traveling swallowing dramamine

on now. dare it. let there be life.

i realized recently—within the past year—that i very rarely make eye contact with people. i noticed it at first with people who work at, say, fast food restaurants. or maybe at the mall. i will go through an entire conversation with these people, and give them money in exchange for some goods or services, and they will politely tell me to “have a nice day” and i will politely say “thank you” and this whole thing will take at least five minutes and not once will i look them in the eye. i mentioned it to breton, who worked at papa john’s at the time, and she said it drives her crazy when customers don’t make eye contact with her. which makes sense. it’s as if you’re not even really interacting with a human—just going through the motions. the thought disturbed me, so i made it a point to make eye contact with the people i encountered. and i found out that it’s hard to make eye contact without smiling. and then it’s hard to get smiled at without smiling back. so then not only have i made eye contact but i’ve smiled and they’ve smiled and all around it’s just better.

then i realized i even avoided looking my friends in the eyes. i don’t know. i’m pretty excruciatingly self-conscious, and i guess it’s a way of...not dealing too directly with people. like...when i walk around campus alone, i tend to stare at my feet. i used to have this thing about walking across the cafeteria in high school—i was afraid everyone was looking at me. every time i walked across the cafeteria alone i’d feel my face get hot. i don’t know why. just some random paranoid thing. and i guess my avoiding eye contact is part of the same thing.

so anyway, i’ve been trying to actually look people—my friends included--in the eye, and it’s been—i could make a bad pun here—“an eye-opening experience”—but instead i’ll say that it’s been pretty astonishing. people’s eyes are amazing. it’s like—sometimes their eyes are off: they’ll look at you and you know that they aren’t paying attention, or that they’re staying guarded for some reason. cold, mean, bored, withdrawn: off.

but sometimes their eyes are on: and that’s the amazing thing, when they’re looking at you and their eyes go all soft and warm, inviting and engaged and, i don’t know, enraptured. it doesn’t matter if it’s a guy or a girl. it’s the look that you give someone when you’re really happy to see them. and it blows my fucking mind.

see, i have this complex—it goes along with the excruciatingly self-conscious thing—i have this totally irrational belief that none of my friends are actually my friends; none of them actually desire to see me or speak to me; they all just play along but secretly they’re wishing that i would leave them alone. and so up until recently i’ve had this habit of never calling my friends because i figured they really didn’t want to talk to me anyway. which leads to these awkward moments, like:

friend i haven’t seen or spoken to in a year: (enthusiastic) hey, ann!
me: hey, friend!
friend: man, i haven’t seen you in forever, how have you been?
me: alright, and you?
friend: alright. (suddenly suspicious and offended) why haven’t you called me? it’s been, like, a year.
me: (embarrassed and at a loss) um....because...ummm.....i’m a bad person?
friend: oh, haha, okay, well, you should call me sometime, seriously.
me: (momentarily convinced) okay. within the next twenty-four hours, i think: i’m bored. i should call my friend.

..............nah.

i guess it’s leftover insecurity from junior high or something. anyway, it’s retarded and hopefully unfounded. i mean, maybe i think no one wants to talk to me because everyone really does think that i’m fucking annoying. it’s certainly possible. but now that i’m, you know, meeting people’s eyes, like a normal person, i’m realizing that it’s kind of unlikely, or else these people wouldn’t look at me as if they gave a shit about me.

it’s really startling.

and where the hell i've ended up on this glary random day

and i poured my heart out / and i poured my heart out / it evaporated / ...see?

i just listened to "evaporated," by ben folds five, and it made me feel better. if you have never heard this song, you should listen to it. right now! it is beautiful and good.

i got home today: so tired, so hungry. it was 8:30pm. we'd been on the road since 4. me and jacob and katie went up to monroeville, AL last night. a group of us from LSU went to shoot DV for this multimedia performance art piece called "thirteen ways to kill a mockingbird." (monroeville was harper lee's hometown and the basis for maycomb, the setting of TKM.)

anyway, trish, the director, was kinda stressed out and thus kinda bitchy, and we were all tired from driving and also from sleeping on the rock-hard beds at the Budget Inn, but it was a fun trip nonetheless. i got a lawn flamingo made out of PVC pipe. i also tasted my first fried twinkie. (it shall not be the last...) jacob and i split one (they were two bucks each!) and agreed that they tasted like moist beignets. they looked like beignets, too. they even had powdered sugar on them.

on the way home, we got to this split in the interstate where I-65 ends and turns into I-10E and I-10W. and i'm in the lane that splits, and i start to take 10W, and jacob starts flailing his arms and saying, "the other way, the other way!"--as in, take 10E. and i'm thinking, "baton rouge is west of alabama, right?" so i take 10W but i'm freaked out because he's like, yelling and waving his arms, you know? and then abruptly he stops and goes "oh wait. nevermind." and it was funny. so now i get to make fun of him for the rest of his life.

so i get home and i'm fucking exhausted. i haven't gotten a full night's sleep in a week, because of mardi gras and my joyce midterm. and i'm broke, because road trips are expensive, and i'm hungry. and on friday, while i was desperately trying to finish my joyce midterm, i ordered papa john's because i didn't have time to leave the house to find food. i ordered a small pizza, thinking it would be cheaper than a large--but it's also, you know, a lot smaller--so i ended up paying 13 bucks for what amounted to two meals--as opposed to a large, which would have been a few bucks more, but twice as much food. anyway, i was pissed with myself for paying 13 dollars for a small pizza--but i told myself it was alright, because i'd only eaten half the pizza, and when i got back from monroeville i could eat the other half for dinner. and it would be okay. so i get back from monroeville and i unload my shit. my room is a disaster, because i'd basically been holed up for three days working on my joyce stuff: there are clothes and dishes and papers all over the place. and i'm annoyed, because i hate when my room is messy. so then i think, "well, at least now i can eat my pizza." and i look in the fridge, and lo and behold: the pizza is gone. gone without a trace.

i wanted to cry. i'd been thinking about pizza for the past, like, two hours. the pizza that i paid way, way too much money for. gone.

so then i'm like, fine, i'll make some pasta. so i fill a pot with water and put it on the stove and turn the stove on--and ten minutes later i walk downstairs to see if the water is boiling, and it's not, because i turned on the wrong part of the stovetop.

so i'm like fine, i'll make grilled cheese. i throw the water out the pot, put the pot away. then i discover that we're effectively out of margarine. i'm pathetically scraping margarine off the sides of the container...i manage to put together something that resembled a grilled cheese sandwich. while i'm toasting the bread, i go to fix myself a glass of water. we drink water out the tap at our apartment. and the tap water isn't very cold, so i use ice. we have three ice trays. all three of the ice trays were empty. all three of them.

so tired, i am so tired, and sunburned. typical. typical of me to get sunburned. my cheeks and nose and forehead are pink. and i have a stupid-looking sunburn on my neck. and i'm tired, and i'm hungry, and there's no ice, and my pizza is gone. and my room is a disaster.

and all i can think is: this is when you need a boyfriend. the shit nights where nothing is really wrong but everything is fucking wrong and the only thing that will make you feel better is to curl up next to him. because being in his company makes you feel better no matter what. and he says nice things to you and is patient with your ridiculous complaining about pizza and ice trays.

see, i know that i'm being ridiculous. in the grand scheme of things, my missing pizza is completely irrelevant. my family is alive and well. that is enough for me. but you know, if something horrible did happen, i would have friends to get me through it. i don't need a boyfriend for the big tragedies. i need a boyfriend for the stupid trivial shit nights. nights like this.

but i don't have a boyfriend. and i don't really want a boyfriend. and what that means is, at the end of the day--good or bad--all i'm left with is myself. that's a good thing, i guess. what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, etc. and the whole point of being single, right now, for me, is to be alone and be okay with it.

but goddamn.

=======

kierkegaard says:

"[The knight of faith] has grasped the deep secret that even in loving another one should be sufficient unto oneself."

i will not rely on other people to make me feel happy or whole. i can do that on my own. that is what this is all about. figuring out how to do this on my own.

and when all else fails, there's always ice cream. chocolate, chocolate ice cream.

damascus/lightning

walking down oak street, jeans cuffed, ankledeep water, black umbrella raised high above my head. another afternoon flash flood in new orleans. rumbly thunder makes me feel cozy, except when it's coupled with giant immediate lightning bolts, so i say holyshitmotherofgod! whereas everyone else in the office yelps. ben used to laugh about this, how when i'm startled i manage to curse at length in the amount of time it takes most people just to make a noise. 

e.g.
ann is getting out of her car. a large dog runs up out of nowhere.
ann: (startled) OHHOLYSHIT!
normal person: (startled) AH!

steve and i had walked to the rue for afternoon tea. i told him about the epiphany i had while driving in from baton rouge last night:

you can't have your cake and eat it, too.

i've always understood the sentiment, particularly how it applies to relationships - to want or expect something both ways and at one's convenience.

but the actual expression never made any sense to me literally.

"to have cake" is to eat cake, right?

so "to have your cake and eat it, too" would mean "to eat your cake...and eat it, too."

it seems gratuitous. not to mention redundant.

anyway, i don't know what in particular triggered this epiphany, but it dawned on me last night that the expression "to have cake" in this sense means "to possess cake." and of course one cannot both possess a piece of cake and consume the same piece of cake simultaneously. once you have consumed the cake, it is gone; you no longer possess it.

i was so proud of myself.

i got home and told michael and he laughed at me.

in my defense:
colloquial use of "to have," when applied to food, virtually always means "to eat."
if your friend tells you, "i had a piece of cake," you probably wouldn't wonder well, what happened to it?

in fact, i would posit that we use "to have" in this sense more often than we use "to eat," at least declaratively. "did you eat lunch yet?" sounds as natural as "what did you have for lunch?" but i think it sounds more natural to say "i had chicken shwarma," rather than "i ate chicken shwarma."

further: when i told steve about my epiphany, he said he thought the expression referred to fat people on a diet.

after i finished laughing, he looked it up on wikipedia, and among other things, we learned that the saying used to be "you can't eat your cake and have it, too." this i find much clearer, as it emphasizes the paradox of having eaten something and still expecting the thing to be there in front of you.

so. this has been weighing on my mind for a long time, and i am glad to finally have made sense of it.

still you have to wonder: what kind of person would choose to have cake, as opposed to eating it? what would you do with the cake? look at it? keep it a while? and then what, you'd have stale cake? i mean, what would be the point?

i guess it underscores the implicit meaning of the phrase:
you can't have your cake and eat it too, you stupid greedy fuck.

there's a you-shaped hole in my dancing heart

oh i don't know.
i cried at dinner, i feel like no one takes me seriously, i feel like my dad and my mom and my grandfather don't take me seriously, i feel like i'm not doing anything that's worth taking seriously. there's no structure in here for me to be an overachiever. there's no up or forward. there's just digging straight down. there's just moving in place.

they look at me like it's my lack of motivation.

i don't know how many ways there are to explain fear to people.
i don't need you to push me.
i can push myself.
i'll figure it out.
that's kind of the whole fucking point.

hari said, well, when you walk up to a cold swimming pool, how do you get in?
she was asking rhetorically.
i said, not rhetorically,
"i go to the shallow end and i walk in really slowly, making terrible noises all the way."

and she laughed
and i said seriously.

tonight my dad actually said,
i was telling him about being afraid, about holding back, about not taking risks,
i said something about being pathologically obedient
and he snorted and said come on, if anything, you're pathologically disobedient.

i mean
i don't know.

i mean.

independent-minded, maybe, stubborn definitely, unconventional by the most conventional standards maybe.

he also said some bizarre something about how the reason i want to go to grad school is because all my life my mother has wanted me to go to grad school--and that she wanted to be a writer, which is presumably why i studied writing--(he made a similar argument a long time ago about louisiana school)--

try to explain to him that frankly i don't give a shit what she wants me to do--it's always struck me as irrelevant--because she's never projected or pushed any career choice onto me--and in fact, to counter his claim, she has within the past six months intimated that she doesn't understand or even approve of anything i'm doing--though i suppose she only said it at that particular moment to be spiteful, because she was being out of her mind, again.

reason number one i can't leave yet.
not in order. but that's one unresolved thing.
also the city.
and marcia said what about the holidays
and i said oh, the holidays
and she said so january then
and becca said but not till mardi gras
and then i remembered michael's graduation
it goes on it goes on
at some point there's a cut-off
you people
please.

it's hard enough.
paul said what i was thinking.
he said it's like if you wanted to go sky-diving
but you were really scared of sky-diving
and not only are you really scared of sky-diving but there's six months of impossible paperwork bullshit to fill out so you can go do this sky-diving thing that you half want to do and half are terrified of doing.
like it's hard enough to work up the nerve to actually go sky-diving,
much less force yourself through a bunch of bullshit so you can do this scary thing that you're barely able to screw up the courage for in the first place.

but that saturday, the first home game, i'd agreed to sit on the rooftop of the tallest dorm and monitor a time-lapse camera for a fox sports documentary. i regretted it all the week before and woke up saturday morning irritated at the impending disruption of my weekend routine--of sleep late, do nothing, sleep some more, read at highland, find something else to do, find a bar to drink at.
and i sat on the roof with the tar and a cellphone-tower headache and i could see forever, in every direction, the best view i've had since prague. i sat alone on a rooftop in the sun for hours. it was beautiful, quiet, hot, there were wasps, i took a nap in the shade of a giant air vent. it was a total disruption of my weekend routine. it felt like somewhere else. i was grateful and ready.

and the next day i go to visit my family for labor day, and ryan is three and gives me a huge wave because he knows me, i won't be the grown-up unfamiliar at family gatherings, grateful i kiss him and sean comes up to me later, he taps me on the shoulder and grins at me, he's seven, he says i didn't know you were here! and i kiss him too, on the cheek, i say i saw you playing basketball, you looked good.

try to explain to everyone who matters how you want to go, with your whole heart, and with your whole heart you want to stay.

and you know already: you can't do anything with half a heart.

i went down so deep

i had a dream maybe friday night
about a lot of stuff that i don't remember
but at one point i was at some kind of park
with one of those rides that drops you straight down
i don't ride those because i hate the feeling in my stomach
anyway i was watching the ride which was over some water
and then i was standing on a ledge
you were with me
over this blue blue water
it was clear and sparkly and the sun was bright
the ledge was high and we were talking about jumping
this is not something i would ever do
and i thought how my stomach would drop but that feeling would pass quickly
i looked down at the water and we were high but not that high
so i stepped off the ledge and it was scary
but i kept my chin up and squinted into the sunlight
i was smiling

when i hit the water i went down so deep i was afraid
about needing to breathe
but i didn't panic
i kept kicking to the surface

how to be lonely: a preparation

i am drunk off of white wine
which i never drink
i bought it from calandro's for six dollars and ninety-nine cents to cook with
i needed 'dry white whine'
i know next to nothing about wine, and
really nothing about white wine because i always drink red
so i didn't know how to pick a dry white wine
besides avoid the ones that say anything about fruit on the label.
i picked a 2005 chardonnay that is named oxford something
and yes it was dry as hell
i was proud of myself
then i made asparagus risotto
(in case you haven't noticed, i've been posting articles and recipes here)
the batteries weren't charged for my digital camera (from dad, from christmas three years ago, and i don't know if it's any good really) but i was going to take pictures for you
because holy shit i cooked something.
the past few times i've cooked things, i've put on c
hang on, i have to pour another glass (baby glass) of wine
by the way, the advice to put on a pot of water to boil as soon as you get home is very sage advice indeed
so i've decided to semi-count calories and exercise five times a week in an effort to not feel disgusted with myself
being that i'm 23 and there is no good reason not to be in excellent shape
simultaneously i made out a budget so that i could have $10,000 in savings when i leave for spain
incidentally, it is difficult to eat healthfully and also not spend money
but we knew that already
to get the ingredients i needed, i went to calandro's and also whole foods (c's didn't have asparagus but they did have a lot of other nice produce, including spaghetti squash!)
whole foods makes my face feel paralyzed
everyone looks so happy and everyone smiles at each other
black people smile at white people
and do you know why
because everyone is happy that they can afford to shop at whole foods
i cannot, so i bought a few things and left feeling frustrated
i've been needing to cut back on my spending for a while but i was making so much with the grant writing that it didn't feel necessary
but my new job really was a 3,000 paycut
so now i'm on a tight budget while having over $8,000 in savings
it's a strange feeling
and i've spent over a hundred dollars in the past three days buying things for the kitchen (two mixing bowls of different sizes; a 3-cup food processor; a cheese grater) and food for the kitchen. because in the long run i know it will save money and be healthy. but all the damn upfront money. it's hard to part with.
what i was saying was that when i've cooked the past few times, i put on classical music or rebirth.
today i played benny goodman from my laptop and then the nightcrawlers "live from old point bar" and i think it seriously helps my cooking. i don't really, but i like to think it, and it's the only time i can listen to music like this, when i sort of need to concentrate on something else. it's like sewing music. i can listen to it on repeat because i'm not paying attention but also i am. and music from home makes me dance while i'm cooking. alone.
also the wine helps.
my uncle 'sings' a lot with the nightcrawlers - which is more like speak-singing, and in track nine ("tchfunta/on that day") he does a bunch of "come on" and "yeah" and it's so good and i am so proud. i love the way he talks because it is how my family talks, and on the CD i can hear it both like a foreign tongue (i like to think how people from not-new orleans hear his accent as strange and exotic) and also like home.
my risotto has excellent, full-bodied flavor - onion and white wine and chicken broth and parmesian - how the hell do you spell that - parmesan, okay. rich but of flavor, not of death-to-your-intestines.
the texture is kind of screwy - you have to add the chicken broth (it was supposed to be stock, oops) - slowly and then save a little before you add the raw asparagus - so my rice was a little undercooked and the asparagus should have been more tender (instead of basically totally raw) - but still. damn. i cooked something. and it tasted good.
i could do this: listen to home music and learn how to cook
spend an evening by myself drinking the leftover wine
dancing down the counter
i could do this anywhere.

hey breton i love you.

revelations

i was walking home for lunch this afternoon, and it struck me, all of a sudden, as bizarre - why do we have mirrors in dance class? doesn't it seem strange? wouldn't we be freer dancers if we weren't constantly staring at the reflections of ourselves and each other? no wonder we're all such self-conscious perfectionist freaks. "oh, don't be nervous, it's just an exercise, no one's even watching you" - yeah, right. everyone's watching you. one whole wall of this place is mirrors.

last night towards the end of modern class, dina put on this music and started teaching new choreography. the melody was familiar to us - we were all sort of singing along, actually - and i asked her who it was. (i am continuously puzzled and grateful that i have learned so much music incidentally from 19+ years of classical dance training.) she said it was a bach piece (Violin Concerto in E Major) and that the choreography was from the beginning of paul taylor's "esplanade." she asked if any of us had seen it. i said mr. allen, my dance director at lsmsa, had shown it to us on video.

today, revelation I:

our three-section bach piece junior year - lyrical-ish bare-footed modern, with the girls in simple white leotards and white skirts, skipping in various formations to allegro violins - was a direct rip-off of (okay, homage to) paul taylor's "esplanade."

revelation II, upon watching this (unfortunately soundless) backstage view of "esplanade" on youtube (i believe it's from the documentary Dancemaker):

01:20 into the clip, a short-haired woman dancer takes off running from the wings and flings herself into a male dancer's arms. he spins her around, tosses her, she hits the ground, rolls, runs. another woman hauls ass and flings herself into his arms - repeat -  again the man stands with arms at the ready for the next dancer - there are four consecutive "lifts" - though they're more like catches -

and we did this too. again, junior year rep, the second piece was a modern number, the name of which escapes me - we were wearing black leotards and pants that we hated - we called them the "mud pants." the music was sort of plinky, with tribal wind instruments, world music-esque. i don't really know how to describe it. not chordal, for sure. anyway, there was this whole extended section (i mean really long) where michael, the single male in the company, stood center stage, and we ran up to him and did various lifts and he put us down and we ran off.

everyone, including michael, thought it was dumb choreography - mostly it seemed like further proof that mr. allen was obsessed with michael, since he was a boy who could actually dance, with actual training. michael had even done lifts before. most of the girls hadn't, so we were kind of excited to learn (mine was a grand jeté, i think, and i was never happy with my split). but overall we felt like this was just a showcase moment for mr. allen - "look, i have a guy dancer! i'm gonna stick him center stage and he'll do a million lifts! run to him, girls!"

indeed the effect was impressive, at least according to the audience - i heard from a lot of my male classmates that they couldn't believe michael (nerdy mathy dancer guy!) could catch all those women, over and over again. it looked exhausting. (it was exhausting. we had to feed and water michael at various points during the concert so he wouldn't pass out.)

but apparently the inspiration for this choreography was not mr. allen's overzealous desire to utilize his talented male dancer - at least not entirely. score another one for paul taylor.

it troubles me that only now, seven years later, do i realize where mr. allen was coming from with this choreography. even though he showed us the video. granted, he didn't explicitly say that he was pulling from "esplanade" while he was teaching us the movement, but it's not like he was masking his influences either. i can't believe i was so dense.

papa dance rep: we teased and trash-talked him, because he was insufferable sometimes. but i also learned a lot from him, and left lsmsa a stronger, better, relatively well-rounded dancer - and had the opportunity to study at the ailey school in manhattan the summer after i graduated - which certainly never would have happened if i hadn't left mount carmel.

and still when i do my ronde de jambes à terre, i think about that semester when i was his sole ballet II student - he could have dropped the class and had that hour and a half to himself before rep rehearsal - but he taught me, alone, because he knew how much my ballet classes meant to me. a few classes into the semester, he stopped me at barre, mid-ronde de jambe, and told me to relax my (scrunched-up) foot while passing through first.

"have you always done this?" he asked, semi-rhetorically. "how could i have missed it?"

i thought to myself, because in our four-person class, you were always paying attention to michael, or correcting anya, or ragging on katherine -

and he might have even answered his own question, a rare thoughtful moment, something to the effect of "i guess i'm usually watching the other students who need more corrections - but that's why this semester will be good for you" -

and all his ridiculous vocabulary that he learned (as michael discovered snooping in his office) from some Impress People By Memorizing One Huge Word A Day pocket-sized book. curvilinear, obstreperous, non sequitur - he liked to throw down a big word in rehearsal and scan our faces for recognition, even ask us if we knew what it meant - a BFA on a faculty of PhDs, we figured he was just insecure. he sometimes used his "vocab" words in the wrong context, which was confusing and hilarious, though we never laughed in his face. 

junior year there was a lot of tension in the company, and by the end of it, after concert, we were exhausted. he was always very considerate in requesting things of us - whenever a performance opportunity came up, he would sit us down and tell us about it and we would decide as a group if we wanted to do it. we were always game - except, about three weeks after concert, when martha kay asked if we would perform in magale hall for blue and gold day. when he told us about it, we all exchanged glances and said we would rather not. we were tired, and the stage in magale - a concert hall - was slippery and too small. we didn't want to do it. he said he understood.

then he came back a week later and said we were doing blue and gold day and he didn't want to hear any complaints. it was so out of character for him to make a demand like this, and we knew we had been within our rights to abstain from the performance, and he didn't explain (until much later) that martha kay had basically told him that he didn't have a choice and we didn't have a choice and we were going to do blue and gold day, period. he was probably just frustrated at the administration's continued lack of understanding and respect for the arts in the school.

but all we got from him was "get your costumes together, and i want you to come in tomorrow during the day and double-check to make sure everything is here."

so we did. and the following afternoon at rehearsal, he told us to re-check our costumes. we told him we had already checked our costumes, that we had come in during the day, like he said, so we didn't see why we needed to do it yet again.

he was practically foaming at the mouth, he was so pissed that we were back-talking (which we were - like i said, it was a tense year) - and he sputtered that for dancers not to check their costumes - why, it was just - it was a non sequitur.

we were standing around the barre where the costumes were hung, in pissy silence, and anya hissed, "i can't take it anymore. i'm gonna ask him - i'm gonna ask him what does non sequitur mean."

michael looked at her. "he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. he uses 'non sequitur' when he's trying to say that he doesn't understand something. this is a non sequitur, anya: one...two...three...blue."

and we rolled our eyes in ballet class when mr. allen told us about the energy flow in our battements, how it came from underneath our leg and went up in the air and circled back down -

but at barre a year later, with a different teacher, i suddenly got what he was talking about.

and i know now that what teachers tell you in class is just a recitation of what their teachers told them, the technique and the imagery passed down, echoed, and so on, and so on,

in dance class you are never alone.

you will never fail at love.

i think i might submit a piece to nola art/lit magazine constance. it's edited by two guys i know through becca, one of whom she dated and one of whom i went on dates with. this is either a pro or a con, or neither.

becca had mentioned the other day that erik (her ex) had invited her to submit work for the second issue, which we agreed was very sweet/professional of him. (it was a semi-dramatic break-up.) i was googling around at work today and came across the website, which says the submit deadline is september fifteenth. i hadn't even considered submitting anything until i saw the deadline. in fact i've never considered submitting anything anywhere. the theme is "delicate burdens" (translated as "what everyday life is like in new orleans"). delicate burdens is maybe not the way i would put it, but i think it's a good idea as far as themes go. or maybe just inevitable.

so i thought i could submit something from my journal, which is, at times, a fair chronicle of what everyday life is like in new orleans, right. i came here and looked at my categories and realized i didn't have anything called "new orleans," which i guess i could have used to label katrina-related posts. then i considered that it's kind of stupid for someone from new orleans living in new orleans to have a category called "new orleans." that's like having a category called "my day," or something.

anyway. the post i think would be most relevant for submission is "broken city," from 9/12/06. i think i would retitle it (probably "there's a you-shaped hole in my dancing heart," which is actually the name of a post from a few days later). i made up a draft with proper caps and cut out a couple of lines to make it easier to read. the thing is, i like this post and i also think it's not particularly good writing. i find it (have always found it) a little bit repetitive and tedious. not the content, necessarily, but the diction. so i sent it out to a few good readers and have already gotten feedback or promises from: ben, becca, barrett.

anyone reading this, feel free to check out the old (unedited) post and let me know what you think. becca has suggested some alternate posts as well. (for the record, i feel funny/uneasy about trying to write something fresh about life in new orleans. not only have i not lived there since march, but i also feel like no one in new orleans actually spends time contemplating the state of affairs unless they absolutely have to. mostly we're pretending [in order] to get by. to sit down and 'write about' new orleans, like on purpose, in a reflective summative way, feels totally unnatural to me, considering the whole city necessarily operates in a state of bizarre denial. the journal/snapshot format feels more authentic.)

anyway. barrett said, via email:

i like it (probably b/c of the name drops).  just put it into context that it was a journal entry w/ a short preface.  in (slight) contextualizing you might also have to do something about the namedrops too.

how many words is it now?  if you have space i'd update & mention that you're now going to spain for a year & mention how you feel about it - writing should be concise & natural.  There might not be room for that, & as it stands i think you could get the piece in w/ very little editing.  but, if there's a theme at all - in cnxn w/ the theme of the issue, it feels like things are still up in the air as it's just a snap shot.  I like that.

that being said, adding an update could be more "honest" (for constance) & hits closer to relevance for the current state of affairs for the city.  you are one of nola's artists & you're on your way out for some reason. maybe watching to see what happens in the future - things were up in the air a yr ago & they are still there now 4 u at least.  i think you can update it w/o putting too much forced closure on the issue & not losing the things that i like about it.  but can you do it w/in 1500 words?

anyway, good piece

i saw him on gchat later:

ann: you really don't think it's boring?
or stupid?
barrett: none of those things came to mind while reading. then i tried to imagine myself reading the constance magazine
ann: and it became stupid and boring?
barrett: no
& i imagined i would read something like that about as often as i read a harpers
ann: which is never?
i like harper's, actually
i would subscribe to it if i actually paid for things like that
barrett: almost never. i know you do. so i decided i would enjoy reading your article
ann: mostly i'm interested in submitting because i think there's a fair chance i could get in
and i'm also interested in submitting because i actually felt like i could submit something, and that never happens
barrett: & that i would probably be reading the magazine in the bathroom, & i would stay to finish your article even if it took an extra minute or 2
ann: hahahahaha
that's so sweet of you
seriously
the dog behind my house howls with the trains
even before the train comes he starts howling really weird
because he's making train noise
barrett: he has a friend
or she
ann: yeah
the first time i heard it i was like what the fuck is wrong with that dog
and brett was like, i think he's....making the same noise as the train?
and i was like, haha yeah maybe
but then he did it again a few nights later and it was before i even heard the train
he is definitely saying what's up to his train friend
barrett: i tried to howl to a coyote the other night
ann: fuck you
are you kidding
were you drunk?
barrett: no - it was silly. i was on my bike on the way home & he was crossing the path <50 ft in front of me & started to move away so i made one of the most pathetic attempts to make a dog noise
he slowed a little
ann: hahahaha
barrett: so you are going to submit that thing eventually right?
ann: yeah
barrett: good
ann: i'll be proud
barrett: me too

sube

i haven't really been in the writing mood. i am in hardcore grad school waiting mode and it makes me feel like i do after i turn a story in for workshop but before i get comments: stalled.

last week i went to paris and gent to visit breton and see dirty dozen. it was a good trip. there are many things to say about it. here are two.

-- i'm proud of myself for going to gent alone and having a good time.
-- i'm proud of myself for riding bikes (for the first time in ten years) with breton in paris and eating brie. and then buying brie last night at hipercor. it's so much cheaper than parmesan! not like they're comparable cheeses. it's just that i didn't eat parmesan until recently either - when i made that asparagus risotto, i think. time to bust that recipe out again..

monday night i got through an entire pointe class with my shoes on.

my teacher (miss shannon, though i call her shannon now) put me on pointe when i was nine and a half, i think. i was a little bit young but i was a good student and pretty strong. the teachers whispered that i reminded them of shannon when she was little. miss barbara was disappointed that she wasn't the one to promote me to pointe - she said it would have been soon. i was shaking when shannon said she thought i was ready - i must have asked her after saturday class, even though you're not supposed to do that. (can you imagine? it would be like, after every class, every kid comes up to you and wants to know if they can go on pointe now.) and i was expecting her to say "soon, but not yet."

my first shoes were capezio pavlovas. they were that dark pink satin, very small and very hard. beginner shoes are supposed to be hard, to support your feet while your ankles are still figuring stuff out. but i could never manage to make an arch in mine. i probably didn't weigh enough to break the shoes in. the teachers told my mom they wanted to take the shoes off my feet and break them in for me. they were like little bricks.

we weren't allowed to wear lambswool and this was years before bunhead pads. we were permitted one paper towel sheet to cut down on friction. when the gel pad came out, miss debbie let us use those. i don't know what the difference was between that and lambswool, but we all got the pads, despite the argument that they make it harder to feel the floor. mostly i notice it's harder to point my toes because they're half-numb - your shoes over the pads really squeeze the hell out of your feet. but i had a hard time getting past the bourreé exercises with just the paper towel - you can feel the 'hot spots' forming, even with tape on your toes.

in the year or so before i got on pointe, the studio had a chart on the wall noting the progress of all the students. at the intermediate level there are lots of little advancements. two ballonné, two pas de basque was to see if you could jump high enough off one leg to clear a few inches (marked at the bottom of the pole in the center of the studio) and get a fully pointed foot on the jumping leg. this got you promoted to beats. soubresaut, royale, entre che quatre, and échappe batu (aka 'back-out-front-back'). we were obsessed with the chart. i used to stare at it and wonder at the pointe promotions. two feet on the barre, one foot on the barre, two feet on the floor, one foot on the floor. i didn't understand why one foot on the barre was harder than two. how could you even put both feet on the barre? this wasn't gymnastics.

it turns out that they were referring to how you get up on your toes. you start off doing exercises while holding onto the barre - going up on two feet at the same time, at first. then you move to piqués, a 'one-footed' traveling exercise, but you get to stick your foot out and step directly onto pointe. then you progress to 'one-footed' relevés. this is when you start from both feet in fifth position, but then you bring one foot up to passé (at your knee), and you go up to pointe by 'rolling through' the other foot. so most of the burden of getting up is on that one foot.

then you start all over again, without holding onto the barre.

so i moved merrily along, trying not to grip the barre too hard during the exhausting bourreé exercises, doing my relevés in center, the whole deal. then we got to pointe turns. it's the same: 'two-footed' pointe turns (doubleés, assemblé turns), 'one-footed' piqué turns, and then pirouettes, which come out of that one-footed relevé. i was fine until pirouettes. pirouettes scared the shit out of me. it's hard enough to get up on one foot, but turning?

this is where it all went wrong.

at most studios, there is a designated pointe class once a week, where all the combinations are geared toward pointe work. the rest of the week you get to dance on flat and work your general technique. but at my studio, once you're on pointe, that's it. you wear your shoes every class. the downside of this practice is that it's frustrating - when you're starting out, you just can't do stuff as well on pointe as you can on flat. you can do double pirouettes in ballet slippers, but you can barely manage a single on pointe. even standing flat is harder in pointe shoes. the soles of the shoes make it harder to balance. so you spend a few years looking terrible at everything. on the other hand, we were stronger on pointe, and smoother at it, than girls at other studios. the girls at my baton rouge studio are light years ahead of where we were technique-wise, but i'm startled at how awkward they look in pointe class.

i was eleven or twelve, and i was scared and frustrated, and i pretty much hit a wall. i stopped wearing my pointe shoes every class. i would start again when we got close to recital time, but by then i was weaker than the other girls, and they eventually passed me up. to get promoted to fouettés, you had to be able to do sixteen tour fini (pirouettes from fifth) right and left, on pointe. i didn't wear pointe shoes, so i was stuck at the barre doing fouetté preparation exercises. i think i did my first fouetté when i was sixteen, in natchitoches, where we didn't wear pointe shoes at all. that was the beginning of my ballet renaissance, sort of. my classes at lsmsa were the first experience i had with another style of teaching - no set barre, no set center work. it's not as good for endurance, but there's no way not to pay attention. i picked up steps faster. i improved my turnout. i discovered that i had above-average balance. i learned how to use my head and arms. fuck pointe shoes. i had a lot of polishing to do.

but after lsmsa, and ailey, and years at the baton rouge studio, and years with the lsu dance ensemble, i got to be pretty polished looking. i'm a decent dancer. the baton rouge studio and another new orleans studio asked me repeatedly to audition with them. except - you have to dance on pointe. and i don't. so no dice.

this is sort of humiliating. what kind of ballet dancer doesn't dance on pointe? i could switch to modern, except...i'm scared of what we do in modern, too. barrel rolls scare me. shoulder rolls scare me. the floor terrifies me.

so i get to granada and i find a ballet studio. pointe class is on monday. i didn't bring my shoes last semester, so i took class on flat. but i noticed that the other girls didn't look that hot on pointe. honestly they're not exceptionally good in general, but they work hard and they're mostly proficient. i am one of the strongest students in the class. the girls really are nice to me, but usually no one feels very affectionately towards the stranger who drops into class and shows everyone up. if i do a triple turn, everyone watches but no one nods.

in baton rouge, i wanted so badly to dance with the company that i tried to get back to pointe. the class is on fridays. i was dancing with level VII/VIII but i went to the level V pointe class at 4:30. that's a shitty time to get over to bluebonnet, and a shitty day for a pointe class. i went a handful of times and even bought a new pair of shoes (i hadn't realized how dead my old ones were; getting up to pointe is so much easier with arch and box support!). but dancing with ten year olds is depressing, even though i was much stronger than they were. and i was still scared. still.

so i'm watching the girls in my class in spain and thinking, i could take this class. i could try to dance on pointe with these girls and not feel really bad about myself. although then i would bust my reputation of being the good dancer. on the other hand, maybe they would like me more if they saw how much i struggle with pointework.

when i went home for christmas, i found my pointe shoes and begged bunhead pads off of catherine. i did something to my achilles tendon right when i got back to granada, so i held off on pointe class for about a month. and then i got sick and missed a week. but i've been wearing my shoes at barre on mondays and thursdays for about four weeks. the first two classes i couldn't even get all the way up over my shoes. it was hard not to feel like i just suck at pointe and have ugly feet with no arches. by the third class my shoes were decently broken in and i was all the way up on them. after ten years, it actually hurt the muscles in the front of my foot to make an arch. i decided there was hope. sylvia saw me taking my shoes off after the barre and ribbed me a little. i told her i wasn't ready for center yet.

but then i saw a youtube video about the etoiles of the paris royal opera ballet and they had a bunch of close-ups of the dancers' feet on pointe, doing boureés and stuff. and you know what. they didn't have perfect banana feet the whole time they were on pointe. sometimes they didn't even look like they were totally up over their toes.

and then i was walking back from the bus stop, i don't remember where i was coming from, but i decided i just needed to stop being scared. i needed to stop freezing up every time i went on relevé. it's not that much further to get from demi-pointe to pointe. i needed to stop thinking about it and just do it.

so on monday i did it. i got through the barre and kept my shoes on and did all of center. everyone was watching. the teacher was literally craning her neck around to watch me do the exercises. (every time she looked, i fell off pointe. typical.) i did relevés instead of pirouettes (my old nemesis - i'm still not ready for those turns). but i did do these sissone relevé things, which is when you kind of glide into an arabesque from one foot - it's not an easy thing to do. you're pretty much going up on one foot without even starting from fifth. and then i did piqué and assemblé turns from the corner. i told the girl from portugal - i think her name is marta - that i was going to have to go half-time. she laughed and said yeah, and you'll finish with a perfect double turn. they really do think i'm the freakishly good dancer in the class, which is crazy and nice. i didn't do any double turns, but i did the exercise up to speed. and then class was over and i took off my shoes and admired the way my taped toes make me look like a real dancer.