of flowing where the wind takes you and being attracted to the sweetest smelling flowers is an aspect of Chris that I have always hated. One must be steadfast, true, I thought.

But I don’t always like anyone. I am not in love with Chris with equal intensity at all times. And, yes, I am sometimes carried away by fantasies that do not involve him. The truth is a hard thing. (When you start admitting it to yourself, you often find yourself going all the way with it, even when you think you could only stand a little dose.) I said ‘love waxes and it wanes.’ Sometimes I feel like a little kid again, and sometimes I am as cold as a stone.

Imagine, then, after having been a stone, to instantly be a flower or a dandelion seed floating away on the wind, laughing into a fade out. I am light and not bound to the earth. Just when I was thinking that I may be the fallen tree in the wood about to be eaten by the elements, I remember that I am still alive and that life must be lived. And, when discussing Chris’ grandmother who, next week will turn 90, I turned to him and said “I wonder what we’ll be doing when we’re 90?” and he looks at me with that deep, loving smile, happy that I believe we will be together till the end just as much as he believes it, I know that, still, it is love for us.

Emmigrate

My father forwarded me this “non joke” and I immediately put it in the trash. But then, this morning, I pulled it out of the trashcan and looked at it again. I had been bothered by it and was determined to give it a rebuttal. Read the joke:

A Somali arrives in Minneapolis as a new immigrant to the United States. He stops the first person he sees walking down the street and says, "Thank you Mr. American for letting me in this country, and giving me housing, food stamps, free medical care and free education!"

But the passer-by says "You are mistaken, I am Mexican".

The man goes on and encounters another passer-by. "Thank you for having such a beautiful country here in America!"

The person says "I no American, I Vietnamese."

The new arrival walks further, and the next person he sees, he stops, shakes his hand and says "Thank you for the wonderful America!"

That person puts up his hand and says "I am from Middle East, I am not an American!"

He finally sees a nice lady and asks suspiciously, "Are you an American?" She says, "No, I am from Russia!" So he is puzzled, and asks her, "Where are all the Americans?"

The Russian lady looks at her watch, shrugs, and says...

"Probably at work!"


Something about this joke reeks of bigotry and malice toward immigrants. My tendency is to look at such a joke as an allegory with many symbols and to read into it, hopefully, both the obvious message that it is trying to send and the underlying, subtler ones as well. Here are some ideas so far:

1. The obvious message is that immigrants all come to America to live off of our giant welfare state while the rest of the population has to go to work every day. That much is obvious. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, “The proportion of immigrant-headed households using at least one major welfare program is 24.5 percent compared to 16.3 percent for native households.” That doesn’t seem like that much of a difference to me, but, ok, one has to admit it IS higher. The Center also says “The low educational attainment and resulting low wages of many immigrants are the primary reasons so many live in poverty, use welfare, and lack health insurance, not their legal status or an unwillingness to work.” How someone could statistically measure a group’s “willingness to work”, I am not sure, but, ok, I agree. I am assuming the poem on the Statue of Liberty:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

would mean that we are not receiving all the world’s best, most-educated peoples. They will need some education and time to catch up.

2. I was especially troubled by the claim that America provides its people with a free education, free healthcare, food stamps, and free housing. Huh? Free education: do they mean free high school education? Because, I think we all know that you can barely even get a shit job with one of those. Do they mean a free university education? Because, I used to work for the Federal Government answering questions about financial aid, and there is almost no one, and I mean no one who gets their entire university education paid in the US. You have to be poor and I mean dirt poor before that happens. Free housing? If, by that, you mean the slums we call public housing, even those people pay reduced rent. But, the rat-infested, drug-ridden ghetto is nothing for anyone to brag about. Food stamps I’ll just leave alone. Anyone who feels that they need help in order to buy food (one can only buy food with them, let’s remember) will not be in any way hindered by me. Shall we starve them, or what? Jeez.
3. The assorted foreigners that are represented include all the old and current enemies of the State: Somalia (anyone who has seen “Blackhawk Down knows what I mean), Vietnam (most Americans still remember the horrors of this “conflict”), Russia (no real war, just a lot of bad sentiment and meddling), and the Middle East (let’s group all of those countries together since we don’t like any of them and they are all violent suicide bombers), and the current representative country of the most-recent debate on immigration: Mexico (of course they’re lazy—they even take off of work to go demonstrate against us.)

I understand that this current debate is hard for extremely conservative Americans. They forget how their ancestors also came to America and had to start from the ground up. They shouldn’t forget, though, that their wealth and social status are a privilege and a blessing. They wouldn’t be so bold as to say a 40-hour week means they deserve all that they have if they were saying it to a Chinese sweatshop worker. America is an extremely wealthy country. One would think that with this great wealth also comes great generosity, shown through caring for their own. But, an American would be more willing to donate money to a victim of some earthquake somewhere rather than encourage any kind of domestic social service. If we are going to allow immigrants into our country, which the current administration is doing, the same administration that the Bible-bangers and neo-conservatives got there and kept there, then we should give them a helping hand as they struggle to stand on their own. Again, from the Center for Immigration Studies:

“There is no evidence that the economic slowdown that began in 2000 or the terrorist attacks in 2001 have significantly slowed the rate of immigration. More than 3.3 million legal and illegal immigrants have entered the country since January of 2000.”

“Immigrants account for 11.5 percent of the total population, the highest percentage in 70 years. If current trends continue, by the end of this decade the immigrant share of the total population will surpass the all time high of 14.8 percent reached in 1890.”

With our invitation comes a responsibility to be a good host and guide. It is, after all, the American way.

Ok, I have to admit, this morning I was the "boisterous tenor".

I’m watching this epic PBS special, in three parts, about China. It is so interesting that I got up this morning wondering what Mao was going to do next. I have to now admit that I knew basically nothing about the specifics of the Maoist regime. I find it interesting how the timing of events can make a huge difference to understanding them. No one really understands Watergate until they see “All the President’s Men” and see just how it all played out at first. No one really understands the bumblings of the Reagan administration without reading the daily update of how AIDS played out in “And the Band Played On”. Now, I am beginning to understand how Mao Tse Tung was a complete mad man who promised his people basic things that they had long been denied, like food and clothes, only ending up raping his own class, the farmers, by forcing them into co-operatives and taking so much of their output that they starved. “The Great Leap Forward” sought to modernize the country to America’s standard within 15 years. 30 million people starved as a result of his policies. One cannot even conceive of such a number.

When I think of Mao, or, perhaps, I should say, when I thought of Mao, I identified him as an overall good leader except for the Cultural Revolution bullshit which sought do destroy art all together. But, the reality of the Cultural Revolution is far more fucked up than I ever thought. Everything was starting to go well. Mao was semi-retired, and the people running the country were starting to make a recovery from the famine that Mao oversaw. Then, suddenly, Mao, discontent for whatever reason, came out of hiding, and called upon all young people to revolt against the Party leaders—his own Party leaders. Because Mao had reached this god-like status for the people, the young were extremely susceptible to being given a direct order by Mao to revolt. They basically became a group of young brigands, putting all party officials on trial, and, eventually, going through the entire country wiping out any signs of foreign influence and old traditions (this included burning many works of precious Chinese art...)

I just find it so interesting. Check it out. It is very well done.

Chris and I were hoping that he would be released from the hospital today. But, he met with his head surgeon this morning, and he will have to stay for another week. Damn. I actually woke up earlier than I normally do, my eyes flickering slowly out of my subconscious’ netherworld, slowly realizing where I was. Then it occurred to me that I might bring my baby home today and, in an instant, I was awake, with a broad smile on my face, jumping out of bed, prancing around like an overgrown hare on meth. When Chris called to tell me the bad news, I was a giant version of that rabbit on the old Duracell commercials, the one that got the “other name” battery: I just sort of hunched over slowly, running out of juice, waiting for someone to wind me up again like the good Stepford husband gone awry. Insert sad, descending trombone lick here...wa wa waaaa.

Tooth Meat

Chris and I have started watching Deep Space Nine, from the beginning. Is it me, or are many of the themes parallels of modern topics? Ok, I need not ask. I think my real question is: how transparent are they, because they seem like kindergarten to me sometimes.

For those of you that don’t know: Chris broke his right elbow about 3 and a half weeks ago. He had an operation on it this last Friday and he is doing well. I hope that he’ll come back home from the hospital by the weekend (I know, all of you Americans are gasping—yes, a one week hospital stay for a broken elbow.)

I, on Friday of this last week, went to the doctor because I have an infection of some kind in my lower right jaw. I was given antibiotics, Ibuprofen and sent away. The next day, Saturday, my friends Betsy and Mirko were coming back from their vacation in Egypt and stopped through here. As we were eating pizza, I heard a strange “crack” in my mouth, and later realized that the tooth just in from of my lower right molar, or, should I say, where my lower right molar WAS before it had to be removed last fall, had cracked. May 1st (Monday) was, of course, a German holiday, which meant that I went to the dentist on Tuesday, where he took one look at my tooth and promptly started getting his instruments together to extract it.

I will just pause and say that it is moments like these that piss me the hell off about German medicine. For what I am forced to pay every month to be a part of the German, socialized medicine apparatus, I could have a really sweet, and I mean sweet, policy in the US. Dental: 100% covered. Eyes: 100% covered. Here, though, because I am paying for myself and for a bunch of other people who can’t afford it, I only get basic coverage. Normally, I am up for this deal, in that I am, after all, a liberal, and I have seen with my own eyes what a socialized system means: no homeless, no ultra-poor, no abandoned, and no one who is working hard but still can’t afford insurance. But, when the doctor tells me that I will need an implant to the tune of 2000 euros out of my own pocket, I start to get a little hot under the collar. Now, why is it that I am paying a premium price for basic coverage? Screw those other people; it’ snot like I don’t need this tooth to, say EAT!

This whole teeth thing is driving me up the friggin’ wall! I am, with each passing day, looking more and more like some kind of hillbilly. And, all of you that know me know that nothing will get under my skin like looking like a hick. And, because I know you’re all wondering it: yes, I brush my teeth. Yes, twice a day just like everyone else. I even floss. It’s true. I floss! But, for whatever reason, my teeth are just slowly disintegrating at an incredible rate. It so sucks!

Needless to say, I am in a lot of pain right now. Thank you, Germany, though, for the 2-day sick pass consolation prize. I am staying home and taking it easy post-mouth-rape. It was gross. Look in your mouth at the tooth just in from of your molar. Big sucker, isn’t it? Only bloody gums and stitches appear there now. Gooey. Icky. And painful, to boot.

On a lighter note, you might find it funny that Germans call “gums” “tooth meat”.