You know when you're a kid and you talk about "when I grow up, I'm gonna be ..." but the thing you're gonna be changes from week to week, if not from day to day or even from one hour to the next? I kinda feel like that lately.

Here's the deal. I'm gonna be an opera singer. Or so I've been saying for about eight years now. Saying you're going to be an opera singer is a huge leap of faith, and also kind of a big risk. It generally requires you to make that decision early on in your 20s, then work and work and work at it for five or ten years before you even know if you should have bothered in the first place. (There are exceptions, but there are exceptions to everything in this world). Once you get to that other side five or ten years down the road, provided you've been working hard enough at it, you can at least figure out if it'll be possible for you to have a career. I've known for a couple years now that I'm good enough, I'm tall enough, and doggonnit people like me enough to make a career out of the singing thing. This I know.

The problem is that the whole time I've been working on that (off and on, not as hard as I should, but I've been pretty much continuously working on it) I've also been working day jobs in the computer industry. That's fine, everybody's gotta work somewhere to pay for their singing habit, and I just happen to have picked a field I'm good in and can make a decent amount of money in. The problem, however, is that it's gotten to the point I can make an indecent amount of money by staying in the computer field.

I can buy a house.
I can pay off my credit cards.
I can pay off my car.
I can actually start saving money.
I can be, in other words, financially stable.

Whoa.

I haven't been financially stable since I, well, no I've just never been financially stable. Living with your parents doesn't count. Compare this to taking off next year to do the opera thing full time:

I'll go back into debt.
I'll be paying rent someplace, possibly more than one place.
If I still have a car, I'll still have a payment.
I'll be living hand-to-mouth for several years.
I will, in other words, be completely financially unstable, and probably on the verge of insolvency at any time.

Now, I've been telling myself that I'm going to be an opera singer for eight years now. That's the only way you can survive that time. "If I keep walking down this tunnel, eventually there's a light on the other side. Man, I wish I knew how long this tunnel was." But I never expected during that time to have to make the decision I'm looking at now. I never thought that I'd be weighing art (and possibly sanity) against homeownership, before age 30. And every other singer I know goes through periods of quitting singing. It's too hard to make yourself face it every day, and the way you survive it is by repeating, "I will be an opera singer, I will be an opera singer, I will be an opera singer ..." ad infinitum, until it becomes this part of your subconscious, a litany of its very own.

Deep down inside, I understand that I have to be a musician. It's not a choice. And I also know that if I decide to pursue something else and get off the opera track, I'll still be a musician, I'll still have that release, although I probably won't take advantage of it as frequently or as well as I need to in order to stay sane.

But I can own a house. A house. It was easy to say I was going to be an opera singer when I wasn't weighing it against that, against an actual career instead of just a day job. It's gotten harder now. I didn't want it to be harder. Opera's not like a bus or a train, I can't put it off now and just hop on it the next time it passes by.

Or at least not the way I've been thinking about it. My plan was (why do I bother planning, my plans always change), my plan was to go to Europe this fall, do a round of auditions, and then presumably accept a contract with some opera company over there that would start the next fall and run for two or three years. I could get a contract over there, this I know. It doesn't even require faith anymore. Europe has its advantages, in that when you take a contract like that you're an employee of the state, you can pretty much sing full time and not have to work a "day job," and you're a good middle class citizen from that point forward. You also get, well, opera-career-in-a-can. When you're done you've got a good CV, lots of experience, and you can get another contract over there and continue to be a good middle class citizen, or you can convert that into work back in the states, thus probably sidestepping the difficult part of breaking into the business over here.

The alternate plan, forming lately because of this whole house thing (it's the middle class American dream, I tell you), is to stay here. Buy the damned house. Keep up with the lessons. Pay off all the debts as fast as possible. Break into the business the hard way, which would mean auditioning everywhere, all the time, and having to be able to accept any contract at any time. This could work, as all the time I'd be not singing I'd be working here making tech-worker-in-a-tight-market money. It could also backfire and leave me with a mortgage I can't pay for if something goes terribly wrong. I don't foresee things going terribly wrong, but I see them going slightly wrong with greater frequency, which could have much the same effect. In that case, I'll be living hand-to-mouth but with a mortgage instead of rent, and equity to counteract the credit card bills. Or something.

So now I'm at this, "that's an idea, I'm just not sure it's a good idea," stage. I don't know what to do. I'll figure it out, I'm sure, but I just didn't expect to be here at this point changing my mind again. I thought I was past it.

I dunno, maybe I'll go back to my original "when I grow up" statement and start over with "fireman." What's weird is I never said "opera singer," and I never said "geek," and those are the two things I'm looking at now.

I was always gonna be an architect. I tried that in college. It didn't work.

(2000-03-04)