So it’s the week before Christmas week, and I feel like I’m working myself to death. As with recent weeks, I’ve been too tired to conduct proper job-hunting strategies. I know, I know – who knows what opportunities I could be missing by my failure to look? But I truly am exhausted – my last day off was Thanksgiving Day, and I’m going to have to enter and maintain Caffiend Mode if I have any hopes of making it to Christmas Eve without crashing and burning. I can do it then – Christmas Day is my only projected day off between now and whenever my seasonal part time job finishes up in January, and I can sleep as long as I need to then. Hopefully I’ll be able to kick back into Library Job Hunter Mode in January, and maybe libraries will be posting more jobs that are my speed, right? I’m still trying to tell myself there’s a library out there that desperately needs me, and I just have to keep sending my resume out until they find me. Tired as I am, I’m still clinging onto my dream of becoming an orangutan with tenure.*
With all the work-related stress I’ve brought crashing down on myself, I’m still trying to keep myself slightly distracted and happy. I’ve been reading good books when I can find the time, and hunting down new and interesting music. I started getting interested in German musical theatre about 7 or 8 years ago, when I heard the show ”Dance of the Vampires” was going to be on Broadway. It’s based on Roman Polanski’s 1967 movie “The Fearless Vampire Killers,” the music was written by Jim Steinman (famous for having written so many epicly angsty Meat Loaf ballads), and it first appeared in Germany as “Tanz Der Vampires”. I shelled out for the double CD cast recording, and I don’t regret the decision. I enjoyed the Americanized version (it was a treat to see Michael Crawford and Rene Auberjonois live on stage), but I admit that the full German recording was a lot better. They made the American version almost horridly cheesy with many the stupid joke, and the audience was laughing half the time when they recognized a tune almost directly ganked from Meat Loaf.
Anyway, I started getting interested in other German musicals this past January when a friend introduced me to the musical “Elisabeth” via videos posted on YouTube. “Elisabeth” is based on the life of Elisabeth of Bavaria, Empress-consort of Austria and wife of Emperor Franz Josef I. I haven’t read much into her life yet, but the musical is narrated by Luigi Lucheni (the guy who assassinated her) and implies that she had a lifelong affaire de coeur with an anthropomorphic personification of Death. The music is amazing, and I would buy a copy of the DVD if I could find a way to make my American (and probably NTSC-formatted) laptop play PAL-format discs from Germany. Nein sprechen** Deutsch, but this show almost makes me wish I’d taken German in high school instead of Japanese. The following links are to some songs from the DVD I mentioned (a filmed 2005 production) that are on YouTube. Prolog http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KD31817Tyw Wenn Ich Tanzen Will http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOy40P_deV4 Die Schatten Werden Langer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihwHC8xCTnc
*See Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, and the recurring character of The Librarian at Ankh-Morpork’s Unseen University.
**I mean “schrepen”! I probably typed “sprechen” because I heard the word in the song “Die Schatten Werden Langer” and it sounds a bit similar. Not that I know the English equivalent of “sprechen” just yet …
