Embarrassingly Dirty Googling

I feel I should mention that I just googled this blog for kicks and giggles, and one of the really fun snippets of text that popped up was "If a bit of garlic is really stubborn, blow through the holes and make a fun spitting sound that entertains children worldwide!"

It is, in case you are curious, the third result that pops up if you just type in "observations of an opera child."  I have rarely been so embarrassed, and have never felt that a sentence about a garlic press could possibly be so indescribably dirty.  Indescribably.

I am still cringing.

Yet, I notice, not cringing enough to make me go back and edit that post.

I feel that I want it to stand there in all of its naked spitting shame for all of eternity, mostly so that I have yet another thing to bring me back to earth if my ego starts to inflate so much that I start to hover.

Blogs, I feel, are either for those with stupendous self-control or the willingness to be publicly unveiled as a complete idiot.  Really, they aren't for the in-between.

On a totally different note, I have a surprisingly busy school year ahead of me.  I just got cast as Aunt Dan in  Aunt Dan and Lemon, which is going to be, let me tell you, a misery to memorize.  I counted, and my monologues take up a total of twenty-three pages.  TWENTY-THREE PAGES of just me talking.  Lemon's worse off; her last monologue alone is a staggering eight pages long.  It's a very cheerful play, too:  all about the virtues inherent in lacking compassion, like the Nazis.  Aunt Dan is also pretty much in love with Henry Kissinger.  It will be fun!

Other plays include Twelfth Night, in which I'm playing Olivia, and Samuel Beckett's Endgame, in which I am playing Nell and spend most of the play except for eight pages buried in a trash can in a nightie and a lot of age makeup while disdaining my husband's biscuit and wanting to die.  It is a very, very good play, and they are cutting holes in the back of the trash can so I don't have to squat on my heels for an hour.  In addition to that, I've got a whole lot of memorizing to do over the weekend so that I can suitably beg Hubert not to burn my eyes with a hot iron in a scene from King John.

Also a paper for my 8100 Critical Methods class, in which I have got to come up with a way to apply Materialist theory to something relevant.  The other option is being a white girl and talking about a play using race theory, which, haha, I clearly cannot do because I cannot fully comprehend what it is like to be anything but a white girl.  That last pretty much bums me out, because I tend to err on the "our DNA is like 99% similar across the globe ANYWAY, so shouldn't the important thing be that we're all human?" side of things, but apparently I am only white girl human, and cannot speak about male human, black human, Latino human, Asian human, or South American human..  I'm just not the right kind of human.  Irritating, but whatever.  I shall still hug my theory of universal equality to my chest and cuddle it to keep warm at night.

Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman once wrote this amazing sentence in Good Omens that I am now paraphrasing, and it goes something like this:  "Newt felt uncomfortable around African Americans, in case they turned around and blamed him for two hundred years of slave trading."

I've thought about that sentence a couple of times in the past month after running into some very angry people who apparently generalize so freely about white people that I suddenly became responsible for all the historical atrocities committed against African-Americans, even though half my family is from Germany, the other half from Austria, and about a drop of blood comes from Pocahontas.  It does not matter that I did not know what racism was or that it existed until setting foot on American soil when I was nine, or that I think it is cruel bullshit.  The only thing that mattered to those very angry people was that I have pale skin.

Now, I may be ridiculously naive, but I feel that behavior like this is just exacerbating a pretty horrid situation instead of actually making it better.  Tell me if I'm stupid, please, but doesn't it seem to you that the best way to eradicate racism might be to quit focusing on the minor bits of DNA that make us different and instead focus on what we can actually do together?

...Although there are some boundaries that prejudice probably needs to keep standing strong, like the prejudice against people who don't bathe making my coffee.