Being a Eurovision fan is hard work. Year in and year out we inflict the best, the worst and the most utterly bizarre ESC and national final entries on ourselves, not to mention quite a dose of emotional attachment. But while the principle is similar every year, the story and the experience are always quite different. We change, we grow older (and sometimes wiser. Not always), we get distracted by something I’m told is called “life” (I’m not sure what it means). And often the difference in the experience is because of other things that are out of our control, like the selection of songs on hand.

It’s ok, Ieva, I’m not great at that wiser thing either

I’ve had my ups and downs. There’ve been years where I loved everything about the season and ended up with 500 new tracks on my mp3 player, including songs that finished 7th in a Lithuanian heat (I’m lying – that has never happened. But you get the drift) – and in other years, every one of my national final favorites has died in its local selection, and if I still managed to like 2 songs at the contest itself (thank you, internal selections) they died in the ESC semis instead. That’s how the game goes.

However, one thing was always constant. I always cared. I cared about the result, even when I knew my favorites had no shot at winning whatsoever. I will not name names, but I have shed some tears over a few relatively recent wins. Sometimes from joy, and once because it made me face the changes Eurovision went through since I first started watching it and realise it was no longer many of the things that made me love it so much. My outlook on Eurovision and emotional investment changed quite a bit since that day. I learned to better separate my personal feelings towards a song and how I expect juries and viewers to react to it. I still cared, just in a different way. I learned to live in relative peace with my favorites not winning their national finals or making it through the semis and just be glad I got to know another song or enjoy a live performance of it. I learned it was possible to argue passionately over songs without taking it to heart or letting it impact my anxiety levels regarding the chances of my favorites come that week in May (hey, you can take the girl out of the Mediterranean, but it’s a lot harder to take the Mediterranean out of the girl) – and I even learned to sometimes not argue passionately about a song at all, because different people like different things, and as long as I like it, why do I need to convince anyone else they need to like it too? I am yet to learn how to deal with people who use the word “masterpiece” in an honest, serious way, but baby steps.

That’s how you argue about a song

This lengthy intro (lengthy? Me? Never) is here just so I can have plenty of context to say something very short: this year, I don’t care. I’m not sure why. It’s true that it wasn’t an easy season for me, with very little I liked in the national final phase already, and even less that made it all the way through to May. But that has happened before, even if not entirely to the same extent. It still doesn’t explain this odd level of detachment I’ve been experiencing this season. There are plenty of examples of things I’ve been very invested in in the past only to stop trying once I realised I couldn’t really get into it, and I would have expected myself to respond exactly like that if I found myself in an ESC season when my main motto is that I don’t care.

The only thing I feel beyond my bones is the San Francisco chill

But instead of pulling away, I found myself enjoying the ability to argue about entries without getting worked up about it. I relished in the possibility of spending this ESC season splashing in a pool of nerdery, investigating numbers and trends and analyzing whatever I can from a, well, stat and research nerd standpoint. Perhaps my internal eternal optimist who cannot stand being upset for more than five minutes is to blame, or perhaps it’s my very external stubbornness refusing to break. Whatever the reason, I was determined to make something good out of it and find my own way of having a bloody good time.

You know what they say about plans and greater powers, though. The universe had other ideas in mind, or maybe just a very mean sense of humor. As the national final season drew to a close, the cosmos decided to make its move in an attempt to complicate my ESC season further: The Israeli entry – my home entry – was released. And… well, things escalated quickly.

Universe 1 – Laura Rizzotto 0

At first, I joked and said someone needed to take a screenshot of the odds and frame it before sanity was restored. Then I was just confused, because even though I voted for Netta and hoped for something like this, never in a million years could I have anticipated the reaction it received. While the new Israeli selection system was put in place four years ago in an attempt to improve our record (which it did, with qualification every year since and one top 10 placing), I don’t think anyone within the Israel circles at least had a feeling of aiming much higher. Qualification was the goal, and a higher finish than “Golden Boy” the dream.

Not that dream, Yianna. But I might keep the boy.

And yet, even with my own country (and both an artist and an entry I like a lot) suddenly being a serious contender, my emotional investment level remained the same, i.e. very little. I don’t know if it’s because the notion of my country actually winning this still sounds so preposterous to me or because my brain decided to be immune this year and now it’s impossible to convince it otherwise, but with only a couple days to go before rehearsals begin, my level of anxiety is non-existent. I’m actually not complaining, I’m just perplexed. Granted, I always knew that the more anxious and hysterical the people around me are, the calmer I am – and do I really need to spell out to you the level of hysteria in Israeli groups right now? But still. And yes, the fact I doubt my one true favorite, Italy, has any chance of doing real scoreboard damage also helps when it comes to managing my nerves, as it means I’ll be delighted with pretty much any result better than just “decent” (which is what I assume it will get).

But the more I think about it, the more I think that maybe the answer is simple. If at first I didn’t care because I had nothing to care about, once I did have everything to care about, the story actually changed entirely. As a sports fan I’ve always been an underdog kind of person. When my favorite teams became teams that always win and are always expected to win, I found myself tuning out completely. It boils down to one very basic thing for me when it comes to competitions and expectations. If you are expected to win, if you expect your team or your favorite song or your country to win, then you essentially end up having two options: you can achieve exactly what you were expected to, or you can be disappointed. Not very exciting, is it?

I want to be surprised. I want to be impressed. I want to be blown away. I want to feel goosebumps when I don’t expect them. I want to end a Eurovision night having a lot more to write than I thought I would have, and have a lot of those words be things I never expected to be writing. It hasn’t happened yet, but it ain’t over until the Te Deum at the end of the final credits.

ESC 2018, it’s time to face the music. Surprise me. I know you have it in you. Let the rehearsals begin.

May the odds be ever in your favor

all images from eurovision.tv/YouTube