to do

It's been awhile!

Tonight is a night where I feel on the precipice of change. Like the night before the day you wake up and smell fall in the air. The first discernible sign of...

(maybe not knowings = excitement in these instances)

I am ignoring my duties to flirt with possibilities in my mind. Feels good. Tomorrow will hurt, as it always does. ('OH no, I have no time,' I will think, promptly ignoring all the valuable and quite useful time that I had the night before, thus become a self-inflicted victim of circumstance.)

What if? and why? and maybe? and wow... have all been cluttering the passage ways that would lead to answers to:

1. Please describe the nature of the proposed mentorship. How would you like to work together?
2. What ideas do you have about the use of your available time in the MJDL?
3. What type of activities other than rehearsals might interest you to structure, or about which you imagine, having an exchange?
4. Write about anything else you would like the CHIME panel to consider

All made the more confusing by the fact that I'm not answering the questions for myself, but for someone I much admire.

I think that's all for tonight.

(For the record, I am quite happy, just tired and distracted.)

Hello, old friend

I have been re-experimenting with an old idea of late. I believe it is going well.

I am looking forward x10 to one week from Tuesday, when I will begin one week of vacation. I have an urge to spend a week somewhere that is the complete opposite of the City, which may indeed be where I am going, but I wish it were the woods. So, what I mean to say is that I wish I could spend a week in the woods instead of a week in two cities that are, in different ways, both the complete opposite of the City.

I met with an old friend last Monday, who is in transition- moving to New York. She said she felt a gravitational pull towards the city, "I am a New Yorker," she said, "I'm just so happy there." I feel the same about San Francisco. After having spent a year here, I feel almost qualified to say, "I am a San Franciscan." I still love all the quirky things about this city that draw in tourists (aside: come and stay in the hotels. There is a 10% hotel tax, part of which goes to fund the arts. This money is doled out through a Grants for the Arts funding program, which Dandelion Dancetheater didn't get this year, but all the same come stay in our hotels. And see some dance while you're here.), but more importantly I love LIVING here. I love biking through Golden Gate Park as part of my daily commute. I love getting home and walking down the street to my local worker-owned vegetarian co-op to get food for dinner. (I love realizing that the fact that this store exists is proof that I live in San Francisco.) I love how I can get just about anything from corner stores on Irving and that I really don't have to go to a Target, let alone Wall-mart. I love that I have an apartment with rent control.

I love how accepting this city is of art, and in consequence how much is here. And how, as I begin to take in more of it, I also realize that there is room for growth.

A wise man once said some paraphrase of, "Find a place you love to be, and you will find avenues for your dreams to take shape."

To sum up:
I love this city.
Things have happened this past year.
I can see the beginnings of more happenings to come.
I want to stick around.

In a strange twist of fate, my life comes full circle

"How small could my world get?" could be the question. And the smaller it gets the more fascinating intricacies I find, so that the old woman version of me could spend each day marveling over a different section of the twists and turns that brought me back to where I started. (I just read The Stranger, sorry for the plagerism, Camus.)

Where did I start? Two months early; too small for the world, I was born anyway, not at all willing to let a silly physical ineptitude stop me. And, a little later, I was holed up in an incubator while my body caught up with my desire to be a part of it all.

Where am I now? One reading of the events could say: One year early. Not yet physically ready to be a part of what I was so desirous of. Recovering (still), not yet ready, trying to catch my physicality up with the feelings that what is here now right in front of me is what I want, if only my body would say yes just as much.

However, what I really meant to say when I started this entry was that I wrote some words that were published in something that went on paper and was was distributed to many people. And, in a strange twist of fate, the subject of my interview article was a professor at the school which I left a year early to come out to this fabulous City and try new, real-world, non-academic things. Like, apparently, writing about one of the professors from the school.

One final statement: ah, never mind. It's late for this old bird.

Huzzah!

I did it! One week down, (out of ten).

Today I was TIRED, with a capital everything.
Many apologies to the roommates who saw me before coffee.
Since coffee didn't happen until noon, many apologies to everyone who ran into me before lunch.

It was funny what a bad mood I was in in class. It was one of those gross days, I was convinced that all my premonitions and insecurities were right and I was, in fact, the worst dancer in the world. Everything was coming together to confirm the daemons in the back of my mind, and whoa were they right. Bah! Why try! Arg!

Luckily I have trained for long enough to know that when those voices are loud enough not to quiet with a little chastising, you give them a designated spot in the bleachers and fill the rest of the audience with the information coming in. That noise is usually loud enough to provide enough of a buffer to keep going. This can sometimes give your attention to the detail of the instruction a greater focus, as you must focus on the class itself in order to ignore the hullabaloo coming from the designated bleacher area.

So today the hullabaloo was really loud, and I was trying to focus instead on learning the first jumping combination of the class, and then on keeping my torso strong and stable and using my feet to capture and rebound momentum in the first jumping combination of the class, and then the combination ended and I realized:

I just DID the first jumping combination of class. Actual jumps, not "getting back into jumping" jumps, real ones, with pointed toes and straight knees at the top.

Huzzah. Ten months out and counting.

stories inbetween

comma comma comma period, exclamation point? question? mark. period! (oh, parentheses.)

close, but not quite

I almost got bored, so I decided to write a blog. I wanted to remember what it was like to record and recap. I used to do this obsessively, as in, today I ate: cereal (the kind with more calories) and milk and a banana and a salad with non-fat dressing and an apple and some stir fry with tofu and... I worked out on the elliptical for 45 min and pushed myself hard but I didn't do any sit ups and I missed a double turn en de dans during the second combination but I finished all my homework and I drank enough water. I still have laundry to do tomorrow, and I should call my parents because I spent all my social time for tonight talking to my boyfriend. My goals in life are A) B) and C) and my goals for this semester are a) b) and c) and my goals for this month are a) b) and c), so that makes my goals for tomorrow X) Y) and Z).

And then I stopped doing that, because...

Loosing track can be a way to find yourself.

Where am I now?

Unknowingly somehow I have a position, something I thought of but in the not-possible sense. And somehow that position entitles me to tell people to do things and to calm them down when they are worried and make them worry when they have not been prudent. And often I make mistakes. But I hope I am learning.

Somehow and knowingly I am not where I thought I would be, and not where I want to be, but maybe understanding while still denying what I need to do to move on. (move past, move up, go forward, press onwards, develop, expand, sheer away, pare down, crystallize, and flower.)

Indisputably there is more I could be doing. Indisputably I am doing a lot. Indisputably I am hardest on myself, and not as hard as I'd like to be.

Sometimes I'd like to be tucked away in a place where I wouldn't have to think, where I could go back to having someone take care of me. Othertimes I'd like to go to a place where I am all by myself with no responsibilities to caretakers or others. Most-times I realize that the people around me are essential to how I construct myself, and that I will not go from a) to b) or elsewhere without them.

Thank you to those.

Hello world.

Once I wrote a computer program that made the screen say, "Hello world." Once I played soccer, once I played the piano, once I played the guitar, then the flute. I was good at math, understood science, and passed all the tests, but I forgot it all the next day. Once I thought I'd be a webdesigner, once I thought I'd be a photographer, on the photojournalist side, or maybe just audition portraits. Once I thought I'd write. (More than once.) More than once I've also thought that I don't want to do anything for money that mattered to me because, once someone gives me money for it, they have influence over what I produce, and then it is no longer child of my own creation.

Maybe I want to create.

But I don't know in what.

Other than in this fashion: asdkfjlsafjawoeifjslkdfjsdla l sfjoawi jfl fsof wl k lkfjowe klsj dia o lsdkfj awoie kdlf bie leio cmsaofjem skfh8en ksjfdklaew dkf dkjwef di03 sjkos;fn ode so ef li fa sf0 ska; viwf .. sadfoijw .saf.

...
.
..
.

Wouldn't you?

I would like to write about the fact that I like writing blogs. In fact, I truly enjoy the activity. I like thinking that maybe somehow I am more interesting, or at least better understood for my already existing interestingness, because I write them.

I would like to discuss how I don't think that all blogs are good, but that the ones I enjoy reading I find very good, and I think they should be made into a book, and preserved as an indication of the times we live in.

I would like to say that I think writing blogs is a very selfish thing to do, at least in the way I do it. And I think that everyone should have more than one entirely selfish activity that they do. My other selfish activities include dancing and bike riding and eating and sleeping and, most of the time, working. Sometimes I go out, and that too, is selfish.

Sometimes when I have free time to think, which is mostly when I'm on my bike and coasting through the Panhandle, I like to think of names for books that will never get written and never get published. One is "A Guide to San Francisco for the Little Moneyed and Easily Amused." Another is "I Don't Really Believe this Light Should be Red: Cyclists' Interpretations of San Francisco." And finally, "Blog it Out: A Cultural History."