2013 Will Be Great

I went to the opera a couple of weeks ago. It was my first opera experience, and I bought the tickets because they were cheap, the thing was in English (which I prefer), and because on camping trips as a kid, Lindsay and I would test out our "opera" voices in campground bathrooms. I remember that being amusing, and I thought maybe the real opera would be amusing as well. It's not like one could ever take people who sang like that seriously.

The opera, Grapes of Wrath, was three hours long and had two intermissions. It went by faster than The Hobbit, the movie. I realized at the first intermission that I was liking it - although, like isn't quite right because Steinbeck's story repeatedly smacks you in the face until you have no memory of happiness or hope, but I was certainly engaged. I was having a new kind of entertainment experience.

(The storyline is very grabbing, but I think it was the music that brought me to this next level of experience. I'm not big into musicals because the transitions between the singing and the speaking I find jarring - I get pulled out of the story. And then in movies, music oftentimes gets laid over a scene and is too obviously there in the director's attempt to manipulate my emotions. It annoys me. But when everything is sung, the music and the narrative are not separate from each other, and there are no transitions in and out of the singing. I stopped noticing it was music even while the music kept doing its heart-swelling stuff. It kept impacting me, but I had lost the detached awareness of it.)

And with that, I have felt motivated to try other new things. I've decided to only drink beer from Midwestern breweries for a while, the beer from Colorado and the pacific northwest being delicious but familiar.

There's such great new stuff to try. There's new music in 2013 by Waxahatchee, Kacey Musgraves, Youth Lagoon, Atoms for Peace, David Bowie, Joy Formidable, and that's just off the top of my head. Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing comes out in June. Doctor Who starts back up at the end of this month. There's a new Tomb Raider for Xbox!

I want to go to the theater - the Goodman and Steppenwolf; I want to go to a burlesque, Gorilla Tango. I might buy new clothes! (at least underwear because I need some)

Mitch and I are going to Sweden and Norway this year. We might run half marathons. I want to ride my bike across the USA with my parents, go to Africa to pet lions with Lindsay (show her my newly informed bathroom aria), and become an astronaut. Maybe I'll try switching genders. New stuff is great, and so, I predict, is 2013.