Yeah... I'm so not updating this blog. After years of "View source", editing raw HTML, and then FTP'ing the blog back up, I am finally entering
the 21st century, where keeping a blog is not reserved for HTML web nerds, where posting a blog involves typing/spewing words and then hitting "Post",
where friends can comment on blog entries. It's time. Anyway, for those of you who didn't actually join myspace in order to see what Pammy is up to,
I discovered that you can see my blog there even if you are not a myspace member. Here is
the link. Beware... I am more open on myspace than I have been here. Because it is a younger crowd there, I don't censor myself as much.
So if you are easily offended by swearing or by the odd melange that is my faith, well, you were warned.
P.S. Myspace is having some issues this week because of a power failure where their servers are, but it should be more reliable soon.
What a naughty blog monkey I have been. I didn't even tell you guys that I made it into that troupe! So now I am awash in
a sea of rehearsing, learning new choreographies, buying goodies (like a sword to balance on my head), and making costumes.
The women in the troupe are fantastic. Between the troupe and restarting my drum classes, I am feeling blissfully plugged in to
my communities. And spring has sprung, so days are sunny and green instead of cold and gray. My mood is up!! I never thought
I had seasonal affective crapola, but maybe years of living in California has rendered me unable to tolerate the gray days of winter.
Two more things of note: For those of you who can't get enough of me, check out Johnny's new
photo blog. Second, if you are on myspace, look me up. I have a blog there too that gets updated
considerably more often than this one.
So I'm thinking it's finally time to audition for a belly dance troupe. Some of you might remember the last time I
considered this. A week before auditions, I was doing a sort of spinning move with no dance shoes on and my foot stuck a
bit to the floor. Well, foot stays in one position, 200+ pounds of body weight keeps spinning, leg takes the brunt and
suffice it to say that I didn't audition that week. But my leg is all better, and my confidence is up a bit for some reason.
Also, I just finished choreographing my first dance with my sis, and it should be a pretty good audition piece. I am going
to get some feedback on the dance in a week or so, and then look out world! Here comes a new bellylicious darling!
So here's the other issue I have been pondering lately. When is a person ready to teach beginners? I am not the world's best
belly dancer, but I can hold my own, and I certainly have the skills to teach beginners to get their groove on. It's odd.
Two or three years ago, a psychic told me that she saw me in a teaching capacity with my dance. (I was decked as a belly dancer at the
time, so the dancing aspect did not require any special psychic talent). I laughed at her, thinking it was profoundly
unlikely, and at the time, it was. I had only been belly dancing for a year or so, and I was in the Bay Area, where you
can't swing a veil without hitting fourteen belly dancers more talented than me. But now I am in Maryland, where I drive 45 minutes
for my dance class, and you can swing an awful lot of veils and hit no belly dancers at all. Also, I have started taking
doumbek lessons from this guy, and he is a great teacher, and I just found out that he's only been playing doumbek for
two years. So why not me? Do I have it in me to teach dance? The beauty of someone like me as a teacher is that I think I
could make a truly fun class that would be great exercise where people would learn the basics of belly dance. And because I
am no toothpick, maybe other women of size would not be intimidated to come out and get a fabulous shimmy sweat going. And I don't
know... it could be really fun.
Another holiday season has come and gone. We had a wonderful time, and our new house decorates beautifully for Christmas.
It also has tons and tons of space for family and visiting friends to sleep. We had a blissfully full house on Thanksgiving and
Christmas. Another perk to the new locale? We woke up on Christmas morning in our own beds... visions of English muffin
breakfast sandwiches dancing in our heads. And we also got a chance to see more of our fabuloso California friends, so that
always makes us happy. As for what's going on... not much... Elise is gorgeous and perfect, of course. You can see many many photos
at Palmerzone.net. I leave in about 6 weeks for my first installment of taketina
teacher training, and I am starting to get really excited about that. I have finally found a drum class (or two actually) out
here, so those classes will start up soon. And I am getting my groove on with exercise at last in a new kind of class called
YogaRhythmics, that is half yoga, half dance. On the downside, if you read the word of the week, you will know that I am feeling
strange about my jobless state. It's wonderful and a great luxury for me to be able to take the time to figure out what the
next chapter of my life will hold.
On the other hand, decorating is expensive and landscaping is expensive and setting up my glass studio is expensive and maybe
this luxury is not one we can afford. Speaking of expensive, John and I are officially trying to get pregnant, so maybe
I would be better off waiting on the next big career move. It's a tricky one. But while I figure it out, it feels really good
to be doing the work to put my graduate school years to rest, and I am grateful to have the chance to do the soul-searching I
should have done years ago to figure out what I want to be when I grow up.
OK, OK, nine months is a new record, even for me. But when you keep a blog for as long as I have, there are bound to be some gaps.
And I have been giving y'all some quickies every 2 months or so on the poorly and over-ambitiously named
Word of the Week page, but apparently you want to be wooed with more inner thoughts and pithy turns
of phrase rather than... OK, sorry, much as I would like to continue the "quickie" and "wooed" metaphor by describing the quickie in lush detail, I feel
that I must let go of the metaphor out of respect for some of my readers who simply don't want to hear that sort of thing. Aaaaannnyway, settle in boys
and girls. Time for the tale of the last nine months.
We bought the house in Maryland and moved across the country at the end of March. Everyone in my universe promptly asked me what I would be doing in
Maryland. Now the truth is that I had hoped to sit home and write my novel and make jewelry and eat bon-bons, but what I decided to do was continue
in my old job, telecommuting to Stanford, until either they found someone new or I decided I could not possibly run another ROC analysis. The money was
just so nice, and I knew how to do the job. Unfortunately, despite the extra time I gained (time I would have been spending in rather pointless
meetings), I found that I didn't have the spare time I wanted to work on my creative pursuits. Once the not inconsiderable excitement of redecorating
an entire new home wore off, I started to feel like nothing had really changed except that I was at home alone all day, and couldn't even see my friends
at night. I missed (and still miss) the Bay Area more than I ever imagined. I miss my friends and all of the people on the street who could have been
my friends. Here in Maryland, surrounded by people who are profoundly unlike me, it is much harder to do something so simple as Be Myself. To be perfectly
honest, these have been a dark six months for me.
The brightest light in this time has been seeing my sister and my new beautiful niece. I never imagined
that I could love someone else's spawn quite as much as I love this little munchkin. It may have something to do with the fact that she has my eyebrows...
Have you ever noticed how my eyebrows come to a point in the center when I raise them? Hers do that too. And for a while she had my face-shape and my
mouth. She is not my baby, but I was there for (all of the gory detail of) her birth, and she shares enough of my genes that I am evolutionarily required
to love her madly. And I do. When I talk to Bec on the speaker phone, Elise smiles and grabs the phone. Sometimes she even talks or sings to me. She
is one cool kid.
Once I stopped feeling sorry for myself, I started seeking out more drum and dance opportunities. The drumming has been harder to find out here than I
thought, but the belly dancing has been great. I am considering at some point auditioning for a troupe. I was all set to audition a couple of months ago,
but I did some weird thing to my calf muscle in a dance class when a pivoting movement went horribly wrong. I still couldn't walk when the audition
day came and went, and I took that as a sign from the universe that it wasn't the right time for me. But I am starting to get the performing bug. I
thought I was immune to that bug, but it turns out I'm not. Who knew?
OK, that brings us to a few weeks ago, when Johnny and I took John's mom to Italy. Her family was from there, but she had never been there (or anywhere in
Europe), so we figured the time was right for that. We spent 5 days in Rome and 5 days in Praiano, a town 20 minutes on the crazy winding road from Positano,
near Capri on the Amalfi Coast. It was quite close to a perfect trip. Our hotel in Rome was convenient to all of the sites, and we had a view from our
suite of the Coliseum. Lit up at night, it was a magical view. Rome was a bit crowded for me, but I enjoyed some of the ruins we saw further away from the
beaten paths. Without 5,000 people swarming about, some of these places were quite beautiful and led to lovely flights of imagination. And Praiano... wow.
The water and the views, the food, the shopping in Positano and Sorrento, the sunsets. Watching a sunset over the water that changes every minute from
my balcony while reading a book in my pajamas with a belly full of mozzarella and tomatoes. I mean, come on. That's my kind of vacation, you know what I'm
saying?
So then I came back to find that Stanford had found someone else for my job. When I came out to Maryland, they asked me to give them lots of notice if
I wanted to leave the position, and they said they would give me the same courtesy. Well, turns out that their version of "lots of notice" is 2 weeks. To
add insult to injury, I was in Italy for one of those weeks so I came back and checked e-mail on Monday to find out from a cold and cursory e-mail that
Friday was my last day. Not exactly what I had hoped to hear after an extravagant vacation in Italy. Well, c'est la vie, and a big fangul to them. I am on
to better things...
...which brings me to my latest trip. Now I know I have raved about taketina in this blog before.
Well, the new round of the 3-year teacher training just
began, and I had been on the fence for months about whether or not I would apply. It's a lot of money, a lot of time, a huge commitment, and kind of scary.
It's also an amazing opportunity, a chance to really grow and evolve, and frankly, my heart just said to do it. So I went out to California for the
selection workshop where they decided who would begin the training. One of my fears was that I was not sure whether Reinhard, the founder of taketina,
would be the right teacher for me. Any doubts on that issue were completely erased by the extraordinary workshop. With all the emotion of the past
months, I was probably primed for an intense experience, but nothing could have prepared me for the exquisite beauty of the experience I had on the
second afternoon of the workshop. It is not something that is easy to describe, but it involves oneness and openness, and most of all, love. I
expected to break down into the tears that have come so easily since I moved out to Maryland. I did not expect to be transported to a complete state of
rapture. I was still coming down from this experience when all of the candidates were asked to make a firm commitment as to whether or not they were
prepared to enter the training. Several people sang their yes responses, still blissed out from the journey. One person said "I do." Me, pupils dilated
and barely verbal? I just said "yes". But there were so many of us, and I had gotten to know little bits about most of the other candidates. I thought
there would be some "ego drummers" and the like... people who were clearly wrong for and/or not ready for the training. But every other person in the
group had something extraordinary to offer. My understanding was that about half of us would need to be cut to keep the class size at the 20-25 it had
always been in the past. As my taketina buzz wore off, I began to feel very sad that some people in the group might not get to move forward into the
training. I actually considered withdrawing my application so that perhaps one more of these extraordinary people might be let in. They already felt
like a family to me. The next day, Reinhard and Cornelia brought us together and told us that they had decided to take all of us into the training. Most
people cheered and hugged each other. I sat there like a freak and just cried, not because I had "gotten in"--I had already come to terms with either
outcome and was prepared for the universe's answer--but because Reinhard and Cornelia had seen what I had seen, that there was simply no way to tell half
of these beautiful, extraordinary, talented individuals that they could not follow their hearts and become taketina teachers. Taketina often makes me
feel very grateful, and I was overwhelmed by gratitude when they made the announcement. Someone came over to me from the group. Despite feeling like these
people are family, I don't know them all by name yet. I don't remember this person's name, but I know his smile and his eyes. I laughed at myself and
the tears streaking down my face and said, "I am such a freak," or something like that. He smiled warmly and said, "Well, you are about to be a
freak with a hug." I love these people. I can't wait to walk on this path with them, and I can't wait to see where the path will take me. It is
hard to imagine that I will ever be completely calm and comfortable leading a group in call and response singing, or leading them in the kinds of
journeys that can bring such torrents of emotion. That is part of what makes it so exciting to imagine the kinds of work and transformation that will
come in the next few years to take me from where I am now, to the person I will be at the end of the training.
This past year has been one of shake-up, of transition, of confusion. But I feel the light starting to come back. I still miss my Bay Area buds
desperately, but I am starting to feel more comfortable again in who I am. I can be the crazy hippie down the street who doesn't drive an SUV and goes
to belly dance classes instead of to Curves. That's just who I am. It's good to be back.
Little update on my dad... he's doing really well, and was released from the hospital today. Now comes the challenge of the lifestyle change... but he's OK.
Yay!
Oh, P.S. Pictures of the house we have a contract on in Maryland are here.
Lest you all complain that I have not been updating my blog, well, pipe down. The new info has been quickie updates using my "Word of the week" page.
The newest one is on my main page and the archives are located here.
Look in the archives for pictures from Bec's sonograms and other info. But this week, indeed the past two months, have been bigger and just
more than any one word of the week could encompass. It all started on Thanksgiving weekend. We had a delicious Thanksgiving meal at Zorina's
house, and then went home, anticipating smooth sailing through the usual three-legged two-family Christmas trip.
Then Friday night, we ran into our real estate agent at the movie theater. (We went to see the new Bridget Jones movie.)
He told us that a house down the street from us, a house that had been completely
gutted--no floors, no countertops, toilets not installed--had gone for almost as much as we were hoping to get for our house and that we should jump into
the market if we could. At this point, we had not 100% decided to move to Maryland, but we were probably about 95%. Saturday night, we met with him to
discuss it and outline a plan. We decided to make it a go. The next 48 hours, to put it mildly, just sucked. We packed up about half of our belongings,
basically anything that was not enclosed in a cabinet or closet (including all of my glass studio and jewelry stuff!!). Our agent mobilized inspections,
house cleaners, window washers, hardwood floor refinishers, landscapers, painters... These people descended on our house in order to prepare it for the
realtor open house on Tuesday. After Tuesday, we had people coming through our house on a regular basis until Saturday and Sunday, when we
took our kitties to a cat-friendly hotel and stayed there while 200 people traipsed through for the open houses. Another week of random people coming
by at random hours and then that Friday, December 10th, we heard offers. We had 8 offers, and I was very surprised to see that most people included
a letter, or pictures of their kids, or something to try to make us sympathetic to their offer. The oddest thing was that our realtor brought his wife
over to show her the place, and she fell in love with it. Even though they hadn't been looking to move, they wound up making an offer on the place too,
so we had a different agent hear offers with us. The highest two offers, one of which was our agent, were within 2% of each other, so we went back to both
and told them to give their best offer. The other woman who had been one of the top jumped her offer up quite a bit and wound up getting the place. It
went for more than John or I even could have imagined, but given how high all of the offers were, it was about what the other realtors expected. Almost all
of the offers were more than 100,000 over the asking price. What a crazy market! If you're keeping count, yes, this was less than 2 weeks from the time we
saw our agent at the movies until we had a signed contract. We close at the end of January, and are staying in the house (rent free - can you say seller's
market??) until the end of March.
OK, a week of settling down from that and packing and Christmas shopping, and then we flew to Florida to spend Christmas with John's family,
which was lovely. Kaitlyn is getting really big. Tiffany
(John's brother's oldest daughter) got engaged. Lots of good stuff. Then we came up to Maryland and New Jersey. My cousin Jen got married on New
Year's Eve. I wore blinky shoes. Then things started to get really nuts. John and I decided to try to find a house while we were in Maryland. We looked
at a few houses and then went up to New Jersey to see Lori (who got a fabulous new house!!), Gaby (who is preggo again), and Eric (who was having
a band rehearsal, which rocked, and whose house made me very nostalgic for my old Rutgers days). Eric's friends were very very cool. We had a little poker
tournament and I didn't even get mad when I lost. I liked them a lot. We slept on the floor and tried to sleep through music and general merriment. Very
Rutgers... very fabulous... we are very old. :) Then we got back down to Bec and Brian's and spent all day every day for 4 days driving around with
an agent (oh yeah, somewhere in that time we found an agent in Maryland) looking at houses. Each fell in love with a different
place... indecision... badness... Paid to extend our trip for a few days. Then we found the house. We put in a bid, which was just accepted yesterday
after some negotiation. Very exciting! Went to Bec's sonogram on our way to the airport (literally, the bags were in the car and we went straight from
the appointment to the airport). Found out the sex of her baby (I was right!). Flew home.
Unfortunately, we're not done.
The day after we arrived home, I got an instant message at work from Eric. My dad was in the hospital with chest pains. That was yesterday. Turns out
he had a relatively minor heart attack. He had surgery and one stent put in. I talked to him on the phone and he seemed OK. But then at 9:30 last night
my mom called. He had another heart attack, and was back in surgery. They put in two more stents. Everyone seems to be saying that he'll be fine. But
seriously, this is just about the scariest thing. It's awful. Bec is heading up to be with my parents tomorrow. I am debating whether to fly back again.
I just got back, and I'll be there in a month for closing on the house, but maybe I should go now. I wish we had delayed the trip one more day...
I'd already be there if we had. In a way, I feel that if I don't go, it means I think
he'll be fine and if I go, it means I think he might not be fine. But maybe he just needs his kids around him now. Maybe he just needs to rest. I'm going
to try to get the vibe from Bec once she is up there. I am hoping she'll get a sense of what he and my mom need. I just need to believe that he is going
to be fine.
So everyone be nice to me, OK?
Whew... busy times. Last time we spoke, I was lamenting my second voice lesson. The lessons progressed very nicely after
that blog entry, and I am actually developing kind of a cool voice. Unfortunately, my voice teacher is abruptly without
a car, so lessons are on temporary hiatus until we can find another solution. But lest you worry that our fearless
heroine is sitting home with nothing to do, never fear. I have started a new "global beats" dance class (mostly Caribbean
and African music and movements) with an excellent teacher, Deanna Anderson. Azar, my old belly dance teacher, moved away,
and the new woman they found to take her place at Stanford just wasn't cutting the mustard for me, so I am really
grateful to have found Deanna's class. In addition to cardio (yay!! fun cardio!!), the movements we do are
strength-building for quads, back, and back of the shoulders. Belly dance was strength-building for abs, obliques,
butt, and front of the shoulder. If you put em together, you get a damn fine core strength training workout in addition
to the cardio. I need to find a new belly dance teacher. I just found out today that Deanna and Zorina are going to
start a drum-and-dance class together. Need I tell you that I am so psyched about this? Um, what else...
I head off to Vegas for the weekend, and um... well, there's other news regarding some people close to me, but it is not my
news to tell, so I guess that's it for now. (I know... so mean!! I'll spill all here as soon as I have permission.)
How the mighty have fallen. My voice teacher took my consonants away. (BooHoo) Apparently we moved much too far too fast, and my lesson yesterday was very
challenging for both student and teacher. Lots of time was spent on the floor breathing in to the back of my neck and out my third eye, and singing vowel
sounds to try to vibrate the floor (which I
did manage to do a few times--it's very cool). It's so interesting. It's like last week, the little singing fairy came in and touched my throat with
her wand so I could see what my voice *could* sound like. Then she came in this week and touched it again so I would have to actually work hard for it like
everyone else. So I'm not a vocal genius... c'est la vie... but if my voice can sound even half as good as it did last week, I'll be psyched. The cool
thing is that when it was good, it was completely effortless. But in yesterday's lesson, I learned what a lot of effort can be expended trying to reach
the same place. I was exhausted afterwards, mentally and a little bit physically too. I went straight from there to my 3-hour drum class, where we worked
on improvisation and soloing. Pammy tired. Tonight is a special African dance workshop with AlalaDe Dreamer Frederick, flown in from New York to show
us crazy drummers how to move our bods in cool new ways. And then a party at a friend's house. Some days, I just don't have the energy for all the
stuff I plan for myself on the days when I have too much energy, ya know? I have two modes: on or off. When I was visiting Bec and Brian, I was
securely in the off position. Lots of sleeping in and watching TV. But when I am in on mode, even watching professional poker becomes boring, and I need
to go out and do stuff!! The trick is knowing which mode I'll be in on any given day. The other trick is balancing my on mode with the fact that
Johnny is much more on at work than I am, so he is more inclined to be in TV/lay mode at the end of the day than I am. Some days he just looks at me
from the couch as if he is exhausted just watching me. Some days I am exhausted just watching myself. Other days, I think... you know? I only get
one life, and if I spend it at work and on the couch, that's just not good enough for me. I feel like I am trying to fit a whole life into the cracks
around having a full-time job. Sometimes I wish I was one of those people who only need a few hours of sleep a night. But alas, after running hither
and yon every evening, I need my full 9-ish hours of beauty sleep. I would make an excellent rich person. I should play the lottery more. If I were
God, I'd give me millions in the lottery. I totally would.
As promised in today's word of the week entry, ego, here are some morsels to ponder and statements to use against me at a later date.
Rather than witty discussion or newsy updates, today you get a window into my more private journal. You get to watch me figure out why I am
the way I am, and wax poetic about it in a truly self-indulgent display. Enjoy...
Anyway, back to the fascinating topic at hand: me and my ego. There is something about drumming and
doing TaKeTiNa that brings ego stuff to the forefront. A lot of people struggle with ego as drummers. They want to
be good. They want to be heard. They want to play the hardest part, blah blah blah. I am no exception, but in some ways, my ego is oddly
underdeveloped. Depending on how well you know me (and for how long), it may come as a shock to you that I was painfully shy as a child.
Like, wouldn't look up out of the curtain of hair to say hello to someone level of shy. We're talking friggin shy. Somewhere around Junior High,
I pulled out of it. I learned how to be social the way some people learn statistics--by memorizing a set of rules but not really understanding them.
This is around the time I started pretending I was not as smart as I was. It seemed to go over well with people. I was easier to like if I said I
got a B rather than an A. I never actually threw my grades, but I hid them as best I could. Somewhere around my sophomore year of college, I realized
that the dumb blonde routine was no longer serving my needs. It made some people like me more, but not the people I wanted to like me. The people I
valued and respected were up-front about their abilities, and didn't understand why I hid mine to the extent that I did. Since then, with the exception
of a short blip at the start of grad school ("Oh my god, all of these people are smarter than me. No wait, they're not, they're just smart like
me.")... with the exception of that blip, I have gotten more and more comfortable with my ego. Maybe too comfortable.
On that note, here is a short list of all the ways in which I am fabulously talented: I started taking voice lessons recently and my teacher has been
very impressed with my progress. She even gave me two consonants and several more vowels in my
second lesson. (Funny, the metrics of success in weird specific interest groups like that). My drumming has progressed much faster than I
could ever have anticipated. I sat down to write a novel, and if I do say so myself, it is a damn fine novel! I make beads and jewelry, and they are really
pretty. And, I am even actually good at statistics. I find myself starting to think, for the first time in a long time, that I am actually pretty good at
things. I fear I am becoming an ego-maniac. But until just now, only John and Rebecca were privy to my "yay for me" proud moments. And if anyone else
pointed out something fabulous about me, I would feel really weird about it. It was OK for someone to say that a jewelry piece I had
made was pretty, but somehow if they complimented me specifically--like "You really have an artist's eye for color" or something like that--I
would shift instantly to self-deprecation mode. This is so bizarre, and something I feel like I need to figure out. Why can't I take a compliment (from
anyone other than myself)? What is it about being proud of myself that I find so unappealing? Why do I need to hide my feelings of pride?
On another note, my musical exploits lately are doing some weird and interesting things to my ego. I took some multiple intelligence tests a few months
ago, and found that I score shockingly high on musical intelligence, much higher than math and even higher than verbal. I took 3 different versions
of the test to be sure it was "real". But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. I used to be really good at music. How did I forget
that? So I tackled one of my old nemeses, singing. I always thought I couldn't sing. As it happens, I was
wrong. I had just never been trained. I may never forgive Clearview (my old high school) for making me choose between band and choir. I spent all these
years thinking I couldn't sing. But lest I let my ego spin out of control with all of the wonderful things I am so good at in the musical domain,
we started something new in drum class last night. We learned a couple of
beginner patterns on the djun-djun. The djun-djun is a kind of drum where the player uses one hand to beat the drum and the other to play a bell pattern
on a bell attached to the side of the drum. This requires the dreaded left-right independence. That's right, the dreaded left-right independence that I
could never manage to achieve on piano, which was the reason I quit piano lessons after a long time on the lack of left-right independence plateau.
Incidentally, my lack of piano ability was one of the reasons I decided
not to go to school for music. Anyway, simply put, I sucked at this djun-djun thing. It has been a while since I really genuinely sucked at something,
especially something I value, and something in the general domain of stuff that I am supposed to be good at. It was a rude awakening. Luckily,
TaKeTiNa has lots of good exercises for left-right independence, so maybe I have finally found something that I am willing to work hard for in order to
be good at it. And that's cool.
Anyway, all of that might have been more than any of you wanted to hear. But it's not about you, don't you see? Did you get nothing from reading
my little journal excerpt here? It's clearly all about me. Now, if you'll excuse me, my id is telling me I have to pee and then get some coffee.
Whew, busy times... the trip to Vienna was very fun, although I am learning that I am a beach-vacation kind of girl. Given the choice
between walking my feet off to admire (admittedly awe inspiring) architecture and culture, and laying on a beach with a book and a frozen drink
served in a pineapple, I will choose the pineapple every time. We leave this week for our trip to Maryland, where there may not be pineapple drinks,
but there will be boats and family and laying on a "conversation raft" for two with a space for drinkies and noshies in the middle. And that doesn't
suck. No it does not. Oh, and don't forget the crab cakes! (I finally saw Cecil B. Demented, which features some of the most excellent crab cake
moments ever, including a sequel to Forrest Gump in which "Life is like a crab cake".) In other news, this past weekend, I participated in my first drum recital.
I've been drumming for about a year, ever since getting hooked while belly dancing at last year's recital. For the past 10 years, it has been hard to
believe that at one point I actually considered going to school for music. It's unbelievably good to have music in my life again. It's just so friggin'
good.
Latest news? Rebecca and Brian just got a puppy. From what I understand, this little creature is shockingly cute and loveable.
See for yourself. Here are the first of what I anticipate to be many Nacho pictures.
Other than that, pretty much just doing my thang, where my thang is running around like a chicken without a head. We're off to Vienna
for a conference at the end of May/beginning of June, and then back east for a visit at the end of June. Oh, and tonight we watch the
second-to-last episode of Angel. After that, there will be no new Joss on TV. Whatever will we do?? Luckily we're heading into good
movie season. I'm excited to see Troy, the remake of the Stepford Wives, the new Harry Potter movie, King Arthur, I Robot (even though it
is going to be awful and I am going to very indignant about it), Shrek 2, Catwoman, and, I admit, Mean Girls. Also,
MoveOn is encouraging everyone to go see The Day After Tomorrow so we can open up a national debate
about how the Bush administration is ignoring the problem of global warming. Hey, speaking of MoveOn, this news slipped under the blog
radar, coming at a busy time for me, but the MoveOn book, 50 Ways to Love Your Country, which made it to the New York Times
bestseller list, has an essay written by our very own Saskia Traill. She's so fabulous!
Just finished a big deadline at work. Whew... I'm not sure how much good all of these publications and presentations
on my vita are going to do me since I'm not first author on any of them (or even second or third on most). But for whatever
they're worth, I'm racking them up. It was pointed out to me last night that it might be time for me to reevaluate what I
say when people ask me what I do for a living. What I've been saying is that I am a statistician, which I follow by making
some sort of self-deprecating facial expression or gesture. I try to own it, but I always break down within about 5 seconds
and make "the face". The "I can't believe I am actually a statistician but at least it's better than being an accountant" face.
A friend of mine is also a statistician and she understands. We have learned to say "I work at Stanford" (or for her, "I work at a
pharmaceutical") when people ask what we do. But in the end, I always give up the S-word. And I always make the face. So last night
at taketina, I got called on it. I explained what I actually do: that is, I help MD radiologists, who are not trained to do research
but who are expected to do it, to design their studies, do data analysis, write the methods sections for their grants, etc. And it
was pointed out to me that what I do is not so dry as the dreaded S-work would imply. So I am going to give it a try. Just because
my business card says "Statistician" (or actually, "Biostatistician" which is slightly sexier but still doesn't sound so good), doesn't
mean I have to use that word to tell people what I do. I can say, "I do medical research at Stanford." Sounds much cooler and is probably
closer to what I do, although in the end, I spend a lot of my day in Excel and SPSS, poring over numbers, and explaining to people how a
log transform will give their data a normal distribution and why that is a good thing to have. Is it weird that I want to be able
to answer the "What do you do?" question with something more fabulous, like "I am a writer," or "I am a jewelry designer"? That seems
so much more consistent with my self-concept, but does leave out a component... the component Zorina summed up by telling this guy
who was asking me career questions, "She's a girl genius." (Frighteningly close to Gordon Bower's infamous "girl scientist" comment,
but with none of the creepy old boy's club vibe). Being a writer or a glass artist or whatever leaves out all of the hard work
I did to get my PhD, and nudges me closer to the hippie that I almost am, but am not quite. You know, when I was little (and even
not so little), the hardest question was "What do you want to be when you grow up?" I imagined that someday, the perfect Life Path
(note the capital L and P) would make itself clear to me. I would find my passion, follow my bliss, whatever, and be a perfectly
integrated complete soul who spent her days doing her Life's Work, the work she was meant to do and loved and blah blah blah. In
some ways, I think that it is that romantic notion that has made career stuff so hard for me. I had this concept that I would find
a career that I would continue to do even if I won the lottery and didn't need the money. Would I still write and make beads if I
won the lottery? Yes. Would I know the ins and outs of the latest picayune modification of ROC analysis? No, no I would not. So a
part of me wants to jump ship and become--well, I'm gonna say it--become a dilettante, a glass artist and writer and jewelry designer
and taketina teacher and wedding officiant and massage therapist and interior decorator and and and... and a part of me knows that that
just isn't practical. [[Note: for more discussion of my feelings about the word dilettante, check out today's word of the week entry (written after this
blog entry) on my main page or in the Word of the week
Archives.]] I'll tell you this. All of this angst gives me newfound respect for the person who crossed my path ever-so-briefly
at Burning Man in 1999. When a group of us asked her, "What do you do?" she thought for a moment, then broke into a huge grin and said,
"I can do a cartwheel!" She proceeded to do a cartwheel--not an extraordinary cartwheel, but a perfectly acceptable cartwheel as
cartwheels go. Cartwheel girl, wherever you may be, I thank you for that lesson. Next time someone asks me what I do, don't be surprised
if I answer with "I can touch my nose with my tongue," "I make really good cookies, no I mean really friggin' good," or "I can sing a mean
Norah Jones or Fiona Apple song in the car when I'm alone."
Earlier this month, John and I took a 3-day TaKeTiNa workshop together with Reinhard Flatischler, the guy who literally
wrote the book on this method. It was a wonderful experience, and I am very grateful that I got to share it with my
honey, who I will turn into a crazy hippie like me if it's the last thing I do! From there, Zorina and Azar and all of the
other current and future TaKeTiNa teachers took off for Portland for the training. This has left me with a whole month
without drum classes, TaKeTiNa practice groups, and belly dance classes!! I've drummed and danced a little on my own, but
it's just not the same. The upside is that the hole in my creativity left behind where those classes should have been has been
filled by my novel. I'm finally back to writing. A spark of inspiration told me what *really* happened to Kaylee right before
the holidays, so I am re-writing that section now. I feel confident that moving on from that point, rather than from the corner
I had previously written myself into, will go much more smoothly. So off I go... back to writing fiction rather than silly
blog entries. Maybe no one will ever pay me for my fiction, but they're sure as heck never going to pay me to keep a blog.
Time has been flying for me lately, a side effect of being busy like a bee... bee-like. John and I took some
time out of grant-writing and other general craziness to take a massage class together on Valentine's day. It was a
great couples activity and was a wonderfully intimate day for the two of us. But it was more than that. You
know how some things just click? Like a little place in your body or spirit that has been holding some tension
just eases, and you feel your whole self say "yeeeeesssssss." That happened to me giving the massages. A lot
of people I like and respect do bodywork, and I finally get it. What could be more about healing than having someone
come to you full of stress and body aches, uncentered, frazzled... and leave an hour later feeling healthy, relaxed,
and happy? And, frankly, what activity could possibly match my personality better? It's almost silly that I
didn't figure this out sooner. Friends and family, look forward to some massages as I learn more and get better
at this form of healing. If a massage table and someone eager to give a free massage can't lure you people down to
the peninsula or out to California... I don't know what can. The list of things that changed me from day one has a
new item on it... the first time I melted glass, my first Ta Ke Ti Na session, my first yoga class with Zora,
and now my first experience with bodywork. Yeeeesssssssssss. Oh yeah. It's good stuff.
February, huh? You know you're getting old when the mere fact that another month has passed shocks and horrifies you.
Not a lot to say since the last. John and I bought a new dining room table, after years of suffering with his old
one. It was really, really time. We will have to have a moment of silence for the lounge chairs that we were using as
dining room chairs. John will really miss them. I will really not. We did get cushy comfy chairs for the new table,
though, so everyone is happy, even the cats, who will have brand new slipcovers to sharpen their claws on. Just a bit of
refinishing on the new table, and then off the old table goes to some charity or other. We also got a storage unit for
the dining room so we can get some of the clutter off of the kitchen counters. Both the storage and the table are solid
wood from Ikea, so cheap but sturdy. Both were lighter in color than I wanted, so now I am getting on the wood finishing
learning curve. Other than that, doing my same ol' same ol' too many activities, watching a lot of professional poker on
TV, and wishing there were more hours in the day...
More than a month since my last update... that's crazy! In my defense, a lot of you have seen me in that month,
and made the holidays too much fun for me to spend them at the computer doing something so mundane as writing a
blog entry. Anyway, what's new... not much. I'm slightly disappointed with Dean's backslide in the Iowa caucus,
but I would take Kerry or Edwards over Clark, so I am not too sad. I went to my second drum circle with the group
I met on Tribe, and spent more time hanging out afterwards this time, which was
fantastic. I got an oxygen concentrator for Christmas from my family, and I am very excited to hook that up and
get back to the glass (minus the frustration of the empty oxygen tank on a friday night-yay!). We saw Something's Gotta
Give yesterday, on a rainy MLK day, and it was laugh out loud funny. Unfortunately, I was the only one in the theater
who almost lost their shit when I realized Keanu Reeves was playing a cardiologist. Our poor protagonist (possibly
antagonist - hard to say) is in the hospital having a heart attack and here I am peeing my pants. In SF it would have
gotten that reception from everyone, I daresay. But in the suburbs of Redwood City, I guess it's not a given that some
actors should be allowed to be in movies like Speed, but should not desecrate Dracula stories or Shakespeare, and should
probably not play culturally savvy doctors. At least they didn't make him a brain surgeon. Aaaaanyway, other than that,
he was not distractingly bad, and Diane Keaton was seriously wonderful. She actually looked sort of old, albeit with a
perfect un-50-like body. I give her credit for not getting it all lifted and smoothed out. Go Diane. You rock, and
are completely sexy, wrinkles and all.
In other news, I am back on the wagon, hopefully to stay this time. I have gotten
pretty jaded with the yoyo dieting of the past few years, but somehow this feels different. I took a year off from
any dieting to let myself detox. Both my body, whose metabolism I had no doubt ruined with all of that up and down, but
also my mind and spirit, which were so stuck in the diet mentality that I didn't have any room to see straight. I joined
an organization called TOPS, which stands for Taking Off Pounds Sensibly. They have a
weekly support group and weigh-in, which I need, and are non-profit, which I like a lot better than giving money to an
industry that feeds on (mostly) women's insecurities and health problems. And I feel different about it this time. I have
done a lot of work on myself in the past year, so maybe I am finally ready to make a lifestyle change for real. It's
never a given, and sustained weight loss is really really hard work, but I think I'm going in with a much healthier attitude
than I've had in the past, and working in a support group atmosphere will certainly help me to stick with it. So, you know...
we'll see.
Other than that, just dancing, drumming, melting, and taketina-ing all over the place. Life is good.
July 25, 2006
April 29, 2006
February 17, 2006
January 26, 2006
November 3, 2005
I'm 2 days and about
4,000 words in at the moment. I had planned on a cross between Harry Potter and Nancy Drew, but what is coming out on the page is more reminiscent of
Narnia and Wonderland (with goofy Pam-style touches like an overemphasis on discussions about footwear, and an odd little soupçon of
Lord of the Flies). All in all, I'm pretty
happy with the story the characters are making me tell. I'm being a little more stingy about letting people read this year. I'm starting to think that
I'm the sort of writer who will play it close to the chest until I have at least a draft, but so far we have a world in which magic is done through
movement. We have a main character from our world who is sucked from her high school into the magic world by a teacher who wants to train her in magic.
The teacher is distracted during the spell and our main character winds up in the right world, but the wrong place. She meets a bunch of self-taught
kids who do magic and a bit of petty crime, a talking dog-like creature named Vandersnuf, some scary dragon-bird thingies that don't have a name yet,
and more good stuff as soon as I think of it. OK, back to the novel!!
Well, folks, I'm doing it again. I'm spending my first chilly Maryland November attempting to repeat the feat of 2003 and write a 50,000 word
novel in 30 days. I have had much scolding from my faithful 2003 reading crew about not finishing the story (I'm well past 50,000 words now, but
it's still not done), so this year I am going for the young adult genre so that 50,000 words will be closer to a complete arc.
October 19, 2005
January 18, 2005
January 14, 2005
October 12, 2004
July 16, 2004
July 13, 2004
June 22, 2004
May 12, 2004
April 21, 2004
March 24, 2004
February 17, 2004
February 5, 2004
January 20, 2004
2003 entries