Saturday, May 27, 2006

1:34 AM - the audio/visual experience

See Spot Run

I just uploaded the video from my March performance to the circus section of the site. I spent an ungodly amount of time tracking down people who took video and then splicing that video together because all of the camerapeople wanted to move around, turn their cameras on and off, or do the hokey-pokey during my performance. The final result is not bad, although there's a bit of a sound foible near the beginning. Grrr.

Anyway, enjoy!

Thursday, May 25, 2006

9:36 PM - Do I get to -choose- which 3 men are in the tub?

the phenomenon

I have noticed, much to my surprise, that whenever I regress into angsty teenager mode and rant indiscriminantly about things that make me happy, that no one ever replies in my blog. By contrast, when I write about inane things, I get lots of comments!

I'm not sure what that means, although maybe in there I can find a nugget of wisdom that explains our continued fascination with people like Cameron Diaz.

In any case, I'm doing much better, with or without allayall. *sticks out a tongue playfully*

I think I may have to schedule myself a birthday massage. Like, a month early!

Monday, May 22, 2006

11:58 PM - rambling with myself, oh oh oh

The Return of Saturn

Here's a warning for you: It's 3 am, and I've just returned from talking a walk. Originally, the walk was just to drop off an application for a graphic artist position for a small local newspaper, but I started thinking a lot about my life and where I am and why I am here, and why life has sucked so bad recently. My walk had a lot of 3 am wisdom, which may more may not make sense to everyone else who is keeping regular daytime hours. I wonder if when I wake up, either tomorrow morning or from the dark haze that's been clouding my life experience lately, this post will seem like incoherent hippie rambling. Anyway, you've all been warned.

In astrology, the return of Saturn happens when Saturn finally completes its long journey around the Sun and revisits the point in the sky where it was when you were first born. Saturn takes about 29 years to complete one orbit. According to astrologers, this corresponds to a point in a person's life where they can examine the patterns of their past and make signifcant and lasting changes for their future. Everything is in upheaval, and it's unpleasant. Some people in describing the Return of Saturn focus on the potential for change and improvement, and some people focus on how hard it is just to get through every day.

I'm in the unique and unenviable position of having enough of a sense of wonder and magic to understand astrology, while also having enough scientific training to know that the position of a gaseous object 840 million miles away doesn't prevent me from washing my dishes. Even if it is a -pretty- gaseous object. Still, a more scientific me might say that the Return of Saturn is simply the way astrologers explain something that happens to people psychologically as they near the end of their 20s. Our bodies aren't as invincible as they used to be, and even the most academically entrenched of us has been forced to experience the "real world" now and again. For me, it's like tasting my own mortality for the first time. It's a kind of truth that scurrying deeper and deeper into the glare of video games simply cannot squash. I'm not going to live forever, so what I do in the present matters. Right now matters. And if right now matters, what am I doing with it? (And then of course I get angry with myself for playing video games so I play more video games, a pattern I imagine other people repeat with cocaine or alcohol or heroin or empty sex or cubicles or television or gambling or any of the other things that it's possible to be addicted to.)

The questions that keep coming up over and over again are: Who am I? Where do I belong? How can I make myself happy?

When I think about who I am at my core, I am a person who is both blessed and cursed with a child's vision of a utopian world, and I really believe the world should be that way. I get overwhelmingly depressed by a world that is swathed in concrete and where people are suffering.... suffering because they don't have money to buy food, or suffering because they are stressed out about making enough money or the skyrocketing prices of real estate, suffering because we pollute the air because it doesn't suit the oil lobbies to invest in solar energy (which can be harvested for free by anyone who has surface area), suffering because of all kinds of completely artificial reasons that stem from people refusing to help each other or share with each other because that's "the system." With the technology that we have right this minute, no one should ever be suffering.

At the same time, this inner vision that I won't let go also makes me feel happy, beautiful things that I don't think other people feel either. I am deeply moved when I can experience nature, or create something beautiful, or see someone committed to working for a change in their lives for the better. I collect stickers. I meet people and see in them so much potential for good, amazing, happy beautiful things.... And so much of what I like to do is considered whimsical or irrelevant by people in "the real world".

It's kinda like watching everyone wandering through the concrete sidewalks of the Matrix, where everything has been greyed out, and the world has been pulled over everyone's eyes... and wondering if I'm crazy when I think the things that I do.

I am happiest when I can inspire other people. I think that, first as a performer and eventually as a director, I can let people into my world enough that they can see and experience things the way I do, at least for a little while. It's weird to create this huge place in my life for circus, to move all the way across the country, to struggle as hard as I have with the limitations of my own body or with the limits imposed by the world, and to come to a point where I say something trite like, "I do it because I want to make other people happy." And yet... I want other people to know what my happiness and inspiration feels like.

I've been struggling with circus lately. On one level, my shoulder has been hurting, but on a different level, I feel like I've lost my fire and my zest. Right after our March show, and I mean as soon as the audience left the room, we had to help set up for Circus Smirkus auditions. These people (who are supposedly personal friends of the twins) didn't even watch our show, but came in afterwards with lots of specific needs about how they wanted the room to be set up and their specific needs everything -they- wanted. And I just felt like saying, "Hey! I'm a circus artist too." Why don't you like... introduce yourself or something. But they were very engaged in some self-important twittery, and I can see that Serenity really buys into it. In fact, that's the world that she lived in and was successful in, and was completely at the top of her field. But it's still hard to feel special or worthwhile when the dominant message seems to be that I'm wasting my time because I didn't start when I was 12. And I feel very.... dismissed.

Um.... this style runs small, I don't think they're going to fit. I mean your feet are.... kinda big. Thanks for noticing.

In any case, I need to get happy and inspired about circus again, and allow myself to be awash in the possibilities. I can create beautiful things, even things that the world has never seen before, but not when I let people hold me back. Not when I get mired down or hold myself back. I wish that Jett and Terry Sendgraff were around for tea. And I wish... even though I never want to lose my imagination or my way of seeing the world, I wish that I had more personal ability to make things happen in the "real" world. I mean, if someone can put up 20 million dollars worth of ridiculous orange gates and have it be called a triumph, there's got to be a way to get people in the world interested in what I can do.

It's sleepytime and I've sorta forgotten how I intended to wrap this all up so that it comes full circle, but I'm really wanting to finish my Return of Saturn with more personal power and confidence than I started with. I want to be able to create a life for myself that will make me happy.... I know when I'm older, I want a garden, a house, cats, and a loving long-term boyfriend. I want to live near my friends. In the more immediate future..... I think I need to create some serious circus goals. I wrote a list of summer goals, but maybe I should reframe it in terms of how those summery goals are going to lead into something more permanent.

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

10:42 PM - warning: this post subtly includes words that are difficult to spell

Up past my bedtime

Just a quick update... I finally finished the organizing-and-judging-and-announcing project for a contest I ran through Puzzle Pirates. The goal was to recruit new island designers... and we got 17 new people! Woohoo.

I'm also finishing up with a web design client, which is good. Once I finish with that, I want to take a couple days to myself and enter a Puzzle Pirates contest... I'm noticing a theme to this post.

My shoulder has been bothering me off and on for the past few weeks, but recently I noticed it getting worse. It's hard because I am trying to work on a doubles trapeze piece with a friend, and she's been very helpful and supportive and selfless... and I feel like I've let her down. Let everyone down! But, my logical brain realizes that's not true at all, and if I were to push and push towards a performance and end up injured and needing surgery again, then I will have let someone down: myself. So I'm taking a week off of aerial work to ice and ibuprofen and rest (I love how those first two have become verbs in my world). If I need more time off, I'll take it, but I'm not walking down that road of punishing my body and pretending that if I get strong enough, the pain will go away. It doesn't; I know this.

We had a beautiful sunny day today.

Over the weekend (hooray for non-chronological blogging) my former Berkeley roomie Brian was visiting his family in Agawam, so I went down there for a day. It was great to get away from Brattleboro, if only for an afternoon. It was also great to see Brian, who is so open and genuine and good. We went to play Candlepin bowling, which is something they only have in Massachusetts and New Jersey (...at least according to Brian. Wikipedia disagrees. Conflict.) The ball is quite a bit smaller, the pins are skinny little sticks, and you have three shots instead of the usual two. It's harder than regular bowling, although sometimes you can use one of the fallen pins to clobber a whole stack of other pins on a subsequent shot. There's a satisfying amount of chaos and things falling down, rattling around, and hopping back out of the gutter for what might be described as madcap antics, at least when compared with regular bowling.

Sadly, it was in the bowling that I saw my shots drifting to the left, which clued me in to how my shoulder is sore and scrunched when I try to protect it, which is why I've got time off from classes and more time to think about Puzzle Pirate contests. I knew there was a common thread in there somewhere! Denouement!

Finally, a post-denouement tidbit for people who find the minutiae of my life a bit tedious and mundane: check out talkto.cc, a friend's blog which chronicles her new adventure as she moves to Japan to explore her roots, find the best shoes, and write weekly horoscopes for everyone.

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

1:06 AM - oh you poor, poor fool

turnabout is fair play

For all you fans of Engrish.com, where we get to see our native tongue twisted and stuck to a frozen pole, it's payback time. I've just discovered HanziSmatter.com, a blog dedicated to the ways in which Americans misuse Chinese characters in their lives. Each entry comes with a lovely detailed explanation for English-speakers to understand just how wonky the mistranslations are.

There are also lots of comparisons between what the characters look like in the images and what they are supposed to look like. If you are even considering doing something like a tattoo in Chinese characters or Elvish or some other language you don't understand, please please please follow my example and download the font. There's a centuries-old art to Chinese calligraphy and stroke order, and it pains me to see mistranslated tattoos with letters that a 5-year-old could make with a crayon. Maybe it's payback for Westerners who exoticize Asian cultures without doing any research. Nyah!

Sunday, May 07, 2006

11:58 AM - let's party.

shoes

Something else I stole from Margaret Cho's blog: I'm unexplainably drawn to this video about shoes. The other videos on his site aren't nearly as good. I sorta imagine that this is what living in LA is like, but somehow I enjoy the video anyway.

I'm working with a friend on a doubles trapeze piece for the student demo in June. We've got some work to do! The chain is.... I think the chain is what is bothering my shoulder, actually. Crikey.

Monday, May 01, 2006

3:10 PM - yuk yuk yuk

the artichoke gag

As a vegetarian, I've learned that I'm already cut off from a lot of mainstream foods, so I try to be open to as many vegetables as possible. When we went on the roadtrip, Fenny started us off with this amazing healthy artichoke pasta salad (which I devoured while she made a beeline for fried Dairy Queen?!?) and I've been hoping ever since to replicate her pasta salad. This week I purchased an artichoke and I am cooking it tonight, so I looked up artichoke-cooking instructions on the internet. The first one I saw read:


Isn't the internet wonderful? I went looking for something a bit more helpful, and soon discovered the Process:


What is this thing?? And they seem to have good reasons for cutting off different parts of the artichoke, reasons like: it's inedible or it's covered in thorns or eating this will induce the plague. Even more exciting was this bonus...


So I do all of the steps and my artichoke immediately turns brown. Grrr.

If you are Fenny, and you are reading this... please tell me how to make your artichoke pasta salad! And if you are not Fenny, but you are reading this, please show me how to cook an artichoke. I feel so uncivilized, like the time recently when a woman at our organic food co-op asked me how I was, and I answered, "I'm good, how are you?" and she replied, "I'm well, thank you," while trying to insinuate that even though I am educated, I am still stupid. As if her poopypantsed, wrinkled disapproval matters.

The good news is that spring has arrived! And I am cooking more, which means I am feeling less depressed than I have recently. Yesterday I made Apple-Walnut pancakes with cinnamon and nutmeg and real Vermont Maple Syrup. *swoon*