googled

I'm turning in a early blog entry today because the guy is once again working on my bathroom, and until he finishes plastering and painting I can't take a shower. And I can't learn music before I've showered. I don't know why, I just need to be clean.

So lately, in order to come up with ideas for blog posts, I've been googling the word "opera" and just seeing what comes up. But last night, I decided to change it up and google myself. I have to be in the right state of mind for an evening of self-googling, because you never know what you're going to find, and you will almost certainly find somebody saying something negative about you. So, armed with the knowledge that at least the opera news reviewer liked me, and slightly inebriated from half a bottle of Rosé (which is very helpful when googling oneself) I typed in "Jennifer Rivera opera," closed my eyes and hit search. Here is a list of things I found which surprised, and in some cases shocked me:

1. There were about a jillion links to Opera Chic's articles about me, or other blogs who had linked to her articles about me. Seriously, everybody in the whole biz and beyond must be reading her blog. Goooooooooo team OC!

2. I found a recording of part of one of my arias from the very first time I sang Cherubino on the Cincinnati Opera website! Here's the link if you want to hear younger me singing non so piu in 2002. I didn't even know a recording of that performance existed, much less that it was somewhere on the internet. But it's nice that my very first experience with my favorite role got recorded for posterity. Now if I could only get a copy.

3. I found a funny blog review of a concert I did in Washington DC that said I didn't have "star quality," although I decided not to take it too seriously when I noticed that in the same review they talked about the Lucrezia Borgia that Kate sang in DC at the same time, but instead of Kate Aldrich, they called her Kate Royale. If they were going to say I didn't have star quality, I wish they would have called me Jennifer Smith. Oh well.

4. I discovered that there were way more links to my blog entries than to my website. I don't know what that means exactly but I guess it makes sense since people look at my blog daily and not my website. Although it made me wonder why I spent so much time designing my website when everybody was looking at my free blogger page.

5. This was a doozy - so, I found this blog / website that had all these photos of women from swimsuit issues of magazines and playboy and stuff, and then if you scrolled down a few inches, you saw the photo of me from the Barber of Seville I did in Tampa where I was shaving the tenor and trying to look sexy with the caption "Jennifer Rivera's close shave." OH. MY. GOD. This brings up so many questions: How did they even find that photo? Why oh WHY with all the naked pictures of people on the internet would they put a photo of a mezzo in a black dress among all these semi porno shots??? I have no more words, just an apology to my parents if I have shamed the family with my errant ways. Ugh.

By the way, I realize that sitting around googling oneself seems like an exercise in self-involvement, and well, it kinda is. But how else am I going to know what's out there? And knowledge is power. Or in the case of #5, knowledge is shame. Either way, what the hell? Might as well just embrace it all. And hey, the guy just finished, and my bathroom ceiling no longer has a hole!!!! Time to get clean and get cracking.