Some really neat stuff

Yesterday I went to go see Magnus, my host family father, sing. It was really neat because the choir sang in an art gallery, and I loved the pictures one of the featured artists had up on the wall. They were these bright scenes that invoked the universe, and out of the painting came these sculptures of big cats- lions, panthers and the like. Some of them hug out of the picture frame, some of them batted at a "planet." They were bright and happy and quite lovely. I really really lusted after one of them, and I played out a brief fantasy in my mind where I was a rich woman who could buy one of them. It was good that I had this quite entertaining fantasy to engage me, because after Magnus's group sang, another group of people came onstage (stage being a loose term here, seeing as they were singing in what could be termed a "found space")

Now don't get me wrong. I enjoy opera in the right setting. But they explained the plot line in Swedish (which I didn't follow) and the actual opera was in Italian (which I only caught one word of, which was Amore). And I still might have enjoyed it, except they were singing in an opera voice, when the space was quite small (you really didn't need to project) and I was in the front row and got blasted. Also, one of the men was sweating profusely, and when he turned his head too quickly, drops of sweat would come off of his hair.

So instead I daydreamed that I was someone who could accidentally make statues come to life if I let my emotions get out of my control, and thought about how it would be if the tigers and leopards and panthers could step out of the paintings, keeping the bright colors of the paintings on their bodies, so their bodies were made up of celestial bodies. I imagined how the opera singers would react and the big cats jumped out of the frames and leisurely stretched, digging their nails into the hardwood floor and leaving pale scares in their wake. One of them would knock over the wine bottle left over from the perception, and then would start lapping the red stain off the floor, looking like it was lapping up the blood of a recent kill. And the man with the big booming base voice would shriek like a little schoolgirl, and the noise would break the rest of the people from their paralysis, as they fled from the gallery into the rain.

And there I/the character (because by the end of the thing we've become two separate entities in my mind, with me sitting in the back of her mind like a full out sensory movie) and she would look at the cats, and would go to pet one, and wet paint would come away on her hand as the more time the cats spent outside the paintings the more real they became. And she would say, quite distinctly in German (and I don't know quite why other than German sounds more threatening than Swedish yet still near enough to English to not be quite so exotic) several choice curse words.

Hey, it got me through the singing.

In other news, I took my normal workout time today and instead of going to the gym decided to walk around the city a bit. (I consoled myself with the knowlege that I will have time to do a bigger workout tomorrow and also the fact that it's getting darker each day and it was beautiful out and the sun was shining). I went to Slussen, and from there made my way around a part of Gamla Stan (I think). I went to a really high point in the city, and got a great view of the area. And then I found this really great spiral staircase on the side of a building, and went up on that, even though I probably shouldn't have went up there since I think it was a fire escape.

But it was so much fun, my heart was beating because of the height and the view, and the sun was warm even if the air was cool, and the sounds of the city were curiously distant. And in a moment of clarity I understood why the Swedish have so much green space. These pockets of solitude keep them sane. Their like butterflies were you least expect them, you turn a corner and there's a bit of green, just enough for you to sit, take a look at the view, and find your balance. It doesn't have to be on the scale of Grand Central Park. I can just be a bit of green, a small jewel set in the concrete and stone ring. A promise and a highlight.