December 31, 2005

To Remember what I Do/Did at home.

Im having a good time at home. dance. sleep. leisurely showers and even a bubble bath, reading graphic novels. making things on the sewing machine. doing a little mindless work for $ on the side. teaching dance classes. playing pictionary. lots of family. watching ben put on funny get ups. burning incense. petting cats. laying on nice beds. having a beer now and again and deciding it still makes my muscles tense. colored my hair. opening presents. training my muscles to be SHARP. cooking food, especially my new yam/parsnip spice/pecan dish. visiting.

Together



December 18, 2005

Really? For Real?

You mean the whole thing was improvised?!

I performed with Rachel, Michelle, Sandra and Susie last night--all of whom I had never danced with before in a performance setting (TT was there with us too). And Mom and I danced with Eva the night before, with whom I had also never danced. I LOVE THIS DANCE! I love that we have the same vocabulary, we know the rules and when breaking rules is kosher, and that this allows us to put on a kick-ass show leaving people wanting more. YEA! Performing with Eva was high energy, very fun. The Dame show last night was dreamydreamy as Tripp played vibraphone for the whole set and the energy was slow, brought up to rousing, and dropped back down to Teresa-sword Alyssum-bend SlowPlay level. oooooooohhh, aaaaaaaaahhh.

December 11, 2005

Epic

Woke up this morning at 6 (after having gone to bed at 2) to finish studying for my physiology exam. Index cards, index cards, index cards. Exam at 8. Lasts til noon. Check my answers: 72.5%, only 2.5 points from “good enough” but thankfully on the right side of good enough. Still, disappointing. School, and especially Dr. E’s classes, are a friggin STRUGGLE for me.
Meanwhile, a snowstorm has been brewing, and a good 6 inches are covering my car and the landscape. Figure I had better get myself to the airport pronto. I already missed the 10:43am train, so I drive myself in (all my friends were busy). The MassPike inches along at 30 mph with occasional white-outs thrown in for good measure. Originally I planned on parking the car at a friend’s house and cabbing it to the aeropuerto, but whether due to the snowstorm or other such situation, I call 3 taxi companies and never have an answer. Soooo, I drive myself there, sucking up the fact I’ll have to pay an arm and a leg to keep my car there a few days before my friend can pick it up for me. On the way, the ice builds up so much on my windshield wipers that one just un-does itself and snaps off! NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!! I’m on The Pike, though, and I can’t stop to retrieve it or even to jerryrig something. One wet, freezing arm out the window with my ice scraper allows me to see enough of the taillights in front of me that I make it somehow to an airport terminal where I can pick the broken wiper off the shield and use the functioning one (on the passenger side. Of course.). Thank god the traffic was slow. As I pull into the economy lot, a full-on blizzard begins to really really rage—total white-outs, thunder and lightning (!) (this is a new one for me!). Pulling my baggage 50 feet to the bus stop is a nightmare because my suitcase on wheels only succeeds in shoveling a foot of snow into my shoes and up my pantlegs every 6 inches.
Eventually, I make it to my terminal. Wait patiently in the very long line, and when I tell the check-in lady I am going to Lexington via Detroit, she looks at me stupidly for a second and says, “We don’t go to Detroit”. I am at the wrong airline. Not just wrong airline, but the wrong terminal. At this point, everything has been cancelled—Logan Airport is shut down for a few hours til the bus drivers can see again and the planes can move on the runway without lightning blizzard storms to contend with—but the combination of the day to that point makes me a little weepy and I shed a few tears of overwhelmtion (that should be a real word. “overwhelmedness” has one too many syllables).
Pull myself together and find my way to the correct terminal (after going to a second wrong terminal as per one ‘helpful’ lady’s directions). My baggage weighs 16 pounds more than maximum (when’d they change that?), but the guy, who calls me Asylum, didn’t charge me, “Since it’s highly unlikely you’ll actually make it tonight to your final destination”. Small comfort.
Here I sit hours after I was supposed to be in Lexington, in the baggage claim of Detroit. Cold, tired, hungry. First plane to Lexington is at noon tomorrow. Can’t afford a hotel room. Sad. At least I have my laptop to write this up.

December 6, 2005

I have skeletons in my closet.

Okay, I really only have an italian greyhound skeleton in the back seat of my car. What else would you expect?

December 3, 2005

Dream, 6

I couldn’t fit everything in my house, had to make room, so I took a tea tray to the salvation army. I was in a new town and had to find it. There were lots of brick buildings with their logos painted on the sides, covering the doors, so that from the road it looked like the city was just one huge billboard. I found a ramshackley wooden house with chickens running around and lots of kids. I asked directions to the salvation army and they convinced me somehow to keep my tray but to go tryout instead for a dance audition. I went to the museum and used an empty room to practice contortion.
Later that month, it must have been thanksgiving, I was at my dad’s and my mom was there too although they were divorced. We were waiting for family members to get there. Mom’s family arrived first: a small Chinese man that must have been Susana, Shelley and Tyler and Cort (as a small child), and Rick, and several other brothers like Rick. They came in to say hello before going to bed which dad was hesitant about, but enjoyed until he realized the cats had been let inside. Everyone was so tired. Shelley was groaning about having to make thanksgiving dinner the next day.
I got something the size of a cd insert booklet in the mail, and it was the month’s goings on at the museum. Crazily, it was filled with pictures of me. There must have been a photographer there when I was stretching and contorting in my striped bodysuit because there I was, on every page. I showed Tyler and he said “neat, let’s go see it!” So we jumped into the picture which took us to this crazy clock-tree museum first. Clocks everywhere, carvings like trees, candles lit in geodes and natural ore formations. Cort came trailing behind but he was much younger. So we had to watch out for him. When the clocktree museum closed, it turned into a head shop with every sort of whimsy condom or colorful thing you can imagine. The lady who owned it was crazy and wouldn’t clean up the place or even make way for clear aisles so we had to scrape ourselves through the floorboards into the space beneath the store to get out. Then we went to the museum where I had practiced to watch my audition.
It was weird to see myself—I looked much younger and more easily overlooked and immature than I had imagined myself to look. I was wearing my old longjohn pajamas to the audition—the white ones with black cat silhouettes and red hearts. I immediately realized that that had been a stupid idea. What was I thinking?! But during my audition I saw myself doing mostly contortion—some great things too (especially walking my legs around myself and moving very dancerly)—but the auditioneer called out “okay, that’s enough, you can go now” to me before I had really gotten into the dance part of my piece. He looked down to write something on his piece of paper. And I spider walked on my fingers with my legs over my shoulders toward him. He looked up surprised that I hadn’t left the floor yet and said, “you want to continue?” I nodded my head. He was very impressed with this and said, “you’ve made it to the next round. Now listen, do you hear? You have to be so willing to work for me, you have to be tireless, do you understand?” He gave me a lesson of a peptalk and I nodded quietly to everything he said. As I watched myself I was surprised that I had been so meek.
In the eventual production, they had used me as the character of a rag doll. The other dancers had been witches and a werewolf and something else scary, and I had been the thing they practiced with. It was a really neat production—the colors and textures were very rich, but not sparkly like usual bellydance performances. I remember seeing myself being held horizontally by the others, and then being bent and angled into various positions. Then they would set me up on the floor and command my movements. It was a really really fun performance.

December 1, 2005

Killer Squirrels!

Click on the link above to read about some amazingly hungry and brave squirrels in russia. What is this world coming to!?!

Dream, 5

I was looking at pictures of running horses on my iPod. Then I realized that they were our horses and that my parents and sister were running down the hill with them. So I jumped in to the picture and ran down the hill too. They were in kentucky, nearby the hike to angel's arch. Kentucky in winter in my dreams looks like grey licheny trees, tricolored halfdead orchard grass (drab green, hay color, burgundy brown), and oak leaves blowing around, and rocks in stones that run cold and burbling. we ran down the hill toward a fudge store, but I had to go pee so I squatted in a ditch. But then Dave and some little black girls and some other hikers came by so I had to sit in the ditch like nothing was going on til they passed and I could pull up my pants. Down at the fudge store, my mom was unpacking roses that she had bought for us to grow into apple trees. They had the hugest flowers I had ever seen and we were very impressed and excited until she dumped them upside down and cupfuls of pellets of growth hormones fell out. They had been so over-hormoned, that they were spilling pellets! So we realized sadly that we couldn't have our organic rose-apple trees afterall.