Do something pretty while you can

First session done, second session begun.

Back from a whirlwind weekend of performances and dance camp in Toronto, straight into the insanity of 500+ campers and 100+ temperatures. A crazy day, a quiet hour. Post-shower, sitting and sweating on a plastic chair on the porch of my summer room, catching up on my Harper's Magazine. This, from a sad and self-condemning article from May:

Walking home, I look at the screen of my cellphone for guidance. In the dark it functions like a little flashlight, I am thinking. Maybe it will knit me a tiny sweater to keep me warm.

Summah summah summah time

Deep breath in... here we go.

I'm back at camp, for summer #8. Historically I blog a lot over the summer than the rest of the year, so perhaps that will be the case again this year. I have four posts drafted from the last few months too, so maybe I'll finish those up and post 'em, finally.

I had been really freaking out about coming back this year, feeling overwhelmed with life and my other jobs and all kinds of things, and just kind of depressed about it being this time of year when it's so easy to compare it to this time of year last year and the one before and the one before and... sigh. But once I got here today and breathed in that Alo air and saw all my friends and had a few big hugs from my favorite staff members, I chilled out a lot... feeling pretty good. Still crazed with all my extra-curricular activities this summer, starting with an altogether-too-brief trip to Albany this weekend for a wedding, but still feeling a lot better than I did for the last few days and weeks.

More updates from 11B to come, I hope... Click the camp label for past summertime missives, some of my favorite posts.

Nobody? Nobody?

You all texted or emailed to complain either about prescriptivism or "to a lesser degree" lonely but no one, no one noticed that pesky subject/verb agreement thing?

Sigh.

I can't get any satisfaction.

You know that song, that goes, "Now there's two less lonely people, two less lonely people in the world, tooooniiiiight"?

It should really be "two fewer lonely people."

Just sayin'.

Next weekend: Santa Barbra. Streisand.

I had an amazing weekend. I had a gig in Santa Barbara on Saturday night, so I spent the whole weekend there. Beautifullllllllll! Over the couple of days I was there, I managed to: see three movies. play tennis twice. read one book. play Guitar Hero. eat delicious meals, spend time with lovely people, go for a gorgeous walk, play with a cute dog, hold a lizard in my hand, enjoy a tour of SB that included the whale skeleton! And you know, do my gig.

More like that, please.

WAIT, THIS NEVER GOT POSTED BACK WHEN I POSTED IT??

"...the language of design, architecture, and urbanism in Los Angeles is the language of movement. Mobility outweighs monumentality there to a unique degree... and the city will never be fully understood by those who cannot move fluently through its diffuse urban texture, cannot go with the flow of its unprecedented life. So, like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original.”

- Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Four Ecologies



If I had a tumblr, I'd have reblogged this from Hillel Aron. But I don't.

What I love best about this is... ok, there are a million things I love about this, but one of those many things is that it's true: Reyner Banham had never driven before he moved here.

Punksatauni? Punxatawnee? Punxsutawney?

My dear friend Aloni is spending a semester in Hungary. Today is his birthday, so why don't you mosey over to Aloni's Blogna and wish him a good one?

An awesome summary of my blog, which I just noticed in October and then blogged and then forgot to post until now:

"Director of Dance reviews books and her crazy life"



Thanks, Sickness Cinema!

Services available; great rates. Inquire within.

From the "waste books" of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg:

The detection of small errors has always been the property of minds elevated little or not at all above the mediocre; notably elevated minds remain silent or say something only in criticism of the whole, while the great spirits refrain from censuring and only create.

Mark Twin, in 1893:

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made proof-readers.

On the other hand, Rabbi Akiba (Talmud: Pesahim, 112a) said:

When you teach your son, use a carefully edited text.

You do it by doing it?

I'm trying to will myself into writing again. There's lots I want to say, but lately I've been unable to say it. We'll start with a summary of 2011. Perhaps after that we'll have a short summary of 2010.

So far in 2011 I have:

-had a short run-in with Restless Legs Syndrome. It was cured by a couple of sleeping pills and my First Migraine Ever.

-gone to Ramah Rikkudiah, a dance camp I've attended every year since I moved to CA. I had a GREAT time, in fact one of the best times I've had at a dance camp in many years. (For an alternate (and more theatrical) take on that camp, see Aloni's Blogna.)

-read (or finished reading) a few books, including Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, the Bhagavad-Gita, finally, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, and Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer. If you're going to buy anything at all on amazon.com, would you do me a favor and use one of those links to get there? If you do, I get some small monetary reward and I looooove small monetary rewards. Especially when they are book-related.

-led dancing at the birthday party of the cutest sweetest four-year-old boy ever.

-went to "Gospel Shabbat" at a temple in the Valley. Fun, but didn't feel the least bit Jewish to me.

-saw Diavolo Dance Theater in Santa Monica. Incredible, breath-taking, awe-inspiring works.

-went to an international folkdance, and had my usual yes-I-teach-dance-but-I-used-to-do-other-things stance turned back on me. When someone asks what I do for a living, I usually rush to mention my years in software before becoming a dance teacher, because of that part of me that seems to feel teaching dance isn't "enough", whatever that means. At this dance last night, however, we were all dancers and dance teachers, and when someone asked me what I do to pay the bills, I was the object of all envy when I said I "just" teach folkdance. A good reminder. I get paid to do something I love. That's altogether too rare, I'd say, and I should remember how fabulous that is, even if I happen to also be missing some other things I love. That doesn't need to detract from the joy I get from my job.

-got trained to be a reading tutor for Koreh LA. I've apparently been placed with a first-grader and we can start meeting as soon as my personal references are in. This should be a pretty interesting experience, no?

It's been a decent 23 days. Lots going on in the next few months, possibly including a trip to Israel. I reallllly want to go... and am not at all sure it'd be a good idea for me to go.