I slouched into my operatic costume

The gun-toting rodent earned his delicious nickname because he arrived at the opera packed inside a McDonald's box labelled "french fries."I watched as the director carefully crafted the tiny paper hat. "You're making a sombrero for a squirrel?" I finally asked."Well, yes," Rob replied, casually. "If you can't accessorize your squirrel, what can you accessorize?"I am sharing this story to give you non-opera stars a sense of the pressures we in the opera community face on a daily basis.Next, I slouched into my operatic costume, which consists of itchy peasant-style pants and shirt, a Mexican serape and a sombrero the size of a manhole cover. I would still be getting dressed right now if it weren't for the heroics of dresser Noel de Leon, who professionally adjusted my opera suspenders, which were causing my pants to bunch up and give me the dreaded Opera Wedgie of Doom.Then it was off to have my operatic face professionally applied by theatrical makeup artist Theresa Thomson, who ordered me to close my eyes and raise my eyebrows, then dabbed me in a soothing manner with sponges and brushes."It's called male chorus," Theresa explained when I asked what she was turning my face into. "I'm not allowed to deviate from that."We were sprawled across the wooden floor of my one-car garage-converted-to-room and passed around a bottle of tangerine wine (if you scoff at my drink of choice, whatever, I'm poor, and it was $5). It was an hour into my birthday, and what did we do? Sulked. About girls and the status of our love lives.I had been dumped a half an hour before I turned a year older, but I was fortunate to have my two best friends with me to recount our romantic endeavors. It sounds pathetic, but it really was one of the most memorable nights we shared, laughing at just about anything we had gone through.So, here I am, going to give you my two cents on relationships to all of you lovely folk out there. I'm not the most well-versed, but I dabble.First and foremost, there must've been a reason as to why I was dumped - and so untimely. If there was one thing I learned from living in a temple for a week (though that's another story), it is that our actions and behaviors are an inner reflection of ourselves and that we cannot always blame outside forces for causing events in our lives. In short, it's not you, it's me (cliche, but true!). To apply this to my example, I have come to realize that the problem with my relationship is that I didn't know what I wanted.