Admiral's Club

Buying the one-day pass to the Admiral's Club was an unnecessary indulgence. I'll admit it. But I refuse to regret it.

Here I sit, at LAX, completely isolated with my fresh coffee in a giant, empty room that is softly lit by lamplight as the sun has just begun to rise and peeks its light through the giant windows that overlook the tarmac... in the midst of the second busiest airport in America, I can't imagine there's a single place that's more peaceful. Which is what I need right now. It's been a crazy couple of weeks. It has, however, been the best imaginable type of crazy that there is.

I've just finished a two week program for emerging young opera singers in Los Angeles called OperaWorks (www.operaworks.com). I am about to make a very important statement, and before I do that I must put a few things in context. That context is as follows:

I have spent much of my life traveling. I love to travel, and I have experienced many unique and wonderful things in my life; I hold these memories dearly. From a week in London to eight weeks in Costa Rica to many, many trips to Disney World growing up, I sincerely believe that I have had one of the best lives anyone who is my age could possibly ask for. I am incredibly happy with how my life has been up to this point and I have no regrets worth mentioning or significant turmoil that would cause me to be an unhappy person in general. Taking that into account, I make the following statement:

This was the best two weeks of my life.

If you are involved in opera, you need to be involved with OperaWorks.

At this moment, I am singing better than I ever have in my life, and I didn't take a single voice lesson. I took acting lessons. I did coachings for interpretation and diction. I took yoga. I was coached on my posture by one of the producers of Aladdin. I waved my hands around in the air like an idiot and produced sounds I didn't know I could make while improvising a seven-part ensemble piece about a turkey sandwich. I danced... very, very badly, in front of many, many people. And nowhere in any of that did anyone mention anything about vocal technique or passagio or soft palettes or anything like that. And yet here we are, two weeks later, and I am one thousand percent stronger as a performer.

There's so much more to say, but the fact is it's just going to be more of me gushing. I am so thoroughly exhausted right now, but I'm equally exhilarated by the prospects I have in front of me. I have a direction for my career, I have a plan for my future, and I know what steps I need to take from here to make this life happen for myself. I can't wait.

Thanks for reading everybody. I'm so glad you decided to stop by. Next stop: Germany for Lyric Opera Weimar (www.lyricoperastudioweimar.com)!

-John

PS
The friends I made are what made it so over-the-top special. My colleagues are all beautiful, and I can't wait to see them again. Until then, I will miss them dearly.

Limerick

I'm writing a blog post in limerick
(Though I fear that it might seem a gimmick)
So readers, beware
It might lose its flair
And then you might give me a dropkick.

I'm learning a role for the summer.
It keeps me from having good slumber.
Italian is hard.
And my brain feels like lard
From taking in words like a dumpster.

My future right now is uncertain.
It's obscured by a magical curtain.
There's talk of more school
But it's "grad" so it's cool.
And I guess there are worse ways of hurtin'.

History Lessons from Myself

In reading some old entries, I've gotten a little frustrated with how whiny I used to be. I know I found some catharsis in writing those entries, but they no longer really reflect how I deal with problems or how I view unpleasant times in my life. I think I might go back and privatize most of them. I don't really want to delete them, because I know I need to read them sometimes to remind myself who I was and remember how I became who I now am. But anyone who reads them now in attempt to know me better will see only snapshots of a person in increasingly rapid stages of change and development. Often they show me encountering things for my first time and handling them clumsily. Bad breakups, unpleasant illness, and bouts of pompous self-importance all creep into my entries from years past, and I can't easily convince myself to keep those things as matters of public record.

So I imagine it's time to clean up a little around here. This entry hereby officially adds that to my "to do" list.

At Nathan's Request...

Nathan requested update photos of my growing hair. So here we go.

For reference, this is me on the day of the shaving, while sitting in Geology entertaining myself:



This is me yesterday, about a week after shaving:



This is me moments ago, eight days of growth:

I'm Low on Shaving Cream

Well... I did it.

Yesterday, before going to class, I took a shower as I always do. When I got out of the shower, I looked at my head in the mirror. My bright orange hair was frizzy from being towel-dried, giving my head the appearance of being on fire. I looked at myself. I mean, really looked at myself. And then, with the kind of sincerity one can only muster when talking to oneself, I narrowed my eyes and said out loud, "You look ridiculous." The face in the mirror seemed to agree.

So I grabbed my clippers. I regarded them for a moment, then set to work. After trimming the hair down to being only a couple of millimeters, I took a second to appreciate that my hair was an even brighter orange as I neared the scalp. Rather than dwell on this for too long, I grabbed my cream and shaving brush and set to work lathering up. The mixture of shaving cream, water, and badger hair was warm against my recently liberated scalp, and as I applied it to the area at the base of my neck it tickled a little bit. The razor was new, and sharp, and it did not bother my skin. It cut cleanly through the fine hair that was left, and for a few hours after I was done, the scalp was very smooth. Forty-five minutes after the begining of this paragraph, I looked like this:



Reaction so far is mixed.

I'm not going to shave it again; this was a one-time thing, I'm not interested in maintaining it as keeping the cue ball clean requires a whole lot of work. I would like to have my old, non chemically-damaged blonde hair back, and according to Wikipedia that will happen at a rate of about .46mm per day. That's about one centimeter per 20-21 days, or one inch every 45-48 days. I may keep a log just for fun. Probably not, but maybe.