Rixosous

Independence Year

Right now a great deal of what is happening politically in our country makes me feel sick and sad.  I don't want to write about our still-worthy ideals when we're so spectacularly failing to operate our actual political system, despite some notable bits of social progress this year.

On a personal level, though, the last ten months of my life, since quitting my day job and deciding to commit full-time to my dance research and teaching, have been some of the best of my life. 

Independence suits me.

That is all.

It Gets Better

Dan Savage does not exactly need me to boost his signal, but here's a wonderful new project that I have to mention.  In Savage's words:

I wish I could have told Billy that it gets better. I wish I could have told him that, however bad things were, however isolated and alone he was, it gets better.

But gay adults aren't allowed to talk to these kids. Schools and churches don't bring us in to talk to teenagers who are being bullied. Many of these kids have homophobic parents who believe that they can prevent their gay children from growing up to be gay—or from ever coming out—by depriving them of information, resources, and positive role models.

Why are we waiting for permission to talk to these kids? We have the ability to talk directly to them right now. We don't have to wait for permission to let them know that it gets better. We can reach these kids.

Billy Lucas was a fifteen-year-old in Indiana who hanged himself after being bullied for being gay.

So Savage has started a YouTube channel, the It Gets Better Project, and is encouraging adults to make and submit videos that say: it gets better.  Here's his video with his husband Terry:

"You gotta give 'em hope."  --Harvey Milk

It gets better.

Spread the word.

Flying Free

Well, I did it.

Black swan and other astonishments.

Prop 8 overturned in federal court.

Absolutely amazing Winter's Tale.

Job interview tomorrow morning.

And there is a black swan munching away right next to me.

Twenty-five down

Ever since I posted Hoop Dreams back in February, I've been steadily hooping, dieting, and losing weight, documented mostly in the comments there and occasionally on Facebook.  Time for a Rixo progress report!

This morning, for the first time, I tipped the scales at twenty-five pounds less than I weighed in mid-February when I started keeping track.  That probably represents a slightly larger weight loss, since I didn't dare weigh myself for the first couple of weeks of the diet-and-hoop plan.  But it's a nice, substantial number to reach and represents the halfway point of my goal of fifty pounds total weight loss.  It's only one pound over the lowest weight I've been in the last five years (at least), though I'm cheating somewhat with that comparison since that was before surgery removed five pounds in one fell swoop.

I was actually a little startled at this morning's weigh-in results.  I'd been hovering around a twenty- to twenty-three-pound weight loss for about five weeks now.  I thought I'd plateaued and was planning to just stay in that range for a few months while my metabolism adjusted.  I'm delighted that the weight loss has resumed, though I'm still not making a big effort at it right now since I don't want my body to decide I'm actually starving to death and start conserving calories.

This weight loss has been achieved entirely by controlling my total calorie intake per day and by regular sessions with my hula hoops.  There's no secret, no wacky diet, no restrictions on what foods I can eat, and no gym time or exercise other than hooping and my usual dancing.  But it's working beautifully.

A few notes on the process so far:

Stardancing

I heard the news today that Jeanne Robinson had died over the weekend, unsurprising since I knew of her fight with cancer, but saddening in the loss of a lovely artist of both words and dance.  I never knew her personally, but she and Spider's novel Stardance inspired one of those lovely songs that has stuck in my mind since I first heard it a quarter-century or so ago and still speaks to me deeply.  When I got my very first webpage, back in 1992, its primitive content consisted entirely of a quote from this song. 

I don't know who wrote it; I'm guessing one of the filk groups that performed at Shore Leave back in the mid-1980s.  I can still hear their voices in my head from an old live cassette tape I made then.  I transcribed the lyrics as accurately as I could long ago and repost them below with no intent to infringe copyright.  They express my thoughts more eloquently than I can myself.

So, and with sympathy to Spider and in thanks to Jeanne and to all those whose diverse arts leave the world a better place and stir creativity in others...

I shall leave the earth behind and dance where I am free
To dream of greater things
I shall say good-bye to air and choreography
And dance as thought I've wings.

The Ultimate Answer

I am the Ultimate Answer today and for the next 364 days.

Fortunately, I don't have to worry about the Ultimate Question.

That's it.

That's all there is.

I don't have to like it.

Gazebo in Spring

Seventeen months later, my gazebo is still standing, and has acquired furnishings.

Wedding fun

A lot of people seem to be getting married lately.  Earlier this evening it was the turn of my friends Alexia and Mike.  Alexia's one of my dance students, and Mike used to be the roommate of another of my dance students, which seems to be enough of a connection for Mike to give me some sort of indirect credit for their meeting and thus their current and future happiness.  This is the third couple in the last few years that's claimed they met through my dance stuff.  Can I figure out a way to use this in advertising?

Boston, again, and help wanted (Holmes fans)

This weekend is the last of my Boston trips for awhile; as soon as I get some publicity materials finished and my costume packed I'm on the road for a Steampunk ball tonight and a waltz afternoon tomorrow, with a meeting with my band interspersed to do some planning.  I'm hoping to squeeze sleep in there somewhere, too.  I'm not running these events -- this weekend is a combination of dancing for fun and event-promotion for a ball which I'm frantically trying to get planned for the end of March.

To that end:

HELP! 

Does anyone who reads Rixo have enough of a passion for Sherlock Holmes to have a general familiarity with the canon and enough writing skill to do some short (one-paragraph) epistles in the style of Doyle/Watson in the next few days?  If I had time to read heavily I could absorb some style by contagion, but (reality check) I don't right now, and it's been years since I've reread the stories, and I'm under omigodcrazy pressure to get a whole bunch of little blurbs written over the next week.  We're not talking pages and pages; more like murder-mystery clues in pastiche form, the length of this post or shorter.

Any takers?  I'm about to lose my mind here, and it occurred to me that this was something that could be delegated long-distance to pretty much anyone with some writing skill.

Hoop Dreams

I've finally gotten around to getting serious about the hooping that I started playing around with last fall at Darkovercon.  I went to a local hoop class, though I won't be able to attend very often since it meets on Fridays and I'm on the road or running dances most Fridays.  I have a hooping DVD to learn new moves from (a lot like reconstructing partner dance from video, except that my partner is a round piece of tubing).  And I got myself a really big hoop in bright shiny colors (from here).  Size matters; big hoops are heavier and easier to spin, especially at my height.  I don't have the muscles to handle a small one yet. 

The colors of my hoop (black-blue-purple-silver) make me feel like I'm letting it down by not wearing a matching costume.  Maybe that will come in the future, if I'm ever good enough to hoop in public.

One small victory

Thirty-seven minutes seems like about thirty six and a half minutes more than needed to convict one "pro-life" assassin of the premeditated murder he'd admitted to in court, but maybe the jury had some procedural work to do before getting to the vote.  I can't say this trial exactly restores my faith in Kansas, which is high on my list of states I plan never to live in, but at least it shows that even in a conservative area of the country gunning down a doctor in cold blood is outside normal bounds of civil life. 

I am sorry to say that I was not confident of this. 

I was appalled that a lawyer could seriously present a case for a conviction of voluntary manslaughter on the grounds of (Kansas law) “an unreasonable but honest belief that circumstances existed that justified deadly force."  Fortunately the judge wasn't having any of that, but just think for a minute about the logical consequences of the idea of allowing "unreasonable beliefs" as an excuse for murder:

What if I'm an evangelical Christian who genuinely believes that Catholic teaching is evil and damns the souls of Catholics to eternal hell (a much worse fate than an earthly death)?  Would that justify murdering the Pope?

What if I am really convinced that "pro-life" nutcases are liable to shoot doctors who work in women's health clinics?  (I can't think why I might have that impression.)  Could I just go around shooting anti-abortion protesters in the head to prevent such occurrences?

What if I truly think that traumatized Iraq war veterans are liable to become violent and kill their wives?  Could I slaughter them in cold blood in the psych ward of a VA hospital?

What if I honestly expect that Sarah Palin would lead us into war with Iran if elected, costing thousands of lives over many years?  Not fetuses, but actual adult human beings.  Could I just gun her down at a campaign stop?

What if I think that meat-eaters are responsible for the deaths of millions of sentient animals?  Could I just take out everyone in a McDonald's who's having a bacon cheeseburger?

Regardless of whether these beliefs are reasonable or unreasonable, there are certainly people who genuinely hold them.  But the rule of law says that we don't let people go around preemptively killing others on the basis of the murderer's beliefs, honest and reasonable or otherwise.  The fact that the judge had to make this clear to a lawyer who thought he could use it as a legal defense is terrifying.  And the fact that I am actually not entirely certain that it wouldn't have worked if the assassin had, say, burst into a clinic room in the middle of an abortion procedure is even more terrifying.

But score one small victory for the rule of law against the bullies and murderers of the "pro-life" (pro-slavery, pro-rape) movement.  I wish I could believe that this represented a turning of the tide.

Facebookery

I've decided to join Facebook, mostly for networking/promotional purposes for my dance stuff, since Facebook seems to be where the energy and opportunities for connection are lately, and I'm trying to be part of the 21st century.  I spent a few hours this afternoon energetically tracking down lots of people and sending out friend requests.  So far it's just people I know in real life, though I've taken a few friend requests from people I've only met online and will continue to do so to build my network.  I hadn't realized how many people I know through my various social circles, which usually don't have much overlap!

Once I figure out how it works and spend some time thinking about how much of my life I want on Facebook, I'll be doing some cross-connecting with my various blogs, websites, etc.  In the meantime, if anyone who reads Rixo is on Facebook, wants to connect with me there, and wasn't among the people I found yesterday, please feel free to send me a friend request.

The menu is cheering

This afternoon's dance event was one of those mixed joys: I went out just for fun, but it turned into advertising, which is professionally good but made guys scared to dance with me.  I hate that tradeoff.  And while the drive back was fine, with minimal snow and occasional glimpses of sunshine, the drive back was slow and nasty in a snowstorm.

I had dinner with the band before heading home, since we do a lot of business together and wanted a chance to chat.  We went off to a diner which had one of those diner menus that covers a wide range of cuisines and every meal from breakfast to dinner.  But it was a bright-pink menu insert that caught my eye:

Sautés Specialties

I wouldn't make fun if it if that were the only error, but inspecting the dishes listed below just got funnier and funnier.

Survived!

Well, I survived.  Four months of non-stop work, divided between my day job (which gets very intense in the fall) and my dancing and teaching (every single weekend since Labor Day).  Things become calm now for a couple of weeks, then the dancing starts to pick up again in mid-January.  I'm going to my mom's in New Jersey for Christmas this weekend and probably popping into the city sometime in the next couple of weeks to do some costume-related shopping and see a show and friends.  But mostly, it's going to be calm.  No day job from 12/23 to 1/3.  No teaching except my regular Monday night group.  Time to catch up on sewing, cleaning, reading, blogging, email, and sleep.  I'm hoping this year my winter break will not be eaten up by illness the way it was last year after I similarly worked myself into the ground beforehand.  And I did finally score a vaccination for H1N1, for which immunity should kick in this weekend.

To celebrate, I went to the comic shop after work and picked up four issues of the original 1970s run of Tomb of Dracula, including one of the Giant-Size quarterly issues and #4, one of the pre-Marv Wolfman issues.  I now have 48 of the 70 issues, including the very first one and the first-appearance-of-Blade issue, and three out of five Giant-Size.  Most of what I'm missing is from the first twenty issues.  I realize I could probably complete my collection very quickly via eBay, but really, it's not nearly as entertaining as rummaging through boxes in comic shops.  The hunt is part of the fun.

My holiday spirit this year is just about nonexistent.  No tree, no lights, gifts for only five friends and family members.  My big effort today consisted of wearing snowman earrings to work.  I hope everyone else is more cheerful and less exhausted.

Dear Odyssey

Dear Odyssey organizers,

Thank you for the lovely postcard encouraging me to attend Odyssey in order to "improve my Science Fiction, Fantasy, or Horror writing."  While I am grateful to be thought of, I think that a six-week workshop costing $1900 (plus room and board) is perhaps a little more than is strictly necessary to take my fiction writing to the "next level" when the movement in question is from the level of "totally nonexistent" to the admittedly important level of "producing even one sentence, no matter how awful."

I am also a little puzzled by your metaphor:

"...strap yourself to the mast this summer and attend..."

While I recognize the reference to your namesake poem (and assume it metaphorical since your location in Manchester, New Hampshire, is not easily reached by sea), I feel that it sends an odd message to the prospective student.  In the scene in question Odysseus is tied to the mast so that he may hear the song of the Sirens and not respond to it by jumping into the ocean and drowning himself.  Is the prospect of writing as a career the Siren song that one pursues only at the risk of self-destruction?  If the student is placed in the role of Odysseus, are the instructors intended to be the Sirens, whom it is dangerous to hear and fatal to respond to?  That seems to suggest that the student should attend in order to listen to the instructors' tempting advice, but under no circumstances follow it.  Or are the instructors the sailors with their ears plugged, made immune to the Siren song themselves and serving to convey Odysseus past the Sirens and ignore his pleas, tying him more tightly when he attempts to respond?  Would that make the Siren song the temptation to use a vanity press?   Or some other hazard on the road to publication?

Metaphorical tangles aside, while I am not personally conservative or easily shocked, I feel that even the suggestion of bondage games with publishing professionals may create a certain wariness in many of your potential attendees.

Sincerely yours,

Susan de Guardiola

P.S. While I realize that noted authors, agents, and editors are above such trivial concerns as proofreading, I can't help but think that I would be more enthusiastic about accepting criticism of my writing from people who get my name right on the mailing label.

Overbooking

My relaxing weekend:

Friday

4:30 PM: Official end of work day at day job.

5:30 PM: End of mandatory-attendance formal presentation event.  Grab portable food and return to office to deal with ongoing crisis.

6:00 PM: Give up solving crisis before Monday morning.  Send email to this effect to those affected.  Actual departure from day job.

6:15 PM: Arrive home.  Frantically do food prep for evening's dance.  Spend fifteen minutes churning through green room looking for black evening pants.  Remember why it is a bad idea to have all one's clothing be black.  Find pants neatly on hanger on costume rack.  Why are they there?  Finish dressing, do hair, load car.

7:15 PM: Out the door for dance.

11:45 PM: Return home from dance, richer but completely exhausted.  Remember that I promised to read Zelazny book as soon as I received it.  Received it Wednesday.  Late.  Oops.  Crawl into bed and open book.

Very soon after: Fall asleep while reading page three of book.

3:44 AM: Wake up with book on lap, glasses still on face, and light still on.  Remove glasses and book, turn out light, go back to sleep.

Thanks, and resolutions

As usual, I'm spending my Thanksgiving quietly at home by myself.  Also as usual, this is fine; I've never been attached to the holiday traditions and I'll have plenty of socializing this weekend.  I have invitations I could accept if I really wanted to.  But I don't.

I haven't done much so far except catch up on my sleep when I really ought to be sewing, cleaning, or doing something else useful.  But it's been such a crazy fall that I'm burnt to a sad little cinder and just need the downtime before heading down to Maryland tomorrow.

Not being religious, I don't devote any time today to thanking a deity for anything, but I do want to thank those of you who are still reading Rixo despite my very peculiar posting schedule.  I think I've mentioned before that I've acquired this hideous habit of writing posts and then not finishing them, or not adding the pictures, or for whatever reason/excuse putting them on hold.  Sometimes I get around to posting them much later, but I have a frightening number of them just sitting around in draft form.  I keep thinking I'm going to come up with brilliant things to add to a post if I just wait a bit longer and maybe fuss with it a bit more.  This is delusional; if I've got the ability to be verbally witty on a regular basis, it's yet to become obvious. 

And that's not a fish for a compliment.  I'm a dance historian, not a writer.  I like being a dance historian, even though this fall it's just about killing me with overwork.  But it makes me a bad blogger.  No blogger biscuit for me.  I'm more grateful than you can imagine that some folks are still reading and my wonderful little group of commenters is still puttering around in the comment threads making cheerful conversation and the occasional bad pun, even when I vanish for weeks on end.  I'd like to have even more commenters, but I realize I've got to give people something regular to chew on in order to inspire this so we can create a happy positive feedback loop and collectively raise each other's beta-endorphins or whatever.  I feel like mine could use this.

So I'm going to try to do two things over the next month:

Before the Fall

(edited 10/25 with some schedule updates)

Lazy August behind me, I'm heading into an insane streak of dance gigs and associated travel.  Weekend by weekend plans from today through mid-December:

• Swing Out New Hampshire (Lindy hop as a student)
• NYC (teaching Regency & Renaissance)
• CT (DJing waltz) and Boston (teaching cross-step waltz and Steeleye Span) and NYC (Steeleye Span)
• CT (teaching quadrilles) and Rhode Island (teaching cross-step waltz)

• NYC (teaching Regency & Renaissance)
• Cape May, NJ (dance weekend: teaching Victorian, leading Victorian ball & 1910s tea dance)
• CT (DJing waltz, teaching Regency, leading Regency ball)
• MA (teaching various couple dances at gender-role-free contra dance camp)

• NYC (teaching 1830s & schottische evolution)
• [possible day job business trip to west coast during weekdays in between]
(not happening, hurrah!)
• MY ^mostly^ FREE WEEKEND AT HOME (unless I go to NJ for a 1910s ball)  (and I've decided to go)
• CT (DJing waltz) and possibly MD if a gig works out (nope, so doing an SCA event on Saturday to show off some dancing, but not leaving CT)
• PA (Philcon, leading a Victorian ball, then back to Philcon)
• MD (Darkovercon, leading a Regency ball there and teaching some 17thc country dance)

• NYC (teaching 1830s & 17thc English dance)
• CT (hosting holiday waltz party and then doing a private dance workshop) and MA (teaching/leading Regency tea dance)
• MA (attending a Victorian ball just for fun Saturday, then running a Victorian tea dance on Sunday)

There's one other gig to schedule either on that last weekend or the weekend before Christmas.  (Scheduled above.)  Then I shall rest.

So is that insane or what?  On the bright side, almost all of these signify extra income and only a few things represent actual unreimbursed expenses.  Overall, I come out ahead.  And if anyone wants to know what I did some weekend this fall, you have a handy reference list above.

I tend to be more disciplined about blogging when my life is otherwise crazy.  Having to budget time carefully seems to help.  So I don't plan to vanish all fall.  But I will be catatonic with exhaustion by Christmas -- I work a full-time day job along with all this weekend work.

I hope everyone's fall plans are equally exciting, though perhaps not equally exhausting!

Biscuits with Aunt Mildred

When I stay at my Aunt Mildred's, I make biscuits.  Not always, but enough times over the years that I have a small collection of pictures of myself making them in her kitchen down in North Carolina.

Aunt Mildred is actually my great-aunt, one of my maternal grandfather's twelve brothers and sisters.  With that size family, the generations get a bit skewed, so she's actually only about ten years older than my mother.  I stayed with her and her husband, Hubert, for a couple of weeks when I was a toddler while my parents were relocating from New York to Dallas, and off and on as a child and teenager.  I've only been back a few times as an adult, most recently over the last few days for a family wedding.  And I wanted to make biscuits, and to get the recipe while I had the chance.

Nothing's Gayer than the Lonely Goatherd

From the Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS  2007 "Broadway Bares" show.  Donations to fight the scourge which has taken so much talent from the world of theater are accepted at their website.

The video is Not Safe For Work.

Happy Pride week!

Hat tip for the video and title to Dan Savage at Slog.

Edited to add:

The shapely male dancer is Nick Adams.

At the Corner

Seen from the edge of Bryant Park, 42nd & 6th, 1:23 PM, Saturday, June 6, 2009:

Women in dirndls carrying banners for a Chinese cultivation practice.*

Either a giant Elmo puppet or someone in an Elmo costume.  I did not get close enough to figure out which it was.**

Lolitas en masse.***  I don't know the official categories, but I'd have labeled them individually as a Gothic Lolita, a Fluffy Pink Lolita, several Punk Lolitas, an Elegant Lolita, and a Honey, Bright Red Polka Dots and Stripes Really Do Not Flatter Your Figure Lolita.

(Yes, I really need to get into the habit of carrying a camera everywhere.  If I'd been quick on the uptake, I could have framed all of the above in a single shot.)

*Falun Dafa (a.k.a. Falun Gong) in its own words.  It was a Falun Dafa parade.  There were people from everywhere, many in national costume, but the dirndls were the most delightfully incongruous.  They also had dragon and lion dancers and a marching band.  I approve of colorful parades so I settled in at the corner to watch for a bit.

**Not having watched Sesame Street since the early 1970s or The Muppet Show ever, I felt that merely identifying the large red muppet as Elmo showed such an admirable awareness of popular culture on my part that no further effort was necessary.

**Does anyone know the proper term for a group of Lolitas?  Should we make one up?

One Day More

Every year I am less and less fond of this system wherein I'm actually only one day older than I was yesterday but am officially labeled one year older.  It's entirely unfair for a matter of six hours' sleep to encompass three hundred and sixty-five symbolic days of aging.

Tonight I will dance, but in the meantime, tell me something amusing to distract me.  By preference, something without the word "happy" or any similar sentiments directed at me.

Things You See in a City

BMW art cars from the 1970s by Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg.

Gold paper clips scattered all over the sidewalk.  I did not pick them up.

Gorgeous black and white portrait photographs of the actors from the Watchmen movie in their roles/costumes.  This is the second of three things I am doing to whet my appetite for seeing the film on Thursday.

The exquisitely corded (sleeves double-corded; remember this technique) "Red Death" costume from Phantom of the Opera as well as Christine's "Masquerade" costume, originally worn by Sarah Brightman, which I recognized on sight.  I had not realized Maria Bjornson had died.

Catherine Elliott pacing gracefully through the Lulu Fado in her butterfly-decorated gown and little gathered cap in 1916.  Where were you?  Who were you?  And what did you say at the end?

Black peppercorns carefully arranged in a triangular formation.  Also, green peas lurking in tomato soup in a steel bowl.

Mitzvah tanks on parade.

Eight dancers performing "La Trenise" as prescribed in the 1818 manuscript Contre Danses à Paris.

Marilee Hospitalized

This seems the most efficient way to let folks here know.  Marilee Layman has been hospitalized with a stroke.  Marilee's health has been precarious for many years, so this is...bad, though not as bad as it could be.  This is after another inconclusive hospitalization earlier this week.

I spoke earlier this evening to one of her friends from her library book group, Steve, who has been to the hospital to visit and reports that she is in the non-critical Neurological ICU.  She is conscious and responsive and does not appear physically impaired, but is having difficulty finding words.  He was able to visit only for a few minutes before she started to get a headache.  He picked up her house key and reassured her that her cats would be cared for by a neighbor who has done so in the past, which was her major concern.  (And he visited the cats and told me they were fine, if annoyed at having dry food.)

I've never met Marilee in person, but she has been incredibly supportive of me as a blogger and a friend and has been one of the most regular commenters here and on my dance history blog.  Her absence leaves a noticeable hole in our conversation and a gaping hole in my heart.  Hopefully it will be temporary and brief.

Since no one has access to her LJ account to post updates there, Steve has set up a separate forum on which he can provide updates on Marilee's condition here.  The hospital will not reveal information to anyone outside the family, but Steve is in touch with Marilee's brother for medical updates.

Repo! The Genetic Opera

Movie.  Surgery.  Movie.  Surgery. 

Movie first, surgery at the end, to be precise.

Just so everyone knows: this is entirely Raven's fault.  She's been on my case for months about this movie, and then she went and put it in my Hugo suggestion post comments, so I felt honor-bound to watch it before the nomination deadline.

I see very few movies -- usually only two or three a year in the theater.  I don't like gore.  I avoid horror movies, and I cover my eyes when things get bloody.  I don't like opera.  I don't like Paris Hilton.  I don't like Sarah Brightman and those liquid-nitrogen high notes of hers.  I'm not goth.  And I thoroughly dislike being told that anything is going to be a cult classic.

So when I sat down to watch Repo! The Genetic Opera on my computer screen, I was expecting to hate it and was already working up a tactful apology for Raven explaining that I was about twenty years too old and just insufficiently cool to connect with it.  But since I'm going to Wicked Faire this weekend, where one of the actors from the movie is going to be, I figured it would be useful to take a look and see what all the fuss is about.

(Anyone who remembers my similarly resigned approach to Buffy in the runup to Buffycon is probably snickering right about now...)

I go to Boston soon

Me going to Boston for a weekend is not usually news, but me going to Boston and having a little free time here and there during which I might see people does qualify.  I'm driving up Saturday morning and back Sunday night.  I will be teaching both Saturday afternoon (cross-step waltz 1:30-4:00 in Medford) and Sunday afternoon (Regency tea dance 2:00-5:00 in West Newton), but this leaves me free to possibly have meals or other low-stress socialization with people before, after, or in between.  (I can only think of four people who read Rixo who live in Boston, two of whom I will see at the dances, but maybe some lurking person will surprise me.) 

My preferred method of meeting, given my utter inability to navigate in Boston, is that people come to where I am.

I go into this trip with mixed feelings because two years ago awfulness happened during this same weekend, and then last year I was overwhelmed by ghosts and memories.  I'm hoping that this year with a little more distance I can be more in the present and in better spirits

These are our books

Saying printed on a bookmark I had as a child:

Books are friends that never fail you.

We don't just read books.  We love books. 

We buy them, collect them, greedily surround ourselves with them.  We keep them on shelves and in bins and in big piles on the floor.  We have organized shelves and randomly-ordered shelves and to-read shelves.  We have books in bed, books in the kitchen, books on the couch, books in our backpacks.  Our books distract us when we're bored, lift us when we're sad, and whirl us away to elsewheres of the imagination for hours on end.  We share them with friends, eagerly: "Have you read...?"  We talk about them, argue about them, write about them.

These are our books.

Tussiculation

L'amour, la tousse, & la galle ne se peuvent celer: Pro. We say, Loue, and the Cough cannot be hidden.
    (Randal Cotgrave, A Dictionary of the French and English Tongues, 1611)

I thought wallowing in words might distract me a bit from the hideous chest cough that will probably take me a week to shake.  I started with "tuss," inspired by my Robitussin and the knowledge that pertussis means whooping cough.  I'm not actually whooping, which sounds like a vaguely pleasant sound made by cranes or particularly perky softball fans.  The noises I'm making are much less enjoyable all around.

Christmas Cookies

I'm at my mother and stepfather's house for a few days over Christmas, though the religious aspect isn't really a part of things here.  My stepfather is a Jewish atheist.  My mother is Unitarian, of culturally Christian background and nonspecific belief.  I'm more or less the same, but with a stronger tilt toward atheism.  So which one of us went to church on Christmas Eve?  My stepfather, to play Christmas carols with the band at my mom's Unitarian church, which she assured him was not Christian and probably wouldn't mention Jesus much.  The hearth here currently displays foot-high statuettes of the Magi (at my request, because I always thought they were lovely) and three miniature poinsettias, which I brought in order to have some holiday-related plant life in the house, since my mother no longer puts up a tree.  Three Wise Men, three plants, three people.  The conversation tends to revolve around politics, the economy, and why children don't realize that there wouldn't be room in Santa's sleigh for toys for all the children in the world.  (I argued for his sack being a Bag of Holding.)  Overall, this is a great improvement over last year, when I spent Christmas alternating gory wound-cleaning procedures with crawling back to bed for heavy doses of painkiller.

For a family holiday movie, we went to see Milk.  But before that we had to bake cookies. 

It's Good to Have Gazebo

My friends Marc and Keira stayed over this weekend for a couple of dance events, and I took the opportunity to get help assembling the gazebo I acquired a few weeks ago via Freecycle. The gazebo consisted of some pretty wrought-metal panels and a pile of pipes. It did not come with instructions. At left is the gazebo in its unassembled form (click the pictures for larger images).

Thanks!

As usual, I am spending Thanksgiving quietly at home with only the occasional companionship of my two incredibly neurotic cats.  Before the Americans reading this get all OMG, alone on the holiday, Susan must be miserable! on me and start posting anxious comments, let me note that I do have family and friends I could be spending the day with, but (as always) I'm exhausted and have been dealing with people on a daily basis for weeks and am perfectly happy to not have to do so today, especially since the holiday is sandwiched between weekends containing two conventions and a major dance gig.  I had invitations (specific to this year and standing), and I turned them down, okay?

On the Boltbus

By way of substance-free posts, I just have to mention that I am currently on a bus going to Washington, D.C., and that said bus is its own mobile wireless node, and that I am thus able to blog from a bus.  How cool is that?  There's even an outlet to plug in, so I'm not draining my battery!  The bus runs express from NYC, so it's fairly fast and much cheaper than the gas and tolls would be.  The only downside is that I have to get to NYC to take it, but I can live with that for a total round-trip price (bus and train) of $60.

So: live from I-95 in Delaware, hail Boltbus!

(okay, and the speed of the connection definitely comes and goes, so by the time this posts I may be in Maryland, but close enough...)

Weekends are for relaxing

My version of relaxing is not quite like other people's.  I'm headed into NYC for some dancing, theater, and more dancing:

Saturday
12:00 - private Lindy hop lesson
3:00 - theater (Wig Out!)
6:00 - dinner with friends
8:00 - theater (Twelfth Night; steampunk production) (thanks for the tip, Raven!)

Sunday
2:00 - set clocks back
1:00 - Regency dance workshop (teaching)
4:00 - Victorian/Civil War era dance workshop (teaching)

In between all of this:
Bloggery.
Project R.
Sleep.

Turning and turning...

This weekend's schedule:

Friday night: Elm City Waltz.  A bit of teaching but mostly DJing and general hostessing.  I do get some dancing in.

Get up early to drive to Boston with a stop at the office on the way for some catchup work.

Saturday afternoon: Cross-Step Waltz workshop for Mostly Waltz-Boston.  2.5 hours of teaching and DJing practice time.

Saturday night: Swing & Blues evening.  Social dancing among strangers at one of my newer dance forms.

Sunday afternoon: Mostly Waltz.  Live music, social dancing.

Sunday night, energy permitting: Visiting a performance troupe's rehearsal.  May or may not get to actually dance, depending on exactly what they're working on.

Arrive home midnightish.

In between all of this, I hope to get a bit of reading, blogging, writing, and costume work done.

It's good to have goals...

...and in theory, it's good to have supportive people reminding me to keep on task.  That's where you guys come in.  If you're reading this, you too can be part of keeping me on task, speaking sternly to me when I get distracted, or indulging in light public humiliation if I blow things off.  Just what you always wanted, right?

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to keep nagging me in the comments here and asking about progress, so that I am forced to either get things done or blushingly admit that I am spending my evenings playing speed Scrabble instead.  This is all in addition to my usual schedule of working, dancing, blogging, dance research, etc. that pretty much burns along quietly without much extra effort on my part.

Nine Months of Bloggery

A few thoughts on the progress of my tandem blogging adventure of the last nine months...

Dance Sleep Dance Friends Sleep Friends Dance Sleep

"There is a bit of insanity in dancing that does everybody a great deal of good." 
-- Edwin Denby

I don't write much about my day to day life, because generally it's not very interesting.  But I enjoyed a rare perfect trifecta of dancing this past weekend: social dancing, taking class, and teaching.  I don't find this combination very often outside a dance week, and it involved some schlepping around between states to accomplish.  But along with the chance to visit with good friends, this combination makes pretty much my ideal weekend.  So, for once, Rixo presents: This Is Susan's Life!

Stateless Firewood

I set off for Stratford (Ontario) on a bright, sunny morning, perfect for a long day's drive.  I had my tent and related camping paraphernalia, plenty of books to read, my passport, and - a last-minute addition - a few sticks of firewood I threw in the back of the car on the off-chance that I couldn't manage to get one of my desired shows and would end up twiddling my thumbs after dark.  I was looking forward to a lovely week in which I would see lots of theater, eat almost every meal al fresco, spend hours reading by the river and watching the waterfowl, browse in bookstores, and talk to almost no one.  I didn't bother getting any tickets in advance; going solo means it's usually easy to get rush tickets, which are half-price, so I decided I would be relaxed about it and just take whatever tickets I could get.  This had worked very well in 2006.

I've been to Stratford so many times in the last two decades that my car practically drives itself there, and I zigzagged happily through New York State all morning and into the late afternoon, singing along to CDs of show tunes.  Best roadside advertising: "Antiques.  Junque."  Best thing stuck on the back of a car: a "Truth" (read: Jesus) fish eating a Darwin fish.  I don't agree with the sentiment at all but I thought the idea was clever.

Everything was going absolutely swimmingly until I arrived at the Canadian border, right on schedule at 4:00pm.

Lord Nelson, the Living Loofah

I took a break earlier this evening from all the stress of preparing for worldcon and my classes this weekend and went out to Storyreading.  Afterwards, one of the hosts brought out Lord Horatio Nelson, an African pygmy hedgehog, who demonstrated proper hedgehoggery by curling up into a spiny ball in my hands like a warm and extra-scritchy loofah.  (Click on the photo for a larger view!)

Lord Nelson is pale in color because he's an African swallow hedgehog, not a European swallow hedgehog.  He was very shy about posing for the camera, which is why it looks like I'm holding a small glowing bath accessory. 

We did get a short video (below) in which we fail to feed Lord Nelson a worm.  He did uncurl long enough for us to get a look at his adorable little schnozz when he wasn't poking it between my fingers.  I can't say hedgehogs are very cuddly, but they're fabulously cute.

Picture and video courtesy of Leon!

I Mailed Back the Books

I woke up this morning
and it was the end of the year
(for some values of year)
and I had a burst of energy
so I packed up all the books
and mailed them back.

Dance Geeks at Play

I was up in Saratoga Springs (NY) this weekend, attending the Society of Dance History Scholars conference at Skidmore College.  Academic conferences sometimes make me wonder if I actually want to get a doctorate.  I can't easily rattle off phrases like "to mediate the intermediality" and "the intersectionality of the intersection" (honest-to-ghod quotes from an actual session) and I'm not sure I want to develop the habit of doing so!  It's all quite different from the other sort of event I'm used to attending that features panel-shaped presentations (science fiction conventions) and even felt quite different from the other two academic conferences I've attended, Kalamazoo and the Dolmetsch conference in England.  I'm sure there were just as many jargon-laden academics at Kalamazoo, but the two times I've attended I've hooked up with other social dance scholars and we've had a grand old time.  And Dolmetsch, of course, is full of social dance historians with whom I instantly have common ground.  SDHS is a bit different: most of the presentations focused on 20th- and 21st-century dance, and most of them focused on meta-analysis rather than on the dances themselves.  There was surprisingly little social/vernacular dance (and what there was leaned toward the not-dead-white-European).

The campus was beautiful, but isolated from the actual downtown in a way that would have made me nervous as a student; I like cities.  I did remember my digital camera, but I didn't feel like taking pictures of pretty campus landscaping or stately Victorian homes in Saratoga, But with my usual evil appreciation for kitsch, the sculpture above left, located at Skidmore, caught my eye.  Yes, that's a giant sculpture of a shopping bag, not an actual shopping bag (click the thumbnails in this post for full-size photos).  The little black thing in the corner is my laptop bag doubling as a size reference, since no one happened to be passing by to conveniently pose next to it.  This makes me think less "art!" and more "some artists have way too much time on their hands!"

Funky Me

I've been silent the last couple of weeks because I'm been in a bit of a funk since Balticon.  I think the hectic travel schedule and competing demands on my time of day job/dancing/research/teaching/blogging and the resulting chronic exhaustion just finally caught up to me, and I needed a mental timeout.  Aside from all the usual day job/dance/research/teaching/travel grind and adding little 1910s bits to my dance history blog, all I've accomplished the last two weeks is to read ten medieval murder mysteries (two Cadfael, eight Frevisse) and one other mystery, have a nasty periodontal procedure, endure a milestone birthday and completely lose it over the whole change of first digit thing, run a dance, teach two classes in New York, entertain my mother for an evening and two houseguests for a weekend (the latter, mostly with sad tales of my disastrous love life), and (of course) attend Balticon and mind my program stuff there (two costume panels and running a dance).

Important activities not on this list include housecleaning, yardwork, sewing, and grocery shopping, all of which have moved from the "should do sometime" to the "dire crisis" stage where I am living amid squalor and towering piles of unsewn fabric while subsisting on dry Cheerios and leftover grapes.  Maybe I'll lose weight.  Or turn into a grape.

Actually, all of that (other than the birthday and the perio work) is fairly typical of my life and shouldn't produce more than the usual amount of exhaustion.  But reading medieval murder mysteries is a definite sign of stress.  The Cadfaels especially are pure comfort reading, since I've read them all a dozen times or more.  The Frevisses are more like a binge - I realized I only owned one and (worse) had only read one, so I trucked off to the library and picked up seven more.  The evidence thus suggests that I am stressed, and thus I am writing a content-free blog post to share this with the world at large with the realistic expectation that the world at large is completely indifferent.

The Last of the Ghost Leak

At 11:00 at night last Wednesday, I got out of bed in the dark and blundered anxiously into my bathroom.  I sat down on the edge of the tub and gently stroked the underside of the tub spout for a few moments before breathing a sigh of relief and heading back to bed.

I wasn't sleepwalking, nor had I mistaken my tub spout for one of my cats.  It's a long story, which I started last week in "The Sound of Drips"...

The Sound of Drips

The roof had been leaking; that was an established problem, one of a long list of problems in my house.  Not constantly, not consistently, but ever so often when we had a really heavy downpour that went on for hours, the roof leaked.  It leaked down the side of the chimney and into my second-floor kitchen.  It discolored the ceiling in two places, and a little drip sometimes came through and dripped on my floor.  I had refinanced last year and taken out money to cover the cost of a new roof, but had postponed it in a fall full of craziness and psychodrama and surgery.   But I was all ready to do the roof this spring.  So last week when it poured heavily on Monday and Tuesday and the kitchen ceiling started to drip, I was annoyed, but mostly with myself for putting off the work.

Drip.  Drip.  Drip.  Drip.

I put a bucket under the drip and called up roofers and waited for the rain to stop and things to dry out.  And that was all fine until I came home Tuesday during the downpour and found a foot-wide hole in the ceiling, a kitchen-sized puddle and soggy shards of sheetrock on the kitchen floor, and a much bigger leak.  After much frantic hopping about with mops and towels and a bucket, I had that temporarily under control.  Putting off the roofwork had really been a bad idea.  Nothing I could do about it now until the rain stopped.

Drip.  Drip.  Drip.  Drip.

The dripping sound was driving me mad.