Don't you love it when someone remembers you? It's a beautiful thing.

I went to cash a check at the bank today and the teller asked me if I'd looked into wiring my money to Europe yet. I'd been at the bank a few days ago and inquired about sending money to Europe for my glorious AUSTRIAN ADVENTURE. Apparently it was the same guy. And he remembered me! And he was pretty good looking. Glorious!

He asked me where I was going and what I was studying.

"Austria for opera."

The conversation abruptly ended with an uninterested "oh." WHY DOES THE WORD "OPERA" TURN EVERYONE OFF SO FAST?!? I don't understand this. Does opera = boring in some subliminal way? Granted, I thought it was boring and didn't care two cents about it until I saw Marriage of Figaro. But, still! I could have said "astronomical geology" and gotten a better response. Am I doomed to singleness forever because I'm an opera singer? Ahhhh!

On another note: I babysat Tammy's 6-year-old kid Rainer on Sunday. What a trip that was. The kid's a frickin' genius.

We played Stratego and he won. I'm relatively smart and pretty good at strategy games (I'm undefeated at Risk and almost undefeated at Monopoly) but this kid WHIPPED me. He watched what I was doing and said, "My dad uses the same strategy. He attacks in groups, too." He also made comments on what he guessed was happening on my side of the board and 80% of the time he was dead on. I had a few tricks up my sleeve, but not enough to win (apparently).

He could build these really intricate Lego ships without instructions. He used the pieces in ways that I've never seen before. It was crazy. And he understood the word "hydraulics." What the heck?

Sure, he still acted like a 6-year-old sometimes (he refused to eat peanut butter with bread; he wanted to eat it with a spoon), but he was incredibly smart. I've babysat a lot of kids, some of them pretty smart, but this kid tops them all. I'm kind of scared/interested to see what he'll do in ten years.

STAR TREK: I saw the movie and I liked it. It wasn't "Star Trek" but it was good as its own thing. The cinematography was outstanding and I really liked the characters. Bones rocks the house!

Question: Has anyone ever read Rainer Maria Rilke's "Sonnets to Orpheus"? I will have to talk about them when I finish. They are so incredible...

Sidenote: This cracked me up. Opera Chic writes: "Please don't tell Stephen Colbert that an Iranian who, suspiciously, always wears sunglasses and has been denied in the past a visa to the USA went to France to direct a show about marital infidelity and Albanians written by a Jewish heretic/Catholic priest obsessed by sex and by an Austrian kid obsessed by p00p."

This of course refers to Abbas Kiarostami's Così Fan Tutte. Ahhh, OC always makes me laugh. That is, OC and any reference to Mozart. :)