Tag Archives: waxing poetic

tassajara

{01 August 2010}

last weekend was an experiment in being off the grid; for my birthday my brother and sister-in-law treated me to a weekend at Tassajara, the san francisco zen center’s monastery in the ventana wilderness. most of the year Tassajara is a closed and working monastery, but they open up to guest season for a few months each summer. as a mountain retreat, they got it right. getting there isn’t easy: the road in to the center of the remote valley is the bumpiest, steepest, toughest 14 miles of dirt road i’ve ever encountered (even having grown up driving around the backwoods of idaho), so it’s not a trip to undertake lightly, and there’s no quick trips back to town once you’re there. the sense of isolation is complete. they have the required amenities (running water, delicious vegetarian food), but not the unnecessary ones (electricity, internet/phone service). this works because: kerosene lanterns are charming, but outhouse stink is not.

staying at Tassajara is the opposite of being on a cruise ship. rather than providing a day full of activities, Tassajara provides a beautiful, open space, in which guests can just slow down for a little while. there isn’t much to do besides hike, read, nap, and bathe in the beautiful bathhouses (fed by natural hotsprings). zen practice is available for those who want to participate, and though i am fascinated by it (my dojo in chicago also served as a zen temple and many of the aikidoka i trained with were also zen students), it also terrifies me. seriously, the thought of sitting sesshin for five days makes me feel panicky. i can’t even get up the nerve to attend a half-hour zazen. it’s an understatement to say that i have trouble with being still. i’m quite aware that this is something i need to come to terms with. just…i’ll get there when i’m ready. until then i creep around the edges, with things like aikido and yoga and hanging around monasteries as a guest.

in spite of the fact that i’m normally an action-packed-adventure vacationer, there really is something profound about a vacation in which there’s nothing to do. i noticed that i walk differently when i’m not in a hurry. (and i’m pretty much always in a hurry). my posture changes, i relax muscles that are normally tensed, my whole gait & posture change. and this transformation was almost immediate. within minutes of arriving, i found my whole body felt different. while hiking i’d catch myself trying to push further, faster – get some cardio exercise, or see what was around the next bend. and then i’d remind myself to try being deliberate in my actions, just to see what it’s like. there’s nothing i have to accomplish with this hike, no time i’m due back. to notice where i walk, what i see, what the path feels like under my feet. i’d grasp that focus for a few moments, then it would slip away again. like all unfamiliar habits, it only comes through practice. a practice i’m not quite ready to undertake, but i know it’s out there. but for the short duration of the vacation, i found that going off the grid was easier than it seemed. its like quitting a job you’ve worked very hard at. quitting seems like it’ll be agonizing, but once you actually pack up your things and leave, it’s easier to detach than you thought it was going to be (is there an echo of a zen lesson in here? yeah yeah, shut up little bird on my shoulder.)

also, i knocked off a 101 in 1001 list item, by the way — skinny dipping in the creek.

coming apart at the (color-coded) seams

{15 November 2009}

Multitasking works? Not really, Stanford study shows

it says more, perhaps, that i’ve been meaning to blog about this article for weeks than the article itself. the study confirms something that i’d begun to suspect – that when i’m multi-tasking, i’m not actually doing any of the tasks as well as when i’m focused on one task. my job demands that i jump around a lot – there is a constant stream of traffic in and out of my office door, phones that ring, reasons why i need to go to the shop and stage and rehearsal room – but i’ve noticed that i’m getting really bad about starting one task and then leaping to another and another, before i finish any of them.

i do think that multi-tasking is a pretty key skill for the nature of my job, but being good at it/flexible about its demands has been giving me permission to multitask even when it’s NOT necessary. i have two monitors on my desk*, and i starting using mac’s spaces function, thinking that it’d be handy to sort my applications into different screens: one for communication — to-do list, email and calendar and quick web research (that’s multiple tabs on multiple firefox windows), another for excel, another for word documents — what i’m realizing is that it’s giving me permission to have even more projects going at one time.

i’m also facing a larger workload than i’ve had in a long time, probaby ever, and feeling the pressure to be really efficient with the way that i work. i’ve been thinking about picking up a book on efficient working practices.** so tonight, on a get-lost-in-a-bookstore-date with B, i wandered over to the business section (steered clear of the self-help section) and looked at some books on time management. i picked up The 25 Best Time Management Tools & Techniques: How to Get More Done Without Driving Yourself Crazy, and this is the blurb on the back:

You get the benefit of the top twenty books on time management in one easy to read book. The authors took an interesting approach to writing this book. They started by reading the Amazon.com customer reviews for over 40 time management books. Then they bought and read the top 20 of these books. The key points from these books were then summarized as 25 clearly described tools and techniques and grouped into five areas of focus.

…and that just kind of horrified me. the quantity vs. quality notion. the approach that we can strip down tasks to make them as efficient as possible. that a book on time management was made by leap frogging off of other people’s books and reviews on time management and then repackaged. i’m…having trouble putting into words exactly what seemed wrong about this to me, but something’s definitely missing. i do need to find ways to do a large work load efficiently and in the lowest-stress manner possible. but i’m not sure i need a list of ways to color-code and organize my post-it notes. i need to think through the philosophy of putting my head and my values in the right place. this job is always going to be hard, always going to be too much work for too little time and pay. the question is whether i can get my head in the right place to work hard, be proud of what i’ve done, and let go of the things that i can’t do. i guess i should be browsing in the philosophy section instead.

PS. it took me almost two months, from the time i started it, to finish this post. and it started out being about multi-tasking, and ended up being about why i’m working in the arts and whether it makes me happy. QED.

* i’m not that fancy – it’s just that both are tiny and i need real estate for spreadsheets

**maybe i can read it while i watch a movie and check my twitter account.

{01 November 2009}


san francisco at dawn

one of the things i like best about the part of califonia i’ve moved to is the variety in flora: on the hillside surrounding my apartment, the following plants are growing: palm trees, deciduous trees: cherry, live oak, eucalyptus among others, coniferous trees: redwoods and others, ferns, bamboo, blackberry bushes, wild grasses, cactus, agave, and ivy. what do all those plants have in common? basically, nothing, except that they all live in my front yard. its kind of an amazing climate.

the other thing about northern california is that the colors of the seasons are all mixed up. growing up in the Idaho rocky mountains, the seasons work thus: summer is green, fall is golden, winter is brown, and spring is…mostly more brown. the same general rule applies to Chicago. but here, everything works backwards: there is so little rain in the summer that everything turns golden brown by july, and stays that way until the rains start in october or november. then suddenly everything turns green, and the morning fogs cease and the skies are deep dark blue, and the world continues to green throughout the winter. spring brings flashes of color as the early flowers bloom. i remember being so surprised by this pattern when i came to northern california for college. being away for eight years, most of which i spent in chicago (or idaho) i’d forgotten how upside down the color palettes are here.

mind you, i’m not complaining. it’s november first, and i woke up to sunlight from my south-facing windows at 7am. by 8am it was warm enough to have the front door open, an zeke went out and slept in the sun on the porch. B and i spent the morning hiking in the hills above MV. recent rains have caused the ferns to spring out of the ground in force, whole hillsides of lime-green fronds unfurling in the shade. the trees that do respond to the changes in light are throwing down their leaves, crunchy, a smell of rotting leaves that evoked some memory from childhood.

but golden gate park shows no sign of impending winter:


too beautiful out for ghouls: halloween game of frisbee in golden gate park

I awoke last night to the sound of thunder…

{15 September 2009}


photo credit: fgfathome

okay so a couple of nights ago this thunderstorm woke me up around 4am and freaked me the fuck out.

4am, sitting up through a thunderstorm, afraid of my hillside going up in wildfire. realizing i am NOT emergency prepared. if i had to leave…put on pants, grab laptop-phone-purse-keys. how would i get the cat? could i shove him into his carrier or would he sense my fear and run and hide? // do my smoke alarms even work? i haven’t tested them. i haven’t gotten renter’s insurance yet. // am radio is talking about afghanistan, that’s a good sign, right? power still on. no emergency sirens. // first drops of rain since i moved here almost three months ago. bang of thunder that shakes the house and sets off car alarms down the hill.

now, admittedly i have a tendency to be easily disoriented/frightened when i’m really groggy, but it was also a HUGE FUCKING STORM. i’ve lived in the bay area a total of five years now (4 college, .7 post-college, .3 since i moved here this past june) and have only witnessed two thunderstorms. they just don’t happen. so i layed awake for more than an hour listening to the storm and fretting about how dry the hillside i live on is (later that night the first drops of rain fell…i’d been here almost three months, and no rain. how does anything green stay alive? ). Gene sent me the link to this photo later in the week and wow. okay, see? it WAS a huge scary storm.

the best thing about waking to a thunderstorm is burrowing deeper into the arms of a lover. waking alone, it underscores the loneliness sharply.

ramblings in the airport after a nearly perfect weekend

{11 August 2009}

So I was supposed to drive to Ashland and see a show at OSF, but I discovered that the Pothole that Nearly Ate My Car last week actually really did nearly eat my car, and I need two new tires and a NEW WHEEL (wtf?) before the car is road-trip worthy. So much for saving up for a new tv…but, I decided to take advantage of a non-ideal start to the trip. Instead of dropping money on the car w/out having time to shop estimates around, I decided that the repair could wait till Monday. So I played hooky with the rest of Friday, burned some frequent flier miles, and hopped a last minute flight to Chicago.

Saturday morning I played in the Ultimate Frisbee Collective’s Finale Game*. As teams sports go, we were a scrappy group of theatre geeks, most of whom have some innate athletic ability but little or no talent for team sports. But for the past two years, we have played nearly every Saturday, rain or shine (or snow), and the ultimate game has often been the best part of my week.

For my efforts, and in recognition of being the only non-carnivore (also the only girl) on the team, I received a trophy shaped like a piece of tofu with arms and legs,** aptly named the “Facon [Fakon?] Award”. The winning team received a trophy with a piece of bacon on it, also similarly anthropomorphized.

In the afternoon Shinjinkai held the fourth annual fall-a-thon fundraiser, raising money for the zendo (rural retreat center) we are building in Wisconsin. I had planned to drop in, cheer and generally be supportive, but a minor injury sustained by someone in an earlier round meant that i got to jump in as nage for one of the later rounds. In 15 minutes I threw a contestant 305 times! The impressive feat isn’t the throwing – it was the guy taking the falls. Last year I took 206 falls and was pretty sure I was going to barf by the end. Anyway, it was so so so good to see all of my fellow aikidoka. Just being back in the room, the scent of the incense, the polished wood floors and textured mat under bare feet – it all felt so comfortingly familiar. I’ve been short on familiar and comfort, lately.

As I was changing into my gi in the locker room I looked at myself in the mirror and remembered how at first I felt so awkward in my uniform, it felt too big, goofy, poorly fit. I felt too tall, long-limbed, my balance too high in my body, i moved like a dancer, not a martial artist — no grounding, my center of gravity up high in my chest rather than centered low in the abdomen. I know those feelings of impossible awkwardness weren’t just born of insecurity because I see that look in new students, in their faces, in the way their gi hangs on their body, in the way they move on and off the mat. I felt that way for a long time. And I’m not sure when I started feeling at home in my gi, in the dojo, in the martials arts. When i started taking newer students under my wing and helping them through the maze of confusing rituals, when to bow, where to leave your shoes, how to sweep the mat in a smooth, even rhythm in step with the student before and behind you.

I’m not saying I’m accomplished or anything. On the contrary, the point here is perhaps that it took me two and a half years of training just to be confident in the most basic of rituals. Any wonder, then, why aikido is a martial art that takes a life time of dedication and study to master.

Since I moved to California I haven’t made any effort to find a dojo yet – there’s just no time for training. And I know how frustrated I would be if I were training once or twice a week, never moving forward or improving, just see-sawing back and forth. Right now there is pretty much time for work, and running. But being back at Shinjinkai for the afternoon reminded me that this is not a part of my life that I want to leave behind in Chicago. I will need to be patient in order to find the time to resume a proper study of it, but I’ll also need to make the effort to find that time. My profession isn’t one that just hands over free time if I don’t make an effort to wrestle some away now and then.

The trip at once was good for me to shake me out of my all-work-all-the-time routine here and remind me that I am more than the sum of my days and nights, that my life is bigger than the work I am doing here now. But I was confused all weekend that I was on vacation in Chicago and returning to San Francisco. I’d forget which airport I was coming from or going to, invert “back home” and “out here” when I was speaking about my new home or my old one. While waiting for my connecting flight in Denver, I had a moment of confusion when a Chicago-bound flight was directly across the hall from a San Francisco-bound flight. I’m headed home, but where is that? This weekend was restorative and troubling all at once. Restorative because it was a reminder that work is not me. I am not my job. I spend long hours at work, and when I’m there I work hard and care passionately about it. But it does not define me any more than any other single thing defines me. I am a sum of many parts, of preferences and fears and activities and plans for the future. I am martial arts and running marathons and making theatre and crafting things with my hands and wanting to explore the world. I am staying up too late and never getting enough sleep, hating to wear shoes and carrying around deep fears of vomit, spiders and mediocrity, a love for fireflies on Chicago summer nights and lingering over after-dinner coffee after a good meal. I am a terminally off-key singing voice and an aunt and someday maybe a parent, someday maybe a very good production manager. Right now I’m mostly working on the career part. But all in good time. My friend Callie handed me a bit of wisdom a few months ago when she pointed out that the great thing about getting to your thirties and facing big life-changing unrest like moving is knowing that you are not defined by your place. That you are still your same self no matter where you wake up in the morning. She’s right, and it’s a good feeling to realize that.

And it was troubling because being back in the community of Chicago makes me feel more sharply the lack of community in my new life. I’m new here, of course, and I know it takes time and work. But it’ll be an uphill battle, I think. Mill Valley is not a community where I am going to find like-minded artists or people my age. It’s an adorable and ritzy little Marin County hamlet that eschews chain stores and has polymillion*** dollar mansions in the hills where successful doctors and lawyers who commute to the city for their jobs raise their kids, disaffected spoiled teenagers who slump around downtown and congregate on the lawn in front of City Hall after it closes, looking as bored as one can possibly be in a town filled with the most spectacular weather and nature that one could ask for. I will have to go further afield to find my community.

* For some reason, the west coast is responsible for breaking up the band: at least four of the core players are in the midst of either executing or contemplating moves to various west coast cities.

** which seems to be working at cross-purposes, doesn’t it? Anthropomorphizing the thing that people eat who don’t like to eat things that have legs or eyes?

***I’ll make up words when I want to make up words. This is my blog. Bug off.

ah, bookish dork that i am.

{09 July 2009}

i’m pretty sure the art of letter-writing has all but been abandoned by my generation. after college there were a few attempts amongst friends to send hand-written letters, but those were few and far between, and with one recent exception, it’s been years since anyone has hand-written me a letter now. even my grandfather, who wrote a letter to each of his five grandkids every week for all the years we were away from home for college and beyond, he too switched to email about five years back.* i’m not complaining, mind you, because in this modern world we have email and facebook and twitter and cell phones and text messages and blogs and as a result i talk to so many more far-off friends than i would if we had only the post as a means of communication. the same thing that bugged me about my own hand-written letters – their imperfections, my inability to edit and tweak the language after i’d written it – are the same things that make me totally cherish letters i receive.

handwriting is like fingerprints; no two people have exactly the same writing, and the shape of the characters speak of so many things: years of schooling, an impatience with or attention to detail, an aesthetic, the emotional state of the writer, the time of day or place or writing surface, even the physical musculature of the writer. it’s all in there. there’s something so personal (and increasingly rare) about something penned in a person’s own unique writing. the handwritten letter is like an artifact from someone’s life, that paper, that pen, that moment is captured and preserved in the paper in a way that defies the world of electronic communication. the drip of diner coffee hastily wiped off, the slightly greasy stain from writing on the kitchen counter, the worn edge where the letter, half finished, served as a bookmark for the writer between paragraphs.

in the tradition of japanese calligraphy, the qualities of each line on the paper reveals the state of the artist’s spirit. to paint a single stroke correctly, the student of calligraphy must be completely focused, centered, their breathing controlled, energy concentrated in the hara. the trained eye can see when all is not centered; the line is weak, the ink turns grey and thin, the line does not have the robust energy it should. i imagine that probably everything we do/make/create might reveal the same things about us if were trained to see them; without a focus of spirit and intent, nothing we do holds the same meaning. the intention is revealed in the form and qualities of a thing.

*i’d always know when his computer was broken, because i’d receive an envelope in the mail that was his email, printed out and folded up and mailed.

no longer unemployed

{01 July 2009}

i’ve started and failed to finish a whole series of posts about my new home (lots of spiders, deer in the front yard at twilight) and new town (people are so small-town quirky and friendly, it’s like i live in the west coast version of that town the Girlmore Girls live in, only everyone here is all tanned and into mountain biking after work).

i’ll get to some of that, but the past few evenings, given the complete lack of nightlife/social life here in the MV, back aching from shoving boxes to and fro all day, i’ve curled up in my arm chair in the front room and read or re-read all the scripts of the plays we are producing this season*. and they are great. all of them. it’s good to have a reminder of why i did all this: why i put myself through all the work of itemizing and evaluating and selling or donating or packing and unpacking and sorting every one of my belongings, the administrative detritus of closing and reopening utilities and bank accounts and registrations and addresses, through the dismantling of my personal life and all the doubts and regrets and heartache i’ve incurred on that front. when i start work tomorrow, it will be such a relief to finally be spending my days thinking about something besides moving. and to start doing what i am good at (what i will hopefully continue be good at): making good theatre. it’s definitely not going to be easy, not this first year, or probably the years after that, but i believe in these plays. it always, in the end, comes back to the text — i learned that working in a company that produced classic works and now that i’m back to doing new work, it resonates even more clearly. i want to make theatre that has some teeth to it, some truth to it. it’s okay with me if it’s messy around the edges. but if there is a moment of truth, if there is a moment of perfect beauty — i live for that, i will turn my life upside down and move across the country for that. and each of these scripts strikes some chord in me somewhere. now, let’s see if i can realize them in a way that strikes a chord in the audiences and artists that come in my doors. when, tomorrow, they become my doors.

* which are, for the record: My Name is Asher Lev, by Aaron Posner (adapted from the novel by Chaim Potok); Boom, by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb; Sunlight, by Sharr White; Equivocation, by Bill Cain; and Woody Guthrie’s American Song, by Peter Glazer

blending

{19 September 2007}

although i work on a college campus, i don’t interact with the actual campus all that often – my theatre is located on the northern edge, i drive in, i work, i leave – and most of my interaction with “the university” is in adapting my department’s purchasing and payroll systems so they’ll interface with the university’s bookkeeping behemoth. this evening during dinner break i took a walk across campus to get a book from the library. it was twilight, a warm, late-summer evening. all the undergrads are back on campus but there’s no homework or classes yet, so the students were out in full force: dressed in board shorts and halter tops that will soon be rendered obsolete, groups of freshman moving swiftly across campus in packs of three and four, talking about home, about which AP exams they took, about picking a major. circles of kids throwing a frisbee while a perky RA tries to get them to learn each other’s names, bands playing in the dormitory courtyard, party-cup holding guys bobbing their heads and casting sideways glances at the girl from down the hall. the hush of the long winter, and classes, will descend soon enough; for tonight everything under the full moon is new.

by contrast, the library was eerily vacant, only a few grad students lurking in their carrels. i dearly love the muted hush of dimly-let library stacks. but i find going into a new library for the first time to be terribly intimidating; will i know where the stacks are? will there be a map showing what floor my call number is on? is that computer the catalog or the internet kiosk or both? where ARE the stairs to the 4th floor? what if the book i want just isn’t there? will i have to talk to a mean old librarian or will i get a bored grad student? will i look dumb? (am i the only one with library insecurities? probably).

the year after i graduated i found excuses/cause to sneak back into the libraries at stanford, (handing over my deactivated student ID card and explaining to the student at the desk that it wasn’t working because of the wrinkle in the magnetic strip and could they please just buzz me thru) but after that first year i detached somewhat from the world of the research library and suddenly i find myself, seven years out of academia, holder of a chicago public library card that i use but rarely.* still, i find that negotiating the main campus library required the same sort of zen flow that one uses when navigating a huge foreign transportation hub like the main tokyo rail station or heathrow airport; if you just move with the flow of traffic, and don’t stop to think too hard about where you came from and where you’re trying to get to, it usually works out right, even if you can’t read the kanji. i drilled down: the right floor, the right stack, the right call number, and there was my book; three english translations to choose from plus several in the original czech. as i was puzzling over translation a tinny old school bell rang to signify closing time; i selected one at random and flowed back down to the main floor. at the circulation desk a bored student looked up at me, took my book, my staff id card, scanned both and handed them to me: “due back january 20th.” (january 20th? not a lot of demand for early 20th century czech sci fi, i guess.) book in hand, task succesfully navigated, i still felt vaguely like an imposter, like someone would notice i didn’t belong, that the “staff” label on my ID card clearly excludes me from the legitimate pool of students and faculty who of course know their way around a library. i’m a janitor. the lunch lady. hospital intake coordinator. production coordinator for an obscure university subsidiary arts organization. still, the old rule seemed to hold true: if i just *look* like i know where i’m going, no one ever stops to question me. it’s a rule i apply in the rest of my life and career, unconsciously as much as anything. people often comment on how in-control and on top of things i seem. really? seriously? wow. that’s great. risky for you, good for me.

*i like paperback editions i can dog-ear ruthlessly, not to mention carry in my bag without undue weight of hard covers. also, i love the aesthetic of the shiny cover art, clean modern fonts, spines i can bend or break till they lay flat on the breakfast table.

baby steps

{09 May 2007}

i’m a big believer than a woman should own her own tools. i’m not talking about a circ saw or anything, but just the basics, whatever basics mean to you. it means that when you want to hang a picture frame you don’t need to guy down the hall to come over and do it. i hate feeling helpless, and as a rule, i try not to.

i was feeling good about such things today when i fixed a few bits on my bike that had come loose. my folks gave me a bike for my birthday earlier this spring, i picked it out and overall it’s a nice sturdy used bike in good shape, but after a couple of weeks of riding it there were some minor things coming apart – the kickstand fell off, the seat was wobbly, the front reflector hanging loose. i had been meaning to take it by the bike shop where i bought it, thinking that they’d probably tune it up for me if i asked nicely. but i got home from work today and wanted to use it this evening, and didn’t relish the thought of riding all the way to the bike shop without a seat. so i dug out a crescent wrench, some hex keys, a screw driver, and managed to put things right, and was pleased with myself for the effort as much as the result.

lately i’m making a concerted effort to drive my car less: still commuting cross town to work, but leaving it parked the rest of the time, and taking public transit or, even better, my bike. the nice weather is making such a resolution much easier to keep, and i’m quickly getting bolder about biking in traffic, a thing that a few weeks ago i was totally scared of doing. the not driving plan, like not eating meat, is born of a variety of reasons rather than one particular conviction.

1) financial: with gas at $3.50/gal in the city, driving less is kind of essential for financial reasons, plus my car, with 92,000 miles on it, isn’t getting any younger and i am a long way from being able to make payments on a new one.

2) environmental: i jog these city streets nearly every day and when the wind blows just right, choke on the smog and fumes. one of the best features of a city is that everything is close together (relatively) and linked by public transit. driving everywhere seems like i’m missing the point of living in a city.

3) sanity: i am not a nice person when i’m behind the wheel. i’m generally pretty patient when it comes to public transit; it’s all out of my control, whether it runs on time or not, so i just sit back and do my crossword or read and get there when i get there. but i’m the opposite when i’m driving my own vehicle. perhaps because there is the illusion of control, i’m constantly looking for the fastest lane, the most efficient route, the way to make the stoplight at ravenswood and irving park turn just a little faster. and then parking? don’t even get me started. i hate feeling like my vehicle owns me. i never, however, experience that sort of incredible hulk rage when i’m on my bicycle even tho it takes longer to get where i’m going.

4) political: one could argue that politics are pretty deeply entwined with the issue of environmentalism and lump these two items together, but given that our country has been fighting a war over oil for the past five years i think this gets its own item number. there’s a girl i see biking around campus a lot with a sticker on the back of her bike that says, “it doesn’t take war to power my bike.” given that i don’t bicycle exclusively or anything, i don’t think i can really get on my high horse like that, but i like her message. and she looks like she probably does echew petrol-based private transportation all of the time, so good for her.

for me, it’s baby steps. it’s karma, it’s the golden rule: i want to live in a better world so i have to start by reforming my own habits, one tiny step at a time. most of us, myself included, don’t have what it takes to make revolutionary changes in our lives. and i find it really easy to feel helpless in the face of something as huge as global warming or thousands of innocent civilians dead over oil prices and legislation for clean energy DOA in congress. but, at the risk of turning this whole post into a cliche, this is what marathon training is teaching me. the thought of running 26 miles isn’t just impossible, it’s absurd. i don’t spend very much time thinking about the upcoming race, in fact, because it’s just too daunting. instead, i get up every morning and i tie my shoes and i go out for 4 or 5 or 6 miles. at the end of the week i’ve run 20 miles. at the end of the month i’ve gone 80. by the time i get to marathon day, i’ll have logged almost 700 miles. and what’s 26 more in the face of 700? that’s how we accomplish big things. in small, unremarkable steps. so: i ride my bike on weekends. i don’t eat red meat. i buy cruelty-free beauty products. i recycle my kitchen trash. baby steps. maybe next year i’ll bike to work once a week, go completely veggie, use biodegradable soaps or start a compost heap. things i can’t do this year will no longer be out of my grasp.

{27 April 2007}

M and i caught the vienna teng concert at schuba’s last night. she was kind enough to put us on the guest list, which made me feel cool. i mean, schuba’s is a teeny tiny venue that holds about 100 people, so it’s not like i was on the guest list at house of blues (altho, come to think of it, BETTY put me on their list there once, too…), but my sorry ego will always get a kick out of being on a guest list just about anywhere.

anyway, the show was really solid and beautiful, and vienna’s percussionist played some pretty freakin’ weird awesome instruments, including this thing that i’ve looked all over the net for but can’t find a name for it. it basically looks like a big, brass top (the kind you’d spin), with lots of thin rods running up the outside of it. when you draw a bow across it, it makes that eerie, high-pitched horror-movie squeal you get just before something bad happens to the heroine. applied judiciously, and it’s spine-tingling. hopefully someone will comment this post and tell me what that is, or even better, send me a link with a better picture than what i can give in words here.

M, who later in the evening confessed to having been a full-on 80’s punk in his teens, and even now wears converses and a ramons t-shirt, gets points for accompanying me to a late show on a weekday night and only looking a *bit* drowsy at one point. and he did ask me to copy her CDs for him. but you should have seen his face when we walked into schuba’s and saw rows of chairs set up on the floor of a concert hall where i think he’s more accustomed to standing-room-only rocking out. “i told you it was adult-contemporary,” i said to him. he nodded and observed that as a straight white couple we were pretty far out of the room’s demographic. “lesbians, asian women, and the men who love them,” is i think how he characterized the room. which was accurate, but not complete. the audience spanned three generations and crossed gender, social, racial and intellectual boundaries in a way that made the room inclusive, rather than exclusive. sort of the way i think about new york city. i love the sense anonymity that i feel when i’m in new york, as if, no matter what i do/say/wear, i will never stand out or feel completely alone in a city as huge and diverse as new york. i really dig artists whose work can bring together a group of people across demographic boundaries that often prove divisive. live performance, whether it is theatre or music or something else, is compelling to me because it’s about the communion that takes place between audience and performer, and between the audience members themselves. a work of art was created, existed, was experienced, and, being ephemeral, will never exist in the same form again, and that shared experience is what makes live performance a profound thing: i was there. you were there. we experienced that moment in a way that will never exist again, and that is something we have in common from this point forward. from there we are punk rockers and lesbians, parents and children, lovers and loners, musicians and the musically-inept, artists, writers, teachers, professionals, black, white, asian. the couple sitting to my left were talking computer science QA blogs between sets; the woman to my right, seated close to her girlfriend, wore a t-shirt that said, “my boyfriend bought me a ford.”