Anyway, happy Sunday! Well, happy being a relative term...I went to the see the Florentine Opera (Milwaukee)'s production of Tristan und Isolde. Yeah. I hate that opera. I think I hate it more from seeing it today. Bad costumes, bad set, too much German singing, yeah. I'm not completely anti-opera though, just anti-Tristan und Isolde in an avant-garde type style. Did they mean to make Isolde look fat? Because they did a good job of it. I know operas typically require fat ladies singing, but I think Isolde would have been better had she not been fat. And please, don't throw around any more chairs!
All in all, I have to say the death scenes were far better than the death scene at the end of Un ballo in maschera (The Masked Ball) that I saw at the Civic Opera in Chicago last year. At the end of the opera, the king dies (duh, someone always has to die in an opera, at least in an opera seria, for you non-music people, a serious opera). So someone on stage shot the king, and when you get shot, don't you die? Well this guy didn't, he got up and sang. For TEN MINUTES. And he walked around stage, dying and singing all at the same time. I'm surprised one of the chorus members didn't just shoot him again and put both him and the audience out of their misery. It was the worst death I've ever seen. Never again...
Anyway, so at the end Tristan und Isolde, Tristan rips off his bandages (at least that's what the opera synopsis said in the program, but in reality he ripped off his shirt), and as soon as the "bandages" came off, and he was shirtless, Buddy immediately had to check him out through the opera glasses. Yeah. Freak. :)
Anyway, so I'm standing in the lobby of the opera, waiting for half our class to show up, and who should walk in but my friend Miriam, who has been living in Germany since last July, and who I haven't seen since the end of freshman year! Needless to say, it was a happy surprise, and being that someone in our party didn't show up for the opera, Professor D sold Miriam our extra ticket, and she got to sit with us! Woohoo!! For anyone who didn't know, Miriam was one of my best friends in high school, so it was super exciting. So that made that part of the opera good! Yea!
Tomorrow starts another exciting Monday. I'm hoping that maybe I can get to the library before class (ha) to see if this book works for my book review in my Modern Germany history class. All of the potential book review books are listed in the ends of the chapters in the textbook I don't have yet because it still hasn't gotten here! Stupid textbook. Yeah. So I'm making it up. Who cares? It's not like I have only three weeks to read and review the book. Well hell! I can do it! This summer, for my Latin American history class, we had six weeks to read and review a book so I though, hell, why not get a head start, and went to the library in the first few days of class to get my book! Being smart, I decided to pick a historical fiction book, because I like reading historical fiction anyway, and I figured it'd be easier to read. So I picked "The General and His Labyrinth" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, because hey, it was historical fiction and someone else had claimed the "House of Spirits" by Isabella Allende (an author I was familiar with, and even, to some extent, liked!). Well picking that book was a terrible idea, because I thought it was a terrible book. So I put it off and put it off and put it off, and suddenly it was the day before the book review was due and I had like, 200 pages left (of like, 300!) to read...after trying just about every single method of reading possible (I even tried being artsy and went to a coffeeshop!), I just was faced with having to read the worst book in the history of humankind. After reading, naturally, I took off about two hours and jabbed on the phone. Then I sat around for another two hours in front of the computer, before finally leaping up and writing the review. I was done by 4am. Bad idea. Very bad idea. I am now determined not to let this happen again, even though it probably will! But then again, I wouldn't be Lauren if I didn't procrastinate!!

- posted by L. @ 10:47 PM