He Is The One Who Robbed Me Of My Honor

What can I say about Don Giovanni? It's basically a romantic comedy about a wealthy Italian playboy trying to make new sexual conquests while his bitter ex-lovers and their significant others try to foil him...and it ends with the lead character getting sucked into the bowels of hell. So more than a little absurdist (and Mozart laid the sexual morals on with a trowel).

From a technical standpoint it's obviously a masterpiece. For such a long opera (it ran from 8.00-11.15, which even with a 25 minute intermission is pretty damn long), it's extremely fast-paced: he managed to cram in a murder, a wedding, a masquerade ball, a balcony serenade, a mad chase in the dark, a visit by a ghost, and the previously mentioned character getting dragged into hell, along with 4 or 5 seductions or attempted seductions. It's full of an incredible amount of energy, and the music is wonderfully complex - every couple gets a duet, most of the characters get a solo aria, and there are a number of bits that are sung between 3 or more singers. It's very exciting to watch.

Although no one stood out as much as last week's singers, it was still very well performed, especially on the part of the men. Don Giovanni was of course great, and his singer had an excellent mastery of this sort of swaggering, leering, insistent debauchery where you could see he was desperate to prove he was having more fun than anyone else at the party (which is always a bit sad to watch). And the girl who sung Zerlina was the understudy from the apprentice program (the singer was sick or hurt or something, idk) and she did excellently.

I liked La Traviata better on purely subjective grounds. This was still pretty much awesome.

Tech Support

I'm really not tech-inclined at all, but I rarely have unsolvable computer problems. I figured out a long time ago that almost any problem I have, someone else more knowledgeable than me had, solved, and posted online about how they they did it. Google has saved my life (and my mp3 player) more times than I can count!

Doing Better

Good news, for once: after the not-a-stroke crisis, and the bleeding-internally crisis, we managed a whole entire weekend without anything new going wrong with my grandfather, and they are finally letting him out of the hospital (thank the stars, because I'm pretty sure any more time there would have killed him for real). He can't come home yet - he's being transferred to a nursing home close to their house to do rehab. But it's a lot easier on my grandma than driving into the city every day, and he shouldn't be there more than a few days, maybe a week, and it's the nursing home where my aunt is a nurse, so she'll be able to keep a close eye on him. Hopefully he'll be able to have the surgery soon and this whole mess will be over.

My mom's boyfriend got home from the hospital this weekend and got straight back into being grumpy and troublesome, so no permanent harm done there I guess. It'll probably be another week before he can start helping her on jobs, but she's worked alone before, it's not like it's a huge hardship for her, especially now that she doesn't have to worry about him or deal with his stupid family. They'll be fine.

And August is almost over, thank god. Fuck you, August, you sucked donkey balls.

Also My Spellcheck Fails At Star Trek

What I am learning from writing the Kirk/Spock anti-sex pollen fic:

1. Spock voice is the hardest thing in the world to get into. I got stuck on this story for like two weeks because I couldn't get into Spock's head space well enough to write him.

2. Scotty is 100000000x worse than Spock. I want to kill all my Scotty dialogue with fire because it is horriblebadawful and I don't know how to fix it.

3. I <3333333333 McCoy all the time. This story isn't about him and he still gets like 5 pages of POV and a huge role later on because he is my favorite ever and I love writing him. If anyone else would read it I would write a novel that was nothing but McCoy wandering around the universe being grumpy at people.

4. I fail at wordcount estimates. I thought this would end up about 2500 words, and then I hit 1500 and they still didn't know what was wrong with Kirk and Spock. And then I thought it would be about 5000 but Kirk hadn't even gotten kidnapped yet. Now it's 7900 and Spock is on the planet walking to the camp of Romulan bounty hunters to rescue Kirk and almost die and then they both get fixed and cuddle in sickbay and have make outs while McCoy makes grumpy faces and argh this fic is never going to end.

colourofsaying , where aaaaaare you? I have ideas and bad dialogue I need to bouce off you!

ETA: also, my Spock is a total mama's boy. I do not believe canon contradicts me on this.