Tag: intelligence

Opera

We went to the world premier of an opera today. It was called Intelligence, and was composed by Jake Heggie, with libretto by Gene Scheer. Also part of the team, directing and choreographing for her first time on an opera, was Jawole Willa Jo Zollar.

Now, a friend had originally scheduled to attend with us, but had to cancel due to a scheduling issue. So, someone else went with us at the last minute. The replacement person was truly delighted by the show, so we were really glad he was able to attend with us.

Not long after the show had ended, however, I got a message from the first friend, “How was it!?” (He could hardly stand that he hadn’t made it, and was already figuring out when he could get a ticket to go on his own later this week.)

My responses, in order:

It was cool
Very American opera
Haha
It was kind of weird in terms of flow, but I believe that was kind of the point
Cool how it’s based on a true story
Seeing how these two women significantly helped end the war
It was a cool combination of time period and cultures
But also totally an American opera, through and through 😂

I didn’t even have to explain myself, and I’m pretty sure he got it. Because, even though opera is opera, the old European opera is definitely a different animal from the modern American opera.

The friend’s response?

“Love that”. 😛

Opera nerds.

Post-a-day 2023

Today’s bumps, I guess

Two not-so-great things happened today at work.  1) I hid under my desk again (second time so far here).  2) I took a stupid typing test, and only got 60 words per minute.

For the desk thing, it’s just a whole new world, working here with these kids.  Education that has felt like second nature to me most of my life, is a piece of education that has somehow eluded a good chunk of these guys, thanks to stereotypes and income levels of families.  The first time I hid under my desk, I think I just wanted to be alone, after a good hour or two of kids being kids, unable to handle sitting in a classroom, even for five minutes at a time (we get up and about in the room a lot during class, excluding test and quiz days).  Today, it was a bit of that, but mostly my distaste at the unfortunate lack of capability of many of these high schoolers to do basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.  I took these same classes at their same ages, and yet I flew threw most of this stuff.  Not only was I good at math, but I had friends and family to support me with it, whether I needed the help or not.  These kids just plain don’t.  So, I’m not sure if it was so much the annoyance at the kids being restless today, as it was their social and educational backgrounds that really just have me wanting to curl up and cry, and go away… but ‘out of sight, out of mind’ has never really been one of my supported phrases in life.

And, for the typing test, it was stupid.  It was for doing Aesop’s fables, including their titles and an introduction.  I didn’t have a single error in the final product, because I corrected as I went, but the flow was difficult, because it was different formatting with the titles and such.  Aren’t typing tests traditionally of paragraphs?  Perhaps my belief in that is a false one, but it makes more sense to me for a general standard test than what I had today.   Anyway, it was some free online test, so I don’t expect it to be the best standard… it was just kind of annoying.  Hopefully I am right, and my typing speed is actually faster than just 60 words per minute.  I didn’t even have a comfortable positioning of the keyboard and everything, either, so I don’t really see why I’m upset about it.  I guess I’m just tired and feeling ill today, and that’s bringing me down in more ways than one right now.

Post-a-day 2017