Getting Propositioned by a 12-year-old Turkish Boy in the Subway is Definitely the Worst of It -- The Rest ist Besser

I try to seem intelligent with just my eyes, here, because the minute I open my mouth, I'm a disaster. The first time I transacted money in public, I was buying a hairclip for $5.95, and I was probably, oh, seven years old. Watching the exchange of money before, I had noticed that there was money given for an item, but then that there was also money GIVEN BACK (strangely enough). I concluded that a buyer intentionally gave more money than necessary (out of generosity?) and that the cashier, determining that the buyer had given too much, then demonstrated her probity by offering back the correct change. GOD WILL THESE PEOPLE NEXT TO ME NOT MAKE OUT SO DEMONSTRATIVELY? WHAT IS WITH EUROPEANS?! For the hairclip, I turned over about $6.06. It seemed about right. I expected to receive 11 cents in return. But the cashier simply showed me how to count out $5.95, and I was humiliated.

More or less the same thing happens to me every time I buy coffee here, which is super good. I like "milk coffee" which is a latte, essentially. But in order to buy coffee, you need to know what size you want (there's a German word for the size I want but I don't know it yet) and whether you want flavor (this word I know--nein) and whether you want sugar, or a hat for your coffee cup (more German) and you have to know what all the gestures mean (do you want a little hat is a kind of cupped hand gesture with an inquiring facial nod). And then of course there's figuring out what a 2-Euro coin looks like. Plenty of opportunity to practice! High marks for Berlin coffee.

STILL MAKING OUT!!

I linger over every interaction here, even like buying coffee in the morning. I'm looking for more meaning in these stupid things than I can possibly expect of people. But then, to me, anyone here has the possibility to be somebody, because as yet, nobody is somebody. A small animal in a children's book my mom used to read me loses himself in the woods and to each of the animals he then meets in the book (a deer, a rabbit) he asks with increasing desperation, "Are you my Mother?" I feel like this animal. But then, if anything, I am seeking solitude as well as communication. Work at the opera house (which isn't really work: more like hanging out and watching opera!) has begun and is more or less all the day long (I got off tonight at 8p) with lots of people all over the place (speaking German!)

Did I mention Christopher Alden? Dear Christopher! To be an opera director (the kind I mean is not the kind I want to become, not out of disrespect but only out of artistic preference) you must have a weakness for opera like some other people have for carrot cake. You must go weak in the knees when you hear your favorite melodies, be overwhelmed with excitement, unable to contain yourself from inhabiting the characters that appear onstage, regardless of gender, and be unaware that you are singing along with them at top volume in no great operatic voice. You must be unmanned by opera. Christopher is no end of energy for this sport. Even during totally tedious crowd scenes--here we come to today--where you rehearse the chorus four times through and four times through at least half the cast is looking at their asses. Christopher can be sharp, but he is never exhausted.

To qualify what I mean by the "kind I want to become," my idea of opera (and this is for all the people who have seen me walk out of operas at intermission and have concluded I secretly HATE opera), I wanna do opera small. Smaller casts, smaller places, shorter works. No touring. No big opera houses. No 200-year-old heavyweight works. Well, maybe one or two. Nick, if you're reading this, I was thinking today we should do L'Enfant et les Sortileges. It'd be off the charts. What do you think?