Now and Then My Country

My apologies. I am nostalgic tonight.

A series of events:

At 9:30 this morning I listened to a student explain to his class what a “mosh pit” was.

A line in a play. My voice with no air behind it, just my heartbeat pushing it through.

Feeling the limits of motion I have made for myself. I am so timid these days.

I traded in, traded up, grew up. I no longer wear home-made shirts that declare
TESTOSTERONE KILLS BRAIN CELLS
SUPPORT ABORTION
or
BEWARE OF GOD, but I also don’t raise my voice, not intentionally anyway. When I stopped looking at my body, I also stopped doing anything that might cause anyone else to look. I discovered inhibition and called it restraint. I wasn’t always afraid of looking stupid. I have taught myself fear and called it reason.

At 11:45 I realized that my 10 year college reunion will happen this year.

A girl with long, straight, hair, and her shirt buttoned just one button off. I am stuck with an image of myself, jeans and a flannel shirt and no shoes. The shirt is a reddish-brown plaid, heavy and slightly scratchy. I took it out of my father’s closet; it is too small for him and too big for me. I am not wearing a bra. I still think that no one can tell. I feel such a strange, wry, affection for this girl, who I envy and pity, who just doesn't know yet.

wanting

That's why I am so offended when I am told that I am the "least motivated person [she] knows." Because everything that I am proud of, everything that I care about, is wiped away by that sentence. They no longer exist. If, as I believe, success = motivation + willpower + forces out of our control, then without motivation there is no success. First one must want, and then one must try, and then, if one is lucky, one gets. Without motivation, everything I have done is something that simply happened. It was not willed or wanted, it just was. So all of the things I am happy about today? I didn't do anything to make them happen. I didn't even want them.

All of the things I am proud of from the last four years -- the going back to school, uprooting my life and making a new one, trying over and over, despite constant failure, to date, learning how to confront substantial addictions and eating disorders and be healthy for the first time in my 30 years of life, finding the courage to show people the ugliest parts of myself because I think it should be done, graduating with the best grades I've ever gotten in my life, trying and trying and trying and finally succeeding in getting a job in my field in a place I'd like to stay, in a community I've built around me-- I believe that I wanted these things. I believe if I didn't want them, they wouldn't have happened.

To suggest that I am unmotivated is to negate all of that. Either it didn't happen the way I think it did, or it happened, it just isn't very much. It shows motivation, but so much less than everyone else. So my accomplishments aren't negated, just diminished. They are worth less, somehow, than those around me. I am diminished, and I do not like it.

twinkle, twinkle, stomp

Yesterday Felicia told me that she's been using one of my essays in the class she teaches, and one of her students wrote an amazing essay in response to mine, and when praised, the student said, "I only did it that way because Angela did it that way."

Today I finally got the code figured out. I have a subway system that knows when you're underground, and if you're underground, it knows what car you're standing in, and can take you with the car when it moves, and let you get off the car at the next stop. I figured it out by myself, by putting together badly written on-line tutorials, and guessing and checking and guessing again, because everyone else -- including the professor -- said it couldn't be done. And I fucking did it. Have I told you how much I hate coding? I stayed late, and I came in on weekends, and I CODED that fucker.

And when I showed Monica, she said, "You know, in a few years we're going to need a new faculty member. You should start putting your work out."

I finally got through to the parts of File Maker I needed, so now I've got that started. And I've been redesigning the categories and it feels like a fresh, better start. I already have a dozen more charts in mind. I think it's going in the infographics fad kind of way, and I think I'm done fighting it.

At HSF I remembered what it felt like to feel really, bodily, good. So I've been tweaking back my bedtime and tweaking forward my waketime, and adding more walking to my day.

a complete list of adjectives I have used to describe myself to strangers, and how often I have used them

(click on image for full size)

Someday to be a web page with rollover captions.

everything

Sometimes, stars really do align. Sometimes, every coin lands heads-up. Sometimes, the world is the way it should be.

If you've learned anything from this blog in the last month or two, it's that I care about communication. Dance, like everything else, is about communication, except it's not the kind that moves from breath to teeth to tongue, it's the communication between the cup of my fingers, curled down, and the cup of his fingers, curled up. It's the communication between his rib cage and mine, between my toes and my shoes, between my shoes and the floor, between the fabric of my skirt and the air it swings through.

And for three minutes, last night, I understood everything.

note to self: Andrew Kuo

Girls (as already established) are Scary. I err on the side of boring when scared. Thus, a vicious cycle is started.




Then I try to counter previous boring-ness with rant about melons.

I needed to host this somewhere so I could post to Ravelry

So here you go.


fig.1 (bewbs, 2007)




fig 2. (bewbs, TONIGHT)


Note that the left bewb is SIGNED BY JOHN WATERS.